Graham Bread
A Standing article on the bill of fare of most hotels. 2 pounds of graham flour, not sifted. 1 pound of white flour. 1 1/2 pints of warm water. 1/2 pint of yeast. (1 cup). 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Commence 7 or 8 hours before time to bake. Mix the yeast and water together; strain them into the graham. It makes a stiff batter. That is the sponge. Let it stand in a moderately warm place about 4 hours. Then add the white flour, knead and pound the dough. Very slightly grease the pan it was started in, place the lump of dough in it, brush that over-no matter how slightly-with the butter brush and set to rise 2 hours more. Then make into loaves, rise and bake.
Graham dough rises faster than white, and after being made into loaves should not be a lowed to rise or proof too much, lest it be too crumbly to slice well. The bakers usually bake these in round moulds. Taking fine French rolls for the standard, graham rolls enjoy a degree of popularity in hotel service averaging about three to five They are more difficult to make-or at least to bake-and a fine graham roll is not to be met with everywhere. They don't all know how to make them as nice as these.
A hotel baker's formula written for a shop with a barm crock and a brick oven. The quantities are sound, but two things need translating before it will work at home: the yeast and the total liquid.
- The yeast is the problemA half pint (1 cup) of liquid yeast means a wet barm or a potato-and-hops ferment of unknown strength, not anything sold today. There is no honest conversion; the closest working substitute is about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast, with the missing cup of liquid made up as water.
- Weigh the flour2 lb graham and 1 lb white are about 7 cups and 3 1/2 cups respectively, but graham flour varies enough in coarseness that scooping will mislead you. Use a scale. Total liquid of roughly 4 cups against 3 lb flour is a slack dough at around 70 percent hydration, which is why the sponge is described as a stiff batter rather than a dough.
- Graham flourCoarse whole wheat, ground from the entire berry and deliberately not bolted or sifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; ordinary fine whole-wheat flour will give a tighter, less crumbly loaf than the recipe intends.
- "Warm water"Around 100-110F. Hotter than that with a slack whole-grain dough and a four-hour sponge will exhaust the ferment before the white flour goes in.
- No oven temperature is givenBread of this size wants 400-425F, dropping to 375F if the crust colours early. Bake to an internal temperature of 200-210F rather than by clock; whole-grain loaves this wet read gummy if pulled short.
- The hinge: underproof the loavesThe instruction to keep the shaped loaves from proofing too much is the whole point of the recipe. Bran cuts gluten strands, so an overproofed graham loaf collapses into a crumb that will not hold a slice. Shape and bake while the loaves still spring back slowly when pressed.
- The butter brushGreasing the surface of the bulk dough stops a skin forming during the two-hour rise. Any neutral fat or a film of oil does the same job; the quantity is meant to be almost nothing.
- YieldThree pounds of flour plus liquid gives roughly 5 lb of dough, enough for three 1 1/2 lb loaves in standard pans. The passage notes that bakers usually bake these in round moulds.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose lectures in the 1830s and 1840s argued that finely bolted white flour had been stripped of what the body needed, and that bread should be made at home from coarsely ground whole wheat. By the time this book was written the moral crusade had faded into a menu category: graham bread and graham rolls were, as the author says, a standing article on hotel bills of fare, offered alongside French rolls for guests who wanted something plainer or thought it better for them. The professional's complaint here is telling. Whole-grain doughs ferment faster and tolerate far less proof, so a hotel baker judged by his French rolls could easily turn out a graham roll that crumbled under the knife, and the note that a fine one is not to be met with everywhere is a working baker's quiet boast.