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Good Potato Yeast

A yeast made by fermenting mashed potatoes with hops, sugar, water, and stale yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Good Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until soft, then mash them.

  2. In a separate pot, boil the hops and sugar in the water.

Ferment and store

  1. Once the mixture is nearly cold, combine it with the mashed potatoes and stale yeast.

  2. Set the mixture near a warm place to ferment until it stops bubbling.

  3. Store the yeast in a cool place; it will keep for two weeks.

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).

  2. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch that yeast can feed on, and body to the mixture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and gas production.
Stale yeast
Starts the fermentation that leavens and flavours the final yeast.
Hops
Add bitter, aromatic flavour and help preserve the mixture.

The step that matters

Cooling before adding yeast. If the hopped liquid is still hot when combined with the yeast, the heat can kill or weaken the yeast cells, so fermentation may fail. Waiting until it is nearly cold protects the culture.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar. 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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