HOME ECONOMICS AND EDUCATION 585 



out which bread is usually considered insipid, and because it retards 

 fermentation. 



When the flour is of good quality, the dough well prepared, and 

 the bread properly baked, the loaf has certain definite characteristics. 

 Thus it should be well raised and have a thin, flinty crust, which is 

 neither too dark in color nor too tough, but -which cracks when 

 broken. The crumb, as the interior of the loaf is called, should be 

 porous, elastic, and of uniform texture, without large holes, and 

 should have a good flavor and odor. In this connection the bread- 

 making and judging contests in some of the household science de- 

 partments of the farmers' institutes are of interest. The members 

 are urged to bring loaves of their own baking to the meetings, and 

 these are judged on such points as flavor, lightness, grain and tex- 

 ture of the dough, color, depth and texture of the crust, and marked 

 on special score cards with as much accuracy as is used in seed or 

 stock judging contests among farmers. If housekeepers would judge 

 the bread baked in their own kitchens with the same intelligent inter- 

 est and profit by their findings they could soon learn to make bread 

 as accurately as wholesale bakers. 



Substitutes for Yeast. Partly because yeast is uncertain in its 

 workings, partly too, because it uses up some of the nutritive ingre- 

 dients of the bread by feeding upon them, attempts have been made 

 to find some substitute for it. Various chemicals have been used to 

 produce carbon-dioxid gas in the dough. The first noteworthy at- 

 tempts were made about the middle of the nineteenth century at Har- 

 vard University and in Germany. Yeast powder, as the American 

 preparation was called, was a mixture of an acid and an alkaline 

 powder, the former calcium phosphate and the latter bicarbonate of 

 soda. When duly mixed with the dough, these were supposed to 

 give off carbon dioxid as effectively as yeast. Liebig, who calculated 

 that in Germany the daily loss of material by the growth of the 

 yeast plant was, if saved, sufficient to supply 400,000 persons with 

 bread, made a great effort to introduce a similar preparation into Ger- 

 many, but with little success. Numerous baking powders, made from 

 various chemicals, are in the market now. The self-raising flour 

 used in the United States is a flour ready mixed with such a prepara- 

 tion. In the United States leavening agents other than yeast are 

 more commonly used for such kinds of bread as tea biscuit and batter 

 cakes, or for cake and pastry, than for loaf bread. Soda, cream of 

 tartar, or saleratus biscuit are examples of breads frequently made 

 in the home with these chemical leavening agents. 



The aerated bread, so popular in London, is made by a different 

 method, invented by the English physician Dauglish in 1856. Ac- 

 cording to this method, the water used for wetting the dough is di- 

 rectly charged with the requisite amount of carbon-dioxid gas and 

 then mixed with the flour in a specially constructed machine. Some- 

 times a little fermented barley infusion from a brewery, or wort, is 

 put into the water. Other breads are made by using leaven, Scotch 

 barm, or the wild yeasts as in the salt-rising bread. 



