Skip to main content
Bread

The Rev. Mr. Haggett’s Economical Bread

A bran bread made by boiling bran, mixing with flour, salt, yeast, and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

The Rev. Mr. Haggett’s Economical Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bran

  1. Remove the coarse flake bran from the flour.

  2. Boil the bran in more than 4 gallons of water until smooth, yielding 3 gallons and 3 quarts of clear bran-water.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Knead the flour with the bran-water, adding salt and yeast as for other bread.

  2. Divide the dough into loaves and bake for 2 hours and 30 minutes.

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

Coarse flake bran
Boiled into the water to make a bran liquid that adds fibre and moisture to the dough.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough as gluten develops during kneading.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and gives the loaves an airy crumb.

The step that matters

Boiling the bran until smooth. Bran left in coarse pieces can cut gluten strands and weaken the dough. Boiling softens it so the liquid is smooth and the dough holds its structure.

“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.

You might also like