Table of Contents

Bread Making

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.04

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Starter

As I did not have a starter, I first decided to follow a modern recipe for making a sourdough starter (https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-starter-recipe). The recipe called for whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, water, and time (about a week). The starter showed signs of activity quite quickly, after only a day or so, but failed to rise for more than a week. After moving it to a warmer location, it began to show signs of vigorous activity, and doubled its height in the course of about 6 hours.

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.12, 07:42 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Attempt 1

My starter had been stubbornly refusing to rise, but, as I needed to begin baking to gain experience with the process before we began molding, I decided to make an attempt at baking a loaf anyway. I used the following modern recipe, as it was intended for beginners: https://www.theclevercarrot.com/2014/01/sourdough-bread-a-beginners-guide/

Materials Used:

150g Sourdough Starter (weakly active, and not yet showing signs of rise, and thus not the active, bubbly starter that the recipe calls for!)

500g King Arthur Organic Bread Flour

25g Filippo Berio Olive Oil

250g Warm tap water (not filtered as the recipe preferred)

10g Kosher salt (I did not have sea salt on hand)

I combined the ingredients as the recipe directs, creating a shaggy ball of dough. I then rested the dough in a glass bowl covered by plastic wrap for 30 minutes to autolyse.

After the 30 minutes had elapsed, I folded the dough as the recipe suggests, pulling about half of the dough from each side directly upward and then folding it back over the remaining half that was still lying flat. The dough was quite dense, and in order to do this I needed to hold down on the bottom half with one hand while pulling with the other. After folding, I replaced the plastic wrap.

After a little over an hour, I folded the dough in the same manner one more time. At this point, I replaced the plastic wrap and left the dough to rise. (This was at about 10 AM)

After waiting for nearly 12 hours, my dough had yet to show any signs of rise, though it certainly smelled sour. As there was no rise and it was quite late, I decided not to bake the dough but to try again tomorrow, as my starter had begun to show vigorous activity after having been moved to a warmer location.

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.5.13, 6:34 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Attempt 2

For my second attempt, now with a much more vigorous starter, I decided to follow the same recipe as I had used for the previous attempt. (https://www.theclevercarrot.com/2014/01/sourdough-bread-a-beginners-guide/)

Materials Used:

150g Sourdough Starter (Very active, doubling in height within ~6 hours)

500g King Arthur Organic Bread Flour

25g Filippo Berio Olive Oil

250g Warm tap water (not filtered as the recipe preferred)

10g Kosher salt (I did not have sea salt on hand)

I started early so that I would have enough time to make a second attempt if things went poorly. I followed the instructions given in the recipe when combining ingredients, but had been imprecise in my measurements and realized that I had added 30g less starter than had been called for after having already formed the mixture into a shaggy dough.

 I was unsure whether working the additional starter into the dough would cause problems, but decided to add it anyway as I was a bit worried about the bread failing to rise and anxious to avoid another failure of that sort. I then added the additional starter and mixed it together with the dough for about 45 seconds, after which the dough still seemed fairly shaggy. I then covered the glass bowl in which the dough had been made and rested it for 30 minutes to autolyse.

After 30 minutes, I then folded the dough in the manner described under the entry regarding my first attempt, and then re-covered the bowl with the plastic wrap. This dough was also dense and required two hands to properly fold, which made me wonder whether I might have been doing something wrong given how easily the author of the recipe appeared to be manipulating the dough in the sample video provided. (The video in question may not even be depicting this particular recipe, however, which makes things even more unclear!) I decided not to fold the dough a second time, and instead simply left the bowl covered while waiting for the dough to rise.

The dough had risen substantially by about 2 pm, and so I decided to test its readiness using a technique found online. I wet my finger slightly before pressing gently about half an inch into the dough to see whether it would bounce back. If it bounced back immediately, this was said to be a sign that it was not ready, while if it did not bounce back at all, this was said to be a sign that the bread had been left to rise too long. It did not bounce back much, so I was concerned that I may have left things too long. In order to avoid leaving things any longer, I then folded the dough as the recipe suggests before placing it over parchment paper in an enameled dutch oven with a lid to rise again for 30 more minutes. I heated my oven to 450 F while waiting.

