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An Excellent Yeast

A yeast starter made from potatoes, sugar, salt, water, and old yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

An Excellent Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash or sift them finely.

  2. Add the sugar and coarse sea salt to the mashed potatoes.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and then add the cold water.

  4. Stir in the old yeast, cover the mixture, and let it rise overnight.

Use the starter

  1. Use ½ cup of this yeast for every 3 pints of 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.

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 + 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
Provide starch and body that feed the yeast as the mixture rises.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a food source so it becomes active and rises.
Old yeast
Acts as the leavening culture that makes the starter rise overnight.

The step that matters

Stir in the old yeast and let it rise overnight. The mixture must be cool enough that boiling water has not killed the yeast before it is added. Yeast needs time and warmth to multiply, so an overnight rise lets it build enough activity to leaven later batches.

“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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