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Baker's Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops in water, cooling, and mixing with mashed potatoes, sugar, carbonate soda, spirits of wine, flour, and brewer's yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Baker's Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hops

  1. Boil hops in water for 1 hour.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Make the starter

  1. Add mashed potatoes, sugar, carbonate soda, spirits of wine, flour, and brewer's yeast, then mix well until combined.

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. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 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. Potato + winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Hops + winetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methylguaiacol (smoky, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps keep the starter from spoiling.
Mashed potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that the yeast can feed on.
Sugar
Gives the yeast quick food, fuelling fermentation and sweetness.
Flour
Adds starch and body, giving the yeast more material to work on.
Brewer's yeast
Ferments the sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol, which leavens and flavours the starter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool. Yeast is killed by heat, so the boiled hop liquid must cool before the yeast is added. Adding yeast to a hot mixture will stop fermentation before it starts.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar, spirit, wine, 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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