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Bread

Railroad Yeast

A yeast starter made from middlings, salt, ginger, baking soda, sugar, and water, allowed to rise for 12 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Railroad Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the yeast

  1. Mix the middlings, salt, ginger, baking soda, and sugar together.

  2. Scald the mixture with boiling water and let it rise for 12 hours in a warm place until light.

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

Make the bread

  1. To make the bread, combine warm water, a pinch of salt, and enough flour to create a thin batter.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of the railroad yeast to the batter and let it rise before using.

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. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Middlings
Provides the starchy base that the yeast culture develops in.
Railroad yeast
Starter culture whose fermentation makes the batter rise.
Flour
Forms the thin batter that carries the fermentation and gives the bread its structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it ferments more actively.

The step that matters

Letting the scalded mixture rise until light. Yeast needs warmth and time to ferment the starch and sugars; too cool a place slows it, so the mixture may not become light enough to use as a starter.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe 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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