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A yeast starter made by boiling hops, adding grated potatoes, sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast, then fermenting in a cool place.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop tea

  1. Boil hops in a bag in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Grate the potatoes and stir them into the boiling hop tea.

  3. Add sugar, salt, and ginger.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

Start and store

  1. Add yeast to raise.

  2. Transfer to a jug.

  3. Cork tightly.

  4. Keep in a cool place.

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

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

  3. Hops + gingertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the starter.
Raw potatoes
Provide starch that feeds the yeast and adds body to the liquid.
Sugar
Gives the yeast an easily used food source for fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and starches, producing gas that makes the starter rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat. Adding it to hot liquid can stop fermentation before it starts, so the mixture should be cool enough to hold a hand in comfortably before the yeast goes in.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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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