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Rice Bread
Simmer slowly, over a gentle fire, 1 lb. rice in 3 quarts of water till the rice has become perfectly soft and the water is either evaporated or absorbed by the rice. Let cool (not cold), and mix thoroughly with 4 pounds Five Roses flour.
Add some fine salt and 4 tablespoons yeast (liquid). Knead very thoroughly. Let rise well before the fire.
Make up into loaves with a little of the flour which you have reserved from your 4 pounds and bake rather long. -Mrs. A. C. Moffatt, Kilburn, N.B.
A very large batch — 4 lb of flour plus a pound of cooked rice will give four or five good loaves. Scale it to a quarter or a half unless you are feeding a household.
- The hinge: temperature of the rice"Let cool (not cold)" is the whole trick. Rice still hot enough to steam will kill the yeast; rice chilled solid will not incorporate and leaves gummy streaks. Aim for lukewarm, around 100F, and break it up with a fork before the flour goes in.
- Weights, not cups4 lb flour is roughly 14 to 16 cups, and 1 lb rice is about 2 1/3 cups raw. Weigh both if you can — rice bread doughs are sensitive to how much water the grain has taken up.
- The rice will drink most of the waterThree quarts to a pound of rice is far more than modern absorption ratios, and the intent is a soft, porridge-like mass rather than separate grains. Long-grain rice cooked this way turns to paste; that is what the recipe wants.
- "4 tablespoons yeast (liquid)"This means homemade barm or a bottled liquid yeast of unknown strength, so no exact conversion is honest. For 4 lb of flour, 2 to 3 teaspoons of instant yeast slackened in a little warm water will do if you allow a long, slow rise; a quicker rise would want two or three times that.
- Salt"Some fine salt" is unhelpfully vague. Bread is normally salted at about 1.5 to 2 percent of flour weight, which is roughly 5 to 6 teaspoons of fine salt for 4 lb.
- Rising "before the fire"A hearthside spot meant a warm draught on one side. Any place around 75-80F works; the dough will be stickier than a plain wheat dough and should not be corrected with much extra flour.
- Oven and "bake rather long"The recipe names no temperature. A moderate to moderately hot oven, around 375-400F, suits these loaves; with this much moisture large loaves need roughly 45 to 55 minutes and are done at an internal 200-205F -- undercooked rice bread stays wet and heavy in the middle.
- Keeping qualityThe cooked rice is there for moisture and economy: these loaves tend to stay soft longer than an all-wheat loaf, and they toast well once past their first day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal in the 1910s, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with Five Roses flour — hence the attribution to Mrs. A. C. Moffatt of Kilburn, New Brunswick. Breads that stretched wheat flour with a cheaper cooked starch are much older than this book: rice bread, potato bread and oatmeal bread all appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American manuals, valued both for economy and for the moist, close crumb the gelatinized starch produces. In a milling company's own cookbook the inclusion is slightly pointed, since the recipe uses less of their product per loaf.