Home › Bread-Making › Hop-Yeast Bread
Hop-Yeast Bread
One tea-cup yeast, three pints warm water; make a thin sponge at tea time, cover and let it remain two hours or until very light. By adding the water to the flour first and having the sponge quite warm, it is never necessary to put the sponge over hot water or in an oven to make it rise. Knead into a loaf before going to bed; in the morning mold into three loaves, spreading a little lard between as they are put in the pan. When light, bake one hour, having oven quite hot when the bread is put in, and very moderate when it is done. (Bread made in this way is never sour or heavy.) To have fine, light biscuit, add shortening at night, and in the morning make into biscuit and bake for breakfast. By this recipe bread is baked before the stove is cold from breakfast, and out of the way for other baking.
To cool bread there should be a board for the purpose. An oaken board, covered with heavy white flannel, is the best; over this spread a fresh linen bread-cloth, and lay the bread on it right side up, with nothing over it except a very thin cover to keep off the flies. It should be placed immediately in the fresh air or wind to cool; when cool, place immediately in a tin box or stone jar, and cover closely. Bread cooled in this way will have a soft crust, and be filled with pure air. -Mrs J. T. Liggett, Detroit, Michigan.
A long-fermented white bread built on the homemade hop yeast that Buckeye Cookery gives elsewhere in this section. The method is sound; what is missing is any statement of how much flour to use, which the period cook judged by feel.
- The yeastOne tea-cup is a period measure, usually reckoned somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a cup, of the book's homemade liquid yeast: a thin, active brew handled more like a liquid starter than like modern dry yeast. A cup of well-fed liquid starter is the nearest equivalent; commercial yeast will work but at that rate the overnight rise runs away, so scale it far down.
- Water and flourThree pints is 6 cups, warm rather than hot: blood-warm, not hot enough to harm the yeast. No flour quantity is given at any stage; the cook added flour by feel, first to a thin sponge and then until the dough would hold a loaf shape.
- The timetable"Tea time" is late afternoon, around five or six. Sponge two hours, knead to a single mass before bed, divide and shape in the morning, bake once it has risen. Total elapsed time is 14 to 16 hours, most of it cool overnight fermentation.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figures. "Quite hot" at the start and "very moderate when it is done" describe a wood range whose fire died back over the hour. In a modern oven a hot start of about 425-450F dropped to about 350F after the first fifteen minutes approximates it.
- An hour is longSixty minutes suited heavy loaves in a falling wood-fired oven. Loaves this size in a controlled oven are done at 190-200F internal, usually 35-45 minutes; take them out then rather than following the clock.
- Lard between the loavesThree loaves were crowded into one pan, greased along the touching sides so they would pull apart after baking. Bake them separately in loaf pans if you would rather have four crusted sides.
- The cooling boardThe flannel and linen absorb steam from the underside of the loaf, doing the job a wire rack does by letting it escape. The point about covering loosely and cooling in moving air still holds, and so does the warning against sealing warm bread away.
- StorageA tin box or stone jar tightly covered keeps the crust soft but also traps moisture; in a warm kitchen this bread may mould within a few days. It slices and freezes well.
- The biscuit variationAdding shortening to the dough at night and shaping in the morning gives a soft raised biscuit, not a baking-powder biscuit. Expect a bread-like crumb.
Before packaged yeast was reliable and cheap, many American households kept their own leaven, and hop yeast is often said to have been among the commoner kinds: hops boiled with water, thickened with flour or potato, and kept going from batch to batch. The hops contributed flavour but also acted as a mild preservative. Buckeye Cookery, first published in Ohio in 1877, devotes an unusually long section to bread-making and prints several contributors' versions of the same overnight sponge method, each with its own timetable. The domestic detail here is the tell: the loaves go in while the stove is still hot from breakfast, so the fire does double duty and the oven is free for the rest of the day's baking. Recipes of this period were written around the heat a household already had, not around a dial.