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Home-Made Yeast

A yeast cake made with flour, salt, sugar, boiling water, potatoes, hops, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Home-Made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Mix salt, sugar, and flour in a bowl while dry.

  2. Pour boiling water over the dry mixture and stir well.

Make the potato and hop liquid

  1. Peel, boil, and mash the potatoes.

  2. Boil hops and add the hop water to the potato water, then mix with the mashed potatoes.

  3. Combine the potato water, hop water, and flour mixture until it reaches the consistency of boiled custard.

  4. Add 2 heaping tablespoons of salt, the same of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of ginger.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil, then let it cool partially.

Ferment and store

  1. Add a soaked yeast cake, set in a warm place, and let rise for 24 hours.

  2. Store in a glass can or jar, covering loosely at first.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Supply starch and body, thickening the mixture and feeding the yeast.
Yeast cake (in the method)
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that makes it rise and become lightly sour.
Hops
Add a bitter, aromatic flavour and help preserve the liquid.
Flour
Forms the thick, custard-like base that the yeast works through.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool partially before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling after boiling lets the mixture reach a temperature where the yeast can grow and ferment instead of dying.

Swap the potato

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

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

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