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Vienna Yeast
The good qualities of Vienna beer and bread are celebrated all over Germany, and are due to the excellence of the yeast used in preparing them. According to Dr. Vogel, the formula for preparing this substance is as follows. Previously malted barley, maize, and rye are ground up and mixed; next put into water at a temperature of 150 deg. to 170 deg. Fahr.; after a few hours the saccharine liquid is decanted from the dregs, and the clear liquid brought into a state of fermentation by the aid of some yeast. The fermentation becomes very strong, and, by the force of the carbonic acid which is evolved, the yeast globules are carried to the surface of the liquid, and there form a thick scum, which is to be removed by a skimmer, placed on cloth filters, drained, washed with a little distilled water, and next pressed into any desired shape by means of hydraulic pressure, and covered with a strong and stoutly-woven canvas. This kind of yeast keeps from eight to fourteen days, according to the season, and is, both for bakers and brewers, very superior to that ordinarily used.
This is a working method for top-cropped press yeast rather than a dish, and it belongs to an era when a baker who wanted reliable leaven had to grow it. Read it as a description of the pre-industrial yeast trade; nothing in it needs doing today.
- The temperatures are real numbers150-170F is a mash range, and it is chosen deliberately: it is the window in which malt enzymes convert starch to sugar without being destroyed. Above about 170F the enzymes denature and the liquid stays starchy.
- "Saccharine liquid" is wortThe decanted sweet liquid drawn off the grain bed is what a brewer calls wort. The dregs are spent grain, which in a nineteenth-century household went to livestock.
- Carbonic acid means carbon dioxideThe gas evolved in fermentation was called carbonic acid throughout the period. The buoyancy described here is genuine: top-fermenting strains are carried up on the gas and collect as a head, which is why they are still called top-cropping yeasts.
- Hydraulic pressureThe press removes free liquid so the yeast can be handled as a block. The recipe does not say why the block was then covered with stout canvas; a wrapping of that kind would slow drying rather than do anything sterilising.
- Eight to fourteen days is the whole problemThat short and season-dependent keeping time is why fresh yeast had to be bought often, and why factory-made compressed yeast and later dried and instant yeasts took over most of its work. Modern instant dry yeast keeps for a year sealed; 7g of it stands in for roughly 20g of fresh cake yeast.
- Distilled waterThe wash would rinse residual wort sugars and bitter matter off the cells. The text does not say why distilled water in particular was specified.
- Why not to attempt itAn open mash held for hours at 150-170F and then fermented in a domestic kitchen is an excellent culture medium for lactic acid bacteria and wild yeasts. The result is not dangerous so much as unusable: sour, slack leaven of unknown strength. Buy yeast.
Vienna's reputation for bread was one of the food talking points of the second half of the nineteenth century, and it rested on two things: hard high-protein Hungarian wheat, roller-milled, and the city's pressed yeast, which was grown on a grain mash rather than skimmed as a by-product of a brewery working for beer. English and American writers picked up the subject after Vienna baking was shown at the great international exhibitions of the 1860s and 1870s, and the phrase "Vienna bread" entered commercial baking as a style name; the transfer of Viennese yeast practice to the American trade is generally traced to that exhibition period. Within a generation the account was obsolete: yeast grown aerobically on molasses, propagated in dedicated factories, gave a stronger and cleaner product than any skimming method, and the domestic reader stopped needing to know where leaven came from at all.