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Unfermented Bread
Fermented bread is sometimes considered unwholesome. Those who are of this opinion may make their bread as follows: Mix 1 ounce of bicarbonate of soda with 8 pounds of flour. Stir 1 ounce of hydrochloric acid with 4 pints of warm water. Stir the liquor into the flour briskly, and with a wooden spoon, till the ingredients are thoroughly blended; divide the dough into loaves, and bake these immediately in a brisk oven. It will need to bake as long as bread usually does.
This is a Victorian "unfermented" or acid-raised bread, in which hydrochloric acid and bicarbonate of soda react in the dough to produce carbon dioxide. The chemistry is sound in principle but the recipe cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen.
- The acid is not a food ingredient todayHydrochloric acid sold now is muriatic acid for masonry and pool work, a technical grade that may carry iron, arsenic and other heavy-metal impurities and is not manufactured to any food standard. Nineteenth-century pharmacies dispensed a dilute medicinal grade; nothing on a hardware shelf is its equivalent.
- Concentration is unstatedThe recipe calls for "1 ounce of hydrochloric acid" with no strength given. Depending on whether that meant the dilute officinal acid or a concentrated one, the amount of free acid in the dough varies by a factor of several — the difference between a balanced reaction and a dough carrying unreacted mineral acid.
- No margin for error in the neutralisationThe method rests on the soda and the acid cancelling each other, leaving common salt and carbon dioxide. The recipe does give a weight for each, but with no strength stated for the acid the balance cannot be relied on, and any surplus acid would stay in the bread.
- Handling hazard before it ever reaches the ovenConcentrated hydrochloric acid gives off fumes and will burn skin and eyes, and diluting it generates heat. Measuring and mixing it in an open bowl in a domestic kitchen is not a reasonable risk to take for a loaf of bread.
- What to use insteadIf you want an unyeasted loaf, follow a current soda-bread or chemically leavened bread recipe, which achieves the same aeration with food-grade acids such as cream of tartar, buttermilk or commercial baking powder.
Distrust of yeast ran through mid-nineteenth-century health writing: fermentation was thought to waste part of the flour and, in some accounts, to leave alcohol and "putrescent" matter in the loaf. Justus von Liebig and others promoted chemically raised bread as the rational alternative, and the idea reached the public most visibly through John Dauglish, whose aerated bread process — dough gassed with carbon dioxide under pressure rather than fermented — was patented in the 1850s and gave rise to the Aerated Bread Company, whose London tea shops became an institution. Domestic manuals of the period carried simplified household versions like this one, pairing bicarbonate of soda with an acid so the two would neutralise into ordinary salt and leave the loaf risen. Such formulas were reprinted from one compilation to another, which may be why they survive in books printed long after the medical enthusiasm behind them had faded.