Vienna bread is a type of
bread that is produced from a process developed in
Vienna
en, Viennese
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,
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
, in the 19th century. The Vienna process used high
milling
Milling may refer to:
* Milling (minting), forming narrow ridges around the edge of a coin
* Milling (grinding), breaking solid materials into smaller pieces by grinding, crushing, or cutting in a mill
* Milling (machining), a process of using rota ...
of
Hungarian grain, and cereal press-yeast for
leavening
In cooking, a leavening agent () or raising agent, also called a leaven () or leavener, is any one of a number of substances used in doughs and batters that cause a foaming action (gas bubbles) that lightens and softens the mixture. An altern ...
.
History
In the 19th century, for the first time, bread was made only from
beer
Beer is one of the oldest and the most widely consumed type of alcoholic drink in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cer ...
yeast
Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom. The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and at least 1,500 species are currently recognized. They are estimated to consti ...
and new dough rather than a
sourdough
Sourdough or sourdough bread is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae and yeast. Lactic acid from fermentation imparts a sour taste and improves keeping qualities.
History
In the ''Encyclopedia of Food Microbi ...
starter. The first known example of this was the sweet-fermented Imperial "
Kaiser-Semmel" roll of the Vienna bakery at the
Paris International Exposition of 1867. These sweet-fermented rolls lacked the acid sourness typical of
lactobacillus
''Lactobacillus'' is a genus of Gram-positive, aerotolerant anaerobes or microaerophilic, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming bacteria. Until 2020, the genus ''Lactobacillus'' comprised over 260 phylogenetically, ecologically, and metabolically di ...
, and were said to be popular and in high demand.
Prior to this time, bakers had been using old-dough leavens, and they had discovered that increasing the starter's rest intervals between
refreshment promoted more yeast growth and less gas production due to overwhelming lactobacillus numbers. At some point bakers began to add brewer's yeast, or beer yeast or
barm
Barm is the foam or scum formed on the top of a fermenting liquid, such as beer, wine, or feedstock for spirits or industrial ethanol distillation. It is used to leaven bread, or set up fermentation in a new batch of liquor. Barm, as a leaven, h ...
, to the refreshments which produced a whiter, sweeter-tasting bread.
A shortage of beer yeast for making sweet-fermented breads developed when beer brewers slowly switched from
top-fermenting to bottom-fermenting yeast (
Saccharomyces pastorianus), and thus the Vienna Process was developed by 1846. In 1845 the Association of Vienna Bakers announced a contest for the production of a sweet-fermenting yeast and the prize was awarded in 1850 to . The Paris Exposition credited the Vienna Bakery in 1867 as the first in the world to use press-yeast.
Three types of bakes were exhibited by the Viennese bakery at the exposition: the sweet-fermented Imperial rolls, wheat and rye or solely rye loaves, and a large variety of fancy breads and sweet cakes. The Imperial rolls were made with the finer grades of flour, milk and water in a 50:50 ratio, beer yeast, and salt. Other breads made with the same grades of flour included
teacakes, which added butter and may have excluded water in favor of milk; Gipfel or Pinnacle cake, which used milk (no water) and lard and
brioche
Brioche (, also , , ) is a bread of French origin whose high egg and butter content gives it a rich and tender crumb. Chef Joël Robuchon described it as "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and e ...
, made with milk and sugar.
Cereal press yeast
Vienna yeast was propagated utilizing a
mash #REDIRECT Mash
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of
malt
Malt is germinated cereal grain that has been dried in a process known as " malting". The grain is made to germinate by soaking in water and is then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air.
Malted grain is used to make beer, ...
ed corn,
barley
Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley ...
, and
rye
Rye (''Secale cereale'') is a grass grown extensively as a grain, a cover crop and a forage crop. It is a member of the wheat tribe (Triticeae) and is closely related to both wheat (''Triticum'') and barley (genus ''Hordeum''). Rye grain is u ...
. After pitching a small amount of yeast into the cooled
wort
Wort () is the liquid extracted from the mashing process during the brewing of beer or whisky. Wort contains the sugars, the most important being maltose and maltotriose, that will be fermented by the brewing yeast to produce alcohol. Wort al ...
, and introducing some air,
the propagated yeast floated to the surface. This yeast was collected with some care by skimming. Cool, distilled water was used to wash and settle the yeast a sufficient number of times until only the yeast remained. It was then drained and compressed with the aid of a hydraulic press.
Press-yeast was one forerunner to the modern, commercially available
baker's yeast
Baker's yeast is the common name for the strains of yeast commonly used in baking bread and other bakery products, serving as a leavening agent which causes the bread to rise (expand and become lighter and softer) by converting the fermentable ...
.
Hungarian high milling
Hungarian high milling used a hard or tenacious variety of Hungarian wheat. Their mills were outfitted with both stone and steel-roller mills, and were using a new process that was undoubtedly at the forefront of the technology of the day. This time period marked a changeover from one-pass stone grinding or ''low milling'' with its higher damaged starch content, to that of roller milling with greater speed, efficiency, and cooler-temperature operation.
