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Bread

The Rev. Mr. Hagget's Economical Bread

A simple bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast, boiled and kneaded with bran water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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The Rev. Mr. Hagget's Economical Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour

  1. Remove the coarse flake bran from the flour.

Make the bran-water

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

Make and bake the bread

  1. Knead 56 pounds of 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

Flour
Forms the dough's structure once kneaded, and its starch thickens the bran-water into a smooth base.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and gives the loaves an open crumb.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour in water until smooth. The flour must be fully boiled and smooth so its starch gelatinizes evenly. Lumps left unboiled would not blend into the bran-water and would leave pockets of dry flour in the dough.

“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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