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Yeast Reciph

A yeast starter made by boiling hops in water, adding flour, and allowing the dough to rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Yeast Reciph

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

  1. Boil the hops in 1 gallon of water.

  2. Strain the syrup into a crock.

Make the starter

  1. Add enough flour to make a 4-meiter dough and stir well.

  2. Let the mixture cool until it is comfortable to work with your hands.

  3. Thin the dough with warm water or milk.

  4. Allow it to rise until it is ready for use.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + milktop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Provide bitterness and aroma, and their boiled liquid supplies the base for the starter.
Flour
Supplies starch and the sugars and nutrients that yeast feeds on to rise the starter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until it is comfortable to work with your hands. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture should be cool enough before it is worked, or the starter may fail to rise. Cooling to a gentle warmth keeps the yeast alive.

“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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