Agricultural chemist
Eben Norton Horsford wrote, Horsford observed that high-milled flour contained less damaged starch,
The origins of high milling appeared to be Austria. Horsford attributed the phrase ''high milling'' to
Vienna grits, which were on sale in Berlin as early as 1810. The recognized pioneer was a miller named Ignaz Paur (1778–1842) who by 1810 had moved to Leobersdorf. The demand for these grits was so great, hand sifting them was inadequate, so Paur employed the services of a cabinet maker named Winter to build the first
middlings purifier A middlings purifier is a device used in the production of flour to remove the husks from the kernels of wheat.
It was developed in Minnesota by Edmund LaCroix, a French inventor hired by Cadwallader C. Washburn and George Christian of the Washbur ...
. Paur milled already-separated grits a second time, first making an ''extract flour'' locally known as ''Auszug''. Over the course of several decades, these high-milling techniques spread to Hungary, Saxony, and Bohemia, among other areas. In Hungary, the steel cylinder or roller mill, locally known as the ''Walzenmühle'', was first invented, and later improved. The Walz sets kept the grain cooler over multiple passes, as successive pairs of rollers were adjusted to incrementally smaller spacings, the grain moved through cooling air from one pair to the next, each cracked them pass-by-pass into smaller successive bits, instead of crushed between stones in one heat-generating pass.
At the Pesth Walzenmühle, when wheat had been fully transformed to flour, it had passed through 18 to 24 pairs of rollers. This new ''cold milling'' process, particularly well suited for hard wheat, likely resulted in lighter, more airy breads of greater baked volumes.
Steam baking
The Vienna bread-production process innovations are often credited for baking with steam leading to different crust characteristics. In 1837,
August Zang, a native of Austria, opened a Bakery in Paris called the "Boulangerie Viennoise" which first introduced steam baking to France,
and whose process was described in detail in an entry on Viennese Bread in an 1849 French Industrial Chemistry book: "the crust of these breads glazes while baking in an atmosphere of steam, to which effect, one places on the floor of the oven a pile of wet hay, well washed in advance, which produces a cloud of steam."
Decades later, another Viennese bakery in Paris introduced the mechanical steam oven, eliminating the need for wet hay, along with cereal press yeast; the United States government report on the
1867 Universal Exposition details the process used in the "Viennese bakery of Mr. Vanner", including his use of a steam oven, which by then had become quite popular in France:
In the steam oven technique, dough is placed into the
oven
upA double oven
A ceramic oven
An oven is a tool which is used to expose materials to a hot environment. Ovens contain a hollow chamber and provide a means of heating the chamber in a controlled way. In use since antiquity, they have been use ...
under a ceiling of steam or, alternatively, the oven is injected with steam as soon as the loaf is loaded. This adds moisture to the body of the bread which delays establishment of the crust and tends to prevent cracking, resulting in a more evenly risen and thinner crust as well as a light and airy crumb.
When the steam is turned off, the dry heat of the oven bakes the crust, producing its characteristically slightly crisp and flaky texture. Vienna bread is typically formed as an oblong loaf, but can be baked in other shapes. As a longer loaf, it may well have been the origin of French bread as bakers there attempted to adopt the steam method to produce their
baguette
A baguette (; ) is a long, thin type of bread of French origin that is commonly made from basic lean dough (the dough, though not the shape, is defined by French law). It is distinguishable by its length and crisp crust.
A baguette has a di ...
s.
Some reports in the decades to follow point out that not all Viennese bread is produced in a steam oven. For instance, Horsford, in his 1875 ''Report on Vienna Bread'', wrote:
See also
*
August Zang, an Austrian who opened a Viennese bakery in Paris in the late 1830s, spreading Viennese baking techniques
*
Austrian cuisine
Austrian cuisine () is a style of cuisine native to Austria and composed of influences from Central Europe and throughout the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austrian cuisine is most often associated with Viennese cuisine, but there are signific ...
*
Charles Louis Fleischmann, the Czech American yeast pioneer who demonstrated Viennese baking at the first American World's Fair in Philadelphia 1876
*
List of breads
This is a list of notable baked or steamed bread varieties. This list does not include List of cakes, cakes, List of pastries, pastries, or List of fried dough foods, fried dough foods, which are listed in separate Wikipedia articles. It also does ...
*
Mill (grinding)
A mill is a device, often a structure, machine or home appliance, kitchen appliance, that breaks solid materials into smaller pieces by grinding, crushing, or cutting. Such comminution is an important unit operation in many process (engineering), ...
*
Proofing (baking technique)
In cooking, proofing (also called proving) is a step in the preparation of yeast bread and other baked goods in which the dough is allowed to rest and rise a final time before baking. During this rest period, yeast ferments the dough and produces ...
*
Pumpernickel, an older European style of bread made with steam, but also dark rye and sourdough
*
Viennoiserie, a French term referring to baked goods in the style of or influenced by Viennese baking
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vienna Bread
Yeast breads
Austrian breads
Austrian culture