Home › The Principles of Cookery › YEAST (another way)
YEAST (another way)
Boil a small handful of hops in a quart of water for half an hour. Pour it boiling through a close sieve or colander upon three-quarters of a pound of white flour. Give it a stir, and let it stand till new-milk-warm, then add a breakfast cupful of yeast from the baker's; stir again, and let it stand near the fire for twenty-four hours. A pint of this yeast makes twenty-one pounds of flour into bread. By keeping a small quantity of this yeast in a bottle, to use in making the next supply, one may be quite independent of baker's or brewer's yeast. This yeast will keep a fortnight if either bottled or covered in a jar.
This is a hop barm — a live leaven kept going from batch to batch, in the days before packaged yeast was reliable or cheap. It works, but it behaves like a sourdough starter rather than a sachet of dried yeast.
- The hinge: temperature"New-milk-warm" means blood heat, roughly 98F/37C — cool enough to hold your finger in comfortably. If the flour-and-hop paste is still hot when the baker's yeast goes in, the culture is killed and nothing will rise.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart is 40 fl oz Imperial (about 4 3/4 US cups); three-quarters of a pound of white flour is about 340 g, or a scant 2 3/4 cups. A breakfast cupful is generous — reckon 8-10 fl oz.
- A small handful of hopsRoughly 1/4 to 1/2 oz (7-15 g) of dried hop cones. Modern high-alpha brewing hops are far more bitter than the varieties of the 1870s; use a low-alpha aroma hop such as Fuggle or East Kent Golding, and err on the small side.
- Why hops at allThe hop decoction is antibacterial, and it suppresses the lactic and acetic bacteria that would otherwise sour the barm before the yeast has done its work. It is a preservative, not a flavouring, though a faint bitterness carries through into the bread.
- "Yeast from the baker's"This meant fresh compressed or brewer's yeast — a live, wet culture. About 15-20 g of fresh yeast, or 1 1/2 teaspoons of dried yeast, is a reasonable modern substitute, though the equivalence to a breakfast cupful of wet barm is only approximate. Once you have your own, a bottleful from the last making replaces it.
- The twenty-four hours"Near the fire" in a Victorian kitchen was a warm but not hot spot, perhaps 75-85F/24-29C. On a modern counter at 68F the ferment will simply take longer. It is ready when it is frothing and smells yeasty and faintly beery, not sharply sour.
- Strength and substitutionA pint raising 21 lb of flour works out at roughly 1 fl oz of barm per pound of flour — about 1/4 cup for a standard two-loaf batch. This is a wet leaven, so hold back a corresponding amount of the liquid in your bread recipe. Rising times will be long, several hours rather than one.
- Keeping itA fortnight in a cool Victorian larder is not a fortnight on a centrally heated worktop. Refrigerate the bottle, leave the cap loose or use a jar covered with cloth — a sealed bottle of active ferment builds pressure — and stir it back together before use. Discard it if it turns pink or orange, or smells of cheese.
Hop yeast, or hop barm, sat in the gap between the brewery and the bakery. Before the compressed yeast of the later nineteenth century, households that baked their own bread commonly leavened it with barm skimmed off fermenting beer, and the quality of the loaf depended entirely on the quality of that week's brewing. As commercial brewing consolidated and moved away from the villages, cookery writers filled book after book with recipes for home-raised yeasts built on hops, potatoes, malt or bran, saying explicitly, that a housekeeper who keeps a bottle back "may be quite independent of baker's or brewer's yeast." The hop was the usual choice because its preservative power was already well understood from brewing. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later reworking of the Dictionary of Cookery generally traced to the 1870s and reprinted for decades, catches the practice at its very end: within a generation, packeted yeast of dependable strength made the whole exercise optional.