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An Excellent Yeast

A yeast starter made by mashing potatoes with sugar, salt, water, and old yeast, then allowing it to rise overnight.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

An Excellent Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil potatoes until tender, then mash or sift them fine.

  2. Add sugar and coarse sea salt to the mashed potatoes.

  3. Pour in boiling water, then add cold water.

  4. Stir in old yeast, cover mixture, let it rise overnight.

Use

  1. Use 1 gill (½ cup) of this yeast for every 3 pints of flour.

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. 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

Potatoes
Provide starch and body that feed the yeast and give the starter a thick, mashed texture.
Sugar
Gives the yeast an easily fermented food source, speeding up gas production.
Old yeast
Supplies the live microorganisms that ferment the starter and leaven the bread later.

The step that matters

Let it rise overnight. The yeast needs time to multiply and ferment the sugars and starch; too short a rise yields a weak starter that leavens poorly.

“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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