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Old-fashioned Yeast

A yeast made by cooking potatoes with hops, sugar, salt, and a yeast cake, then cooling.

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

Cook the potatoes

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes.

  2. Tie the hops in a piece of cheesecloth and cook them with the potatoes in 2 quarts of water until the potatoes are done.

  3. Drain the mixture through a colander.

Make the starter

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

  2. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast cake.

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

Store

  1. Afterward, store 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 and produces carbon dioxide, which makes the liquid bubble and rise.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, speeding up fermentation.
Potatoes
Supply starch and sugars that the yeast can feed on during fermentation.
Hops
Add bitter, aromatic flavor to the finished liquid.

The step that matters

Add the yeast when the liquid is lukewarm. Very hot liquid kills yeast cells, while cold liquid makes them work very slowly. Lukewarm liquid lets the yeast become active and start fermenting quickly.

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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