Home › Bread-Making › Graham Bread (To one and a half pints)
Graham Bread (To one and a half pints)
To one and a half pints of tepid water add one heaping tea-spoon of salt and one-half cup of sugar; stir in one-half pint or more of the sponge made of white flour, as in recipe for "Bread with Potato Yeast;" add Graham flour until almost too stiff to stir; put in the baking-pan and let rise well, which will take about two hours, bake in a moderate oven, and when done, wrap in a wet towel until cool. -Mrs. Clara Woods Morey.
A batter-style loaf that depends entirely on a wheat sponge already at work; the Graham flour is stirred in at the end and never kneaded. Read the sponge instructions in the potato-yeast bread recipe before starting, since this one cannot begin without them.
- The sponge is the whole recipeHalf a pint (1 cup) of active white-flour sponge, or more, is the only leaven here. If you are not keeping potato yeast, build a poolish the night before with 1 cup flour, 1 cup water and a pinch of instant yeast, and use it when domed and bubbling.
- MeasuresOne and a half pints of water is 3 cups; half a pint of sponge is 1 cup. "Tepid" means lukewarm, roughly 90 to 100F, warm to a fingertip; yeast is not actually harmed until much hotter, but genuinely hot water will check it.
- Graham flourSylvester Graham's flour is coarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb. Expect to use somewhere near 7 to 9 cups, added by feel.
- "Almost too stiff to stir"This is the hinge. The dough should be a heavy, sticky mass that a wooden spoon can just turn, not a smooth kneadable ball. Add flour past that point and the loaf bakes dense and dry, since bran cuts gluten strands and the dough has no kneading to develop structure.
- Moderate ovenCall it about 350F. Whole-wheat batter loaves want the full time at steady heat; count on 50 to 60 minutes for a large pan, and take the internal temperature to about 200F rather than trusting a tap on the crust.
- The two-hour riseSound for a warm nineteenth-century kitchen with a lively sponge. In a 68F room it may take three hours or more. Go by volume, not the clock: the batter should climb close to the pan rim and look domed and slack.
- The wet towelWrapping the hot loaf in a damp cloth steams the crust soft and keeps the bran-heavy crumb from drying. It also traps moisture, so unwrap once cool or the crust will go leathery.
- YieldRoughly two 9x5-inch loaves, or one very large pan loaf. The half cup of sugar is generous by modern bread standards; it will feed the yeast as well as sweeten, and the loaf reads as mildly sweet rather than as a plain bread.
Graham flour and Graham bread carry the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign for coarse unsifted wheat, cold water and plain living made whole-meal bread a moral question in American kitchens. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, the reforming zeal had largely worn off and Graham bread had settled into being simply the household brown loaf, valued for keeping well and for what the period called its "laxative" virtues. The book's bread chapter is unusually insistent that good bread begins with good yeast; this recipe borrows a sponge from another entry instead of standing alone, and wet-brewed potato yeast and a saved sponge belonged to the era before packaged yeast became reliable. The signed attribution is typical of the volume, which was assembled from contributions by Ohio housewives and prints their names beside their recipes.