No. 3408

Stock Yeast

Fond de Levain

Boil five quarts of water. Put in a stone jar five ounces of flour; dilute it with a part of this boiling water, sufficient to obtain a very firm paste; put into the remainder of the water one ounce of hops; let boil for ten minutes, then remove the liquid from the fire and run it through a fine sieve into the stone jar and over the paste. Set this jar in a cool place until the liquid is only lukewarm. Then dissolve the paste with the water, and add to it four ounces of malt; cover the pot, and leave it in a rather warm temperature for forty-eight hours, where it cannot be disturbed; when this time has expired strain the liquid through a sieve into another stone jar. The stock yeast is now ready to be used.

← No. 3407 To Make Bread Bakery & Breads No. 3409 Yeast →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a hop-and-malt starter of the kind every large kitchen kept going before packaged yeast, not a bread dough. It is a wild ferment: nothing here inoculates the liquid except the yeasts already living on the malt, the flour and in the air of the room.

The hinge: cool the wort before adding the maltThe boiling hop water must fall to lukewarm (about 100F/38C or below) before the paste is slackened and the malt goes in. Malt stirred into hot liquid kills the very organisms the recipe depends on, and the batch will sour instead of ferment.
Scale and vesselFive quarts is a professional quantity, close to five litres, and it wants a two-gallon stoneware crock or food-grade plastic bucket, loosely covered rather than sealed. Fermenting liquid gasses off and a clamped lid can build pressure.
MaltRanhofer most likely means crushed malted barley, sold today by homebrew suppliers as pale or lager malt. Four ounces is roughly 3/4 cup crushed. Diastatic malt powder will serve as a stand-in; non-diastatic malt syrup is not the same thing.
HopsAn ounce of whole dried hop cones is a bulky, very loosely packed quantity. Modern pellets can be substituted by weight, though they tend to give somewhat more bitterness. The hops are here chiefly as a preservative: their acids suppress lactic bacteria and let yeast take the vessel.
"A rather warm temperature"Read this as 75-80F (24-27C) for the forty-eight hours. Below about 65F the ferment stalls and spoilage organisms get their chance; above about 85F it turns sharp and acetic.
How to tell it workedAfter two days it should be foaming or at least beaded at the surface, smelling of bread and beer, slightly sour and pleasantly bitter. Ropy strands, a skin of coloured mould, or any smell of cheese, nail varnish or must means it failed; pour it away and start again rather than baking with it.
Yield and useYou get roughly four to five quarts of thin liquid yeast. Nineteenth-century hop-yeast recipes often call for something on the order of a cupful to a large loaf, with a long rise; expect several hours rather than the ninety minutes a packet of instant yeast buys you. Use it while fresh and cold, and Ranhofer's next entry (No. 3409) appears to be the working yeast built from this stock.
Whether to botherNothing this starter does cannot be done faster by commercial yeast, and more reliably for sour flavour by a flour-and-water levain. Make it for the hopped, beery character it gives a loaf, which is genuinely distinct.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows a restaurant of that scale still manufacturing its own leaven. Hop yeast was widespread in American households, and in some bakeries, through the nineteenth century: hops were cheap, and their resins keep a sugary liquid from going over to lactic bacteria long enough for wild yeast to establish, which is the same principle that made hopped beer keep better than unhopped ale. Bakers also commonly obtained barm, the living foam skimmed off a brewer's fermenting vat, and a hop-and-malt stock like this one is essentially a way of brewing a small quantity of beer purely for its yeast. Fleischmann's compressed yeast had been sold in the United States since the late 1860s and 1870s and was widely available by the time Ranhofer wrote, so the recipe's survival here is worth noting, though the book does not say why he kept it.