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Drink

Parisian Barm

A fermented beverage made from water, malt, flour, and store, boiled and stirred, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and flour work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Parisian Barm

Ingredients

Directions

Mash the malt

  1. Heat 15 lbs of water to 180°F in a clean tub.

  2. Cover and let the temperature fall to 162°F, then add the malt.

  3. After 2.5 hours, wring off the liquor and add enough water at 150°F to total 15 lbs and reach 128°F.

Make the barm

  1. Stir in the flour by hand, then add boiling water and stir vigorously.

  2. Ensure the mixture is not too stiff and tastes sweet when freshly made.

  3. Do not cool artificially; stir vigorously when storing.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Malt + flourtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Malt
Provides sugars that feed the yeast and give the barm its sweet taste.
Flour
Supplies starch and body, forming the thick mass that the yeast works in.

The step that matters

Adding the water at the right temperature. Malt enzymes convert starch to sugar only within a suitable temperature range. If the liquor is too hot, the enzymes are destroyed; if too cool, the sugar yield is poor and the yeast has little to feed on.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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