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Flour Mixtures: Quick Breads

THE cooking of grains, as mush or porridge, is of comparatively recent date, but the grinding of grains into meal of flour and mixing the product with water and baking it is a custom as old as written history. The most delicate and feathery cake that is made to day is a direct and lineal descendant from the cake of stone-ground meal and water, baked on stones made hot in the blazing campfire of primitive man.

In flour mixtures the essentials are flour, salt, wetting and leaven, or something to make the mixture light and porous. The leaven may be either carbon dioxide, evolved in various ways, air beaten or folded into the mixture (sponge cake), or the expansion of a cold liquid when heated. Usually all three agents are present and at work in a flour mixture. In quick breads (time is a necessity, when carbon dioxide is evolved by the growth of a microscopic plant-yeast-introduced into the dough); the carbon dioxide is usually generated by the use of bicarbonate of soda (an alkali) and an acid, as cream of tartar, sour milk, molasses, etc. Keep in mind that the proportion of flour to liquid determines the consistency of the mixture, and that the quantity of liquid used determines the size of the finished product. Different names are given to mixtures, according to the proportion existing between the flour and the water. As, when one measure of liquid is used to one or two measures of flour, the mixture is called a batter; and when one measure of liquid is used to three or four measures of flour, the resulting mixture is a dough.

BATTER AND DOUGH When a batter is made of equal measures or parts of flour and liquid, it may be poured from the dish in a continuous stream, and it is known as a thin or pour batter.

When a batter is made of one measure of liquid to two measures of flour, it breaks while being turned from a dish and is known as a thick or drop batter. SOFT OR STIFF DOUGH When one measure of liquid is used to three measures of flour, a soft dough is formed - to four measures of flour, a stiff dough results. A soft dough sticks to the sides of the bowler a stiff dough while being mixed gathers to itself all the material on the sides of the bowl, and the bowl is clean, when the dough is mixed. In practice there are gradations between these mixtures. The misture for fine baking powder biscuit is neither a soft mor a stiff dough, but intermediate between the two. All doughs are mixtures of a consistency to be kneaded with the hands.