Name: Kirkleatham Yeast
Ingredients: 4 quarts of water; 1/2 pint of yeast; 1/2 pint of the yeast; 1/2 pint of this yeast sufficient; 3 lbs

Kirkleatham Yeast

A yeast preparation for bread made by boiling hops, water, flour, and yeast, then using it with potatoes and flour to rise bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

Kirkleatham Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the yeast

Boil the hops and water for 20 minutes.
Strain the boiled mixture.
Mix the strained liquid with 1/2 lb of flour and not quite 1/2 pint of yeast.
Bottle the mixture and tie the corks down.

Make the potato starter

When needed, boil potatoes according to the quantity of bread to be made (about 3 lbs are sufficient for about a peck of flour).
Mash the boiled potatoes.
Add 1/2 lb of flour to the mashed potatoes.
Mix about 1/2 pint of yeast with the potato and flour mixture.
Let this mixture stand all day.
Lay the bread to rise the night before it is wanted.

By Isabella Beeton. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Potatoes (in the method): Add starch and moisture to the dough, helping the loaf stay soft and moist.
Yeast: Ferments the flour mixture so the dough gases up and rises.
Flour (in the method): Provides the starch and gluten that give the bread its structure.

“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.