Name: Economical Wheat Bread
Ingredients: 5 pounds coarse bran; 4 gallons water; 3 quarts clear bran liquor; 56 pounds brown flour; salt to taste; yeast

Economical Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil 5 pounds of coarse bran in slightly more than 4 gallons of water until smooth.
Pour in 3 quarts of clear bran liquor and knead with 56 pounds of brown flour.

Shape and bake

Add salt and yeast as you would for other bread.
Shape the dough into loaves and bake for 2.5 hours.

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 bran: Boiled into a smooth liquor that adds moisture and body to the dough.
Brown flour: Forms the main structure of the dough as gluten develops during kneading.
Yeast: Produces gas that makes the dough rise before and during baking.

“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.