Oops. I woke up this morning with a vague sense of something
not right and logged into my e-mail and then FB. All seemed okay there, so I
checked that the blog post I scheduled went live…Wrong blog. Wrong post. Wrong
day.
So, I deleted the post. No harm, no foul, right?
Wrong. I didn’t back that post up when I wrote it. So, I’m
recreating this one from scratch, rather like the subject of my post—making yeast
when there isn’t a grocery store for miles and miles or a few more decades of
time.
Making yeast was something every cook, wife, and baker
probably knew how to do in the time period we’re talking about. Without yeast,
you’ve got flatbread. And if you didn’t know how to make yeast, you couldn’t
just run to the grocery store. Even if you could just run into town, what we
know as grocery stores still didn’t exist.
The simplest recipe to make yeast involves potatoes, sugar,
and flour. Boil your potatoes as you usually would, except save three cups of
the water. Divide the water in half. Stir in about a tablespoon of sugar and
about a cup of flour into a cup and a half of the water, or until the mixture
is sort of stiff. Cover and leave overnight in a warm place and it should be
bubbly and yeasty-smelling the next morning. If not, you’ll need to start over.
(That’s where the other half of the boiled potato water came in.) If you don’t
have flour, you can boil an extra potato and plan to smash that potato and use
as the starter for the yeast.
Have you ever heard when selecting potatoes for cooking
(other than baked) that it’s one for me, one for you, and one for the pot? The
one for the pot was so the cook could make yeast.
After all this talk of boiled, smashed potatoes…I’m hungry.
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