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Bread

Flour Ferments

A dough made by scalding flour in boiling water and cooling to 90°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Flour Ferments

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Ensure your ferment tub is clean.

Mix and cool

  1. Add 4 pounds of flour to the tub.

  2. Pour 2 gallons of boiling water over the flour.

  3. Add cold water until the mixture cools to 90°F.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Flour
Supplies the starch and protein that the ferment is built on and that microbes feed on.
Boiling water
Softens and gelatinizes the flour's starch, making it more open to fermentation.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to 90°F. Boiling water is hot enough to kill the microbes that drive fermentation. Adding cold water until the mixture reaches 90°F brings it into a range where those microbes can become active.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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