[Sca-cooks] Period Pretzels, yet again...

[Guenievre de Monmarche]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Terry Decker <t.d.decker at att.net> wrote:

>  Bear, this may be a dumb question, but have you baked directly from the
>> ale barm? How was it different from, say, the powdered yeast you can buy at
>> the grocery? I know when I was brewing small mead, I would skim off the
>> foam and wonder if I could scoop it off and use it for bread. Never tried
>> because even then I was having serious hand/wrist issues. Haven't made
>> bread in about 15 years. I might give it a try if it was part of an
>> experiment...
>>
>> Liutgard
>> --
>>
>
> My limited experience with ale barm was that it wasn't as potent as modern
> dry active yeast, which has been carefully bred for the past 100 years to
> reduce alcohol production and increase the CO2.  As I remember it, the
> bread took about 6 hours to rise.  This was before I took copious notes on
> these kinds of experiments, so I have only memories to rely on.  I should
> be in New Mexico full time by year's end and I'm thinking about getting a
> stone crock and running up an ale pot just to test the leavening.
>
> Terry



I actually have been playing around with bread-from-fermenting beer lately,
just hadn't had time to reply to the list until now (thus the zombie
thread). I got intrigued by a quote out of that Peter Brears book mentioned
lately - Cooking and Dining in Medieval England - from page 118:

"“Since the sourness produced by these methods was unsuitable for the
finest white manchets and paindemain, they were replaced by a leaven of the
frothy yeast carefully skimmed off the top of ale around the second day of
its fermentation ... When required, a volume of it equal to one twentieth
of the white flour was mixed with salt and warm water, mixed to a batter in
the flour in the dough trough, and then processed just like the cheat
dough."

I have a Resident Brewer, and so I got to experiment. I found it made
*very* tasty bread, but there were a couple of "gotchas" that affected the
end result.

1. The first batch I tried was using a stout as the leavening, and even at
only using 1/2 cup of beer foam to 24 oz flour (plus extra water, of
course) that significantly affected the color of the bread. Here's a
picture -
http://www.erminespot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/154128_10151787910267119_1644233747_n1.jpg-
that's with *all white flour*, and it came out looking like
half-whole-wheat. With a lighter beer - something along the lines of a
newcastle brown - this effect was lessened.

2. The yeast was far more heat sensitive than the commercial yeast I
usually work with - I usually proof bread in a briefly-heated oven,
probably around 100 degrees or a bit more, for speed. The beer yeast just
*stopped* at that temperature, but happily rose in a 65 degree house.

3. You could definitely taste a little beer in the final bread - it wasn't
necessarily identifiable as beer if you didn't know that was what you were
tasting, but it was there. I possibly could have used less beer foam and
let it rise longer to reduce that effect while still getting a high-enough
yeast population.

Overall, though, the results were good, and much better than those a friend
of mine achieved playing with "spent" beer barm.

Guenièvre