No. 3409

Yeast

Levure

All the utensils used for making yeast and leaven should be kept scrupulously clean, as also the tubs. Put fifteen quarts of water into a large pot; set it on the fire and remove it at the first boil. Lay two pounds of flour in the bottom of a tub, dilute it with a pint of boiling water and make a sufficiently hard paste. Put into the rest of the water in the pot three ounces of hops and let boil for ten minutes, then remove from the fire and strain the boiling liquid at once through a fine sieve into the tub and over the paste; set this tub in a cool place and leave it till the liquid is only lukewarm, then with the hands work the paste well into the water; add immediately one quart of barley malt and a quart of stock yeast, mixing all well together. Set the tub in a moderate temperature and leave without disturbing it while fermenting, which process will take place in eighteen to twenty hours. By attending to these elementary details with care a perfect baking will ensue. Strain the yeast through a fine sieve into another tub and set this in the ice box, or any cool place, to use as needed for the preparation of the ferment. This yeast will keep perfectly good for four days.

← No. 3408 Stock Yeast Bakery & Breads No. 3410 Ferment →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a bakery-scale hop barm, not a household recipe: it makes roughly four gallons of liquid yeast intended to be drawn on daily for the ferment (No. 3410) and then the bread doughs. Scaling it down by a factor of eight or ten gives a workable quantity for one kitchen.

The quantities in modern termsFifteen quarts of water is just under four gallons (about 14 L); three ounces of hops is about 85 g of dried hops, a generous quantity for the volume and used here mainly as a preservative and bacterial check. Two pounds of flour is roughly seven to seven and a half cups.
Ambiguous measures"A quart of barley malt" is a volume of what was almost certainly ground or crushed malt, not liquid malt extract; the weight is unknowable from the text. "A quart of stock yeast" refers back to No. 3408 in the same book; without it this recipe has no viable culture and will not ferment on schedule.
The hinge: strain the hop liquid hot, then cool before adding yeastBoiling water poured over the flour paste scalds and gelatinises the starch, making its sugars available. But the malt and the stock yeast go in only when the mixture is lukewarm — no warmer than about 100F. Added to hot liquid, the malt's enzymes and the yeast both die and you have a tub of hop tea.
"A moderate temperature"For fermentation this presumably means a steady warm room, somewhere in the region of 70-78F, not an oven setting. At that sort of range the eighteen to twenty hours quoted is realistic; a colder room will stretch it.
Why the malt is thereThe barley malt supplies diastatic enzymes that convert the gelatinised flour starch into fermentable sugar. Modern diastatic malt powder does the same job in far smaller quantity; non-diastatic or roasted malt will contribute flavour but no conversion.
Keeping and strengthFour days in an icebox is the stated limit, and that is honest for a liquid barm — after that the lactic bacteria dominate and the raising power falls off. Keep it refrigerated, stir before measuring, and expect it to be far weaker than commercial yeast, so any substitution has to be arrived at by trial.
Cleanliness is not decorationThe insistence on scrupulously clean tubs is the whole reason a barm works or fails. An uncontrolled culture in a soured wooden tub goes ropy or acetic, and the resulting bread will taste of it.

A Little History

Before packaged yeast, a bakery kept its own culture alive in a tub, and this hop barm is the standard nineteenth-century American and British method: a scalded flour porridge, a bitter hop decoction to hold off spoilage bacteria, malt to make sugar from the starch, and a ladle of yesterday's yeast to carry the strain forward. Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean in 1894 out of his years at Delmonico's, where the kitchen baked its own bread daily and could not depend on a supplier; the yeast, ferment and leaven entries run in sequence precisely because each is fed by the one before it. Hops in bread yeast were valued as much for keeping quality as for flavour, a role brewers had long understood, and the practice faded quickly after compressed cake yeast became widely and cheaply available in the last decades of the century.