I uncovered the dutch oven after 30 minutes, though the bread didn’t seem to have risen much. When the dough is “puffy and no longer dense” is the only indication given by the recipe as to when the dough is ready; I wasn’t sure what this would look like, and decided just to bake the bread as is and to consider making adjustments in future attempts if the results were unsatisfactory. I then made a straight 3-4” incision with a paring knife on the top of the bread, before re-covering the pot and placing it in the oven. I immediately reduced the set temperature to 400 F as instructed.

After 20 minutes, I uncovered the pot before closing the oven again; the bread seemed to have begun to rise a bit, and small bubbles had formed on the exterior.

After 40 more minutes, the bread had a pale golden-brown crust, but I decided to use a digital thermometer to check the temperature before allowing it to cool. It measured ~193 F, which was more than 10 degrees below the target range of 205-210, so I returned it to the oven for ~9 more minutes; I was also hoping the crust would develop more color, as it seemed a bit pale.

After 9 minutes I removed it from the oven again and re-inserted the thermometer, which this time gave readings within and slightly above the target range. I decided to remove it from the oven, and then set it down on my stove top to cool. The vent that I had cut seemed to have shifted almost entirely to the front, though the crust had a fair amount of color and the bread smelled quite good.

I rested the bread for 2 hours, but it still felt warm to the touch and a thermometer reading showed that it remained over 100 F, so I decided to let it rest a bit longer lest it be gummy (though gumminess may be exactly what we want when it comes time to mold!).

After 30 minutes, I took another reading; this time it registered at 94 F, and, since I was getting a bit impatient to try some, I decided that the bread had cooled enough to cut. The crust was crisp, and the bread was dense but not gummy. I tried a few pieces, and thought it was quite good, though I would probably prefer a lighter consistency and a bit more sourness from sourdough, as it was extremely mild. The density, however, may make this a good loaf to use for molding! Overall, I think this attempt was a solid success, and I hope to try my hand at a 16th or 17th century bread recipe (if I can find one that I have any chance of actually following!) shortly.

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.14, 07:00 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Attempt 3

Although the density of the loaf produced in the previous attempt is probably ideal for actual molding, I was curious to try my hand at a different no-knead sourdough recipe that seemed likely to produce a more open crumb, chiefly because it seemed to use not only different ingredients but also different techniques to achieve that result. IN other words, I wanted to better understand different ways in which sourdough might be made before attempting an older recipe (and I was also keen to learn to make bread that I would personally find more enjoyable!).

I started at about 7 am, and decided to follow Joshua Weissman’s recipe for no-knead sourdough, which is also described as a beginner recipe, but seemed to be quite different from the previous recipe: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eod5cUxAHRM)

Materials Used:

Levain:

45g active starter (had been left out overnight after having been fed around 10pm, so it was warm and active)

45g King Arthur Whole Wheat Flour (the recipe calls for stone-ground, which might actually have been more authentic, but I didn’t have any on hand; perhaps I’ll try to find stone-milled flour when trying to make a more historically accurate loaf)

45g King Arthur Organic All-Purpose Flour

90g Warm Tap Water

Dough:

As instructed, I took 45g of active starter and placed it into a clean pint glass. I then added a further 45g of whole wheat and 45g of all-purpose flour, followed by 90g of warm tap water. I mixed these together in the pint glass, but decided it would likely be too small after the levain began to rise, and so transferred it to a 2-cup measuring cup, which I then covered with plastic wrap. (I wonder whether the emphasis in precise weights in modern baking was also present in premodern baking - would it have been easy to ensure consistent weight among ingredients? Were scales readily available? The lack of detailed information in many recipes re: ingredient quantities and weights would seem to suggest that precise weights, at least, were far less important in the past) I then placed the covered levain into my oven, which was turned off but had the light turned on, making the inside noticeably warmer than my kitchen overall.

