BREAD.. 
Nothing in the art of baking is more essential 
than to have a due proportion of flour.and water. 
That proportion, however, cannot be regulated 
by any certain rules; for it: varies with the di- 
versity of soil, climate, years, seasons, and grind- 
ing. There are some kinds of flour which imbibe 
precisely three-fourths of their weight of water ; 
and others. which imbibe only half their weight. 
That flour: is. always best which, imbibes the 
greatest'quantity of water; of course the method 
ef discovering the quality of the flour is abun- 
dantly simple. Merely take a certain quantity 
of flour, and observe how much water it requires 
to make a good paste.. Bread made of good flour, 
is about five-sixteenths heavier than.the quantity 
of flour which. it contains; of course it retains 
nearly one half of the water employed in forming 
| the dough. These results, however, are by no 
means uniform:; they depend not only on the 
quality of the flour, but on the manner of em- 
ploying it, on the skilful regulation of the heat 
of the oven, and a variety of other circumstances, 
“ By various mixtures of one kind of flour, less 
supplied with. azotised matter, with another 
which is richer in this material, the equilibrium 
of the food which from meteorological causes pre- 
vailing in any particular country, may not have 
reached the proper standard, may. be effectually 
restored. The wheat of England, for example, 
is inferior to that of the continent of Europe, 
and of America. It may, however, be improved. 
by an admixture with foreign flour, or with oat- 
meal, barley, or beans ; and in this state it will 
be found to form palatable bread. It is in the 
predominance of glutin over the other azotised 
materials that wheat owes its superior power of 
detaining the carbonic acid engendered by fer- 
mentation, and thus communicating to it the 
vesicular spongy structure so characteristic of 
| good bread. By mixing one-third of Canada flour 
with: two-thirds of maize a very good loaf is pro- 
duced, and when equal parts of flour and oat- 
meal, or of barley, or of peasemeal, are employed, 
palatable bread is the result.”——See ‘ Hxperimen- 
tal Researches. on the Food of Animals,’ By RK. D. 
Thomson, M. D. London: 1846. 
The method of making household bread, prac- 
tised by our bakers, is thus: To a peck of flour 
add a handful of salt, a pint of yeast, and three 
quarts of water ; the whole, being kneaded in a | 
bowl or trough, will rise in about an hour ; it is 
then moulded into loaves, and put into the oven. 
For French bread, take half-a-bushel of fine flour, 
ten eggs, and a pound and a half of fresh butter, 
into which they put the same quantity of yeast, 
with a manchet, and tempering the whole mass 
with new milk pretty hot, leave it half an hour 
to rise, after which they make it into loaves or 
rolls, and wash it over with an egg beaten 
with milk: care is taken that the oven be not 
too hot. 
“Mr. Henry, of Manchester,” says the author 
last quoted, “in the end of last century, sug- 
517 
gested the idea of mixing dough with carbonate 
of soda and muriatic acid, so as to disengage 
carbonic acid in imitation of the usual effect. of 
fermentation; but with this advantage, that the 
integrity of the flour was preserved, and that the 
elements of the common salt required as a sea- 
soner of the bread were thus introduced, and 
the salt formed in the dough. ‘The result of 
my experiments upon the bread produced by the 
action of hydrochloric acid upon carbonate of 
soda, has been, that in.a sack of flour there was 
a difference in favour of the unfermented bread 
to the amount of 30 lbs. 13 oz., or in round num- 
bers, a sack of flour would produce 107 loaves 
of unfermented bread, and only 100 loaves. of 
fermented bread of the same weight. Hence it 
appears, that in the sack of flour by the common 
process of baking, 7 loaves, or 63 per cent., of the 
flour are driven. into the air and lost. An im- 
portant question now arises from the considera- 
tion of the result of this experiment: Does the 
loss arise entirely from the decomposition of 
sugar, or is any other: element of the fiour at- 
tacked? It appears from a mean of eight 
analyses of wheat flour from. differertt. parts of 
Kurope by Vauquelin, that the quantity. of sugar 
contained in flour amounts to 5°61 per cent. 
But it is obvious that, as the quantity lost by 
baking exceeded this amount by nearly one per 
cent., the loss cannot be accounted for by the, 
removal merely of the ready-formed sugar of the 
flour. We must either ascribe this extra loss to the 
conversion of a portion of the gum of the flour 
into sugar and its decomposition by means of the 
ferment, which is highly probable, or we must 
attribute it to.the action of the yeast upon an- 
other element of the flour; and if we admit that | 
yeast is generated during the panary fermenta- 
tion, then the conclusion would be inevitable, 
that another element of the flour, beside the 
sugar, or gum, has been affected. For Liebig ; 
has well illustrated the fact. that when yeast is | 
added to. wort, ferment is formed from the gluten 
contained in it, at the same time that the sugar 
is decomposed into alcohol and carbonic acid. 
Now, in the panary fermentation, which is pre- 
cisely similar to the fermentation of wort, we 
might naturally expect that the gluten of the 
flour would be attacked to reproduce yeast. 
“A wholesome and palatable bread may be 
produced by the employment of ammoniacal alum 
and carbonate of ammonia, or soda, as a substitute 
for yeast. In this process the alum is destroyed 
by the heat: the bread is vesicular and white, 
and rises, according to the judgment of the baker, 
as well as fermented bread. It is obvious that 
none of the ingredients added can afiect the 
integrity of the constituents of the flour; an 
occurrence which may possibly happen in the 
preparation of bread by the common process of 
fermentation, as has been shown, even to the 
azotised principles of the flour. The disadvan- 
tages of such a deterioration is sufficiently evi- 
