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Potato Yeast (with Mixer)
2½ quarts potatoes YEAST 2 quarts boiling water Boil till tender and pour over 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups white sugar ½ cup salt Stir till smooth, then add 3 quarts cold water 2 quarts lukewarm water 2 Royal Yeast cakes.
Let stand 24 hours in warm place.
Then put away in air-tight jars in a cool place.
BREAD For every loaf of bread take 2 cups of this yeast. Put in bread mixer set in pan of warm water. Heat stirring constantly to about 90 degrees. Allow about 3 cups sifted Five Roses flour to every cup of yeast. Have flour warm. Knead down hard and stand in warm place till risen about twice the size. Knead down well again-a long kneading improves it. Let rise again till light enough. Shape in loaves. Put on tins. Let rise till nice and light, then bake in moderate oven.
This is two recipes in one: a liquid potato yeast kept as a household stock, and the bread built from it. Almost nothing in it matches a modern kitchen's scale, so read the quantities before you start.
- The yield is enormousThe liquids alone come to seven quarts, and with the potatoes the batch is around nine quarts, a little over two gallons. At two cups a loaf that is roughly eighteen loaves' worth. Divide the whole formula by six or eight if you want a jar that fits a refrigerator shelf.
- Storage is the weak pointAn active ferment in an air-tight jar builds carbon dioxide pressure and can blow the lid. Use a loosely covered or vented container, keep it refrigerated rather than in a nineteenth-century cool cellar, use it within a week or so, and discard it if it smells sour-rotten, cheesy or of anything but bread and potatoes.
- MeasuresTwo quarts of potatoes means volume, not weight: roughly 3 to 4 lb of potatoes. Note that a Canadian book of this date may be reckoning in imperial quarts rather than the four-cup US quart. The half cup of salt is not a misprint — it seasons the whole batch of yeast, and the bread instructions add no further salt.
- Royal Yeast cakesThese were dry compressed cakes, not the perishable cream-coloured fresh cakes. Two of them correspond to roughly 4 to 5 teaspoons of active dry yeast, or two standard 7 g packets.
- The bread mixerA tinned pail with a crank-driven dough hook and a clamp lid, set into warm water to hold the temperature. A stand mixer with a dough hook does the same work; the water bath was only a way of reaching and holding the 90F called for.
- Temperature is the hingeHeat the yeast to about 90F and no further. It is damaged well above that and killed somewhere around 130 to 140F, which is why the original insists on constant stirring in a water bath rather than direct heat.
- Flour ratio and hydrationThree cups of flour to one cup of liquid yeast makes a dough on the firm side. Hold back some of the flour and add it as needed; flour of this period may have absorbed water differently from what is on the shelf now.
- Oven'Moderate' is conventionally taken as about 350F, though no figure is given here. For a loaf this size, 375F for 35 to 45 minutes gives better colour and a fully set crumb; the loaf is done at an internal temperature near 200F.
- Kneading and rises"A long kneading improves it" is the instruction to take seriously — this dough gets three rises and two hard knead-downs, and the second is where the crumb is made. Expect the whole bread process to run four to six hours after the yeast is warmed.
Before packaged yeast was reliable and cheap, many households kept a liquid stock alive themselves, and potato water was one common medium: the starch feeds the yeast, and the sugar and salt here both nourish it and slow spoilage enough for the jar to last a week or two in a cool place. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal from 1913 onward and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the flour, sits exactly on the hinge between the two systems: it is started with two purchased Royal Yeast cakes, and the whole thing is worked in a patent crank bread mixer, a fixture of well-equipped kitchens of the period. Recipes of this kind became less common as commercial dry yeast made the twenty-four-hour stock unnecessary.