Simon Kander

The Settlement Cook Book (1910) Simon Kander

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV BREAD, ROLLS AND TOAST GENERAL RULES FOR YEAST BREAD Flour should be kept in a dry atmosphere. It makes better bread if heated just before using. The yeast must be fresh. Scald the milk or water, then cool until lukewarm. The heat of the oven should be increased slightly the first twenty minutes, then kept even for twenty minutes, and the last twenty minutes it should decrease. Bread should be kept in a clean tin box, and not exposed to moisture. Yeast is a plant, the small, invisible germs of which are floating in the air. They settle in various places, and when they find a warm, moist, sweet, strength-giving or nitrogenous mixture, they begin to grow. Hot water kills the yeast plant; cold water chills it. Lukewarm liquids should be used. When the yeast plant grows it causes fermentation, which changes some of the starch into sugar, and then some of the sugar into alcohol and carbon-dioxide or carbonic acid gas. This carbon-dioxide gas raises the dough. If it rises too long, it will make the bread sour. Dough is made light in four ways: (1) by the use of yeast; (2) by the use of baking powder; (3) by the use of soda and molasses or sour milk; (4) by beating air into a mixture. Butterine, nut butters, meat fats or vegetable oils can be used in bread in place of butter. In using meat fat or oil take less. HOW TO USE SUBSTITUTE FLOURS Any recipe containing wheat flour may be used by substituting: M cups Rolled Oats for 1 cup Wheat Flour. M cup Potato, Rice, Corn, Buckwheat, Cornmeal, or Soy Bean Flour for 1 cup Wheat Flour. % cup Cornstarch for 1 cup Wheat Flour. Combinations of substitutes produce better results than a single substitute. Wheat flour combined with any of the above substitutes, using only % substitute flour, is the m...