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Bread with Potato Yeast
Materials: 8 large potatoes 4 tablespoons Five Roses flour 4 tablespoons salt 4 tablespoons granulated sugar 4 cups boiling water 4 quarts cold water 2 cakes Royal Yeast.
Method:
Peel and boil the potatoes, and mash in water boiled in. While boiling, pour this over the flour, salt and sugar (which have been previously stirred together).
To this, add boiling water, mix well, then add the cold water. Dissolve the yeast cakes in ½ cup lukewarm water, and mix with the above. Let this mixture remain in a warm place about 18 hours. Then it is ready for use. Keep in a cool place and use as required.
Materials:
BREAD 8 cups Five Roses flour (sifted) 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon brown sugar 1 tablespoon butter 4 cups (1 quart) potato yeast.
Method:
Set the yeast on the stove and stir until it is at about blood-heat (98 degrees Fahr.). Then add the salt, sugar and butter. Mix in sufficient of the flour (previously warmed) to make a batter.
This will require 3 to 4 cups to the quart of liquid used. Cover and set to rise.
When light and frothy, add balance of the flour, or until the dough ceases to stick to the hands. Knead thoroughly for 15 minutes. Let rise again until double original size, when it may be gently moulded into loaves. Let rise again.
Then bake 60 minutes in moderate oven.
Note-2 quarts of the liquid potato yeast in this recipe make 4 large loaves, so that the rule should be doubled for this quantity.
Two recipes in one: a liquid potato yeast that ferments overnight, and a plain white bread built on it. The starter makes roughly five quarts, far more than most kitchens want at once, and the bread formula uses only a quart of it.
- Scale firstThe starter yields about 5 quarts; the bread as written uses 4 cups of it and makes two large loaves. Quartering the starter (2 potatoes, 1 tbsp each flour, salt and sugar, 1 cup boiling water, 1 quart cold water) gives a manageable batch.
- Royal Yeast cakesThese were dry yeast cakes, not the compressed fresh cakes sold today. One cake is roughly equivalent to a 7 g packet of active dry yeast, though the strength is not exactly documented; two packets for the full batch is a reasonable substitution.
- "Blood-heat"The book gives it as 98°F, and that is the number to hit. Much above about 120°F the yeast starts to suffer, and it dies off around 130-140°F; warming the liquid on the stove is easier to judge with a thermometer than with a finger.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F. Sixty minutes suits large loaves in heavy tins; check for an internal temperature of about 200-210°F rather than trusting the clock, and tent with foil if the crust colours early.
- The salt reads highFour tablespoons of salt in the starter is correct for the volume — it seasons five quarts of liquid, of which only a quart goes into each batch of bread. The bread itself then takes only one more tablespoon.
- Storing the liquid yeast"A cool place" meant a cellar or cold pantry. Refrigerate it, keep it covered, and use it within about a week; a starter based on cooked potato spoils faster than a flour-and-water one. Discard it if it smells cheesy, putrid or sharply off rather than pleasantly sour and beery.
- Kneading and risesFifteen minutes by hand is not exaggeration for a dough this size; 8-10 minutes in a stand mixer on low does the same work. Three rises are called for — sponge, bulk, and pan — and the potato ferment is slower than commercial yeast, so judge by doubling, not by time.
- Why potatoThe starch and the potato cooking water feed the yeast and keep the crumb soft and moist. Mash the potatoes into the water they boiled in, as directed, and do not drain any of it away.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour, and it circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian households in the early twentieth century. A recipe like this one sits at the hinge between two eras of baking: packaged yeast was available and named in the ingredients, yet the cook is still expected to keep a living pot of potato yeast on hand and top it up as required, the way her mother might have kept a barm or a salt-rising ferment. Potato-water yeasts were among the common domestic starters in North America in the nineteenth century — the cooked starch gives yeast an easy, reliable food, and the resulting bread keeps softer than one raised on flour alone. Cheap dependable dry and compressed yeast gradually displaced the practice in the decades that followed.