Home › Recipes › Finest Hotel Bread
Finest Hotel Bread
Sometimes called Vienna bread, and French bread.
Make the dough by the receipt for French split rolls, and knead it several times according to the extended directions already given for common bread. This makes bread so white and fine that it vies with the napkins on the best appointed tables, and elicits admiration from the most fastidious. It is a feather in the hotel baker's cap when very particular, excellent and discriminating housekeepers outside, send to beg a loaf of this extra fine bread for their company days. That's the only sort of premiums hotel fellows are ever allowed to win. Remember, this bread should be kneaded 3 or 4 different times, at intervals apart.
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: the dough is the one given for French split rolls, and the whole lesson here is in the handling. Everything below assumes a lean enriched white dough of flour, water or milk, yeast, salt and a little butter and sugar.
- The hinge: repeated kneading"Kneaded 3 or 4 different times, at intervals apart" means knead, let rise, knock back and knead again, two or three more times before shaping. Each round degasses the dough, redistributes yeast and sugars, and tightens the gluten, which is what produces the fine, even crumb the author is boasting about.
- Time, not forceSlow doughs over many hours suited the working day of a nineteenth-century bakeshop, though the original gives no timings. Modern instant yeast will run through those intervals far faster; keep the dough cool, use a modest amount of yeast, and let the intervals be 45-60 minutes rather than driving the rise with warmth.
- FlourThe whiteness prized here would have come from finely bolted white flour. Modern unbleached bread flour gives the strength this repeated kneading demands; all-purpose will work but yields a softer, less shapely loaf.
- YeastThe original bakeshop would have used compressed yeast or a liquid ferment. Compressed yeast is roughly three times the weight of instant dry yeast for the same effect, so scale down accordingly if you are following an old formula literally.
- OvenVienna-style bread was baked hot with steam. The original gives no oven guidance; as a modern starting point, around 425F with steam for the first ten minutes, then vented and finished, gives the thin crisp glossy crust the style is known for. A pan of boiling water or a few ice cubes on a lower shelf will do it in a home oven.
- ShapingThe classic Vienna loaf is a long oval, slashed diagonally, sometimes washed with milk or egg. Nothing in the text specifies shape, but the split rolls it derives from point to that family.
- YieldThe original gives no batch size, so the number of loaves depends on the French split roll receipt it refers to. Bread of this kind is at its best the day it is baked and stales quickly.
Vienna bread earned its international reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century, and is generally traced to the Austrian steam-oven bakeries whose display at the 1867 Paris Exposition set off a fashion for the style across Europe and America. What distinguished it was not an exotic ingredient but method: finely milled flour, a well-worked dough, and steam in the oven for a thin, glossy crust. American hotel bakers took it up as a showpiece, and the pride in this passage is of its period. The aside about housekeepers sending to beg a loaf for company days suggests that recognition for a hotel baker came largely by reputation.