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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Feeding the sourdough starter
Ingredients:
Sourdough Starter
King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour
Room Temperature Water (filtered through Brita filter to remove chlorine)
Materials:
Glass jar
Bamboo spoon
Metal spoon
Metal measuring cups
Glass measuring cups
Recipe: From King Arthur flour website here
Stir starter well, discard all but 4 oz. Add 4 oz flour and 4 oz water. Mix until smooth. Cover. Repeat twice a day (when kept at room temp.)
Personal notes:
I don’t have a scale, so I used the volume conversions instead (½ cup of each ingredient). Flour cannot necessarily be estimated with volume accurately, unlike water, but I went with ½ cup anyway. For the first couple days, I plan on keeping the starter out at room temperature to observe what happens.
I was also worried about the water, as many of the websites on sourdough that I examined very strongly stated that water with chlorine was not acceptable. I checked the status of tap water in NYC to discover that there were indeed low levels of chlorine in the water. I had a Brita filter, so I researched whether or not the filter worked for chlorine. Brita’s website only stated that their filter removed “chlorine taste” but gave no indication about whether the chlorine itself was removed, but it was the best I could do for the time being.
Note from 2 hours after feeding: The starter has expanded and is bubbly. The starter has a very fermented, cheap wine or beer-like taste and is quite sour. I’m guessing that the Brita did in fact filter out the chlorine because the starter seems quite happy.
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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Bread making attempt 1
My sourdough starter had some fun this morning. I accidentally overfed it and found that it had expanded so much that it spilled out of the jar and all over my kitchen…
For my first attempt, I used a recipe from Don’t Waste the Crumbs.
Ingredients:
2 cups starter
5-6 cups king arthur white whole wheat flour
1 tbs salt
1 cup water (brita filtered to remove chlorine)
Mix 3 cups flour with starter and water. Add salt. Continue to add flour by the half cup, kneading by hand when it can’t be done by spoon until dough-like but still pourable. Let rise overnight.
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Personal note: My dough was in no way “pourable.” It was tough after even 3 cups of flour, and I was only able to knead in 4 cups total. I suspect that it may be a difference in the absorbency of whole wheat vs. white flour?
Next morning (2018.9.19) at 10:11am:
Transferred bread (which hadn’t risen much overnight) into a cast iron skillet, placed in a cold oven (as per instructions) and began warming to 350 degrees F. Baked for 50 minutes.
Bread has a hard shell and sounds hollow when tapped, but is very dense. Didn’t capture air well. Distinct sour taste.
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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Bread making attempt 2
This time, I’ll be trying a different recipe, from homemadefoodjunkie.com
Ingredients:
700g flour (5 ½ cups) Note: I’m using White Whole Wheat King Arthur)
20g salt (1tbs)
200g very active starter (1+ cups) ← very active meaning that it has been fed about 2 hours beforehand and floats when placed in a bowl of water
525g 80F water (2.22 cups)
Note: I don’t have a food scale, so I’ll use the volume measurements.
Pour starter into bowl with water. Mix. Add flour. Mix with spatula. Allow dough to rest for an hour. Mix in salt.
Stretch and fold dough every 30 minutes for 2.5 hours until it forms a billowy dough (<-- I’m not sure what this means, and am doubtful that mine has become billowy after 2.5 hours of periodic stretching…) I allowed to rise overnight (the recipe calls for it to rise in the fridge, but in keeping with the spirit of a non-refrigerated time, I let mine rise on the countertop).
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The next day (9.23) at 10:00am
I turned the risen dough out onto the counter. It was filled with lots of air bubbles and had dramatically increased in volume. I split the dough in half and shaped them into loaves by stretching the dough from the top and tucking it around at the bottom. I floured the dough and placed the loaves into bowls to rest for 2 hours.
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At 12:00
With an improvised dutch oven (a cast iron skillet and a stock pot as a lid), I baked the bread at 450F for 30 minutes covered and then for 10 minutes uncovered. This was definitely too long, and the crust was burned. Still, following the author-practitioner’s bread molding instructions, I removed the bread from the oven, promptly cut it in half, and pressed my object (a small ceramic jar) between the two halves. Before pressing the jar in, I noted that there was indeed much more air in this loaf of bread than my previous attempt. I removed the jar after a minute and saw that it had captured the details of the jar’s surface quite well, but noticed that the warm bread expanded quickly to fill in the impression, so I pressed the jar in again, tied it the bread together with string, and let it mold until the bread had cooled.
