Recipe
Home Bread Before Commercial Yeast: A Historical Loaf
How households raised bread for centuries without a packet of yeast, from natural leaven to barm, plus a modern sourdough loaf to make now.
Context
How households raised bread for centuries without a packet of yeast, and how to do it now.
Reliable packaged yeast is a modern convenience. Charles Fleischmann began marketing compressed commercial baker's yeast in the United States in 1868, and it reached a wide public after the company's Model Vienna Bakery drew crowds at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Before that, and for a long time afterward in many homes, bread was raised by other means.
The two main methods were a natural leaven, what we now call sourdough, kept alive from batch to batch, and barm, the live yeast skimmed from brewing beer. Below is the natural-leaven method as households understood it, followed by a modern loaf you can actually make, since a sourdough starter is the one historical technique still in everyday use.
Historical note
Bread needs a living leaven to rise, and before you could buy one, you had to keep one.
A natural leaven is a mixture of flour and water that has captured wild yeasts and lactic bacteria from the flour and the air. Once established, it bubbles and sours, and a portion of it stirred into a fresh dough will raise it. Households kept this leaven going indefinitely by saving a piece of each batch to start the next, which is why the same starter could stay in a family for years. The sour flavor that gives sourdough its name is simply the signature of this slow, living process.
Barm was the other common source of lift. Brewing beer produces a froth of active yeast, and bakers used this barm to raise bread. In communities where brewing and baking happened side by side, barm was a dependable supply of yeast, though its strength varied with the brewing. Salt-rising bread, raised by a different microbial ferment, was a further regional method, prized by some and notoriously temperamental.
The arrival of consistent commercial yeast in the late nineteenth century changed home baking profoundly. It made a fast, predictable rise available to anyone, and it gradually pushed the older, slower methods to the margins, where sourdough in particular has since returned to favor.
Ingredients
- 100 g active sourdough starter (recently fed and bubbly)
- 350 g (about 1.5 cups) water, lukewarm
- 500 g (about 4 cups) bread flour
- 10 g (about 1.75 teaspoons) salt
Instructions
- In a large bowl, stir the starter into the water until dispersed. Add the flour and mix to a shaggy dough with no dry flour left. Rest 30 minutes.
- Add the salt and work it in. The dough will be sticky. Cover.
- Over the next 3 to 4 hours, at room temperature, give the dough four sets of gentle folds, spaced about 45 minutes apart, lifting and folding the dough over itself in the bowl. It should grow visibly puffy.
- Shape into a round, place seam-side up in a floured bowl or proofing basket, cover, and refrigerate overnight (10 to 16 hours). The cold, slow rise builds flavor, much as the long overnight rise did historically.
- Heat the oven to 240 C (465 F) with a lidded cast-iron pot inside. Turn the loaf out onto parchment, score the top, and lower it into the hot pot.
- Bake covered for 20 minutes, then uncovered for another 20 to 25 minutes, until deeply browned. Cool completely before slicing, which finishes the crumb.