Name: Potato Yeast
Ingredients: 2 medium boiled potatoes; 1 pint boiling water; 2 tablespoons brown sugar

Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

2 medium boiled potatoes
1 pint boiling water
2 tablespoons brown sugar

Directions

Make the yeast

Mash the boiled potatoes in a bowl.
Add the boiling water and brown sugar to the mashed potatoes.
Stir well until the sugar dissolves.

Use and store

Use 1 pint of hot water for every ½ pint of the mixture.
Store in a cool place; this yeast will keep longer without flour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

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

Brown sugar: Feeds the yeast, giving it sugar to ferment and produce gas.
Boiled potatoes: Supply starch and moisture that thicken the mixture and give the yeast material to work with.

“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.