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

[Terry Decker]

One of the things I haven't tried and and you haven't apparently tried 
either, is washing the yeast.  Skim the froth from the active ferment and 
rinse it with repeated baths of cold water until white yeast settles out. 
The process shows up in a plantation cookbook from the early 19th Century. 
IIRC, the same cookbook discusses creating an active ferment (cream yeast) 
on potato water.

I don't recall anyone who has used lees for leaven as having stated that 
they washed out the yeast to purify it.  So such baking was done with all of 
the brewing impurities intact.

English baking was done with ale barm, which based on 16th Century usage, 
would be the active ferment of an unhopped barley malt beverage.  The ale 
might or might not have been bittered with gruit.  So you might want to try 
this with a batch of traditional unhopped ale.

Sounds like you had fun.

Bear


----- Original Message ----- 

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