Home › Recipes › Common Bread Dough
Common Bread Dough
As a rule use one-fourth yeast to three-fourths water. The good potato yeast with no germs of sourness in it, such as we have already directed how to make, does no harm in still larger proportions when the weather is cold or time of mixing late. But the whitest bread is made when the dough can have long time to rise, not hurried up. 1 pint of yeast. 3 pints of warm water. 1 heaping tablespoonful of salt. 8 pounds of flour. Makes 8 loaves of convenient size.
This is a baker's working formula rather than a step-by-step method: a stiff, lightly salted dough scaled for eight loaves, leavened with the homemade potato yeast described earlier in the book. The substitution of modern yeast is the whole problem to solve.
- The yeast is not packaged yeast"1 pint of yeast" means a pint of liquid potato barm — a fermented potato-and-flour slurry that supplies both leavening and part of the water. For 8 lb of flour, roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of instant dry yeast will do the same work, and you must add a fourth pint of water to replace the liquid the barm was carrying.
- Scale it down8 lb of flour is about 3.6 kg and needs a very large tub and a strong pair of arms. A quarter batch — 2 lb (about 900 g) flour, 1 pint (475 ml) water, 1 heaping teaspoon salt, about a teaspoon of instant yeast — gives two loaves and behaves the same way.
- HydrationFour pints of liquid to 8 lb of flour works out near 52 percent hydration, stiffer than most modern bread doughs. It will feel dry and tight at first; expect a close, fine crumb rather than an open one. Add water a spoonful at a time only if the flour refuses to come together.
- Salt is lowOne heaping tablespoon is about 20 g against 3.6 kg of flour, roughly half a percent. Modern practice is 1.8 to 2 percent, so a scaled batch will taste flat unless you raise it — about 3 teaspoons fine salt per 2 lb of flour.
- "Warm water"Aim for 100–110°F (38–43°C) at the tap. Hotter than about 120°F begins to damage the yeast, and with a dough this stiff the friction of kneading will add a few degrees of its own.
- The instruction that matters"The whitest bread is made when the dough can have long time to rise, not hurried up." Use the smaller quantity of yeast and let it go slowly — several hours at cool room temperature, or overnight in the refrigerator — rather than pushing it in a warm spot. The flavour and the crumb both depend on it.
- Yield and bakingThe book gives no oven or timing. Divide into eight (or two, scaled down) loaves of about 1 lb 8 oz each, proof until nearly doubled, and bake at 400–425°F for 30 to 40 minutes, to an internal temperature of 200–210°F.
Cookery writing of this period still assumed that yeast was something the kitchen made and kept alive itself. Potato yeast — mixed with flour, sugar and a little of the previous batch, then left to ferment — was one of several barms in common use, alongside hop and salt-rising ferments, before reliable compressed yeast cakes made their way onto every grocer's shelf, generally traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century. That is why the recipe opens not with flour but with a ratio of yeast to water, and why it hedges about "germs of sourness": a house barm drifted acid with age and warm weather, and an experienced baker judged the proportion by the season and the hour rather than by a measured packet. The note that the whitest bread comes from a long, unhurried rise is the same argument made today for slow fermentation, though here it is whiteness rather than flavour that is held out as the reward.