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

Bitter Yeast, to Correct

Ingredients

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

Directions

Prepare the bread

Bake a piece of bread until it is quite black.

Treat the yeast

While the bread is hot, drop it into the yeast or add a red-hot cinder.
To sweeten very bitter yeast, place a little bran in a sieve and strain the yeast through it.
To purify the yeast, pour cold water over it and let it sit until the yeast sinks, then 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: Charred bread is added to the yeast to absorb odours and impurities in this old purification method.
Bran: Bran strained through the yeast is meant to soften its bitter taste in this method.

“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.