After about 5.5 hours, the levain was quite active (it had already risen almost as much several hours earlier, but I decided to wait the prescribed length of time); I then prepared the dough as instructed, though as this is a two-loaf recipe, I needed to use a larger bowl than I had previously. I also scrambled to get a Banneton or wicker proofing basket from amazon as Weissman calls for two of them (and, interestingly, Ken Albala uses one when attempting to reconstruct Medieval bread, though it’s unclear whether he felt doing so was period-accurate: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/reconstructing-medieval-bread/) delivered by the afternoon before proofing began. I am curious to try using a banneton for one loaf and a standard bowl lined with a cloth for the other (and wasn’t keen to spend more than I had to), so I only bought one. After the dough was prepared, I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and placed it in my oven next to the levain for 30 minutes to autolyse (interestingly without the starter added in advance as the previous recipe had called for), which meant that the levain was left very slightly longer than suggested.

After 30 minutes, I took both the levain and the dough out of the oven. I added 18g of Kosher Salt (I still didn’t have any sea salt on hand) before covering the dough with the levain. I used the technique Weissman demonstrates, first pressing the starter into the dough with my fingers, and then pinching the dough for ~2 minutes. I wasn’t convinced that the dough was as fully combined as I would like (i noticed some lumps when handling it), and so decided to use the “rhubaud” method to further homogenize the dough. Weissman suggests doing this for three minutes, but it was quite tiring so I stopped after 2.5 minutes since no clumps seemed to remain. The dough was notably speckled and had a bit more of a sweet whole wheat odor than the previous recipe had yielded, no doubt because of the inclusion of the whole wheat flour. It will be interesting to see how this affects the final loaf. After this, I re-covered the bowl, and placed it back in the oven to ferment for between 3-4 hours (I intend to check it after 3 to see whether it has doubled in size)

Unfortunately, I failed to note that I was supposed to fold the bread at the beginning of bulk fermentation and so was unable to do so until 3 hours in, at which point it was nearly done. I folded the dough twice, waiting fifteen minutes after each. After the second 15 minutes had elapsed, I moved the dough to a wooden cutting board and, as Weismann instructs, made a line of flour down the middle of the dough and cut it in half with a board scraper.

 After this, I pre-shaped the dough as instructed before covering each ball (or lump) with glass bowls for 15 minutes, after which I removed the bowls and allowed to sit for about ~7 minutes longer (I followed the wrong timer and had meant to leave them for 3 minutes longer - a hazard of doing too much simultaneously).

 I then shaped the dough as instructed and placed one into the Banneton which I had coated with rice flour (perhaps not something that would have been available to/used by medieval bakers, though I think rice was available in Europe at the time) to prevent sticking, and placed the other into a metal bowl lined with a rice-flour-coated kitchen towel.

I placed each inside a plastic shopping bag before tying the handles together to imitate the rubber band/plastic bag method shown in the video as I did not have a bag of the sort shown that was big enough to encompass an entire bowl. I then transferred both bowls to a refrigerator to proof.

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.15, 09:17 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Attempt 3 - Bake Day

Loaf 1:

After waking up I reviewed the video and realized that it specifically requested oven mitts rather than pot holders when loading the bread into the dutch oven, as it was going to be pre-heated along with the oven at 500 F for an hour before baking. Since I didn’t have any and didn’t fancy burning my wrists, I placed the pot in the oven and set it to 500 F before rushing off to Target to buy two oven mitts (my parents were home and in the kitchen, so don’t worry!). (I suppose the whole dutch oven method would have been foreign to medieval bread baking, but I wonder how pots were handled then - perhaps similar kinds of thick cloth/mitts were used) After getting back, the pot had been in the oven for ~1 hour, so I took one of the two loaves (the one that had been proofing in the Banneton), placed it on a floured cutting board, scored it in a kind of square shape as Weissman did, and then placed it (using my new mitts) in the hot dutch oven, before placing inside the oven itself. I kept it in the oven for 20 minutes with the lid on at 500 F. When I removed the lid 20 minutes later, the bread showed considerably more color than the dough made from the  previous recipe used in attempt 2 had. In fact, it looked nearly as brown as the previous loaf had after it was fully baked! The fragrance this time was also much more noticeable and pleasant - I think the whole wheat flour may have played a role here too, but I’m not sure. I lowered the temperature to 475 as instructed, and let the loaf bake for 25 more minutes. After taking it out, it had a lovely deep brown color, and the spiral pattern from the banneton also made the loaf quite lovely to look at. An internal temp. Reading read 212 F just after the bread was taken out. After placing the bread on a wire rack to cool, small crunching noises could be heard (the bread was clearly still baking as it was so hot, though I’m not sure exactly what the crunching was from)

Loaf 2:

Before baking the second loaf, I put the oven back to 500 F and placed the pot with the lid on inside for 15 minutes to let it get back to temperature. I followed the same method as before, though I scored the bread using a cross pattern this time; it also had an imprint from the pattern of the kitchen towel it had been proofing on, so it will be interesting to see how the finished loaf looks. I placed it into the oven with lid on at 500 F for 20 minutes.

