Name: The Rev. Mr. Hagget's Economical Bread
Ingredients: 5 pounds coarse flake bran; 4 gallons water; 56 pounds flour; ½ pound salt; yeast

The Rev. Mr. Hagget's Economical Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bran-water

Boil the bran in more than 4 gallons of water until smooth.
Strain to obtain 3 gallons and 3 quarts of clear bran-water.

Make and bake the bread

In a large bowl, knead the flour with the bran-water, adding salt and yeast as for other bread.
Shape the dough into loaves weighing about 5 pounds each.
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake the loaves 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

Flour: Forms the gluten network that gives the loaves their structure and chew.
Bran: Adds fibre and bulk, giving the loaves a denser, coarser crumb.
Yeast: Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.

“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.