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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making dough for loaf #1
Materials
1 ½ cups of Gold Medal whole grain flour
3 cups of Gold Medal white flour
2 ½ cups of tap water
1 tablespoon of salt
¼ cup active sourdough starter
I mixed the ingredients together in a bowl and set the bowl aside, covered in plastic wrap, for 30 minutes. After the 30-minute period, I kneaded the dough for ten to fifteen minutes – in the bowl, because I couldn’t reach a countertop from a seated position -- and left the mixture on the counter overnight to ferment.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Kneading dough and preparing it to prove (loaf #1)
I added the salt to my dough, kneaded it again for about ten minutes, and left it overnight to prove in a greased bowl, covered with a towel.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Baking loaf #1
I shaped my dough. I slit the top of the ball of dough with a knife. I pre-heated my oven to 500 degrees. I put the dough in a greased pan in the oven. I also put a pot with ice cubes on the bottom shelf of the oven for moisture, since I do not have a Dutch oven. I baked the loaf for 25 minutes.
After 25 minutes, I took my loaf out of the oven and cooled it on the countertop. The loaf was poorly shaped and coming apart slightly at the seams. This only became apparent once I went to cut the loaf. The crust of the loaf was very tough and difficult to cut through. The loaf was also deeply browned. I decided to try all white flour for my next loaf.
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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making a leaven for loaf #2
Materials
¼ cup of water
3 tablespoons active sourdough starter
½ cup of Gold Medal white flour
I decided to try a different method to make my second loaf. I started to create a leaven by combining water, 3 tablespoons of my starter, and active sourdough starter in a bowl. I left this out on the counter overnight to ferment.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making loaf #2
Materials
Leaven
3 ½ cups Gold Medal white flour
2 1/2 cups tap water
1 tablespoon salt
I made my dough by combining 3 ½ cups of white flour, 2 cups of tap water, and my leaven. I put a tablespoon of salt in ¼ cup of water and stirred it occasionally to dissolve it. I continued to mix my dough. After my dough was fully mixed together and a little bit “shaggy,”, I added the salt water. This made the dough very wet. I left the dough to prove in a bowl covered with a cloth towel on my countertop for thirty minutes.
After 30 minutes, I came back to fold the dough. I folded it over on itself by grabbing one end and pulling it inward towards the middle. I went around the bowl in a clockwise motion and did this eight times until all of the dough had been folded in on itself. Then I re-covered the bowl and left it to prove for another thirty minutes. I repeated this process six times over the course of two and a half hours.
Next I rolled the dough out onto a floured surface. I attempted to knead the dough, but found once again I could not reach the countertop well enough from a seated position. After pausing to clean the countertop, I kneaded the dough in the bowl for ten to fifteen minutes, using primarily my knuckles and the heels of my hands to work the dough. Then I transferred the dough to another greased bowl and left it to prove for five hours.
At the end of this three hour period, I pre-heated my oven to 500 degrees. I let the oven sit at 500 degrees for about 20 minutes before putting in my bread. This time, instead of using a pan, I put the dough on a baking sheet. I wanted to avoid shaping the bread in the hopes that that would help me avoid a messy seam once the bread was baked.
I put the bread in the oven. I also placed a pot full of water in the oven on the shelf below the bread for moisture. I baked the bread at 500 degrees for 25 minutes. After 20 minutes, I opened the oven briefly to release some of the steam. This was intended to emulate taking the lid off of a Dutch oven. After 25 minutes, I removed the loaf from the oven.
While the loaf was still hot, I cut into it and pressed a small object into either side of the loaf as per the instructions in BnF Ms 640 f. 140v, “Molding and Shrinking in a Large Shape”:
Mold it with the pith of bread just out of the oven, or like that aforementioned [in the entry “To Cast in Sulfur”] The bread straight from the oven is best.”
The bread was too hot to touch so I used oven mitts while pressing the objects into the bread. I noticed that the structure of this bread appeared to be airier and less tight. I suspect that this is not as conducive to molding as a less airy, tighter structure. This could have been because the kneading involved in making this loaf of bread was less intense than the kneading involved in making the previous loaf. I will make note of this for my next attempt.
