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Old-fashioned Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling potatoes with water, sugar, salt, hops, and a Royal 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato water

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes in 2 quarts of water until tender.

  3. Tie the hops in cheesecloth and add to the boiling potatoes.

  4. Once cooked, drain the potatoes through a colander.

  5. Add the sugar and salt to the warm potato water.

Make the starter

  1. When lukewarm, dissolve the Royal Yeast cake in the mixture.

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

  3. Store in a cool place after it has risen.

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

Potatoes
Their starch and sugars feed the yeast and give the starter body.
Royal yeast cake
Ferments the sugars in the liquid, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.
Granulated sugar
Provides quick food for the yeast, speeding up fermentation.
Hops
Add a bitter, aromatic flavour and help preserve the starter.

The step that matters

Dissolve the yeast at lukewarm temperature. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the potato water must be only lukewarm before the yeast cake goes in. If it is too hot, the yeast will not ferment and the starter will fail to 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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