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Easy Recipe for Beginners (Over Night)
Take a quart sealer. Put in 1 yeast cake, 2 tablespoons sugar and the water drained from the potatoes cooked at dinner-time (allowed to get lukewarm).
Keep in a warm place to ferment. It will be ready for use in 5 or 6 hours. I then get about 5 lbs. or more of Five Roses flour and ½ tablespoon salt. Mix thoroughly. Then pour off the liquid in the sealer into the middle of the flour with as much warm water as it will take (a pint or more) to mix into a dough so that it does not stick to the hands. Allow to rise overnight.
In the morning, mould into loaves.
Allow to rise again an hour or more. Bake as usual. This is an easy recipe for beginners, and a good one when made with Five Roses flour.
Note-The sediment in the sealer can be used for any length of time. It is called a starter." Put 2 tablespoons sugar and the lukewarm potato water, and add a yeast cake occasionally.
A wet potato-water ferment used as a perpetual starter, then a straight overnight dough. The quantities are farmhouse scale and the salt is unusually low, so both need adjusting before you begin.
- Quart sealerA one-quart glass preserving jar with a screw band — what North Americans now call a Mason jar. Leave the lid loose or covered with cloth; a sealed jar of active ferment builds pressure.
- Yeast cakeCompressed fresh yeast cakes of the period were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied and dry yeast cakes were also sold under the same name. Substitute about 2¼ teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, softened in a little of the lukewarm potato water.
- Potato waterThe starch and dissolved potato solids feed the yeast and the ferment tends to go faster than in plain water. Keep the liquid genuinely lukewarm, about 100 to 110F; water much above 130F will kill the yeast.
- Five pounds of flourAbout 18 cups, yielding four large loaves or more. Halve or quarter the whole recipe unless you want that much bread; the ferment jar can stay the same size.
- Fix the saltHalf a tablespoon for five pounds of flour is a fraction of what modern bakers use and the loaf will taste flat and ferment slack and fast. Figure about 2 percent of the flour weight — roughly 2½ tablespoons of table salt for the full batch.
- The overnight riseThis assumed a kitchen cooler than a modern heated house. In a 70F room the dough may well overproof by morning; use cool water, keep it in the coolest room, or move it to the refrigerator after an hour.
- Bake as usualFor loaf tins, 400F for 35 to 40 minutes. The loaf is done when the internal temperature reaches 195 to 200F and the bottom sounds hollow.
- Keeping the starterThe instruction to hold the sediment "for any length of time" at room temperature is not advice to follow with cooked potato water, which spoils readily. Refrigerate the jar between bakes and start fresh if it smells sour, cheesy or off rather than yeasty.
Potato-water yeast was one of the standard home ferments across nineteenth-century North America, kept going in a jar on a warm shelf and refreshed with sugar and the drained water from the evening's potatoes — a practical use for something that otherwise went down the drain, in kitchens where commercial yeast was an occasional purchase rather than a staple. The recipe reads as a submitted household method, and the Five Roses Cook Book, published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was built almost entirely from such contributions: Canadian housewives sent in what they actually made, and the company printed it with its own flour named in the text. The plug for the brand at the end is the price of admission. The structure of the recipe — long ferment, overnight bulk rise, mould and bake in the morning — is older than either the flour or the yeast cake, and reflects a kitchen where bread day was organised around the stove already being hot for other reasons.