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Home-made Yeast

A yeast starter made from boiled potatoes, salt, water, sugar, flour, and yeast cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the potato stock

  1. Cook the potatoes in boiling water until tender.

  2. Drain the potatoes, reserving the stock.

  3. Press the potatoes through a strainer.

Make the starter

  1. Mix the dry ingredients.

  2. Scald the mixture with 1 pint of potato stock.

  3. Beat the mixture until smooth.

  4. Add the remaining stock.

  5. Add the pressed potatoes.

  6. Add the yeast cakes dissolved in 1 cup of lukewarm water when the mixture is lukewarm.

  7. Keep the mixture warm until it becomes light and foamy.

Store

  1. Store the mixture in a cool place.

  2. Stir before each use.

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

Potatoes
Add starch and body, giving the starter a thick, moist texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, supplying fuel for fermentation and sweetness.
Flour
Provides starch and structure for the yeast to work within.
Yeast cakes
Ferment the mixture, producing gas that makes it light and foamy.

The step that matters

Add the yeast when the mixture is lukewarm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a hot mixture can stop fermentation. Cooling to lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can grow and make the starter foamy.

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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