History Bakers: Making Bread With Rice (The Great British Bake Off - Week 3 - Bread)

 History Bakers: Making Bread With Rice (The Great British Bake Off - Week 3 - Bread)  

To tie in with the Great British Bake Off this year, staff at the History Centre have decided to gather historic recipes and try them out. With bread week just gone, I decided to make bread using rice with a recipe from 1800 that I found in the Papers of the Pennington Family of Warter (U DDWA).

Image: Recipe for Rice Bread. Ref: U DDWA

I had not heard of the Pennington family before I found this recipe; the biography section at the beginning of our catalogue for U DDWA shows their influence over the years, some of their connections with other members of the landed aristocracy, and several important positions they have held over the years. «Coll_RefNo»

Image: Ingredients

This recipe intrigued me a lot and it looked relatively simple as far as instructions and ingredients go, which you can see below. However, I found it quite difficult overall.
I began by converting the measurements from imperial to metric and saw that the original ratio of flour to rice was roughly one part rice for 5.3 recurring parts flour. I found this ratio made a dry dough and a drier bread—but one which has paired fine with some of my favourite liquids: curry, gravy, and melted butter. I doubled the amount of rice for my second attempt but still found this far too dry. You can see a side-by-side comparison of those breads below, looking more like ancient rocks or anaemic coprolites than anything edible.

Image: First attempts

For the third attempt, I used a lot more rice as this was the only moist ingredient. Both the dough and the baked bread came out a lot nicer, but I would probably use even more rice if I were to try again, as it still came out drier than I would like. You can see two of the doughs together below, note how much cleaner the bowl is with the high-rice mixture dough.

Image: Smoother bread mixture 

The ingredients I used to produce the final attempt were: 450g flour, 300g rice, a tbsp of yeast, and three pinches of salt. Overall, I found this dough relatively easy to mix, far easier than the dryer doughs I had made previously. Rolling out the dough was its own ordeal, however, as it proved to be very sticky. Not only did it cling to the rolling pin, but it immediately incorporated most of the flour I put down to help roll it. The fissures you can see above were commonplace whenever I rolled it too far in one direction and a short period of rolling was generally followed by a longer period of consolidation. When I was satisfied enough with the dough blocks, I put them in the oven at 190 degrees Celsius for roughly 30-40 minutes.

Image: Pre-oven mixture

I did not get a picture of the final batch of bread as, by this point, I was very hungry and part-way through making a curry. I did, however, get a picture of the slices I fed to the people in my house. They look quite a lot like bread, especially if you squint. 

Image: Finished product, baked and sliced

Dilara – “Surprisingly nice.” Joey – “It was nice, I think it could have done with longer in the oven.” Sofya – “Weird bread is good. It reminds me of Palestinians having to make bread using any old s***e.” I brought the third loaf into work for people to try and they had the following to say: Lucy – “Definitely quite heavy, but really nice flavour! It’s a little bit sweet in the same way as white bread. Really surprised it was made with rice!” Rachel - “Quite dense and stodgy but nice flavour & definitely enjoyable enough toasted with some good butter.” Overall, this recipe did not go very well, and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly why. Some of the instructions weren’t particularly clear and I had no idea what it was meant to look like at any stage of the process. I was half expecting to create a light and fluffy bao bun but instead I ended up with a dense and heavy loaf. On the plus side, it tasted fine to the people brave enough to try it and it is sure to be a lot healthier than many breads because it was made with boiled rice instead of butter. I may try to make this again in future as it was relatively simple, but I would probably try to find a different recipe or at least use ratios like those for the third loaf. The imprecision of the instructions left me with a few questions about where I had gone wrong. Did I cook the rice for the correct amount of time? Is it assumed that I should add water to get the right consistency of dough? Did I have the oven at the correct temperature? Is/was the original texture desirable even though it did not appeal to me personally?