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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making the leaven for loaf #3
Materials:
2 tablespoons of active sourdough starter
½ cup of Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour
1/3 cup of water
I tested that my sourdough starter was active by dropping some of it in a glass of water to see if it floated. This was not mentioned in the recipe, but it was something I had read on various sourdough-themed recipe blogs throughout the week and I have found it to be a useful trick. My starter was not active enough for baking, so I fed it 3 heaping teaspoons of flour and ¼ cup of warm water, stirred the flour and water into the starter, and let the starter stand in the warmest spot I could find in my kitchen for an hour. After about an hour, the starter passed the floating test and I was ready to make my leaven. I mixed all my materials together in a bowl, ensuring that some of the “meale” (flour) was covering the other ingredients.
The recipe makes reference to water, but does not actually say to mix the water into the leaven. I figured that the author was assuming that the reader would know to add the water to the flour and the starter, particularly since the author makes explicit reference to the temperature of the water that should be used. Although it seems fairly obvious, I imagine that “add the water to your dough” could be considered tacit knowledge – even though it is mentioned in this recipe, it is never actually stated.
I covered my leaven mixture with a towel to keep insects out of it overnight. The recipe does not explicitly say to do this but it does instruct the reader to cover the dough at almost every other stage, so I figured that the author probably intended for the leaven to be covered here as well. I also wanted to ensure my leaven was covered for sanitary purposes.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making dough for loaf #3
Materials:
4 cups of all-purpose flour
2 cups of water
Bowl of leaven from previous steps
I took the bowl of my leaven that had been sitting out overnight and for part of the day and mixed it together with four cups of all-purpose flour and two cups of water. I took note of the fact that unlike most sourdough recipes I had previously encountered, John Evelyn’s recipe did not make use of salt. It also did not include time for the autolyse process, which allows the dough to rest for half an hour after first being mixed from the flour, leaven, and water. This is supposed to make the dough more elastic and easier to work with. Based on my previous experience with my first two loaves, I found that the dough was indeed harder to work with without an autolyse. I kneaded the dough for fifteen to twenty minutes, until I thought it was stiff.
In this instance, as in others, I had a great deal of difficulty finding an appropriate workspace and kneading the dough correctly because I do not think that Evelyn (or any other sourdough recipe authors) ever intended for their dough to be kneaded from a seated position in a wheelchair. The kitchen counters in my apartment are too high for effective kneading from a seated position. I tried standing to knead my dough but could only stand for very brief periods at a time while leaning against the counter. I was concerned that this would impact the gluten structure of my dough.
After kneading my dough, I placed it in a large bowl, since I did not have access to a trough. I laid it so that the bottom of the dough was face up as per Evelyn’s instructions, and punched the dough three times all the way to the bottom of the bowl. Then I covered it with a clean towel, since I didn’t have any blankets to cover it with, and left it to prove.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Shaping and baking loaf #3
I left the dough to prove for a long time (nearly 24 hours) because the instructions said to do it “longer in winter than in summer” and I wanted to see what would happen if I left the bread there for an extended period of time. At this point, I thought the dough was nicely risen. I tried to shape it on the kitchen counter but I had difficulty shaping it without using any flour. Eventually I set it on a baking tray (since my approximation of a “trough,” a large mixing bowl, would not have been safe to bake in.) I pre-heated the oven and baked the bread at 450 degrees for thirty-five minutes. Once out of the oven, I saw that the bread did not rise and therefore would not have been suitable for mold-making. However, it had good coloring and tasted better than any of my other previous loaves.
Here is a picture of loaf #3:
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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Experimental protocol and making the leaven for loaf #4
Having practiced on loaves #1-3, I set out to follow my experimental protocol for loaf #4. The protocol is as follows:
Experimental Protocol:
The two recipes that I thought were the most relevant for this project were “To cast in sulfur” (folio 140v) and “Molding and shrinking a large shape” (folio 140v). The text of “To cast in sulfur” reads as follows: “To cast neatly in sulfur, arrange the pith of bread under the brazier, as you know. Mold whatever you want into it & let it dry & you will have very neat work.” I interpreted this as an instruction as to how to actually create an imitation object out of sulfur by using the bread mold. Thus, it will be most relevant when we are actually in the lab pouring sulfur but is not particularly helpful in the bread-making and mold-making stages of the process.
