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Bread

Economical Bread

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Economical Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bran water

  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 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Coarse flake bran
Adds fiber and a coarse, hearty texture to the crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas that leavens the dough so the loaves rise.

The step that matters

Boiling the bran until smooth. Bran that stays coarse or unevenly cooked can leave gritty pieces and absorb water unevenly, so the dough's texture and moisture become inconsistent. Boiling softens the bran fully before it is kneaded in.

“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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