A treatise on the art of making good wholesome bread of wheat, oats, rye, barley and other farinaceous grains / Exhibiting the alimentary properties and chemical constitution of different kinds of bread corn, and of the various substitutes used for bread, in different parts of the world

by Friedrich Christian Accum

Rice Bread.

Rice, though one of the roughest and driest of farinaceous vegetables, is converted by the Americans into a very pleasant fermented bread. The process is as follows: The grain is first washed by pouring water upon it, then stirring it, and changing the water until it be sufficiently cleansed. The water is afterwards drawn off, and the rice, being sufficiently drained, is put, while yet damp, into a mortar, and beaten to powder; it is now completely dried, and passed through a common hair sieve. The flour, thus obtained, is generally kneaded with a small proportion of Indian corn meal, and boiled into a thickish consistence; or sometimes it is mixed with boiled potatoes, and a small quantity of leaven, or yeast, is added to the mass. When it has fermented, sufficiently, the dough is put into pans, and placed in an oven. The bread made by this process is light and wholesome, pleasing to the eye, and agreeable to the taste. But rice flour will make excellent bread, without the addition of either potatoes, or any kind of meal. Let a sufficient quantity of the flour be put into a kneading trough; and at the same time let a due proportion of water be boiled in a cauldron, into which throw a few handfuls of rice in grain, and boil it till it break. This forms a thick and viscous substance, which is poured upon the flour, and the whole kneaded with a mixture of salt and yeast; the dough is then covered with warm clothes, and left to rise. In the process of fermentation, this dough, firm at first, becomes liquid as soup, and seems quite incapable of being wrought by the hand. To obviate this inconvenience, the oven is heated while the dough is rising; and when it has attained a proper temperature, a tinned box is taken, furnished with a handle long enough to reach to the end of the oven; a little water is poured into this box, which is then filled with dough, and covered with cabbage leaves and a leaf of paper. The box is thus committed to the oven, and suddenly reversed. The heat of the oven prevents the dough from spreading, and keeps it in the form which the box has given it. This bread is both beautiful and good; but when it becomes a little stale, loses much of its excellence. It comes out of the oven of a fine yellow colour, like pastry which has yolks of eggs in it. Other methods of making rice bread are the following:

1. Boil a quarter of a pound of rice till it is quite soft; then put it on the back part of a sieve to drain, and when it is cool, mix it up with three quarters of a pound of wheaten flour, a spoonful of yeast, and two ounces of salt. Let it stand for three hours, then knead it well, and roll it in about a handful of wheaten flour, so as to make the outside dry enough to put it in the oven. About an hour and a quarter will bake it, and it will produce one pound fourteen ounces of very good white bread, but it should not be cut till it is two days old. Another way is the following:

2. Take half a peck of rice flour, and one peck of wheaten flour, mix them together and knead the dough up with a sufficient quantity of salt, yeast, and warm water, as stated in page 97. Suffer it to ferment, divide it into eight loaves, and bake them.

3. Take a peck of rice, boil it over night till it becomes soft, then put it in a pan, and the next morning it will be found to have swelled prodigiously. A peck of potatoes should now be boiled, skinned, and mashed into a fine pulp, and while hot, be well kneaded up with the rice, and a peck of wheaten flour; a sufficient quantity of yeast and salt must now be added, and the dough left in the kneading trough to prove or ferment; and when well risen it may be divided into loaves and baked in the usual way.