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Barm Dumplings: A Truly Barmy Experience!

The Recipe: Barm Dumplings

About the Recipe
As a food historian, I have known about barm for a long time. Barm is essentially the yeast that can be drawn off fermenting malt, usually ale malt. It appears to have been a common type of yeast available from local breweries. Ale barm produces a sweet not sour taste in the bread. The method for leavening dough with ale barm was actually developed by Gaelic people in Scotland, Ireland and England.  Anecdotally, the term to describe flighty people,"barmy", refers back to the unpredictability of the ale barm.

So barm was essentially yeast. Confusion over this term emerged over time because the word "barm" could be sometime used to define sourdough or levain.   It was the type of yeast used to create the Manchet loaf for British nobility. On the other hand, Maslin, the bread of the lower classes was raised with a sourdough starter. Continental Europeans also tended to use sourdough levain starters for their breads.

For this challenge, I needed to detect how to recreate barm in the 21st century. Needless to say, it would be very helpful to be good friends with a brewer. I am not. So, I had to keep digging to find a substitution for authentic ale barm. After several Google searches, I finally found a fellow blogger who offered up a method for making barm. Please go to the Bewitching Kitchen blog post for details on making Barm and Barm Bread (I will detail it below too but I want to give credit where it is due).

What I discovered is that I needed the following to make the barm:

Why Bottle Conditioned? Bottle conditioned ales ferment and get their bubbles from live yeast cultures contained in the bottled beer. You can actually see the yeast in the bottom of the bottle. This is the historic way of getting those bubbles in beer. Most modern beers get their carbonation from "forced carbonation" where CO2 is pumped into the beer to give it the right amount of bubbles. Using bottle conditioned beer therefore makes a lot of sense--if you want ale yeast, buy a beer that actually contains it!

Here is a good ale to use: This one is pretty straight forward so no need to elaborate.

Here is where I needed to do some more detecting. While I have worked with sourdoughs in the past, I wanted to make one that was historic. After searching through my many historic cookbooks, I found a very simple instruction in a recipe for Home Made Yeast from The International Jewish Cookbook by Florence Kreisler Greenbaum (New York: 1919). The recipe is interesting because it gives a lengthy direction to make yeast using potatoes, hops, water, and yeast!  I have seen so many of these recipes that infuriate me because these recipes for yeast actually contain yeast as an ingredient!!  However, this recipe offers an alternative when yeast is not available. Here it is: Now, I was ready to make my own levain with a historic recipe.

Making the Sourdough Levain:
I found a website called Culinate which gave some measurement direction and used those directions as a guide.

Here is what it looked like:

For full disclosure, I made a batch of bread with the first batch of this sourdough that I made. I was actually surprised at how well the levain worked to raise the bread and make it really tasty. To make the bread: I added the levain to about 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour and 1 tablespoon of salt. I kneaded it on a floured board for about 8 minutes and let it raise for 8 hours.  Here is what it looked like:

Making the Barm:
Please refer to the blog, Bewitching Kitchen, for specific directions on making the barm. Here are some items to note: Making the Barm Dumplings:


Posted by Joyce White at Monday, February 01, 2016 Labels: 18th century food, Ale Barm, Barm Dumplings, Challenge 3, Historic Yeast, Historical Food Fortnightly 2016, History Detectives

