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Oatmeal Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup lukewarm water 2 cups boiling water 2 cups rolled oats 1/4 cup brown sugar 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 4 cups sifted flour 1 teaspoonful salt OATMEAL Bread provides a remarkable amount of nourishment at slight expense. Chopped nuts (one-half cup) give this Bread an even more tempting flavor. It is best when cut the day after baking; use a very sharp knife. Pour two cups of boiling water over oatmeal, cover and let stand until lukewarm. Dissolve yeast and sugar in one-half cup lukewarm water, add shortening and add this to the oatmeal and water. Add one cup of flour, or enough to make an ordinary sponge. Beat well. Cover and set aside in a moderately warm place to rise for one hour, or until light. Add enough flour to make a dough--about three cups, and the salt. Knead well, or "throw and roll" as shown on opposite page. Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise in a moderately warm place, until double in bulk--about one and one-half hours.
Mould into loaves, fill well-greased pans half full, cover and let rise again about one hour. Bake forty-five minutes in a hot oven.
Rolled oats soaked in boiling water, then built into a sponge and a soft dough. It is the cheapest loaf in the book and the one most altered by what is actually on a modern shelf.
- Rolled oats, not quick or steel-cutThe method depends on flakes that soften under boiling water while keeping their shape. Quick oats collapse into paste and give a gummy crumb; steel-cut oats will not soften in the time allowed and leave hard specks throughout. Old-fashioned rolled oats are what this is built on.
- Let the oats cool properlyThe instruction to let the soaked oats stand until lukewarm is the one step that ruins the bread when it is hurried. Yeast begins to die above roughly 110°F, and a bowl of hot oat porridge holds its heat far longer than it looks as though it should. Test it with a finger rather than by the clock.
- A wet dough on purposeSoaked oats hold a great deal of water and give it back slowly, so this dough stays tacky long after a plain white dough would have tightened up. Adding flour until it stops sticking is the usual mistake and it produces a dense, dry loaf. Use a scraper, keep the hands lightly floured, and let kneading do the work.
- Hot oven, and watch the colorA hot oven of the period is around 400°F to 425°F. Between the brown sugar and the oats, this loaf takes on color well before it is baked through, so if the crust has gone dark at the half hour, cover it loosely with foil and let the forty-five minutes run out.
- Cut it the day afterThe booklet’s advice here is sound and worth following. A loaf this moist is still setting as it cools, and a day’s rest firms the crumb enough to slice cleanly. A very sharp knife and a sawing stroke, as the book says.
- The optional nutsThe half cup of chopped nuts goes in with the second addition of flour, where the dough is stiff enough to hold them suspended. Stirred into the thin sponge they settle to the bottom.
“A remarkable amount of nourishment at slight expense” is the whole pitch of this page, and it rests on an industrial change. Oats had long been a porridge grain and a horse feed, slow to cook and awkward in a hurry, until steam-rolling flattened the groats into flakes that soften in minutes. That is what lets this recipe open by pouring boiling water over a bowl of oats and then get on with the day. Oats in bread also stretch wheat flour, which mattered a great deal whenever wheat was dear, so a loaf that is a third oats by volume was a household economy long before it was a flavor. The booklet, which sold yeast rather than flour, had no reason at all to object.