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Potato Yeast

A fermented potato dough made with flour, hops, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Pare the potatoes and boil them in plenty of water.

  2. Tie the hops in a piece of cheesecloth and boil with the potatoes.

Make the dough

  1. Combine the flour in a pan.

  2. Pour the boiling potatoes and water over the flour, mashing everything together.

  3. Let the mixture cool, or add cold water or ice until it's no warmer than milk.

  4. Strain through a sieve.

  5. Mix in the sugar and yeast.

  6. Let it stand in a warm place for 24 hours to ferment.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Potato + hopstop 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

Potatoes
Their starch thickens the liquid and gives the dough body and moisture.
Hops
Their bitter and aromatic compounds flavour the liquid and help preserve it.
Flour
Its proteins and starch form the structure of the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it produces gas and the dough rises.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide that makes the dough rise.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to lukewarm before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the mixture to about the warmth of milk keeps the yeast alive so it can ferment the dough.

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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