For that, I turned to the author-practitioner’s following entry, “Molding and shrinking a large shape.” In this entry, the author-practitioner advises his reader to “Mold it with the pith of bread just out of the oven” and warns that the mold will shrink as it dries. He also writes that “The bread straight from the oven is best.” This I took to mean that I should cut the bread as soon as I could after it came out of the oven without letting it cool and press the object being molded into the “pith” (inside) of the bread. I also interpreted this to mean that if I removed the object from the pith to allow it to dry the mold itself would shrink, so I decided to leave the objects in the pith of my bread as it dried. I hoped that this would keep the mold from shrinking and allow for the creation of a more accurate mold once the sulfur was poured.
To make the bread I would use, I followed John Evelyn’s recipe for “House-Hold Bread,” as transcribed by Reut Ullman.
Step-by-step protocol process:
Step 1: At about 10 o’clock at night, take your flour (this recipe calls for a bushel of flour to start with) and put leaven (sourdough starter) into it, and cover it with some more flour. Add water. Adjust the heat of the water you use according to the temperature outside.
Step 2: Early the next morning, add the rest of the flour you will use to your leaven (which has been fermenting overnight). Mix the flour and leaven together to create your dough. Knead it for a very long time until it is pretty stiff.
Step 3: When the bread is well kneaded, turn it into a trough and lay the bottom side of the dough face up. Thrust your fist into the middle of the dough until you hit the bottom of the trough. Do this in two or three places. Then cover your trough well with meal sacks or clean blankets to prove.
Step 4: Let your bread prove for a while (longer in winter than in summer), until you find that the holes in the dough are closed or swelled up. At this point your dough will be perfectly risen. At this point, heat your oven and cut the mass of dough into pieces. These pieces will be very large, possibly 16 pounds each, or more. Mold and form your dough into loaves. Put these loaves on a clean layered cloth so that they do not touch one another in the oven.
Step 5: Check that your oven is hot by raking the end of a stick against the roof or hearth of your oven. This should make your oven spark, which is how you will know it is hot enough. Clean your oven with a wet, wrung mop and close it up a while to allay the heat and dust, which could cause scorching. When the inside of the oven is a less fiery color, put your loves in as quickly as you can, starting with the biggest towards the upper end and filling the middle of the oven last. Be careful that the heater of your oven burns wood in every part of the oven, which will require him to kindle wood at different parts of the oven while the bread bakes. He must also continually scrape away the ash from the oven.
Step 6: Once the bread is in the oven, stop up the mouth of the oven with the oven door. Put cloths around the edges to keep in the heat. Since this recipe makes a great deal of bread, you should bake it for four hours. If you take out your loaf, scrape your knuckles across the top to see if it is done. It is done if the top is hard. If the top is hard, it is ready to come out and you can leave it to cool. If the top is not hard, you will know that the bread is not yet done. You will soon know from experience how long you should bake the loaves. If you bake the loaves for too long, it will turn red on the inside and burn.
Step 7: When you take your bread out of the oven, cut it while it is still hot. Press an object into the pith of your bread to make your mold. Let the bread dry to create the mold. As it dries, the mold will shrink.
Step 8: Arrange your bread mold under a brazier and pour sulfur into it to make whatever it is that you want to make.
Materials for leaven for loaf #4:
½ cup of all-purpose flour
1/3 cup of water
¼ cup of active sourdough starter
Since my last loaf did not rise, I decided to use more active starter in this loaf. I ensured that the starter was active by testing to see if it floated in a mug of water. Once I had determined it was active, I put ¼ cup of starter and 1/3 cup of warm water in a bowl and added all-purpose flour, ensuring that the “meale” covered the other ingredients, and mixed them together. I took note of the fact that the recipe does not actually say to mix them, but I knew that that was what I should do because I had made sourdough a number of times already. I covered the mixture with a cloth for sanitary reasons, even though the recipe does not exactly say to cover the leaven (it does, however, instruct you to cover the dough at most other stages).
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Mixing the dough for loaf #4
Materials
5 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
2 ½ cups of warm water
Leaven
The recipe says to mix the dough “the next morning early” after making the leaven. I mixed dough for loaf #4 by combining 5 ½ cups of all-purpose flour, 2 ½ cups of warm water, and the leaven I had prepared the night before. The recipe calls for a bushel of flour (which it refers to as “wheate” or “meale.” However, I thought that making this much bread would be unreasonable, since a bushel is nearly 149 cups of flour. After researching some sourdough recipes to see the quantity of water and flour they used, I settled on 5 ½ cups of flour and 2 ½ cups of warm water. I considered using wheat flour instead of white flour but decided against it, since most of the recipes I have seen call for all-purpose flour and I did not think that the author had the same understanding of the word “wheat” as we do today.