Some general observations:
There is something incredibly satisfying about squishing an object into the pith of a warm loaf of bread. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at it, and wondered if that would have been the case too for people testing this method out across history.
I was very surprised how well I could see the ridges on the jar represented in the bread after the first press (until the bread expanded and the impressions disappeared). I couldn’t see such great detail after the second press, though the faithfulness to the overall shape and size of the jar was much truer.
I’m curious about whether this method (i.e. pressing an object straight into the bread) was indeed what the author-practitioner meant, or if he meant to scoop the pith from the bread, mush it together, and then press an object into that (as I believe the students who did their annotation on this recipe did). Given my understanding of bread and my own experience with the bread expanding out and obscuring my impression, I would imagine that the second method would be better, so if I have time, I would like to test that one as well.
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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: my apartment
Subject: Observations of bread attempt 2
I have noticed that the loaf has dried out quite thoroughly and that the impression has shrunk as a result. This isn’t something I’m too worried about, as the author-practitioner suggests that the impression will shrink with the bread, but I am worried about the parts of the crust that have collapsed in on the impression a bit as the bread has dried.
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I have made another loaf of bread following the instructions from the NY Times No-Knead Bread recipe and will allow the dough to rise overnight so that I can bake it in the morning and bring in a “fresher” mold tomorrow for class. I think that this time I will test the method used by the students in Fall 2014 who wrote the annotation on 140v. I.E. I will scoop out the innards of the bread and use that to make a mold.
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It seems like the condensed bread innards have captured much more of the detail of the object. I marked the outside edges of the bread with triangular cuts to function as a makeshift register so that the pieces fit together when I mold them.
Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: Lab Room
Subject: Making the Bread Mold
Materials:
Breadmold
Linseed oil
Beeswax
Tools:
Brush
Hotplate
Pot with pouring spout that can be heated on a hotplate
I began the actual breadmolding making by brushing the interior of my mold with linseed oil. I made sure to coat the mold entirely, getting into all of the grooves and small details.
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I placed the two pieces together and determined a spot to cut a small hole in which to pour the wax. I tore the hold with my fingers. I then tightly wrapped the two halves of the mold together with masking tape, making sure first that the register cuts were lined up. It took a lot of tape to secure the two pieces together.
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At around 1:45, I began melting beeswax pellets. Because the object I had molded was quite large, it took a lot of beeswax to fill the mold. Once the wax melted (it took a long time), I poured it carefully into the small hole I had made until the cavity was filled.
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Having poured the wax and filled the mold, I labeled my breadmold and left it in the lab to dry.
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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: Lab Room
Subject: Revealing the bread mold
After class on October 8th, I removed my wax casting from the bread mold. Probably because I had scooped and then smooshed the freshly baked pith of the bread around the object I wanted to caste and there were therefore no air bubbles in the bread, and because I had oiled the inside of my mold, the bread was very easy to remove. The wax hadn’t poured into any air bubbles (because I had smooshed them all out), and the oil made separating the wax from the bread quite effortless.
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There was some extra wax that had bled out between the two pieces of my two-piece mold, but that was something I had expected: as far as I know, even very expert caste iron kettle artisans deal with slight “leaks” between the two pieces of the mold. This is simply something that has to be cleaned off afterwards. It seemed like the very tight taping I had done around the bread mold helped hold the two pieces together well enough to get relatively little spillage.
I was surprised at how well even the details of the jar lid were captured by the bread, especially considering that they were mostly clustered near the part where the two pieces came together.
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Upon inspecting the final caste, I did notice that my wax jar was somewhat warped in shape compared to its ceramic model. In particular, it was slightly taller and thinner. I suspect that the two bread pieces were stretched lengthwise during the taping, causing this slight change in shape. Though I hadn’t intended to test the claim our author practitioner makes that the shapes can be stretched and pulled by stretching and pulling the bread according to one’s desires, my bread mold inadvertently demonstrated that this is, indeed, possible.
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