Sheet-iron pans, about eight inches in length, four in width, and five in depth, are the most satisfactory.  After the dough is molded, divide it into loaves which will fill such pans to the depth of two inches.  Let them rise until double their first volume, and then put them in the oven.  In baking, the loaves will rise still higher, and if about five inches high when done, will have expanded to about the right proportions.

[Illustration:  Bread Pan]

PROPER TEMPERATURE OF THE OVEN.—­The objects to be attained in the baking of bread are to break up the starch and gluten cells of the Sour so as to make them easily digestible, to destroy the yeast plant, and render permanent the cells formed by the action of the carbonic acid gas.  To accomplish well these ends, the loaf must be surrounded by a temperature ranging from 400 deg. to 600 deg.  The oven should be one in which the heat is equal in all parts, and which can be kept at a steady, uniform heat.  Old-fashioned brick ovens were superior in this respect to most modern ranges.  The fire for baking bread should be of sufficient strength to keep the oven heated for at least an hour.  If the oven has tendency to become too hot upon the bottom, a thin, open grate, broiler, or toasting rack, should be placed underneath the tins to allow a circulation of air and avoid danger of burning.  If the heat be insufficient, fermentation will not cease until the bread has become sour; the cells will be imperfectly fixed or entirely collapsed; too little of the moisture will have evaporated, and the result will be a soft, wet, and pasty or sour loaf.  If the heat be too great, the bread will be baked before it has perfectly risen, or a thick, burned crust will be produced, forming a non-conducting covering to the loaf, which will prevent the heat from permeating the interior, and thus the loaf will have an overdone exterior, but will be raw and doughy within.  If, however, the temperature of the oven be just right, the loaf will continue for a little time to enlarge, owing to the expansion of the carbonic acid gas, the conversion of the water into steam, and the vaporizing of the alcohol, which rises in a gaseous form and is driven off by the heat; a nicely browned crust will be formed over the surface, the result of the rapid evaporation of water from the surface and consequent consolidation of the dough of this portion of the loaf, and a chemical change caused by the action of the heat upon the starch by 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.