As we continue our series on 18th century
breads, we feel we’ve only just begun to discover the complex role bread plays in
history. Today we’ll take a closer look at leaven in the 18th century, how to preserve
it and then how to use it. First, we need to make a distinction between
the word leavening and the word leaven. The word leavening is a generic term meaning anything
that you add to dough that creates a lighter and fluffier loaf when you’re finished.
Leavening can be mechanical. We can whip air into egg whites, creating a meringue that
we fold into batter to make a lighter bread. We could also use a chemical agent such as
pearl ash or saleratus similar to the modern baking soda and baking powder. These create
a chemical reaction. Carbon dioxide bubbles are formed and this creates a quick bread,
a lighter and fluffier sort of bread. Then there’s yeast, which is a biological agent.
The word leaven, at least in the 18th century, means a lump of old dough.
We know from archeological evidence that yeast has been used for thousands of years for brewing
beer and for baking bread. By the mid 1700’s, two strains of yeast had been domesticated,
ale yeast used for brewing beer and for baking bread and lager yeasts which the Germans had
developed for brewing beer at cooler temperatures for longer periods of time.
By the late 18th century, ale yeast had been further refined by the Dutch for commercial
sale, specifically to bakers. Now while modern commercial baking yeasts have been cultivated
into various strains, they still remain the same species of ale yeast.
Now there’s a third species of yeast we have yet to mention. That’s wild yeast.
Wild yeast exists everywhere. It exists in the air, on your skin, even on the grains
of wheat themselves. Many 18th century bread recipes call for the
use of barm, which is that soupy yeast mixture that’s skimmed off the top of a fresh batch
of ale. In our mixed bread episode, we showed you how to make a modern equivalent to barm.
For the British palate, barm was the preferred form of yeast. They like this lighter sweeter
bread. In fact there were laws passed that prevented professional bakers from recycling
or reusing they’re yeast, this old dough, which resulted in a much sharper flavor. In
contrast to the British, up until 1670, the French outlawed the use of barm yeast in making
bread in favor of the much more flavorful and acidic old dough or leaven method.
We talked about our generic term of leavening and the term leaven which means old dough.
After our initial batch of bread dough is yeasted, we save back a piece of this dough
for our next batch, whether it’s the next day or the next week, and as this process
continues, each time we make the dough, we save some back for the next batch, it turns
into what we call sourdough, but I’ll explain that more in a minute.
Now, there were many reasons to use this old dough or leaven. The first one was flavor.
It gave a much more rich and sharper flavor to the bread, but there were other reasons
also. Not only in France, but in Great Britain and America, because of the importance of
ale in the 18th century diet, virtually everyone had access to ale yeast or barm, but there
were circumstances when the supplies were very limited. Take for instance, William Ellis
who wrote the 1750 book Country Housewife Family Companion, and in it he mentions a
shortage of yeast during the great frost of 1740. This year marked the coldest period
during what is now known as the little ice age. Yeast was very scarce during that time
in Europe because of the extended period of frigid temperatures that prevented it from
being cultivated. When barm was in short supply, leaven was
used to replace it, but there was another reason to use leaven and that was to preserve
yeast from one session to the next. Frequent use of a wood fired oven was impractical and
inefficient for the home baker so there needed to be a way to preserve yeast from one baking
session to the next. Now we have to remember that in the 18th century,
no one fully understood yeast, what it was and how it worked, any of these things. It
wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that yeast was proven to be a living organism. Now the
difference in taste between bread made with barm and that made with leaven has a lot more
to do with bacteria than it does with the yeast that’s involved. Bacteria lives along
with yeast inside of every ball of dough. It converts sugars that are in the dough into
lactic acid, so if you let your dough ferment long enough, it doesn’t matter whether you
start with a wild yeast culture or a barm, your dough will begin to sour. It’ll begin
to take on those characteristics of sourdough bread and so your dough may not taste exactly
the same as some regionally famous sourdough breads, it will be a sourdough bread nonetheless. For the first part of our demonstration today
we’re going to make a very simple bread dough. I’ve got four cups of simple bread
flour here, unbleached, and I’m going to add to that just a teaspoon of kosher salt,
and now I’ve got some yeast. I could mix up barm, but since this isn’t really the
main part of what we’re doing here, this is just a start, we’re going to use dry
instant yeast. It’ll end up being exactly the same in the end so that’s what we’re
going to use here. So we’re going to use a packet of instant yeast. And now we’re going to add to that about
a cup and a half of warm water, make a pool here. This should make just about the right consistency. Now we’ve got this mixed, let’s turn this
dough out onto a floured surface here and we’ll get that mixed up, and we’ll knead
this until its ready, until it’s nice and soft. Okay, this dough is ready to let it set and
rise, but now’s the time, I’m going to extract a piece of dough to use for the next
time I’m going to bake bread, so here we go, here’s a piece of dough, we’re going
to save this for later. And we’re going to take this, reform it up into our shape,
let’s put it in the dough bowl and let it set for baking. We’ll let this set an hour
or two and then we’ll bake it in our oven. Now here’s our dough that we’ve taken
off for the next baking. If we’re going to use this dough tomorrow or if we’re going
to use it maybe the day after, we can just take this ball and put it into a little pile
of flour and save that for later on, but if we aren’t going to bake for 7 days or 10
days, we need a way to preserve this for later use, so what we can do is we can store that
in some salt. To preserve this properly, what we’re going to do is we’re going to punch
a hole in our dough, we’re going to take that and fill the hole with salt so that it’s
got salt in the middle of it and once this is salted we’re going to make a little cavity
in our salt canister and we’re going to pour salt right on top and fill that up so
it’s covered up with salt and this’ll dry out. It’ll be a little hard lump when
it comes out of here in a week or 10 days. In our next episode we’re going to take
this preserved dough ball and we’re going to wake it back up and we’re going to use
it to bake some bread. We’re also going to start a wild yeast culture. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel
and check out our Facebook page for all the news at Jas. Townsend and Son. All of the
items you’ve seen here today, all the cooking implements, all the clothing, these things
are available on our website or in our print catalog and I want to thank you for joining
us today and I want to invite you to join us as we savor the aromas and flavors of the
18th century.
