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Nags Head Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops, mixing with flour and malt, and fermenting with 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 ↓

Nags Head Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the hop tea and paste

  1. Boil the hops in water for 10 minutes.

  2. In a bucket, mix flour and malt.

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

Build the starter

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

  2. Let it stand until warm (about 100°F or 38°C).

  3. Add the old yeast and stir well.

  4. Let it stand until it rises and then falls.

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

Flour
Forms the thick body of the paste and supplies starch that the yeast can work on.
Malt
Provides sugars that the yeast ferments, driving the rise and fall of the starter.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the hop tea that flavours the finished starter.
Old yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing the gas that makes the starter rise and then fall.

The step that matters

Let it stand until warm, then add the yeast. Yeast works best in warm liquid around 100°F. If the mixture is too hot, the heat can kill the yeast, so the liquid should be warm rather than hot before the old yeast goes in and is stirred well.

“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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