Bran Bread
2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 cup lukewarm water 1/2 cup molasses 7 cups flour 5 cups bran 4 tablespoonfuls lard on butter 2 teaspoonfuls salt BRAN Bread made after this recipe is tasty and brimful of Bread-goodness--just the loaf to appeal to an epicure. The addition of one cup of raisins imparts richness and affords a pleasant change.
Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm liquid. Add molasses and four cups sifted flour. Beat well. Then add the bran, lard or butter, balance of flour, or enough to make a dough that can be handled, and the salt. Knead well, cover, let rise until double in bulk--about two hours. Divide into three loaves. Place in well-greased pans. Cover and let rise about forty-five minutes or until double in bulk. Bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven.
A three-loaf recipe built around five cups of bran, and nearly everything a modern cook needs to know concerns the bran itself.
- What bran means hereThis is raw wheat bran: the loose, papery flakes left when white flour is milled, sold in bags or in bulk. It is not bran breakfast cereal, which has already been malted, sweetened and baked into shreds, and which will not hydrate or behave the same way in a dough.
- Two cakes of yeastTwo cakes of compressed yeast come to roughly four and a half teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or two 7g sachets. That looks extravagant until the scale registers: this is three large loaves, and bran blunts the rise enough to justify the help.
- Bran drinks the liquidBran takes up water slowly and keeps taking it up after mixing, so a dough that feels slack at the end of kneading will have firmed on its own twenty minutes later. Treat the seven cups of flour as a ceiling rather than a measure—the recipe says only to add enough to make a dough that can be handled—and stop short of it. A bran loaf floured into submission bakes like a brick.
- Expect a close crumbBran particles cut the gluten strands as fast as they form. This loaf will never be open or springy, and longer kneading will not change that. Forty-five minutes is right for the second rise; much past doubling there is not enough structure left to hold the gas.
- A moderate ovenIn a booklet of this period a moderate oven means roughly 350°F (175°C). Molasses darkens a crust early, so judge the loaves by a hollow sound and an internal temperature around 195°F (90°C) rather than by colour.
- The raisinsIf the cup of raisins from the headnote goes in, toss them first with a spoonful of the measured flour and add them with the last of the flour, not into the sponge. Fruit left sitting in a wet sponge for two hours leaks sugar and slackens it.
Bran reached the table by a roundabout route. White flour is made by taking the bran and germ out, and for most of the nineteenth century the bran went to animal feed. What brought it back was argument rather than appetite: first the dietary reformers who objected to white flour on principle, then the broader enthusiasm for roughage that this same booklet repeats a few pages away, where it claims that whole grains stimulate digestion and give the digestive tract needed exercise. The recipe stands on both sides of that. It loads in five cups of bran, and then the headnote hurries to promise a loaf that is tasty and would appeal to an epicure, with raisins offered as a way of making it pleasanter still. A cook who wanted bran for its own sake would not have needed the reassurance.