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Bread with Potato Yeast (Short Process)
N. B. Many a batch of bread has been thrown to the pigs in this Northwestern country through some of the recipes calling for the yeast cake batter or even the dough to stand overnight, and it is not always successful this time of the year (January). This is a first class recipe: Five Roses flour at 12 noon and bread out of the oven at 5 P.M. is a pretty good record-5 hours in winter and 3 or 4 in summer.
YEAST Boil 8 large potatoes, mash in water boiled in, and when still boiling pour this over 4 tablespoons Five Roses flour. Then add 4 tablespoons each of salt and granulated sugar. To this add 1 quart of boiling and 4 quarts of cold water. Dissolve 2 yeast cakes of Royal Yeast in lukewarm water, and mix with the above. Let this mixture remain in a warm place for 18 hours. Then remove to a cool place and keep until required.
BREAD 1 quart of yeast for every 2 loaves.
Set on stove and stir with hand till about blood-heat. Add 1 tablespoon each of salt, brown sugar and butter. Mix into a soft dough (having previously warmed the flour). Let rise for 30 minutes, then knead. When light enough again, mould into loaves. Put in a pan and allow to rise. Bake in moderate oven. -Mrs. J. L. Forrest, Naseby, Sask.
Two recipes in one: a potato-water yeast ferment that keeps in the cold, and a bread built from it. The scale is a homesteader's, not a household's, so read the yield before you start.
- Yield, and how much you actually wantThe yeast makes better than five quarts, and at a quart per two loaves that is ten to twelve loaves' worth of ferment. Quarter the yeast recipe (2 potatoes, 1 tablespoon each flour, salt and sugar, 1 cup boiling plus 1 quart cold water) if you want a manageable batch.
- Royal Yeast cakesThese were dry cakes, shelf-stable and much weaker than modern yeast. Two cakes are roughly equivalent to 2 packets (about 4 1/2 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, though the substitution is approximate — the ferment's 18 hours is what really builds the population.
- Blood-heatAbout 98F. Warm enough for the yeast to work fast and cool enough not to damage it; much above 120F and you start losing it. The recipe has you judge it by hand, as written; a thermometer does the same job.
- Keeping the yeast"A cool place" means a cold cellar or unheated pantry; a refrigerator is the nearest modern equivalent. It will separate and smell sharply alcoholic; stir before using. Discard it if it turns pink, orange, or fuzzy rather than sour, and start again.
- Warming the flourNot decorative. A cold flour bin in a Saskatchewan January will drop the dough below working temperature and cost an hour. Spread the flour in a pan in a barely warm oven for a few minutes, or simply leave it in a heated kitchen overnight.
- Flour quantity is not given"Mix into a soft dough" is the only guide. For one quart of yeast liquid expect somewhere around 10 to 12 cups of bread flour; add it gradually and stop while the dough is still slightly tacky.
- A moderate oven350 to 375F. Loaves of this size take 35 to 45 minutes; they are done at an internal temperature of about 200F, when the bottom sounds hollow.
- The timings are optimisticThirty minutes for the first rise assumes a warm kitchen and a very active ferment. Judge by the dough, not the clock — first rise until roughly doubled, shaped loaves until they hold a fingerprint and have risen just above the pan rim.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and it worked by printing recipes sent in by Canadian women, each credited with name and town — here Mrs. J. L. Forrest of Naseby, Saskatchewan. The note about bread thrown to the pigs is the point of the page: overnight sponges were the norm in older books, but in an unheated prairie kitchen in January a sponge left from bedtime to breakfast was as likely to go cold and dead as to rise. A standing potato-water yeast solved that. Potatoes and their cooking water give yeast a sugar-and-starch broth it multiplies in freely, and the resulting ferment, kept cold, was a household's insurance against a bad batch of yeast cakes — a practice generally traced to the era before reliable commercial yeast reached rural stores. That Royal Yeast is named at all shows the transition in progress: a purchased culture used to start a homemade one.