Vienna bread is a type of bread

Bread

Bread is a staple food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and often additional ingredients. Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed , fried , or baked on an unoiled frying pan . It may be leavened or unleavened...

 that is produced from a process developed in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

, in the 19th century.

The Vienna process in part used high milling of Hungarian grain, cereal press-yeast for leavening, and care and thought in the production process.

History

In the 19th century, for the first time, bread was made only from beer yeast and new dough (no old dough). The first noted or applauded example of this was the sweet-fermented  Imperial "Kaiser-Semmel" roll of the Vienna bakery at the Paris Exposition of 1867. These sweet-fermented rolls lacked the acid sourness typical of lactobacillus, and were said to be popular and in high demand.

Prior to this time, bakers had been using old-dough leavens, and they discovered that accelerating the latter refreshments' rest intervals promoted yeast growth in a race against time and what would later be learned were overwhelming lactobacillus numbers. At some point bakers began to add brewer's or beer yeast or barm to the latter refreshments, and liked the results. However, beer brewers slowly switched from top-fermenting to bottom-fermenting yeast (both S. cerevisiae

Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a species of yeast. It is perhaps the most useful yeast, having been instrumental to baking and brewing since ancient times. It is believed that it was originally isolated from the skin of grapes...

), creating a shortage of yeast for making sweet-fermented breads, so 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, this prize was awarded in 1850 to Adolph Ignaz Mautner (see biography). In 1867 the Paris Exposition was said to recognize the Vienna Bakery as, "First in the world."
Vienna yeast was propagated utilizing a mash

Mashing

In brewing and distilling, mashing is the process of combining a mix of milled grain , known as the "grain bill", and water, known as "liquor", and heating this mixture...

 of malted corn, barley, and rye. After pitching a small amount of yeast into the cooled wort

Wort

Wort may refer to:* Wort, the liquid created by the mashing of malted barley to use in brewing beer* Worting, Hampshire, a large district and suburb of the town of Basingstoke, in Hampshire, England....

, and introducing some air, the propagated yeast floated to the surface. The krausen

Krausen

Kräusen, also spelled "kraeusen" or "krausen", pronounced "KROY-zen", is a beer-brewing term that has two definitions in that context.1. A method to carbonate beer in which wort is added to the fermented/finished beer to carbonate.2...

 was collected with some care by skimming, and it may have been washed lightly with distilled water. It was then drained and compressed with the aid of a hydraulic press.

Press-yeast was one forerunner to our modern, commercial Baker's yeast

Baker's yeast

Baker's yeast is the common name for the strains of yeast commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products, where it converts the fermentable sugars present in the dough into carbon dioxide and ethanol...

.

Other remarkable aspects of the report included procedures for high milling of grains (see Vienna grits), cracking them incrementally instead of mashing them with one pass.

The Vienna bakery of the exposition year made three kinds of bread: the sweet-fermented Imperial rolls; wheat and rye as well as rye-only 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 claimed to include: Tea cakes 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, made with milk and sugar.

Steam baking

The Vienna bread-production process innovations are often popularly credited for baking with steam leading to different crust characteristics, however Horsford, in his 1875 Report on Vienna Bread, wrote:
The dough is placed into the oven

Oven

An oven is a thermally insulated chamber used for the heating, baking or drying of a substance. It is most commonly used for cooking. Kilns, and furnaces are special-purpose ovens...

 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, the crumb, 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 gone (sometimes today, withdrawn), 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

Baguette

A baguette is "a long thin loaf of French bread" that is commonly made from basic lean dough...

s.

See also

• (Kaiser)semmel
  Kaiser roll
  The Kaiser roll, also called a Vienna roll or a hard roll , is a kind of bread roll, invented in Vienna, and thought to have been named to honor Emperor Franz Joseph...
  
  
• Proofing (baking technique)
  Proofing (baking technique)
  Proofing , as the term is used by professional bakers, is the final dough-rise step before baking, and refers to a specific rest period within the more generalized process known as fermentation...
  
  
• Austrian cuisine