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CRISPED BREAD (Cut the crust from stale bread)
Cut the crust from stale bread. Slice it as thin as a wafer, dry it on a pan lined with paper, in the oven, leaving the door open. When entirely dry close the oven door and brown slightly.
ZWIEBACK-This of course simply means twice baked bread. Cut bread, or better still, rusk, one-half-inch thick, in neat squares. Set these on a paper in the bottom of a dripping-pan in the oven, leaving the door open. When dry, close door and bake a delicate brown.
Zwieback is often made of sweetened bread.
Two versions of the same idea: bread dried through, then coloured. The whole method hinges on drying before browning, which is why the oven door stays open for the first stage.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no temperature at all. As a modern equivalent, use 250-275F with the door ajar for the drying stage, then close the door and raise to about 325F to take on colour. Anything hotter browns the surface while the centre is still soft, and the slice goes leathery instead of snapping.
- Why the door stays openAn open door lets moisture escape rather than recirculate. If you skip this and simply bake, you are toasting rather than drying, and the bread is more likely to soften again as it cools.
- "Thin as a wafer"For the crisped bread, aim for 1/8 inch or less. The recipe calls for stale bread; day-old to two-day-old bread slices cleanly with a serrated knife, while bread dried right through tends to crumble. A fine-crumbed white loaf is easiest to cut thin.
- RuskA rusk here is a slightly sweet, enriched yeast bread or bun, baked and then dried out again. Products sold as "rusk" today vary and may not match it; a brioche or challah loaf, or a plain milk bread, gives a close result.
- Paper liningThe original means plain kitchen or butcher's paper, used to keep the bread off hot metal. Parchment is the direct equivalent. Waxed paper is not; it will smoke.
- TimingReckon on 30-45 minutes drying for wafer-thin slices and up to an hour for half-inch zwieback squares, then 8-12 minutes to brown. Judge by feel: a fully dried piece is light, rigid and makes a dry click when tapped.
- Yield and keepingA one-pound loaf gives a large jarful. Cool completely on a rack before storing, or trapped steam will soften the lot. Airtight, it keeps a couple of weeks.
Zwieback is simply the German for "twice baked," the same construction as Italian biscotto and French biscuit, and it points to the oldest reason for baking bread a second time: driving out the moisture that lets bread spoil. Twice-baked breads were provisions food long before they were breakfast food, carried on ships and campaigns because they kept for months. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, zwieback and crisped bread had settled into two domestic roles: a use for the stale end of a loaf in a household that wasted nothing, and a bland, dry, easily digested food prescribed for invalids, convalescents and teething infants. The sweetened version noted at the end is the ancestor of the boxed zwieback that American mothers bought for babies through most of the twentieth century.