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Dutch Oven Bread
I QUART FLOUR I TEASPOON SALT WATER 4 TEASPOONS BAKING POWDER Mix dry ingredients and add enough water to make a soft dough so thick it can scarcely be stirred-but stir as little as possible. Have Dutch oven well heated but not smoking hot, and grease both bottom and sides. Have cover hot but not red hot. Pour bread dough in, put on cover upside down, set deeply into hot embers, fill cover with hot embers, and bake. Cover may be lifted a couple of times for inspection.
This simplest of breads would be better, of course, if 3 tablespoons of fat were worked into flour mixture, and if milk could be substituted for water. But the Dutch oven will bake almost anything, once you master the technique of having the heat right. 2 CUPS FLOUR 34 TEASPOON SALT
A biscuit dough scaled up to a single pan loaf, baked in a cast-iron Dutch oven buried in coals. The measurements are by volume in old kitchen terms, and the entire success of the thing rests on heat management rather than on the batter.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in cook camps: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 500 g of all-purpose flour. With 4 teaspoons baking powder, that works out to the standard 1 teaspoon per cup.
- Water quantityNone is given because it depends on the flour. Something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups will give a dough "so thick it can scarcely be stirred" — closer to drop-biscuit consistency than to a kneadable bread dough, but it has to be judged by eye.
- Stir as little as possibleThis is the hinge. Baking powder plus water and no fat gives a tough, rubbery crumb if worked; combine until the dry flour disappears and stop, then get it into the pan immediately while the leavening is active.
- Reading the heat"Well heated but not smoking hot" means the greasing fat shimmers rather than smokes; the recipe gives no figure, and any temperature is guesswork on our part. A hot home oven — somewhere around 425F, covered, with the lid off at the end to colour the top — is a reasonable modern stand-in, but the timing has to be watched rather than trusted.
- Coals, in numbersFor a 12-inch camp oven, about 8-10 coals underneath and 18-20 on the lid gives a working temperature near 400F, with most of the heat from above so the bottom does not scorch.
- The inverted lidThis assumes an older lid without a coal-holding rim — a domed or plain lid, which only forms a hollow for embers once it is turned over. A modern lid with a raised rim and a loop handle is designed to carry coals right side up; do not invert it or the coals will slide off.
- Lifting the lidSweep ash off the lid before raising it, and lift it clear rather than tilting, or grit falls into the loaf. Two quick looks are enough; each one costs heat.
- The suggested improvementsThe 3 tablespoons of fat and the substitution of milk for water are worth taking. Rubbed-in fat shortens the crumb and milk adds sugar and protein for browning, which this lean dough badly needs.
- YieldOne round loaf, thicker in a 10-inch oven and flatter in a 12-inch one, enough for six to eight. Cut it in wedges and eat it hot; with no fat in it, it dries out quickly.
Dutch oven bread of this kind is the plainest end of the American quick-bread tradition: flour, salt, leavening and liquid, no yeast, no waiting, no thermometer. Chemical leavening made it possible — saleratus and then commercial baking powder, widely available from the later nineteenth century, let a cook produce bread in half an hour over a fire instead of tending a sponge overnight. The technique itself is older than the powder, since the lidded three-legged iron pot set in embers with more embers heaped on top had been the frontier and trail baking oven for generations. What the recipe really teaches is not the formula, which is barely a formula, but the reading of coals, and the author says so outright: master the heat and the pot will bake almost anything.