After mixing the dough, I kneaded it fifteen minutes. That was the standard amount of time I had seen on many sourdough recipes online, and I wasn’t sure if Evelyn’s definition of “pretty stiff” and my definition would align. I did not include an autolyse phase, since Evelyn does not say to include one in his recipe. This made the dough difficult to handle. Complicating matters was the fact that I had difficulty standing upright to knead my dough for more than a few seconds at a time. After 15 minutes, I put my dough in the largest mixing bowl I could find (since I did not have a trough) and punched it 3 times as per Evelyn’s instructions.
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I then covered it with a towel (instead of meal sacks and blankets, since I did not have any on hand).
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Shaping and baking loaves #4 and #5
I let the dough prove for six hours. Then I removed it from the mixing bowl that had been serving as my “trough” and attempted to shape it. I noted that Evelyn did not say to use any flour while attempting to shape the loaves, but I was not having much success shaping the loaves without flour. The recipe says to clean your oven, which I did, for good measure. The recipe also says to put your loaves on a clean layered cloth to keep them from touching in the oven. I could not find an oven-safe cloth, so I skipped this step. Since Evelyn says that the purpose of the cloth is to keep the loaves from touching, and my oven is only big enough to bake one loaf at a time anyway, I figured that there was no reason that the clean layered cloth would be needed, strictly speaking. I shaped my dough into two loaves. I baked the first loaf for 35 minutes at 450 degrees (pictured below going into the oven).
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I did not score the loaves on top with a serrated knife before they went into the oven, even though most sourdough recipes say to do that, because Evelyn’s recipe does not say to do that. After 35 minutes in the oven at 450 degrees, two parts on the top of the loaf were scorched. Loaf #4 is pictured below.
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I cut into loaf #4 immediately after it came out of the oven and pressed two objects – a measuring spoon and a staple remover – into the pith of either side of the sliced bread.
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I set loaf #4 on a rack to cool.
I decided to try a shorter cooking time for the next loaf. I baked it for 450 degrees for 30 minutes. This loaf was even more scorched than the previous loaf and the top of the loaf cracked and fell apart when I tried to cut it. I decided that it would not produce viable molds and did not put anything into it. Loaf #5 is pictured below.
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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Making the leaven for loaf #6
Materials
½ cup all-purpose flour
⅓ cup warm water
¼ cup active sourdough starter
I followed my protocol to make the leaven for my next loaf (or loaves) by combining ¼ cup active sourdough starter, ½ cup of all-purpose flour, and 1/3 cup of warm water. I covered the leaven with cloth for sanitary reasons and left it out overnight.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Mixing and kneading the dough for loaf #6
Early in the morning (as per the instructions in Evelyn’s recipe), I mixed together 5 ½ cups of flour, the leaven that had been fermenting overnight, and 3 cups of warm water (since I found that I needed more water after making my last 2 loaves). I kneaded my dough on a floured surface for 40 minutes. I had noticed that my last loaf seemed as though it had been under-kneaded, and Evelyn’s recipe only calls for one period of kneading (as opposed to the two kneading periods that I have seen in many modern sourdough recipes). Therefore, I decided to lengthen my kneading period considerably. I still have doubts that I was able to knead the dough properly from my seated position, but the dough felt somewhat stiffer than it did for previous loaves, which Evelyn’s recipe leads me to believe is how it should feel.
Next, I placed the dough in the mixing bowl that was my substitute for a trough, making sure that the bottom part was facing up, and punched it 3 times with my fist. The dough is pictured below.
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I covered the dough with a clean cloth since I did not have any meal sacks or blankets to use as a covering.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Shaping and baking loaves #6, #7, and #8
I shaped Loaf #6 according to the recipe’s instructions. I had difficulty shaping it without flour. I baked it for 20 minutes at 450 degrees to try and avoid the scorching that had been happening with my previous loaves. It still came out somewhat scorched at the top, but less so than the other loaves. While it was still hot, I cut it and put a plastic coffee pod holder and a wine stopper in its pith to make molds. Then I left it to cool. It seemed to be underbaked due to its short time in the oven. Loaf #6 is pictured below.
