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To Make Barm

Barm is a yeast-like starter made by boiling hops, dissolving isinglass, mixing with flour, and allowing it to ferment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Hops and flour work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

To Make Barm

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the hops in 1 quart of water until reduced to 1 pint, then strain.

  2. Dissolve the isinglass in warm water.

Make and rest the barm

  1. Mix the flour, dissolved isinglass, and a little barm in 6 quarts of warm water.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 30 hours in a warm place to develop barm.

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. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Best hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and their boiled extract flavours the starter.
Flour
Provides starch that yeast feeds on, supplying material for fermentation.
Barm
Supplies live yeast that ferments the mixture and makes it develop.
Isinglass
Acts as a fining agent that helps clear the liquid as it settles.

The step that matters

Standing the mixture in a warm place. Yeast activity depends on steady warmth; if the mixture gets too cold, fermentation slows and barm may not develop within the 30 hours. Too much heat can also kill the yeast.

“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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