I removed the lid after 20 minutes, but forgot to lower the temperature this time; I removed it after 20 minutes, 5 minutes fewer than the previous loaf, to compensate; the internal temperature measured ~209 F in the middle, and the crust was a deep brown, and approaching black in places, so I think it was a good decision to remove it early. Hopefully it won’t taste charred!

I cut open the first loaf after it had cooled on a wire rack for ~4 hours, when the center gave a temperature reading of 78 F; the crumb was open, and the bread was delicious — I’m kind of shocked it turned out as well as it seems to have! We ate most of the loaf with dinner and it was an excellent complement to our food. Happy to know how to make some bread that I might truly enjoy eating without too much effort going forward! (Though, of course, these very qualities that make the bread enjoyable to eat seem like to make it less useful as a mold. I wonder whether the comment that bread fresh from the oven is best for molding made by the author-practitioner is, in some sense, a hint that this is true, as bread, presumably baked for eating, would likely be quite gummy and dense if cut immediately after being baked, and thus wouldn’t require an entirely different recipe or approach to baking to get a good result if one were to use the bread as a mold. In hindsight, I regret not trying to cut one of the loaves immediately after baking, as it might have offered some insight as to what the insides would have looked like and thus might have given a clue as to whether the bread would have been more suitable for molding immediately after baking.)

Reflecting on this experience in light of some of the key themes of the course, a written recipe, even one with visual aids, was much more difficult to follow with confidence than the video that I chose to follow for this third attempt. The ability to see someone else perform all of the steps in essentially the same way that I did while using equipment that was clearly comparable to what I had at home made the process of learning considerably easier, as it was easy to see what techniques were used and to see whether the result I had ended up with was similar to the one that the video depicted. (An example might be how to score the bread; I’ve often worried about doing it incorrectly by making too deep a cut, too short a cut, too long of a cut, etc.; using the video made it fairly easy to get a sense of what to shoot for, and also gave me the idea of using a safety razor) Learning from a video isn’t quite the same as learning in a workshop, but it was certainly much easier than trying to follow a written recipe!

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.17, 09:01 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Attempt 4

As we will be molding beeswax using our bread tomorrow, I needed to make a loaf that would be suitable for molding and that would, ideally, be at least somewhat similar to an early modern bread. Although John Evelyn provides a number of different French bread recipes from the 17th century, I failed to note early enough that (almost?) all of them seem to demand multiple days of effort, usually to accommodate starting a levain the night before. As I would not have enough time to bake bread before class if I waited until tomorrow to actually bake, I decided to look elsewhere for a recipe that might be feasibly completed in just one day. After a bit of googling around (without much success, alas), I found recipes for two types of bread from Early Modern England (none from France, alas): Manchet and Maslin. In the end I decided to bake Manchet following William Rubel’s interpretation of a 16th century recipe from The Good Huswifes Handmaide in the Kitchen as it was a wheat-based recipe and seemed likely to produce a dense pith, ideal for molding, though sadly it did not call for sourdough starter (I considered simply re-doing the first recipe I had used so that I could use sourdough, but decided that it was probably more important to make some effort to reconstruct an early modern bread than to use sourdough starter as I had already made bread with starter several times at this point).

