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Bread

Good Yeast

A fermented batter made from potatoes, flour, hops, and yeast, used as a bread starter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Good Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the starter

  1. Boil hops in water until done.

  2. Boil and mash the potatoes until smooth.

  3. Combine the mashed potatoes with flour and strained hop water to form a thin batter, adding hot water if too thick.

  4. Let the mixture cool to just above milk-warm.

Ferment and store

  1. Stir in the brewer's yeast and let it stand in a warm place for 8 to 10 hours.

  2. Add salt and sugar, mix well, and store in a stone jar or jug.

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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Brewer's yeast
Its microbes ferment the sugars in the batter, producing gas that leavens the bread and flavor.
Potatoes
Mashed potato adds starch and moisture that feed the yeast and give the starter body.
Flour
Provides the starch and proteins that form the thin batter the yeast works in.
Hops
Hop water adds bitter, aromatic notes and helps slow spoilage in the starter.

The step that matters

Cooling to just above milk-warm. If the batter is too hot, it can kill the yeast; if it is too cool, fermentation slows. Just above milk-warm keeps the yeast active and healthy.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, sugar. 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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