which is converted into dextrine, finally assuming a brown color due to
the production of a substance known to the chemist as _assama_.

Bread is often spoiled in the baking. The dough may be made of the best
of flour and yeast, mixed and kneaded in the most perfect manner, and
may have risen to the proper degree of lightness' before going to the
oven, yet if the oven is either too hot or not hot enough, the bread
will be of an inferior quality.

Without an oven thermometer, there is no accurate means of determining
the temperature of the oven; but housekeepers resort to various means to
form a judgment about it. The baker's old-fashioned method is to throw a
handful of flour on the oven bottom. If it blackens without igniting,
the heat is deemed sufficient. Since the object for which the heat is
desired is to cook the flour, not to burn it, it might be supposed that
this would indicate too high a temperature; but the flour within the
loaf to be baked is combined with a certain amount of moisture, the
evaporation of which lowers the temperature of the bread considerably
below that of the surrounding heated atmosphere. The temperature of the
inner portion of the loaf cannot exceed 212 deg. so long as it continues
moist. Bread might be perfectly cooked at this temperature by steam, but
it would lack that most digestible portion of the loaf, the crust.

A common way of ascertaining if the heat of the oven is sufficient, is
to hold the bare arm inside it for a few seconds. If the arm cannot be
held within while thirty is counted, it is too hot to begin with. The
following test is more accurate: For rolls, the oven should be hot
enough to brown a teaspoonful of flour in _one_ minute, and for loaves
in _five_ minutes.

The temperature should be high enough to arrest the fermentation, which
it will do at a point considerably below the boiling point of water, and
at the same time to form a shell or crust, which will so support the
dough as to prevent it from sinking or collapsing when the evolution of
carbonic acid gas shall cease; but it should not be hot enough to brown
the crust within ten or fifteen minutes. The heat should increase for
the first fifteen minutes, remain steady for the next fifteen minutes,
and may then gradually decrease during the remainder of the baking. If
by any mischance the oven be so hot as to brown the crust too soon,
cover the loaf with a clean paper for a few minutes. Be careful that no
draugh