Home › Breads › Whole Wheat Flour Bread
Whole Wheat Flour Bread
1 cup scalded milk. 1 cup boiling water. 1 cake yeast. 1/2 cup lukewarm water. 1 spoon salt.
Add boiling water to milk, with salt. When lukewarm add yeast dissolved in one-half cup lukewarm water. Beat into this with egg whip enough flour to make batter. Whip until light and then add flour to knead into dough. Knead well, let rise until light. Shape into loaves, let rise again, and bake forty minutes.
A sponge-method loaf written for a cook who already knew what bread dough should feel like: no flour quantity, no oven temperature, no yield. The gaps are filled below.
- The yeast cakeOne cake of compressed yeast equals one packet of active dry or instant yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons. Compressed yeast was sold in small foil-wrapped cubes and was the ordinary household yeast of the period; it works faster and is not interchangeable by weight with dry.
- "1 spoon salt"Genuinely ambiguous. For the flour this batch will take, a tablespoon is on the high side and a teaspoon low; something in between, near 2 teaspoons, is a safe choice. Judge by flour weight rather than trying to decode the spoon.
- Flour quantityThe recipe gives none. Reckon on 6 cups or more of whole wheat flour for the 2 1/2 cups of liquid here, added in two stages: enough for a loose batter first, then enough more to knead. Whole wheat absorbs liquid slowly, so let the batter sit a few minutes before deciding it needs more.
- Why the milk is scaldedScalding once served to kill souring bacteria and to deactivate whey proteins that slacken dough. With pasteurised milk the food-safety reason is largely gone, but heating still improves crumb structure. The recipe has the boiling water go into the milk with the salt, and the mixture is then left to fall to lukewarm before the yeast goes in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350 to 375F, suits a loaf of this size for the stated forty minutes; the interior should read about 200F. Whole wheat browns faster than white, so tent with foil if the crust darkens early.
- The kneadingWhole wheat bran cuts developing gluten, so this dough wants longer working than a white loaf and will never feel as silky. Ten minutes by hand is reasonable; the dough should be tacky rather than stiff.
- Rising times"Until light" means roughly doubled, about 1 1/2 hours for the first rise in a warm kitchen and 45 minutes to an hour for the shaped loaves. Older kitchens were cooler and slower than modern ones.
- YieldTwo 8 1/2-by-4 1/2-inch loaves, or one large loaf if you prefer, in which case add ten to fifteen minutes to the bake.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book belongs to the years around the First World War, when American home cooks were pressed hard to stretch white flour: government food-conservation campaigns urged substitutes, and whole wheat, rye, barley and cornmeal loaves appeared in newspaper columns and cookbooks in unusual numbers. That context explains why a whole wheat loaf sits in the bread chapter as a matter of course rather than as a health novelty. The method itself is older than the campaign — the batter stage, beaten light with an egg whip before the second flour goes in, is often said to reflect a time when yeast was less reliable and a wet batter gave it a head start. The instruction to bake forty minutes without any word on the oven is typical of the era: heat was judged by hand and habit.