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Bread. Yeast

A yeast bread flavored with hops, made from mashed potatoes, flour, sugar, and hop tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Bread. Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop tea

  1. Peel the potatoes and place them with the hop bag in a saucepan with 2 quarts of cold water.

  2. Cover and boil until the potatoes break apart.

  3. Remove the potatoes with a skimmer, leaving the water boiling.

Make the starter

  1. Mash the potatoes finely and mix in the flour and sugar.

  2. Gradually moisten with the boiling hop tea, stirring to a smooth paste.

  3. Set aside to cool.

  4. While still slightly warm, add 4 tablespoons of lively yeast.

  5. Transfer to a large open vessel to ferment in a warm place until it stops bubbling, or until the next day.

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. 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
Starch that thickens the paste and gives the starter body and moisture.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma to the hop tea and help preserve the starter.
Flour
Adds starch and body to the paste, giving the starter structure as it ferments.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and the rise of the starter.
Yeast (in the method)
Ferments the sugars in the paste, producing gas that makes the starter bubble and rise.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast while the paste is only slightly warm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the paste must be cool enough not to harm it, yet warm enough to stay active. Adding yeast to boiling or hot mixture can stop fermentation.

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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