1012. How to Use Baking Powder, &c.
Baking powder may be used instead of yeast in making all kinds of bread, cake, teacakes, &c., and for biscuits and pastry, either without or in combination with butter, suet, &c. Bread, &c., made with baking powder is never placed before the fire to rise as when made with yeast, but the dough may be shaped and put into the oven as soon as it is made. The chief points to bear in remembrance are that in making bread two teaspoonfuls of baking powder should be used to every pound of flour, but for pastry, cakes, buns, &c., three teaspoonfuls should be used. The ingredients should always be thoroughly incorporated by mixing; the tins on which or in which the dough is placed to bake should be well floured, and not greased; and the oven should always be very hot, so that the baking may be effected as rapidly as possible.
1013. Bread (Cheap and Excellent)
Simmer slowly, over a gentle fire, a pound of rice in three quarts of water, till the rice has become perfectly soft, and the water is either evaporated or imbibed by the rice: let it become cool, but not cold, and mix it completely with four pounds of flour; add to it some salt, and about four tablespoonfuls of yeast. Knead it very thoroughly, for on this depends whether or not your good materials produce a superior article. Next let it rise well before the fire, make it up into loaves with a little of the flour—which, for that purpose, you must reserve from your four pounds—and bake it rather long. This is an exceedingly good and cheap bread.
1014. Economical and Nourishing Bread
Suffer the miller to remove from the flour only the coarse flake bran. Of this bran, boil five or six pounds in four and a half gallons of water; when the goodness is extracted from the bran,—during which time the liquor will waste half or three-quarters of a gallon,—strain it and let it cool. When it has cooled down to the temperature of new milk, mix it with fifty-six pounds of flour and as much salt and yeast as would be used for other bread; knead it exceedingly well; let it rise before the fire, and bake it in small loaves: small loaves are preferable to large ones, because they take the heat more equally. There are two advantages in making bread with bran water instead of plain water; the one being that there is considerable nourishment in bran, which is thus extracted and added to the bread; the other, that flour imbibes much more of bran water than it does of plain water; so much more, as to give in the bread produced almost a fifth in weight more than the quantity of flour made up with plain water would have done. These are important considerations to the poor. Fifty-six pounds of flour, made with plain water, would produce sixty-nine and a half pounds of bread; made with bran water, it will produce eighty-three and a half pounds.