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Common Yeast, or Baker's Ferment
About 24 potatoes. 2 pounds of flour. 4 ounces of sugar. 1 quart of stock yeast.
Wash the potatoes thoroughly, using a brush for the purpose, and boil them in a kettle of water When done pour off what remains of the dark water and fill up again with fresh. When that boils turn out potatoes and boiling water on to the flour in a large pan and mash all to a smooth paste. Throw in the sugar. Thin down with ice water till like thick cream. Set the large colander over your 6-gallon stone jar (just fresh scalded out) and strain the yeast into it. When it is no more than about milk warm mix in the stock or other yeast to start it. Let stand in a moderately warm place, undisturbed, for from 12 to 24 hours--according to weather, activity, and need of using. It will then be ready for use, and should be kept cold Not much in that; yet it was once the subject of an English patent. Somewhere between 1825 and 1835. And in the days of our daddies was kept a profound secret and termed patent yeast, London yeast, and patent London potato yeast, long after the patent had expired. Now it is used in almost every household where bread is made.
To avoid sourness in this ferment it is quite essential that the flour be well scalded, which is the reason for filling up the kettle the second time to have plenty of boiling water to pour over it along with the potatoes. Ought not the potatoes be pared?
Yes, they ought to be. In nice little hotels kept by ladies they are pared and the eyes scooped out. All the bakers will do that way when the millennium comes. At present the bakers have a sort of superstition that the potato skins make the yeast stronger, and if it should fail to be good would be sure to lay the blame to the paring of the potatoes. However, they are obliged to wash them very clean, and if they did not pour off the first water they are boiled in, its blackness would injure their bread.
There is no salt in the receipt. Ought not salt be added? It need not be. It seems about all the private house authorities add salt. The baker's superstitions all are against it. Most bakers will not put salt in their first sponge. Salt in yeast probably does no harm; it certainly does no good. This little book teaches to make bread with such ease, certainty, and indifference to trifles that you will be at liberty to do either way without impairing success Not so with sugar. It has a chemical effect that is very observable. People can go on for years making good bread without, but they never discover how quick and strong yeast can be until they try the sugar experiment. But there is stock yeast mentioned. Where are we to get that? By all means make your own if you have to make bread constantly and regularly, no matter in what quantity, for stock can be made either by the barrel or bottleful, and needs be made only once a month, because stock is not put into bread direct, but only used to make the common yeast or ferment. It costs only the trouble of making, the materials being almost too trifling in expense to count. Of course you can shuffle along without. Some hotel pastry cooks do so all their lives, never knowing how to make stock. But then they are always dependent, begging from those who are unwilling to give or sell it. Or else they use ferment to start with over and over again, and it carries the germs of acetic fermentation, or seeds of sourness all the time; it is weak and makes rotten dough, while with stock used to start with every time, or at least alternately, it is the most difficult thing to make dough or bread become sour, even if you were to try it.
Some who go on using the lifeless ferment made with ferment for years, blaming the flour and the luck, are astonished after all to find yeast made with perfect stock turning out rolls and loaves twice as large and twice as good as ever they had known them before.
Stock yeast is the foundation corner stone of a trade. The receipt for making it is never published It is too valuable to be spread broadcast in a newspaper, yet some way will be indicated at the end of this book by which those who really need it my obtain the desired information. But if no stock yeast, what then?
A quart or more of good ferment from the shop of a good baker is the best substitute. Next to that is dry hop yeast in cakes, (they are made from stock yeast) not good for making bread direct because of their taste, perceptible to all persons critical about their bread, but good to start ferment along with sugar. Use a liberal amount--about 6 cakes to each gallon of ferment made. Make a new start that way about once a month and use ferment for starting at other times.
There are no hops. Don't you use hops in making yeast? Yes, in all cases where no stock can be had, tie up 4 ounces of hops in a piece of muslin, boil them with the potatoes in the second water, and press out the liquor through the colander when straining the yeast. Hops are not needed with stock for starting, as that is already bitter with them. The baker or pastry cook who makes perfect yeast is naturally reluctant to take chances on other people's on making a new commencement, and will prefer to take along his own in the following easy and reliable manner.
This is a bakery-scale sponge starter, not a recipe for a loaf: the finished "ferment" is the liquid leaven you then use to raise bread. Almost everything about it needs translating for a domestic kitchen.
- Scale it down hardTwenty-four potatoes, 2 lb of flour and a quart of starter are meant to fill a 6-gallon stone jar; the recipe never states the finished volume. Divide by eight for a household: 3 medium potatoes, 4 oz flour, 1/2 oz sugar, 1/2 cup of active starter, thinned to about 2 quarts.
- The hinge: scald the flour, then cool itTwo things decide whether this works. The flour must be scalded by the boiling potato water — that is the whole point of refilling the kettle — because raw flour paste sours. And the mixture must be no warmer than blood heat before the yeast goes in. "Milk warm" is about 95–100F; get much above that — 130F and up — and you kill what you are adding.
- "Stock yeast"A maintained mother culture kept in the shop and refreshed monthly. The author deliberately withholds the formula, so the recipe as printed cannot be completed on its own terms. Use 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast per gallon of ferment, slurried into the cooled mash; the sugar in the recipe is there to wake it up quickly.
- Dry hop yeast cakesThe "6 cakes to each gallon" refers to the dried hopped yeast cakes of the period, which no longer exist in that form. They were not equivalent to a modern packet, either in strength or in flavour, so the ratio does not transfer.
- Hops, and what they were forThe 4 oz of hops boiled with the potatoes are an antibacterial as much as a flavouring — hop resins suppress lactic acid bacteria while leaving yeast unharmed. The author notes that stock is "already bitter" with hops and so needs none added. Skip them and expect the ferment to sour sooner.
- Temperatures for the riseThe recipe never puts a figure on a "moderately warm place"; somewhere in the 70sF is the likely intent. At that range 12 to 24 hours is right; in a modern 68F room it will be slower, and in a much warmer spot it will run to sourness fast.
- "Should be kept cold"Refrigerate it and treat it as perishable. A thin potato-and-flour ferment at room temperature is a good medium for spoilage bacteria as well as yeast; use it within three or four days, and discard it if it smells cheesy, acetic or off rather than yeasty.
- Vessels and equipmentA scalded stone jar is a wide-mouth crock; a glass or food-grade plastic bucket does the same job, loosely covered so gas escapes. The colander — the recipe specifies no cloth lining — is the only straining step, and it matters if you leave the skins on.
- Salt and skinsThe digression is sound. Salt is genuinely optional here and slightly retards fermentation; peeling the potatoes and discarding the first cooking water removes the dark liquor the author says would injure the bread. Peel them.
Potato ferments like this one bridge the gap between brewers' barm and the packaged yeast we buy now. Before compressed yeast became widely available in the United States — one firm is also generally credited with beginning its commercial manufacture in Cincinnati in 1868, and it reached a mass audience through the 1876 Centennial Exhibition — a baker's leaven was a living thing he kept, fed and guarded, and a good "stock" really was a tradable asset. The author's story of an English patent "somewhere between 1825 and 1835", after which the method circulated as "patent London potato yeast", is trade lore repeated at second hand rather than anything he documents, and should be read that way; what it does record accurately is the secretiveness of the craft, which is why this book prints the common ferment freely and holds the stock recipe back, promising only that some way will be indicated at the end of the book by which those who really need it may obtain the information. The tone is characteristic of Jessup Whitehead, who wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks and enjoyed puncturing what he called the bakers' superstitions while conceding, as here, that some of them worked.