Name: Bitter Yeast, to Cobbect
Ingredients: 1 piece of bread; 1 red-hot cinder (optional); a little bran; cold water

Bitter Yeast, to Cobbect

Ingredients

1 piece of bread
1 red-hot cinder (optional)
a little bran
cold water

Directions

Prepare the yeast

Bake a piece of bread until it is quite black.
While the bread is hot, drop it into the yeast or a red-hot cinder.
If the yeast is very bitter, put a little bran into a sieve and strain the yeast through it.

Purify the yeast

To purify the yeast, pour cold water over it and let it sit until the yeast sinks.
Once the yeast sinks, pour off the water.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread: Baked black, it supplies the bitter charred flavour that the yeast takes on.
Cold water: Washes the yeast so that it settles and the bitter liquid can be poured away.

“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.