No. 3412

The Dough

La Pate

Remove the supporting board and let the sponge cover a larger space in the trough; pour over it twenty-nine quarts of water and three pounds of salt dissolved in a part of the water, then mix the whole together until the sponge is well blended; then dredge over the half of the remaining flour and knead well together with the hands, giving them a vertical rotary movement, going and coming from one end to the other of the dough; it should now be rather soft and begin to acquire body. Pour the remainder of the flour in one layer over all the paste and knead it once more, but this time cutting it into small pieces with the hands and superposing these pieces at once, one on top of the other; as soon as all the flour is absorbed, then push all of the dough to one end of the trough. Cut from the whole of it a piece weighing twenty-five pounds; knead it strongly, blowing and beating it forcibly against the sides of the trough, which means to take the piece of dough by the two lateral ends, raise them to the height of the chest, stretching out the dough and bringing it down heavily against the sides of the trough in such a way as to imprison all the air possible, and give it consistency; repeat the same operation with the remainder of the paste. Superpose the pieces of dough as quickly as they are done, one on top of the other, at the other end of the trough; repeat this operation a second time, then a third and even a fourth time, until the dough has acquired the desired body, then gather it together into a small space in the trough, holding it up with the well-floured board wedged against it. Dredge over lightly with flour, cover and leave it to rise for one hour. The dough is then ready to mold.

← No. 3411 Leaven Bakery & Breads No. 3413 Bread with Butter, Varsovian →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is one stage in a professional bakeshop sequence, not a standalone formula: it picks up from the sponge in No. 3411 and hands off to molding and proofing. Read it as a description of hand mixing at commercial scale rather than as a recipe to follow measure by measure.

The flour quantity is not hereThe instruction says only "the remaining flour" and "the remainder of the flour," because the total was set when the sponge was made in No. 3411. Taken alone, this page cannot be scaled accurately; it is genuinely incomplete without the preceding entry.
What 29 quarts meansTwenty-nine quarts of water is about 27.5 litres, weighing roughly 60 lb. Since the dough is cut off in pieces of twenty-five pounds and the operation repeated, the batch plainly ran to well over a hundred pounds, i.e. many dozens of loaves, though the exact total cannot be worked out from this page alone. Any domestic version needs a drastic reduction.
The salt looks high because it is measured against waterThree pounds of salt to 60 lb of water is about 5 percent of the water, but bakers reckon salt against total flour. Against the flour of a batch of this size it would fall somewhere near the ordinary 1.8 to 2 percent, where modern bread salt still sits, though the flour total is missing from this page so the figure cannot actually be checked. Dissolving it in part of the water first, as directed, is still best practice.
The troughA maie or dough trough is a long wooden box, waist high, that the baker works in and against; the "sides of the trough" are the vertical walls he slams the dough onto. A large tub or a clean counter substitutes, but the geometry of the stroke was built around the trough.
"Blowing and beating" is the hingeLifting the dough by its two ends to chest height, stretching it and throwing it down is pétrissage à bras, the hand equivalent of intensive mixing. The claim that it imprisons air is period reasoning; what it actually does is develop gluten by repeated stretch and fold. Four rounds of this is roughly a well-developed dough on a spiral mixer, or a series of stretch-and-folds at ten-minute intervals.
Cutting in the last flourAdding the final flour in one layer and then cutting the dough into pieces and stacking them works much like the French contre-frasage, in which extra flour is worked into an already slack dough without tearing it. A modern cook adding late flour to a wet dough would do much the same by folding.
One hour is a bulk ferment, not the full proofThe dough rests an hour under flour and a cloth, then goes to molding, with the real proof happening after shaping. The timing assumes the vigour of the leaven of No. 3411 and the conditions of a working bakehouse; commercial yeast at kitchen temperatures will not match the clock exactly. Judge by volume and feel.
Covering and the floured boardThe board wedged against the mass is there to keep the dough gathered and off the trough walls while it rises. Flouring it well is what stops it welding to the dough, which matters more here than any timing on the page.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summary of thirty-four years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its bread chapter is written for a hotel bakeshop rather than a household: a leaven, a trough of dough measured in dozens of quarts, and a crew of hands to work it. The method described here is the classic French pétrissage à bras, in which the whole batch is developed by lifting, stretching and throwing the dough against the trough, section by section, several times over. It is worth noticing what the passage takes for granted, since mechanical dough mixers were only beginning to spread through large bakeries in the 1880s and 1890s; within a generation of this book the arm work it describes so carefully had largely been handed to machines, and the belief that beating "imprisons air" had given way to an understanding of gluten development. The stacking of cut pieces to absorb the last of the flour is a technique bakers still use, generally traced to the same French tradition, under the name contre-frasage.