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Home-made Yeast

A potato-based yeast starter made by mixing mashed potatoes, flour, sugar, salt, and water, then allowing it to ferment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Prepare the starter

  1. Cook the potatoes until tender, then drain and reserve the potato water.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt; then add the mashed potatoes.

  3. Add the reserved potato water and clear water.

  4. When cool, add the yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water.

Ferment and use

  1. Let the mixture stand in a warm place until very foamy.

  2. Make a sponge with the mixture and let it stand until light, about 1 hour.

  3. If making bread in the morning, use 2 cups of this yeast and 1 cup of water.

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

Yeast cake
Provides the live yeast that ferments the mixture and makes it foamy and light.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, and their cooking water helps feed the fermentation.
Flour
Forms the body of the sponge that traps gas as the yeast works.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, helping it become active and foamy.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand in a warm place until very foamy. Yeast is most active in warm conditions. If the mixture is too cold, fermentation is slow and the starter may not become foamy; if it is too hot, the yeast can be killed.

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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