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Starter

To Start Beer Yeast

A starter for beer yeast made with mashed potatoes, sugar, water, flour, salt, and yeast foam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

To Start Beer Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the starter

  1. Cook enough potatoes to make 1 pint after mashing.

  2. Put 2 tablespoons flour into a gallon crock.

  3. Moisten with 1 spoon warm water.

  4. Add the hot mashed potatoes and pour over 1 quart boiling water.

  5. Set on the back of the stove until the flour is well scalded.

  6. Remove from heat and cool until slightly warmer than milk.

Add the yeast and rise

  1. Stir in 1 cake yeast foam soaked in ½ cup warm water and 2 tablespoons sugar.

  2. Cover and set in a warm place to rise until bedtime.

  3. Add the salt and stir well before retiring.

  4. Leave a crack at one side of the lid to let gases escape.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Provide starch that thickens the mixture and feeds the yeast.
Flour
Provides starch that scalds and thickens into a base the yeast can feed on.
Yeast (in the method)
Ferments sugars, producing gas that makes the starter rise and turn airy.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it ferments and produces gas for rising.

The step that matters

Cool until slightly warmer than milk. Yeast is killed by excessive heat, so the mixture must cool to a warm but gentle temperature before the yeast goes in. Adding yeast to a hot mixture can stop fermentation entirely.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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