How Was Bread Made 200 Years Ago?

0:00 What if it took two or three days to bake

0:03 a loaf of bread from the beginning to the end?

0:06 Recently, we did an episode on baking potash cakes.

0:10 And potash cakes were specifically to sort of fix this problem.

0:15 If we had a visitor that came to our house,

0:17 but we didn't have our bread ready to go,

0:19 and bread could take a while in the 18th century,

0:22 then we could make potash cakes to feed

0:24 them right away with something that was bread-like.

0:27 This whole concept came from Margaretta Curly's article in 1799,

0:32 where she describes this special way of baking, at least for that time.

0:37 But the wonderful thing about her letter is

0:41 there was a little extra part at the end.

0:44 This part of the letter talks about baking bread if you don't have yeast.

0:49 This could be a real problem in the 18th century.

0:51 Today, we get yeast from the store.

0:53 It's available to us all the time.

0:55 We have a dried form of it.

0:56 But in the 18th century, they didn't have that.

0:59 Yeast came either from the brewer or from your local baker, and you bought it,

1:04 and it was in a liquid form that didn't last for very long.

1:07 Margaretta Curly talks about this problem.

1:10 She says, "Yet there is a method

1:12 of preparing a fermenting mixture with which the Long

1:16 Island women are well acquainted that I

1:18 will take the liberty of mentioning to you.

1:21 It is to take as many hops as may be held between thumb and three fingers,

1:27 put them into a pint and a half or a quart of water,

1:30 and boil them together." And then she goes on with more directions.

1:35 She's talking about making a mixture that will capture the wild

1:39 yeast in the air so that you can use it for baking.

1:43 Now, this is something that we do quite often today.

1:46 People who experiment with sourdough bread

1:48 sometimes kind of capture their own yeast.

1:51 And the great thing about yeast is it's in the air around us all the time.

1:56 We have yeast on our hands, it's on fruits and vegetables out in the fields.

2:01 We have yeast available to us,

2:03 yet in the 18th century they did not even know what yeast was.

2:08 They hadn't even really got the whole concept of yeast.

2:11 So, this idea that we could just capture it

2:13 in the air was something that was very new to most people.

2:18 In fact, if you look in 18th century English cookbooks,

2:21 you will find some recipes that say how to make yeast,

2:26 but those recipes always start with take some yeast.

2:30 They're not recipes for making yeast,

2:33 they're recipes for making more yeast from a little

2:37 bit of yeast that you might already have.

2:39 But, this recipe actually tells us how to capture wild yeast,

2:43 basically making yeast from nothing.

2:46 And this is extremely rare in the time period,

2:50 at least for people writing it down.

2:52 People may have been doing it and were doing it for hundreds of years.

2:55 Where did bread come from 200 years ago or 500 years ago, for that matter?

2:59 And where did beer come from?

3:01 Well, it came from yeast from the air that was kind of worked on.

3:05 There's one other recipe that I found in the 18th

3:08 century for this, and it's also an American recipe.

3:11 It comes out of this book that is a New Jersey Farmers Book,

3:17 and there are a few recipes in the back.

3:19 And he explains another method very similar to this, where

3:22 we take wheat bran and we boil it,

3:25 and then we add some things like ginger and molasses to it,

3:30 and we let it set, and it starts to bubble all on its own.

3:34 That's the yeast taking off.

3:36 So, today we're going to be doing this grand experiment,

3:39 where we're going to use Margarita Curly's recipe,

3:42 maybe a little bit of this one, too,

3:44 and we're going to make bread without yeast.

3:47 So, here's Margarita Curly's recipe for making your own yeast.

3:51 Take as many hops as will be held between thumb and three fingers.

3:55 Put them into a pint and a half or a quart of water and boil them well together.

4:00 If you have a few apples or a pumpkin in the house,

4:04 cut a few slices of either of these and throw in.

4:07 It will be all the better.

4:09 Then pour the liquor off or strain it through

4:12 a coarse cloth and add three or four spoonfuls

4:15 of molasses and stir in just as much flour

4:20 as will mingle with it to the consistency of thin batter.

4:24 Set the whole in the corner of the kitchen fireplace

4:27 or in any temperature of moderate warmth until a fermentation takes place,

4:32 which will happen in a few hours.

4:34 Then mix it up with your flour and knead it

4:37 up into your dough as in common cases of bread making.

4:41 The key to this recipe is the hops at the beginning.

4:44 We could just basically mingle some flour with some slightly

4:51 warm water and set it aside in a bowl and wait.

4:56 That could take two hours or two days for it to start to do something,

5:02 but it will do something eventually.

5:05 More than likely though, it will start to do something bad.

5:08 So not only will the yeast start to take over

5:10 and start to grow in our little bowl of flour and water,

5:14 but other things will start to grow in there as well.

5:17 Basically, bacteria.

5:19 Now the bacteria may be good, it may be bad,

5:21 more than likely it's going to create a sour

5:23 taste and that's where sourdough kind of comes from.

5:27 It's sometimes caused by bacteria.

5:31 What the hops do here is it keeps that from happening.

5:35 So when we boil the hops, we're starting to create a lightly hopped water.

5:41 And the hops do two things.

5:43 It has some enzymes and it starts to I think

5:46 break down things like starches and puts them into sugars,

5:50 so the yeast can work on them.

5:52 But, the more important thing is is it suppresses

5:55 the growth of bacteria while it lets the yeast grow.

5:59 If we have too strong of a hop mixture here,

6:02 it will even suppress the yeast and basically nothing will happen.

6:06 We don't want that.

6:07 So, we want some lightly hopped water.

6:10 We want to let it get cool.

6:12 We don't want it to be so hot that we kill any yeast.

6:14 Then we can add in our flour.

6:17 Margarita Curly just talks about flour.

