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White Bread, Over-night Method
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 quarts water 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 6 quarts sifted flour 2 tablespoonfuls salt THE over-night straight dough method has one special advantage--the process is largely completed during the night and the baking may be done while the day is still young.
The ingredients specified will make six large loaves. If this amount of Bread is not needed, take just half the quantities called for. In that case the remaining half cake of yeast can be kept in good condition several days by re-wrapping in tinfoil and keeping in a cool, dry place. Substitute milk for water if a richer Bread is desired.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in the water, which should be lukewarm in winter and cool in summer, add lard or butter, and half the flour. Beat until smooth, then add balance of the flour, or enough to make moderately firm dough, and the salt. Knead until smooth and elastic. Place in well-greased bowl and cover. Set aside to rise over night, or about nine hours. In the morning mold into loaves. Fill well-greased pans half full, cover and let rise until light, or until loaves have doubled in bulk, which will be in about one and one-half hours. Bake forty to fifty minutes.
Six large loaves from six quarts of flour and a single cake of yeast, left to work for nine hours. The scale is the first thing to deal with and the yeast is the second.
- Cut it downSix quarts is about twenty-four cups of flour, and the finished dough runs to something over ten pounds. The booklet suggests halving; a quarter is more useful still. Six cups of flour, two cups of water, and a teaspoon and a half each of sugar, salt and melted fat makes two ordinary loaves and fits a domestic mixer.
- Scale the yeast down hardOne cake across six quarts of flour and nine hours is a very small proportion of yeast, and that is exactly what makes a long overnight rise work. Scaled to the quarter batch above it comes to about half a teaspoon of dried yeast—not a whole sachet. A full sachet in six cups of flour will tear through the night and collapse before morning.
- Lukewarm in winter, cool in summerThat instruction is a thermostat. The booklet controls how fast the dough ferments by changing the water temperature with the season, because the kitchen itself could not be changed. A centrally heated house is the same temperature all year, so take the cool end as the default: water straight from the tap, not warmed. In a hot kitchen, give the bowl part of the night in the refrigerator.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe says to bake forty to fifty minutes and nothing more, assuming the reader has the booklet’s other white loaves to hand. For loaves this size, 400°F (200°C) is the right neighbourhood, and the centre should reach 195°F to 200°F (90°C to 93°C).
- Nine hours is not a measurementNine hours is the gap between the end of one working day and the start of the next, not a fermentation time anyone arrived at by testing. Judge the dough in the morning: domed, soft, smelling of yeast rather than of alcohol, and still holding a dent when pressed. If it has fallen in the bowl it has gone too far; mould it and bake it anyway, and expect a flatter, sourer loaf.
- The leftover half cakeThe advice to re-wrap the unused half in tinfoil and keep it cool and dry is a reminder that compressed yeast was perishable. Dried yeast removes the problem: keep the jar in the freezer and measure out what is needed.
What this recipe assumes about a household is more interesting than the bread. Six large loaves at once is not a daily bake. It is a household baking to last, with a crock or a bread box and enough people at the table to get through it before it turns. The advantage the booklet names—that the work happens overnight and the baking can be done while the day is still young—belongs to a kitchen heated by the same stove that bakes the bread, where nobody wanted the oven going in the afternoon. And the aside about the leftover half cake, re-wrapped in tinfoil and good for several days in a cool dry place, says plainly what sort of commodity yeast still was: perishable, bought in person a few cakes at a time, and needing to be bought again the following week. That last fact is the whole reason a booklet of free recipes existed.