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Potato Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling potatoes, mixing with water and sugar, and fermenting overnight.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and honey work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 351 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato base

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel the potatoes.

  3. Weigh the potatoes.

  4. Finely bruise the potatoes while hot.

  5. Mix bruised potatoes with boiling water, using 1 quart per pound of potatoes.

  6. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Add sweetener and cool

  1. Add honey or brown sugar (1 ounce per quart of water).

  2. Boil until it reaches a batter-like consistency.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool slightly.

Ferment and store

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of yeast per quart of water.

  2. Cover the mixture with a cloth.

  3. Let it rise overnight.

  4. Store the mixture in a bottle for future use.

  5. Pour off any thin liquid on top of the stored mixture.

  6. Make fresh with beer yeast every 2–3 months.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + honeytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together351 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 thicken the batter-like mixture.
Honey or brown sugar
Supplies sugar that the yeast consumes, helping it grow and produce gas.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces carbon dioxide, causing the mixture to rise and bubble.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to cool slightly before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool enough that it no longer scalds the cells but is still warm enough to encourage fermentation.

“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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