Home › Bread-Making › Graham Bread (Take a little over a quart)
Graham Bread (Take a little over a quart)
Take a little over a quart of warm water, one-half cup brown sugar or molasses, one-fourth cup hop yeast, and one and one-half tea-spoons salt; thicken the water with unbolted flour to a thin batter; add sugar, salt and yeast, and stir in more flour until quite stiff. In the morning add a small tea-spoon soda, and flour enough to make the batter stiff as can be stirred with a spoon; put it into pans and let rise again; then bake in even oven, not too hot at first; keep warm while rising; smooth over the loaves with a spoon or knife dipped in water. - Mrs. H. B. Sherman, Plankinton House, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
An overnight sponge bread from the era before packaged yeast, leavened with a homemade hop-water starter and given a lift of soda in the morning to counter the sourness that develops overnight. It is a batter bread, not a kneaded dough.
- Unbolted flour"Unbolted" means unsifted — the whole wheat berry, bran and all. Modern whole wheat flour is the equivalent; stone-ground gives the closest texture. Graham flour, where you can find it, is coarser still.
- Hop yeastA quarter cup of homemade liquid yeast, kept going in the kitchen from a hop-and-potato or hop-and-flour brew. Substitute about 1 cup of active sourdough starter, or 2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast slaked in some of the warm water; with commercial yeast the overnight rise will be much faster, so use cool water and expect it to be ready sooner.
- The sodaThe morning soda is not a leavener here so much as a corrective — it neutralizes the acid built up by the wild starter and softens the crumb. If you use commercial yeast and a short rise, there is no acid to neutralize and the soda will taste soapy; leave it out.
- ConsistencyTwo stages: a thin batter first, then "quite stiff" overnight, then stiff "as can be stirred with a spoon" in the morning. It should never come together into a kneadable dough. Expect something between a thick muffin batter and a wet dough.
- Warm waterA little over a quart is about 4 1/4 cups. Aim for 100-110F for a starter or commercial yeast; water much hotter than that (above roughly 120F) will start to damage the yeast.
- Oven"Even oven, not too hot at first" asks for a steady, moderate heat; the recipe does not say what kind of oven. As a modern equivalent, start at 375F for 15 minutes, then drop to 350F and bake until the center reads 200-205F -- roughly 45-55 minutes for standard loaves.
- YieldThis much batter should fill two 9 x 5-inch pans, or three smaller 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch pans. Grease them well; whole wheat batter breads stick.
- The wet knifeSmoothing the tops with a wet spoon or knife is worth doing. Batter bread does not have a skin to hold its shape, and the wet surface keeps the crust from cracking apart as the loaf springs.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned against white flour, meat and stimulants, and argued that bread should be made at home from coarsely ground whole wheat. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, "graham flour" and "graham bread" had passed out of the reform movement and into ordinary American usage as plain names for whole-wheat products, and the book carries several versions of the loaf. This one is signed by Mrs. H. B. Sherman of the Plankinton House, one of Milwaukee's grand hotels — a reminder that Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions solicited from housekeepers and hotel women across the Midwest, credited by name. The hop yeast is the period detail: commercial compressed yeast had existed since the late 1860s but was not yet universally available, and many households still kept their own liquid ferment alive and paid for the sourness with a spoon of soda in the morning.