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Home Made Yeast Cakes

Yeast cakes made with hops, potatoes, flour, sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast, boiled and shaped.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Home Made Yeast Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Boil hops and potatoes in 3 pints of water until done.

  2. Mash the potatoes smoothly and mix with 1 pint of flour.

  3. Pour the boiling hop water over the mixture.

  4. Add ½ cup sugar, 1 tablespoon salt, and 1 tablespoon ginger.

Ferment and shape

  1. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm, then add 1 yeast cake.

  2. Let it stand until the next day, then shape into cakes with meal and dry.

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. Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger 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

Yeast cake
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that makes the cakes rise and become light.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, giving the cakes a soft, moist crumb.
Flour
Mixes with the mashed potato to form the base structure of the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness.
Hops
Contribute bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the mixture to lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can ferment and leaven the cakes.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, sugar, ginger. 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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