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To Make Yeast

A homemade yeast starter using hops, potatoes, flour, sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast.

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 ↓

To Make Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop water

  1. Tie the hops in a thin cloth and boil in water with the potatoes for one hour.

  2. Strain the mixture over the flour, squeezing the hops well.

Make the yeast

  1. Mash the potatoes and add sugar, salt, and ginger when the mixture is milk-warm.

  2. Add the yeast and let it rise.

  3. Stir it down several times, then cork it tightly and 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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 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

Hops
Provides bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the liquid.
Potatoes
Supply starch and sugars that feed the yeast as it ferments.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and gives the yeast starch to work on.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and the rise.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar, salt and ginger at milk-warm. If the mixture is too hot, it can kill the yeast; if too cold, fermentation starts slowly. Milk-warm is gentle enough to keep the yeast alive while still encouraging it to grow.

Swap the potato

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

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

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