Zwieback
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/4 cup lard or butter, melted 2 eggs 2 3/4 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt ZWIEBACK (twice-baked Bread) is toast par excellence and enjoys a wide popularity. The second baking changes some of the starch to dextrine, which promotes ease of digestion.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add three-fourths cup of flour and beat thoroughly. Cover and set aside, in a moderately warm place, to rise for fifty minutes.
Add lard or butter, eggs well beaten, enough flour to make a dough--about two cups--and salt. Knead, shape into two rolls one and one-half inches thick, and fifteen inches long. Protect from draught and let rise until light, which should be in about one and one-half hours.
Bake twelve minutes in a hot oven. When cool cut diagonally into one-half inch slices. Place on baking sheet and brown in a moderately hot oven. It is better when the second baking is done twenty-four hours after the first, though it may be done sooner if desired.
A sweet, egg rich roll baked, rested a full day, sliced and baked again. The gap between the two bakings is the step most likely to be skipped and the one that makes the method work.
- Wait the twenty-four hoursThe booklet allows the second baking sooner but says plainly it is better a day later, and it is right. A fresh roll tears and compresses under the knife. One that has sat a day cuts into clean half inch slices that dry at the same rate.
- Two different oven heatsNeither is numbered. The first baking is hot, around 400°F for twelve minutes. The drying is moderately hot, nearer 325 to 350°F, and it takes longer than it feels it should — fifteen to twenty minutes, turning once. Stop at pale gold. Dark zwieback turns bitter.
- Shape and spacingTwo ropes an inch and a half thick and fifteen inches long will spread while proving and again in the oven. Give each one its own sheet, or at least four inches of clearance.
- Cut on the diagonal, with a serrated knifeThe diagonal is not decoration. It takes a longer slice off a narrow roll, so more surface dries in the same time. Saw through rather than pressing down.
- They keep for weeksCooled completely and stored in a tin, properly dried zwieback lasts the way a cracker lasts. Any softness means the second baking stopped early, and a few more minutes in a low oven corrects it.
Twice baked bread is one of the oldest preservation methods there is, and nearly every European baking tradition keeps a version of it: the rusk, the Greek paximadi, the Russian sukhari, the Italian biscotti, whose name says in Latin what zwieback says in German. The logic is identical everywhere. Bread spoils because it holds water, so drive the water out in a second slow baking and what remains will keep for weeks, travel in a sack, and come back to life in coffee or soup or milk. That is why rusks fed armies and ships and anyone living a long way from an oven. By the time this booklet printed its version, the preservation argument had been quietly replaced by a medical one — starch converted to dextrine, ease of digestion — which was the language the food business used in those years for everything from breakfast cereal onward. The method underneath it had not changed at all: bake, wait, bake again.