Home › Recipes › Italian Bread
Italian Bread
Formula Straight wheat flour, 100 lbs.
Water, 56 to 58 lbs.
Salt, 1½ lbs.
Yeast, 1/2 to 3/4 lb.
Method Dissolve the yeast in 2 qts. of water and place to one side. Put 36 lbs. of water, 60 lbs. of flour and the yeast solution into the mixer and mix until smooth and elastic. This mixture Allow this sponge to ferment until The sponge should have a temperais known as the sponge. it comes to 21½ risings. ture of about 80 degrees when mixed.
Doughing Put the balance of the water and salt into a mixer and stir. Now add the sponge and break it up. After the sponge has been broken up, add the balance of the flour and mix until the dough is smooth.
Fermentation Allow the dough to come to one rising when it will be ready to be divided. If a more vigorous fermentation is desired, more yeast should be used.
This is a commercial bakeshop formula, written for a mixer holding 100 lbs of flour and for a baker who already knew how to shape and bake a lean loaf. Scaling it down is straightforward; the missing steps at the end are the bigger gap.
- Read it as percentagesFlour is the 100% base: water 56-58%, salt 1.5%, compressed yeast 0.5-0.75%. For a home batch use 1000 g flour, 560-580 g water, 15 g salt, and 5-7 g fresh yeast (or roughly a third of that weight in instant dry, about 2 g).
- The yeast is fresh, not dryA commercial bakery of this period bought compressed cake yeast in bulk blocks, and 1/2 to 3/4 lb per 100 lbs of flour is a compressed-yeast rate, not a dry-yeast one. Dissolving it in water first, as directed, is a habit worth keeping with fresh yeast; instant dry can go straight into the flour.
- "Straight wheat flour"Straight-grade flour is the whole milled endosperm stream rather than a patent flour; in a bread formula of this kind it was likely a strong blend. Bread flour at 12-13% protein is the closest supermarket match.
- The sponge is 60% of the flour60 lbs flour to 36 lbs water plus the 2 qts holding the yeast gives a firm sponge, around 67% hydration (60% if the yeast water is counted separately). Scaled down: 600 g flour, 360 g water, plus the water the yeast was dissolved in. It should be mixed to about 80F.
- "2½ risings" is garbled but meaningfulThe rising instruction is garbled -- The text has been mangled by transcription ('it comes to 21½ risings'), most plausibly a fraction of risings, perhaps 2½. On that reading the sponge would rise, drop and rise again before use, some hours at 80F. Judge it by the collapse of the dome, not by the clock.
- Salt goes in at the dough stageHolding the salt out of the sponge lets the yeast work fast and unhindered; it dissolves in the remaining water before the sponge is broken into it. Do not move it forward into the sponge or the fermentation timing above will not hold.
- The formula stops at dividingThere is no shaping, proofing or baking here because the bakeshop supplied that knowledge. For a lean Italian loaf, proof shaped pieces until nearly doubled and bake at 450F with steam for the first several minutes, until the crust is deeply coloured and the internal temperature reaches about 205F.
- YieldThe full formula makes about 158 to 160 lbs of dough. The 1000 g scale-down gives about 1.58 kg of dough, enough for two generous loaves or three smaller ones.
Bakers Weekly was a trade paper, and formulas like this one were written for the man running the mixer in a wholesale shop, not for a home cook: quantities in even hundredweights of flour, no oven instructions, and an assumption that the reader could judge a sponge by looking at it. The sponge-and-dough method it uses was a dominant American bread process from the late nineteenth century onward, though it persisted in industrial baking well past mid-century alongside continuous-mix and liquid-ferment systems; a long firm preferment gave flavour and tolerance from the modest, variable yeast of the day. "Italian bread" in an American bakery of this era meant a lean formula with no fat, sugar or milk, baked crusty and often with steam, sold in long or round loaves to a largely immigrant urban trade. It is the same skeleton of flour, water, salt and yeast that underlies most crusty European bread, and the absence of any enrichment is precisely what marked it out on the shelf next to the pan loaves.