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Old-fashioned Yeast

A yeast starter made by cooking potatoes with hops, then adding salt, sugar, and yeast cake.

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 ↓

Old-fashioned Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and strain

  1. Tie the hops in a piece of cheesecloth.

  2. Cook the hops with the potatoes.

  3. Strain the cooked potatoes through a colander.

Make the yeast

  1. Add the salt and sugar to the potato water.

  2. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm.

  3. Dissolve the Royal Yeast cake in the lukewarm mixture.

  4. Let the mixture stand in a warm place until ready for use.

Store

  1. Store the yeast 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 + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

  2. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Sugar + hopstop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    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

Yeast cake
Ferments the sugars in the liquid, producing gas that leavens the mixture.
Sugar
Provides readily fermentable food for the yeast, driving activity and sweetness.
Potatoes
Supply starch and body to the cooking liquid, giving the yeast material to work on.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma and help preserve the liquid against spoilage microbes.

The step that matters

Cooling to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast cells are killed by high heat, so the mixture must be lukewarm before the yeast cake is dissolved in it. If it is too hot, the yeast will fail to ferment and the mixture will not rise.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, hops. 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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