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One Hour Dough
Formula Hard wheat flour, 100 lbs.
Water, 58 lbs. (approximately).
Sugar, 1¼ lbs.
Malt extract, 1¼ lbs.
Salt, 1½ lbs.
Yeast, 32 to 4 lbs.
Shortening, 1½ lbs.
Method Dissolve the yeast and malt extract in about 6 qts. of water and place to one side. Put the salt, sugar and balance of water into the mixer and stir to dissolve the ingredients. Add the flour and begin mixing. Then add the yeast and continue mixing until the ingredients have been incorporated. Now add the shortening and mix until the dough is smooth. The dough should have a temperature of 80 to 82 degrees when mixed.
Fermentation First rising, 40 minutes; second rising, 15 minutes. Allow the dough to rest 5 minutes, when it should be divided immediately.
This is a commercial straight-dough formula written in baker's percentage, scaled to a 100 lb sack of flour. It stops at dividing, so it is a dough procedure rather than a full bread recipe.
- Read it as percentagesEvery quantity is a percentage of the flour weight: water 58%, salt 1.5%, shortening 0.5%. To make a household batch, pick your flour weight and apply the same percentages — 1,000 g flour takes 580 g water and 15 g salt.
- Yeast figure still unusableThe sugar reads 1¼ lbs., which the printed page confirms. The yeast, however, is still given as "32 to 4 lbs.", which is not a coherent weight against 100 lbs of flour; a short-fermentation white dough of this type normally runs 3–4% yeast, so start near 3 to 4 lbs. rather than converting the printed figure.
- Hard wheat flourBread flour, roughly 12–13% protein. The strength is what lets the dough stand up to a high yeast dose gassing it quickly and to machine handling.
- Yeast typeA bakeshop formula of this period means compressed (fresh) cake yeast. If substituting, use about half the weight in active dry yeast or about one third in instant, and add instant directly to the flour rather than dissolving it.
- Malt extractAt 1/4 lb per 100 lbs of flour this is a quarter of a percent, and in a formula like this it is most likely a diastatic malt, supplying enzyme activity as well as fermentable sugar. Non-diastatic or plain barley malt syrup will add flavour and colour but not the enzyme action a short ferment leans on.
- Dough temperature is the controlThe 80–82°F finished dough temperature is the whole mechanism of a one-hour dough; a few degrees cool and the timings no longer apply. Adjust the water temperature to hit it, accounting for flour temperature and the heat a mixer puts into the dough.
- The fermentation scheduleForty minutes, then a second rising of fifteen, then a five-minute rest and immediate dividing — a total of about an hour from mixing. The two risings imply the dough was knocked back between them, though the text does not say so. This is a production timetable rather than a flavour-development one.
- What is missingNo make-up, proof or bake instructions are given; the bakeshop would have had its own. The divided and panned dough will need a final proof and a bake, neither of which this formula specifies.
Baking trade publications printed formulas for working bakeshops, and a "one hour dough" answered a specific commercial problem: how to get saleable bread out of the oven without the long sponge fermentations that had governed baking for centuries. The levers are all visible in the formula — a high yeast dose, added sugar and malt to feed it, a warm 80–82°F finished dough, and hard wheat flour strong enough to hold up under fast gassing. Short-time doughs of this kind spread through American bakeries in the first half of the twentieth century alongside mechanical mixers, standardised compressed yeast and reliable oven controls, all of which made timing predictable enough to build a shift schedule around. What is traded away is flavour: the aromatic compounds that a long ferment produces have no time to form, which is why formulas of this era lean on sugar, malt and shortening to supply softness and taste the fermentation no longer provides.