Starvard.
Starvard University · Baking
Bake bread the Boston Cooking School way: level measures, a real first loaf with real quantities, quick breads, pastry, cakes, and a full Sunday table.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Baking is kitchen science you can eat. A lady named Fannie Farmer had a big idea: if everyone measured flour and sugar the exact same level way, recipes would work for everybody, every time. In this course you learn her measuring trick, meet the tiny living yeast that puffs bread up like a balloon, and bake a real loaf with your hands. Then come biscuits, pie crust, cakes, and cookies. By the end you can fill a whole Sunday table with food you baked yourself, warm from your own oven.
Before Fannie Farmer, cookbooks said things like add a piece of butter the size of an egg, or flour enough to make a stiff dough, and beginners failed through no fault of their own. Her Boston Cooking School Cook Book, first published in 1896, replaced guesses with level cups and spoons, and modern recipe writing was born. Mrs. Beeton, writing in England a generation earlier, taught the same respect for order, cleanliness, and understanding what each ingredient does.
This course follows Farmer's own teaching order. You measure correctly first, then learn the four bread ingredients and what yeast does inside dough. Your first white loaf uses her Water Bread proportions, and the kneading lesson uses her words for the motion and the feel of finished dough: smooth, elastic to touch, with bubbles under the surface.
After yeast bread come the faster families: baking powder biscuits and muffins, soda leavened cornbread, pie pastry kept cold, and cakes built on simple ratios you can memorise. Ratios are freedom. Once you know them, you can bake with confidence even when the exact recipe is not in front of you.
The whole course in brief
Measure level, understand yeast, and bake with confidence, from your first white loaf to a full Sunday table.
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Farmer's great reform was one sentence long: correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results. Before her, recipes called for a lump of butter the size of an egg or flour to make it stiff, and two cooks following the same recipe baked two different loaves. Her answer was the level measure, done the same way in every kitchen.
Her rules are exact. Sift flour, meal, and sugar before measuring. Fill the cup by spoonfuls, round it slightly, then level it with a case knife without shaking the cup down. A tablespoonful and a teaspoonful are also measured level: dip, fill, lift, and level with the knife edge towards the tip of the spoon. A cupful of liquid is all the cup will hold. Butter and lard are packed solidly into the cup or spoon and levelled. Measure dry ingredients, liquids, and fats in the order a recipe lists them, and one cup can serve for all three.
Lesson 2
Every yeast loaf is four things. Flour gives the body: use bread flour for yeast baking, because its slightly granular feel signals the strength dough needs, while softer pastry flour suits cakes and biscuits. Water, or milk and water, wets the flour and carries the yeast. Salt seasons and steadies fermentation. Yeast does the lifting. Farmer calls yeast a microscopic plant that grows by budding, feeding on sugar and starch in the flour and giving off carbon dioxide gas, which puffs the dough full of bubbles.
Yeast has firm temperature rules. It is killed at 212 degrees F, its life is suspended but not destroyed at 32 degrees F, and the temperature best suited to its growth is 65 to 68 degrees F. So dissolve yeast cake in lukewarm water, never hot, and let dough rise in a warm, even place, away from both cold draughts and direct heat. A little sugar is usually added to hasten fermentation. Use yeast fresh: a good cake is light in colour with no dark streaks.
Lesson 3
Here is Farmer's Water Bread, the loaf this whole course stands on. You need 2 cups boiling water, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon lard, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 and a half teaspoons salt, a quarter yeast cake dissolved in a quarter cup lukewarm water, and 6 cups sifted flour.
The recipe makes a double loaf and a pan of biscuits, so shape part of the dough small if you like.
Lesson 4
Kneading works the ingredients into one smooth, living dough and develops its elasticity. Farmer's test is by touch: knead until the mixture is smooth, elastic to touch, and bubbles may be seen under the surface. Work on a lightly floured board, pushing the dough away with the heels of your hands, folding it back, and turning it a quarter turn each time. Some practice is required to knead quickly, she admits, but the motion once acquired will never be forgotten.
Rising is yeast at work. Cover the dough and let it rise at about 68 degrees F until it has doubled its bulk. Too long a rise gives large holes and a sour, yeasty taste as alcoholic fermentation tips into acetic fermentation. Too short a rise gives a heavy, soggy loaf. Knead or cut down the risen dough to break the big bubbles and distribute the gas evenly, then shape it: divide, knead each piece smooth with no seam underneath, and set it in a greased pan half full. Cover and rise a second time to double before baking.
Lesson 5
Quick breads skip yeast entirely. Their gas comes from baking powder: soda and cream of tartar mixed with a little flour or corn starch to keep them quiet until used. Farmer's proportion is two teaspoons of baking powder to each cup of flour when eggs are not used, and one and a half teaspoons to the cup in egg mixtures. The moment liquid touches baking powder, gas begins to escape, so mix quickly, handle little, and bake at once in a hot oven.
For baking powder biscuits, her Strawberry Short Cake base does double duty: 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, and half a teaspoon salt, with shortening cut in and milk stirred in to a soft dough. Pat or roll to about 2 centimetres thick, cut round, and bake hot and fast: biscuits should rise in the first five minutes and begin to brown in eight. Muffins follow the same leavening with a wetter batter, stirred only until the flour disappears, because overmixing makes tunnels. Cornbread leans on cornmeal, often with soda and sour milk, whose acid frees the soda's gas just as cream of tartar does.
Lesson 6
Good pastry is flour, fat, salt, and just enough ice cold water to hold it together, kept cold and handled little. Mrs. Beeton's household teaching and Farmer's pastry chapters agree on the discipline: cold ingredients, a cool board, and a light touch, because warm fat melts into the flour and gives a tough, greasy crust instead of separate, flaky layers. Cut the fat into the flour with fingertips or two knives until the pieces are small, sprinkle cold water in a tablespoon at a time, and gather the dough only until it just holds.
Rest the dough, wrapped and chilled, so the flour relaxes. Roll on a lightly floured board from the centre outwards, lifting and turning the dough so it does not stick, and roll to an even circle a few centimetres wider than your pie plate. Fold it loosely, lift it into the plate without stretching, because stretched pastry shrinks back in the oven, trim the edge, flute it with your fingers, and fill. Bake pies in a hot oven at first so the crust sets before the filling can soak it.
Lesson 8
Finish by planning one meal around your oven, the way Beeton planned a household day: work backwards from the table. Start the Water Bread dough first, because it needs two risings, and let it rise while you do everything else. Mix the biscuit or cornbread dough last among the breads, since quick breads must bake the moment they are mixed. Make the pastry while the loaf dough rests, chill it, and roll and fill the pie so it is ready for the oven.
Use the oven in waves. The loaf goes in first and should keep rising for the first fifteen minutes of baking, brown for the next twenty, and finish in reduced heat for the last fifteen, Farmer's own schedule. Biscuits take the hottest, shortest blast. The pie follows its filling, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 cake bakes steadily in moderate heat once the bread is out. Cool bread on a wire rack at once, uncovered for a crisp crust or under a towel for a soft one, and store it in a clean, scalded tin box.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
You can measure level, wake up yeast, knead dough smooth and elastic, and time an oven so bread, biscuits, pie, and cake all reach the table warm. Keep Farmer's proportions in a notebook, bake often enough that your hands learn the feel of dough, and remember her promise: with correct measures and a little practice, good results stop being luck and start being habit.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
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