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Hop Yeast
Peel and grate 8 medium-sized potatoes, then add ½ cup salt, ½ cup sugar (granulated), 3 tablespoons Five Roses flour. Take 4 quarts water and 1 large handful of hops. Put on to boil, and boil just 8 minutes. Pour this over the potatoes, sugar, salt and flour. Stir up well. Let cool. Put 2 yeast cakes in ¾ cup warm water. Add to the hop liquid when cool enough. Put in a warm place to rise.
Then put in sealers to use as needed.
Rule:
Take 4 quarts sweet milk and 2 of buttermilk. Put on stove to boil, but do not let it scorch. Take off, dip the whey from the curd and let cool.
In Put the flour in the bread dish. Make a hole in the centre, put in a ¼ cup salt, the same of sugar, 2 cups hop yeast and 4 quarts whey. This quantity will make 8 large loaves. Stir all together with a spoon until very stiff, then knead into stiff, solid bread about 10 o'clock at night. I get better bread this way than if made in a sponge. Cover up well and warm. the morning, it will be up nice and light.
Knead down, but do not add any more flour. It should be stiff enough not to stick to your hands. Let rise again, then knead into pans. Let rise 1 hour, or until very light. Then bake 1 hour. Be sure and use Five Roses flour: you can't miss but have beautiful light, white bread; it won't get hard and dry out like potato bread. If your bread has a tight skin on it and won't rise, wring a cloth out of very hot water, lay over the bread, then cover up for 5 minutes before you put it in the oven. That will take it off.
Two recipes run together here: a hop-and-potato yeast starter, and a whey bread built on it. Both assume a kitchen where flour was measured by the bread dish and yeast was kept alive on a shelf.
- The hinge: cool the liquid firstThe boiled hop water must be no more than lukewarm, around 100F, before the yeast cakes go in. Hotter liquid weakens the yeast and above roughly 130F kills it outright, leaving the crock to sour.
- A large handful of hopsPerhaps ½-1 oz (15-30 g) of dried hop flowers; the original leaves it to the hand. Pellet hops sold for brewing can be used in about the same weight, and will give a somewhat stronger bitterness.
- Yeast cakesEither compressed fresh yeast or the dry yeast cakes then sold in packets; a compressed cake ran about 0.6 oz. Substitute roughly 4-5 tsp of active dry yeast, proofed in the warm water as directed.
- Storing the starter in sealersSealers are Mason-type jars. Keep the finished yeast refrigerated, lid resting on rather than clamped down, since it continues to give off gas. It stays usable a couple of weeks; discard it if it smells of nail polish, cheese, or anything but sour beer.
- The wheyBoiling sweet milk with buttermilk curdles it; the liquid dipped off is the whey. Cheesemaking whey or plain water plus a cup of buttermilk gives the same effect if you would rather not curdle 6 quarts of milk.
- The salt is out of proportionOne cup of salt in the dough, about 9 oz, is far more than modern practice for eight loaves; the 2 cups of starter add a little more on top of it. Salt to about 2 percent of the flour weight instead.
- No flour quantity is givenThe original leaves it to the cook: enough to make a dough stiff enough not to stick. Eight large loaves runs to roughly 11-12 lb of flour, which is a very large batch for a home mixer.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. For pans of this size, 375F for a full hour suits a 2 lb loaf, and the crumb should read about 200F at the centre.
- The tight skin trickThe hot damp cloth is there to soften a crust that has dried on the rising loaf. Covering the pans with plastic or a proofing box from the start prevents it in the first place.
Before packaged yeast was reliable and cheap, many households kept a living barm on hand, and hop yeast is often said to have been a common Anglo-Canadian version: hops boiled with potato and flour, the sugar feeding the yeast and the hop resins discouraging the bacteria that turn a starter sour. It is a kitchen use of the same property that made hops indispensable to brewers. That this recipe survives in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes sent in by women across Canada, shows the transitional moment it comes from: commercial yeast cakes are called for to start the hop yeast, but the household still expects to keep and stretch its own supply in sealers. The insistence on the brand, and the swipe at ordinary potato bread drying out, may well be the milling company's voice rather than the contributor's, though there is no way to be certain.