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Kao's Head Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops, mixing with flour and malt, then adding old yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and malt work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Kao's Head Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop tea

  1. Boil the hops in water for 10 minutes.

Make the starter

  1. In a bucket, mix the flour and malt.

  2. Pour 1 quart of the hop tea over the flour mixture to make a thin paste.

  3. Strain the remaining 3 quarts of hop tea over the paste.

  4. Let the mixture cool to milk warm.

  5. Stir in the old yeast and let it stand until it rises and falls.

Use the yeast

  1. Use ½ pint of this yeast for every quart of flour to make rolls or loaf bread.

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. Flour + malttop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Old yeast
Provides the living culture that leavens the starter and later the bread.
Flour
Forms the thin paste that feeds the yeast and gives the starter body.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the hop tea and helps preserve the starter.
Malt
Supplies sugars that the yeast ferments, driving its rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool to milk warm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the liquid must be cool enough to be safe, yet warm enough to keep the yeast active and rising.

“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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