Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓
Substitute for Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the starter
Boil flour, brown sugar, and salt in water for 1 hour.
Let the mixture cool to milk-warm.
Bottle and rest
Bottle and cork it tightly.
It will be ready for use in 24 hours.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Supplies starch and nutrients that the boiled mixture gives the yeast to feed on.
- Brown sugar
- Provides sugar that yeast ferments, producing carbon dioxide for rising.
The step that matters
Let the mixture cool to milk-warm. Yeast is damaged or killed by very hot liquid, while a cold mixture ferments slowly. Milk-warm lets the yeast become active without harm.
“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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