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Steamed Graham Bread (Cups Graham flour cup bread)
3 cups Graham flour 1 cup bread flour 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Mix as Boston Brown Bread and steam 4 hours. 2 teaspoons salt 1 cup molasses 2½ cups of milk
A brand-cookbook shorthand recipe: it assumes you already know the Boston brown bread method, so the whole procedure is compressed into four words. Here is what it leaves out.
- The method it points toWhisk the dry ingredients together, stir in the molasses and milk to a thick batter, and fill greased molds two-thirds full. Cover each tightly with greased foil or a lid, set on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the molds.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat, including bran and germ, milled without sifting. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest supermarket match; regular whole wheat works but gives a finer crumb.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting powder (its formula paired sodium aluminum sulfate with phosphate), named by brand in the recipe, which suggests the collection was tied to the maker. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes at the same 4 level teaspoons, and the second rise it gives in the heat suits a long steam.
- Sweet milk, not sourBecause the leavening is baking powder rather than saleratus and sour milk, fresh whole milk is correct here. Do not add soda.
- MoldsPudding molds or the traditional coffee cans, in whatever combination holds the batter at about two-thirds full. The batter must have headroom; a filled mold will not rise properly and may force its lid.
- Four hours is generousComparable steamed loaves in quart molds are often tested nearer 2.5 to 3 hours, when a skewer comes out clean and the loaf pulls slightly from the sides. The recipe's full four hours would suit larger molds or a very dark, dense loaf.
- Keep the water boilingTop up only with boiling water from a kettle. Cold water drops the pot temperature and can stall the rise, which may leave a gummy center.
- FinishingThe recipe stops at the steaming. If you want to dry the surface, the molds can be uncovered and given a short spell in a moderate oven before turning out. Cut warm loaves with a taut string or thread rather than a knife, which drags on the moist crumb.
- YieldAbout two loaves, roughly 20 slices. Traditionally served hot with butter alongside baked beans, and good toasted the next day.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance and dietary reformer who preached coarse unbolted wheat against the fashionable white bread of the day; by his century's end the name had outlived the movement and largely meant whole wheat on a grocer's shelf. Steaming rather than baking is the older New England habit for brown bread, and it persisted after ovens improved because the method gives the moist, close crumb the dish is known for. Baking-powder makers were prolific publishers of recipe collections in this period, and here the older brown bread, leavened with soda and sour milk, is reworked to use four level teaspoons of a named brand's powder.