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Home-made Yeast

A method for making yeast using potatoes, water, flour, sugar, salt, and a yeast cake.

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 potatoes

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

Make the yeast

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

  2. Add the reserved potato water and clear water.

  3. Once cool, add the yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water.

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

Make the sponge

  1. If making bread in the morning, use 2 cups of yeast and ½ cup of water.

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

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
Starch that thickens the mixture and feeds the yeast as it ferments.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation and foaming.
Yeast cake
Live yeast cells that ferment the sugars and make the mixture rise.
Flour
Adds starch and body to the mixture, helping it hold its structure.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the potato mixture must be cool enough, or the yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water will fail to ferment and foam.

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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