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I shaped Loaf #7 using flour. After having struggled with shaping 6 loaves without flour, I thought that perhaps using flour to shape the bread was tacit knowledge in much the same way that using flour on surfaces while kneading the bread is tacit knowledge. I also realized – finally – that these loaves were too large for my oven and as they grew, they pressed against the top of my oven, causing them to scorch. To rectify this problem, I removed the top rack from my oven and set Loaf #7 on the bottom rack. Then I baked the loaf at 45 degrees for 35 minutes.
When Loaf #7 came out of the oven, the top was slightly scorched at the tip but it looked much better than my other loaves. I thought that the inside of the bread looked better for molding – it appeared to be denser and more worked, probably as a result of my extended kneading time for this batch of dough. While Loaf #7 was still hot, I cut it and pressed a plastic lid into one side of its pith and a wine stopper into the other side of its pith. I then left it to cool.
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Next, I shaped Loaf #8 using flour. I baked it at 450 degrees for half an hour with the top rack removed from the oven. It did not scorch. When I removed it from the oven I cut it immediately and pressed an elephant figurine and a flashlight portion of a headlamp into either side of its pith.
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Although Loaf #8 is probably the best loaf I have made so far, the inside of the pith collapsed slightly when I pressed the objects inside for molding, especially the small elephant figurine. This makes me think that Loaf #8 will not be a good loaf for molding. I think I am going to turn in Loaf #7 for my attempt at bread molding in class.
Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: Making and Knowing Lab
Subject: Observation on Bread Molding Results
My bread molds did not turn out very well. I used Loaf #7 for molding purposes. The sulfur mold -- of the impression of the wine stopper -- was very brittle and a lot of the sulfur seeped into the bread rather than forming the molded object. When I tried to open the bread to access the mold, it broke into fragments. I made the mold with linseed oil and sulfur.
The second half of the bread mold turned out better. The shape of the plastic lid that was impressed on the bread did turn out in the mold. I made this mold from beeswax without linseed oil. The bread did not reflect the negative space of the lid, but captured the shape of the lid in its broad contours.
The inside of the bread was rather tough when I broke it open. Perhaps a doughier interior is better for molding and allowing the mold to come out with more detail. I suspect that my bread was too deep to allow the sulfur to fill it well, which would have made the sulfur mold less brittle and less liable to break into fragments. If I were to repeat this experiment I would try to mold both sides of the wine stopper and I would use beeswax, not sulfur, to make my wine stopper mold.
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Name: Amanda Faulkner
Date and Time:
Location: My apartment
Subject: Reflections on Mold-Making Process
On Monday, October 1st, 2018, at approximately 1pm, I used Loaf #7 to make my molds. I coated the first half of the loaf (with the impression of the wine stopper in it) with linseed oil using a paintbrush.
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Then melted sulfur was poured into the mold. The mold was very deep, so it was not filled up all the way. The mold with sulfur was set aside to harden.
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Next, I poured melted beeswax into the other half of my bread mold (the half with impression of a mold in it). No linseed oil was used for this part of the bread.
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On Tuesday, October 2nd, at approximately 1pm, I returned to the Making & Knowing Lab to see if my molds had dried properly. Both molds were dried. The sulfur mold was very brittle and broke apart when I attempted to remove it from the bread. It was not very detailed since there had not been enough sulfur to fill the mold initially. Ultimately, the wine stopper mold did not resemble the object it was modeled after. The piece of bread that had beeswax poured into it had wax seep through different parts of the bread that were not part of the mold. This may have been because the bread had too many air pockets to serve as good molding bread.
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The mold of the plastic lid resembled its original in shape, but was unable to imitate the negative space of the plastic lid (thus, where the lid was mostly empty space, the mold was solid). Much of the bread stuck to the beeswax plastic lid mold. When I attempted to get more bread off of the molded lid, the mold was damaged by efforts, so I ultimately decided to leave some bread remnants on the molded lid rather than breaking the object as I tried to clean it.
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I had anticipated having difficulty removing the molded object from the bread, but I had not anticipated having difficulty removing the bread from the molded object. This unforeseen hurdle made me think for the umpteenth time about learning by doing – how I could never have known to anticipate many of the significant hurdles to making an effective mold without first completing the process and thereby discovering what the pitfalls of the process are.
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