6:19 Here in this other book,

6:21 he specifically mentions rye and rye flour is one of the best

6:25 flours to use for this capturing this wild yeast basically.

6:29 The yeast is probably on the flour itself.

6:32 It might be coming from the air, might be coming from the flour,

6:35 or just about anything else in your kitchen basically.

6:38 But, if we take this hopped water and we add our molasses,

6:43 which is the sugars that that will feed the yeast as well as the rye flour,

6:48 then it will start to do its thing.

6:51 It will Now, she says 2 hours.

6:54 It's more than likely going to take a lot more time than that.

6:58 Um I would say at least in cool weather like this, might take half

7:01 a day or even 2 days for it to really start to look like something.

7:06 Let's work on our hops water.

7:08 We need about a quart of water and let's have that boiling.

7:12 We'll take our hops flowers.

7:14 We don't need very many, about an ounce or so.

7:16 Five or six is probably enough.

7:19 Put them into our boiling water and let that boil approximately 10 minutes.

7:24 And then, take that off the fire and let it cool.

7:27 Once our water is cooled off, we can stir in a little bit of molasses,

7:31 which she calls for and also the other recipe from a New Jersey.

7:35 We just need maybe a tablespoon of molasses.

7:38 Even a teaspoon will do.

7:39 We don't need a whole bunch of sugar in here.

7:43 She kind of overdoes it in her recipe.

7:45 Once that molasses is stirred in, we can also stir in our rye flour,

7:51 as much as will make a very thin batter.

7:54 We're going to stir this in, and then our mixture is done for now.

8:00 Now, we set it aside someplace not too hot and not too cold.

8:05 It It needs to be about, say, 72° if you can find that.

8:09 You can cover your bowl up with a cloth,

8:12 or you can even cover it up with plastic

8:15 if you want to make sure nothing gets in there.

8:18 This is going to set, and probably not do anything.

8:23 It will look completely dead for a couple of hours or even a day or two.

8:30 But, sooner or later,

8:32 it will start to show some little bubbles around the outside.

8:35 Maybe some larger bubbles and start to bring up some of this flour,

8:39 because it'll separate.

8:40 It'll have like a water on the top.

8:43 Sometimes I'll come in and just stir it, just to kind of keep it moving.

8:47 And when it starts to bubble, then we know that it is starting to work.

8:52 We can definitely maybe warm it up just a tad.

8:55 Don't get it past about 80° to see if you can get it a little more active.

9:00 Once we have that doing its thing, we can pour that in.

9:05 We can use that basically as our basis for making our bread dough.

9:09 We're going to do bread just like we normally would.

9:11 So, take about a half a pound of our bread flour.

9:15 We're going to put a little bit of salt on that.

9:17 We're going to make a little divot

9:18 in our flour and then pour in our yeast mixture.

9:22 Now, we're going to need a little bit of warm water off the side here,

9:25 uh because we probably won't have enough liquid.

9:28 But, let's stir that in and start to make our bread dough,

9:31 and add just a little bit of water until

9:33 we get to a nice soft bread dough consistency.

9:38 Now, here's the trick.

9:39 The The yeast, the wild yeast that we've just put in there,

9:42 it's very, very lowly active at this point.

9:45 It is not anything like a modern bread wheat yeast that we would use today.

9:50 It's going to take a long time for it to work through this lump of dough.

9:55 So, knead it well, and just like you did with our yeast mixture,

10:01 where we were capturing that yeast, we're going to set it aside someplace warm.

10:04 And it will likely take 8 hours, 12 hours, a day,

10:09 a day and a half before it really starts to look like it's growing.

10:13 We'll punch that down once, make it into our loaves, let it rise one more time,

10:18 and then put it in the oven

10:20 at our normal bread baking temperature of, let's say, 400°.

10:24 We're going to bake our pound loaf for 35 to 40 minutes,

10:28 and then it's ready to go.

10:29 As this was proofing, it kind of flattened out a little bit,

10:32 and I was worried it was going to be a real flat loaf,

10:35 but in the oven it puffed right up, and it really grew a lot.

10:40 In fact, I didn't bother to split it over the top,

10:43 and you can see how it really uh has a life of its own here,

10:47 but we've got lots of wonderful formation here of the crumb.

10:53 It really turned out so much better than I expected.

10:57 It is fairly fine over most of it,

10:59 with some larger bubbles, but it smelled tremendous, it looks really good.

11:04 You would think, because this loaf really sat around

11:07 for quite a while waiting for it to kind of build,

11:10 more than 24 hours, um that it would be a sourdough,

11:14 that we could smell the sourness.

11:17 This does not smell sour at all.

11:20 So, we really didn't get to that state of fermentation,

11:23 even though it took a long time.

11:24 It's just because this wild yeast really hasn't had

11:29 a chance to grow so much that it became sour.

11:34 So, let's give it a taste.

11:36 This is brand new fresh bread.

11:47 Texture not perfect.

11:49 No real sourness to it all.

11:51 Again, kind of a fine texture.

11:53 It would probably do really well toasting it.

11:55 Now, we can and what we should do in a low flame this is

12:01 to save this save part of that dough for the next loaf we do.

12:05 That's the old leaven technique that was done over and over in the 18th century

12:09 by especially particular cultures and places like North

12:12 America would be a classic place to do that.

12:15 And then this this this strain of yeast and other things

12:19 going on here we kind of grow and get their own character.

12:22 This was quite an experiment for me trying to figure out how to get this done.

12:26 In fact, I was worried it just was not going to work.

12:29 But, the reality turns out it worked perfectly.

12:33 This was an experiment for me and you can

12:35 have fun doing the same kind of experiment for you.

12:38 What kind of yeast will you get?

12:41 What kind of loaf will you end up with?

12:43 Only you can find out.