Home › Recipes › Maltless and Milkless Loaf
Maltless and Milkless Loaf
Flour, 100 lbs.
Formula Water, 56 lbs. (variable).
Salt, 1¾ lbs.
Yeast, 1¾ lbs.
Sugar, 2½ lbs.
Shortening, 2 lbs.
Method Dissolve the yeast and about 4 ozs. of flour in about 2 qts. of water and place to one side. Now put the balance of the water, the salt and sugar into the mixer and stir to dissolve these ingredients. Begin mixing and add the yeast. After these ingredients have been incorporated, add the shortening and continue mixing until the dough is smooth. The dough should have a temperature of 80 to 82 degrees when mixed. Fermentation If a 4 hour fermentation period is required to mature the dough, you may divide the period as follows: First rising, 27/4 hours; second rising, 1 hour; third rising, 1/2 hour. Allow the dough to rest 15 minutes when it should be divided. Allow it to rest from 10 to 15 minutes and then mould into the desired shape and proof. If pan bread is being made, do not give the bread too much proof in the pans, as this will produce poor grain, poor texture and also a poor colored crumb. You will get just as large loaves if you will give less proof in the pans and develop your volume in the oven.
This is a wholesale bakery formula built on 100 lb of flour, written for a mixer and a bench, not a home kitchen. Everything scales cleanly by weight, and the fermentation schedule is the part worth studying.
- Read it as baker's percentagesAgainst 100 lb flour: water 56%, sugar 2.5%, shortening 2%, yeast 1.75%, salt about 1.75%. To make a domestic batch, divide every figure by 50 — 2 lb flour, 18 oz water, a scant 1 oz sugar (0.8 oz), ⅔ oz shortening, a generous ½ oz fresh yeast, a generous ½ oz salt.
- The salt figureThe salt is printed as "134 lbs," which is impossible at this scale and is a mangled fraction. Standard commercial practice of the period put salt at 1¾ to 2 lb per 100 lb flour, and that is the range to work in.
- What "maltless and milkless" meansMany commercial bread formulas of this era carried diastatic malt syrup for crust colour and sugar conversion, and milk powder for softness and keeping quality. This one uses plain sugar and no milk at all; the 2.5% sugar may be standing in for the missing malt, though the formula does not say so.
- Yeast typeThe 1¾% is compressed (fresh) yeast. Use roughly one third that weight of instant dry yeast, or about 40% for active dry, and dissolve as directed rather than adding it to the salt water.
- The three risings are punch-downs"First rising, second rising, third rising" within a single four-hour period means the dough is knocked back twice: about 2½ hours, then 1 hour, then ½ hour. The intervals shorten each time because the yeast population and gas production are rising.
- Dough temperature is the control80–82°F at the end of mixing is what makes the four-hour schedule predictable. Adjust the water temperature to hit it; a dough run warm will ripen faster than the stated schedule allows.
- Underproof the pans deliberatelyThe formula is explicit that too much proof in the pans produces poor grain, poor texture and poorly coloured crumb. Load the pans short of full proof and let oven spring finish the volume, as the text directs.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given anywhere in the formula, and no loaf weight is specified. Modern practice for a lean pan loaf would be somewhere around 400–425°F to an internal temperature near 200°F, but that is not from this text.
- Yield100 lb flour gives about 164 lb of dough, or on the order of 145 one-pound loaves (about 95 at 1½ lb). The scaled-down version above makes two standard 1½-lb pan loaves.
The title tells you what problem this formula was solving. Malt syrup and milk powder were two common improvers of early twentieth-century commercial bread — malt for fermentation and crust colour, milk for a soft, tender, longer-keeping crumb — and both were subject to price swings and, at times, to shortage. A maltless, milkless loaf let a bakery keep producing when one or both were unavailable or too dear, which fits with the emphasis on restraining pan proof. A three-punch, four-hour straight dough of this kind was a familiar bake-shop schedule, generally said to have given way, at some point, to mechanical dough development and long refrigerated fermentation.