Home › Fancy Bread › Brown Bread (Rolled Wheat)
Brown Bread (Rolled Wheat)
Scald 1 pint rolled wheat (or rolled oats). Let stand 1 hour, then mix and knead with 3 pints Five Roses flour, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 cup yeast, ⅔ cup molasses.
Set to rise overnight in a warm place. When risen to double original bulk in the morning, mould into loaves.
Set to rise again and bake 1 hour and a half in slow oven.
A straightforward overnight molasses bread, written for a cook who kept a jar of liquid yeast on hand. Two things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen: the yeast and the water.
- The cup of yeastThis means home-brewed liquid yeast — a potato- or hop-based ferment that was mostly water. Substituting a cup of any modern yeast product would be disastrous. Use about 2 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, and replace the missing volume with a cup of lukewarm water.
- Scalding is undefinedThe recipe never says how much boiling water to pour over the rolled wheat. Roughly 2 cups to the pint of grain is a reasonable working proportion; the hour's standing lets it swell and cool. Check that the mush is no warmer than blood heat before the yeast goes near it.
- Rolled wheatStill sold, sometimes as wheat flakes, in bulk and health-food aisles. Rolled oats behave almost identically here, as the recipe allows. Steel-cut grain is not a substitute — it will not soften enough in an hour.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300°F; period usage for "slow" spans about 250 to 325°F. At that temperature a heavy molasses loaf can well want an hour and a half, though many modern bakers start at 375°F for 15 minutes and drop to 325°F for another 35 to 45, which gives better crust and spring.
- DonenessMolasses browns the crumb, so colour tells you nothing. Go by internal temperature: 195–200°F at the centre, or a hollow sound from the bottom of a turned-out loaf.
- SaltA tablespoon for three pints of flour is on the high side by modern taste but not unreasonably so; the molasses needs it. Reduce to two teaspoons if you prefer.
- Overnight rise"A warm place" in a kitchen of this period meant near a banked range — cooler than a modern proofing spot. If your kitchen sits above 70°F, the dough may overshoot by morning; refrigerate it overnight instead and let it warm an hour before moulding.
- YieldThree pints of flour plus the soaked grain makes two generous loaves in 9x5-inch pans.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who baked with the brand — which is why the instructions assume so much and specify so little. Brown bread built on molasses and a scalded grain was common household baking across eastern Canada and New England, where molasses arrived cheaply by sea long before refined sugar was affordable, and where the cooked-cereal soaker stretched expensive white flour while keeping the loaf moist for days. The instruction to set the sponge overnight belongs to the same world as the cup of homemade yeast: a slow, forgiving ferment timed to the rhythm of a wood range that was warm in the evening and cool by dawn.