" If salt-rising bread does not
fulfill the whole of this unpleasant description, it certainly does
emphatically a part of it. The smell which it has in baking, and when
more than a day old, suggests the inquiry, whether it is the saccharine
or the putrid fermentation with which it is raised. Whoever breaks a
piece of it after a day or two, will often see minute filaments or
clammy strings drawing out from the fragments, which, with the
unmistakable smell, will cause him to pause before consummating a
nearer acquaintance.
The fermentation of flour by means of brewer's or distiller's yeast
produces, if rightly managed, results far more palatable and wholesome.
The only requisites for success in it are, first, good materials, and,
second, great care in small things. There are certain low-priced or
damaged kinds of flour which can never by any kind of domestic chemistry
be made into good broad; and to those persons whose stomachs forbid
them to eat gummy, glutinous paste, under the name of bread, there is
no economy in buying these poor brands, even at half the price of good
flour.
But good flour and good yeast being supposed, with a temperature
favorable to the development of fermentation, the whole success of the
process depends on the thorough diffusion of the proper proportion of
yeast through the whole mass, and on stopping the subsequent
fermentation at the precise and fortunate point.
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