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Name: Katie Bergen
Date and Time:
Location: Apartment
Subject: Baking preparation
I spent some time researching historical bread recipes, but many recipes I found added complications that I didn’t agree were necessary (adding fats or egg to the dough, adding sugar). All that’s necessary to make bread is flour, yeast, water, and salt, and I decided that a simple recipe should work. If the bread had to have special ingredients, I have to imagine that it would have been noted somehow in the manuscript, perhaps as a specific type of bread. I had made sure to feed the starter daily for four days before I baked so the yeast would be active. I measured out half a cup of starter, an equal amount of water, and two cups of flour to start, and let it rest for half an hour before placing it in the fridge overnight to prove. In the morning, I knocked the dough down as much as possible, but it was very wet indeed. I put it back in the fridge during the day, and took it out for three hours before baking in the evening. My oven at home is small and leaky, and I was disappointed in the color and rise of the loaf. I fed the starter again and decided to give it another try over the weekend.
Name: Katie Bergen
Date and Time:
Location: Apartment
Subject: Baking
I decided to bake two loaves in the hopes that at least one would turn out well. At this point, I was still thinking about these loaves as a baker, and I wanted to be proud to “serve” them. I upped my ratio of flour to water, and added less starter, in order to have a drier dough that would hold together better. I also kneaded both loaves for about 15 minutes each so that their resting time could be cut down. I baked one loaf on a cookie sheet and another on a cast iron pan, determined to get the color “right”. The cookie sheet loaf behaved similarly to the initial loaf, spreading and splitting. The grill pan loaf was a better shape, but in order to attempt to get it to color, I left it to bake for a very long time. This was a critical error, because breaking open the hot loaf to attempt to make an impression revealed a very dense and springy crumb with large air holes near the crust. I was unable to make a satisfactory impression with the hairpin I’d intended to use, so I left a key in the loaf overnight in the hopes that an impression would form.
Name: Katie and James!
Date and Time:
Location: 260 Chandler
Subject: Beeswax and sulfur pouring lab
Began melting beeswax at 1.15pm, melted sufficiently by 1.25, poured into bread mold of key (Katie) and left to set. Didn’t paint with linseed so that wax would “stick” better to bread crumb (a very shallow impression). James helped balance mold to ensure wax would go where it was meant to. Took about 10 minutes to dry, 20 to cool completely.
Katie also painted a large bean-shaped air bubble in her bread mold with linseed to see whether wax would be able to take the shape of the air hole. A large amount of wax was poured in, indicating that the hole branched and connected through the crumb of the bread. A small drainage hole was left in the visible surface of the wax, showing where it had escaped into the bread. A small leak was sprung on the bottom crust of the bread, but the majority of the wax was kept inside. The oiled hole was much easier to break free from the bread mold - the bread had been cooked quite a lot, which meant the crumb was heartier and the crust was more difficult to break than it otherwise might have been. The unoiled mold clung to the key shape but the oiled mold held a more detailed impressions.
Looking at my colleagues’ projects, I realized that those who had baked their bread for a shorter time were having much more success with their molds. This was an incredibly useful exercise for me because it encouraged me to look at these projects not as a cook but as someone attempting to recreate a process faithfully. If I had it to do over again, I would be better equipped to decouple my modern expectations for tasty bread from an experiment whose goals are vastly different to my own.
Caption: Feeding starter
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Caption: Active starter ready to use
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Caption: Kneaded dough before resting
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Caption: Rested dough
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Caption: Impression: first attempt
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Caption: Impression: key
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Caption: Pouring beeswax into key mold
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Caption: Steadying bread mold as beeswax cools
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Caption: Bread molds drying in place
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