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Potato Yeast (Take as many hops as can be)
Take as many hops as can be grasped in the hand twice, put onehalf gallon water over them in a new coffee-pot kept for that purpose, boil slowly for one hour. Do not tie them in a cloth to boil, as that keeps the pollen (an important rising property) out of the yeast. Pare and grate half a dozen large potatoes into a two gallon stone crock, add a half cup sugar, table-spoon each of salt and ginger, pour over this a half gallon of the boiling hop-water, stirring all the time. When milk-warm, add one cup of good lively yeast, set in a warm place until it rises, and remove to the cellar or some other cool place. The boiling hop-water must be added to potatoes immediately or they will darken, and darken the yeast. A good way to prevent the potatoes from darkening is to grate them into a pan half filled with cold water. As grated the potatoes sink to the bottom; when done grating, pour off the water and add the boiling hop-water. This is an excellent recipe, and the method given for boiling hops is especially recommended.
This is a wet leaven kept alive in a crock, not a packet of dried yeast — the potato supplies starch, the sugar supplies quick food, and the hops keep bacteria in check while the yeast takes over. Everything else follows from that.
- The hinge: temperature before you pitch"Milk-warm" means about 95-100F, no hotter. Hop water straight off the boil will kill the cup of live yeast you are adding, and the batch will simply sour instead of rising.
- MeasuresHalf a gallon is 8 cups; the two-gallon crock leaves headroom for a vigorous foam, so do not substitute a jar barely larger than the liquid. Two handfuls of dried whole hops is hard to pin down by weight — perhaps an ounce or so; whole leaf hops from a brewing supplier are the right thing, and any bittering variety will do.
- The "new coffee-pot"The point was a dedicated vessel, because hop resins and bitterness cling to metal and to whatever else you brew in it. Stainless or enamel is the safest choice; reactive bare metal such as aluminium or cast iron may discolour a tannic liquid.
- "One cup of good lively yeast"This assumed the reader already had a working batch of the same yeast, or barm from a brewer. With no starter in hand, a package of active dry yeast bloomed in warm water will get the first batch going; thereafter reserve a cup of the finished yeast to raise the next one.
- Ginger and saltBoth are working ingredients rather than seasoning. Ginger was widely believed to liven the ferment and mask sourness; the salt is sometimes said to restrain bacteria, though the quantity here is small.
- Grating the potatoesGrate on the fine side of a box grater into cold water as directed — the water blocks the enzymatic browning, and pouring it off keeps the starch, which has already sunk. Six large potatoes is roughly 2.5 to 3 lb.
- Rising and keepingExpect 6 to 12 hours in a warm room before it foams and drops back. Cover loosely so gas escapes, then refrigerate; it stays usable about a week to ten days, stirred before each use. It should smell of beer and bread — discard it if it smells putrid or shows fuzzy mould.
- Yield and useAbout half a gallon. Nineteenth-century bread recipes typically call for a cup or so of such homemade yeast per batch, with a correspondingly longer rise than modern commercial yeast gives.
Before compressed and dried yeast were reliably available, a nineteenth-century American household often had to keep its own leaven alive, and hop yeast was one common method; this book gives several competing versions. The hops were more than flavour: their resins suppress lactic bacteria while leaving yeast unharmed, which is why a hop-based starter keeps sweeter and longer than a plain flour-and-water one, and the same property is what preserves beer. Potato supplied the starch and the ginger was traditionally credited with keeping the ferment brisk. Fleischmann's compressed yeast, promoted heavily after its appearance at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, gradually displaced recipes like this one.