[Some of my thoughts on the closeness of this recipe to the bread the author-practitioner likely would have used: Manchet was, according to William Rubel, the “best of the white breads.” (https://williamrubel.com/2011/09/12/manchet-bread-from-huswifes-handmaide-in-the-kitchen/) In his discussion of a 16th century English Manchet recipe, Rubel also notes that “It was made in private homes, not sold by bakers.” (Ibid.) That Manchet was an exceptionally high-quality white bread made it (or any French equivalent) seem a less-likely candidate for use as a mold in a workshop. If the author-practitioner had intended the reader to use particularly high-quality bread, presumably he would have said so, though this belief rests on a number of assumptions that could very easily be wrong (such as the assumption that high-quality bread or the ingredients require to make it would have been a significant expense for the author-practitioner and/or his intended readers, when perhaps it would have been negligible). That this sort of bread was made in private homes, at least, seems to square with the author-practitioner’s note that “bread coming from the oven is better” for the purposes of making a mold that will shrink after an object is imprinted;it would certainly be much easier to get and experiment with bread fresh from the oven if one were baking it at home. Interestingly, however, Emma Le Pouésard writes in her essay Pain, Ostie, Rostie: Bread in Early Modern Europe that “The baking practices required for different grains influenced the breads one could bake. Some, such as oatbread, could be baked on the hearth at home; others, such as fine wheat bread, required the high and constant heat of a specialized oven and were chiefly baked professionally.” (https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/essays/ann_046_fa_16) That Rubel suggests that Manchet, a fine wheat bread, was baked only in private homes may indicate that Manchet was such a high quality bread that only very wealthy households baked it, and thus they did, in fact, possess specialized ovens, though this may also reflect a difference in practice between France and England. The bread, then, seems especially unlikely to have been used to make molds given its quality and the cost of the ingredients used to make it. Nonetheless Le Pouésard suggests that, despite the relative ease and cheapness of baking non-wheat breads at home, she believes that the author-practitioner most likely used wheat-based bread given, among other things, his far more frequent references to wheat than to other sorts of grain/flour. In accordance with this, I decided to use wheat flour rather than to combine wheat with rye flour as was done in making Maslin bread, which was seemingly a more common sort of bread eaten by those lower on the social ladder. Finally, although a recipe that calls for whole wheat flour may have been more historically accurate, given the lack of time to follow a recipe such as one of John Evelyn’s and the paucity of Early Modern bread recipes online, I decided to make Manchet bread according to Rubel’s interpretation, linked above, as it would be possible to finish in time for class and, if Rubel’s descriptions suggested that the bread would be particularly dense, which seemed more desirable than the open-crumb loaves made during my previous, third attempt.]

The recipe calls for a massive quantity of flour (20.5 lbs), so I decided to reduce the recipe to ~1/20th its size, using only 500 grams or slightly more than 1 pound of flour.

Materials Used:

500g King Arthur Organic All-Purpose Flour

7g Saf-instant Active Dried Yeast dissolved in ~23 grams of lukewarm water (I chose not to worry about chlorination as my tap water had worked fine in my previous loaves)

200g lukewarm water

First, I weighed out the flour, yeast, and water, after which I combined the yeast with the small amount of water described above in a measuring cup. Before mixing these together, I looked up some videos on youtube to watch others knead as I had never kneaded bread before (clearly not a way in which early modern bakers could have learned!). After this, I mixed the ingredients together and, after they seemed well-combined, moved the dough to a floured cutting board to knead it.

After kneading, I rested the bread in a glass bowl covered in plastic wrap in my oven with the oven light turned to warm it slightly.

After 1 hour had passed, the dough had increased in volume, though not by much; when I “degassed” the dough as instructed by Rubel, it was quite clear, though, that the dough had risen.

After another 30 minutes rise, I scored the dough as instructed, cutting deeply around the waist and making several incisions on the top. I moved the dough to a baking sheet that I had sprayed some non-stick spray onto and then baked it at the very low temperature of 250 F for 1 hour (Rubel writes that one of the goals in baking this bread was to avoid a crust).

 After an hour, the bread only gave an internal temperature reading of ~160 F; as my sourdough loaves had targeted ~205 F, I decided to give the bread a bit more time (20 minutes, ultimately), and raised the temperature to 300 F to speed it along. After this, the bread gave an internal reading of 206 F, so I decided it was baked enough and immediately moved it to a cutting board where I cut it open so that I could make molds.

I ended up discarding almost all of the crust and a fair amount of pith, as my initial attempt to make a two-part mold with a astronaut figurine was a fairly complete failure; the figure was fairly thick, and I had not used enough bread pith to ensure it could be properly imprinted. I used the second half of the loaf, which I had reserved, and made a second attempt at imprinting the figurine, and felt that the second attempt was at least a partial success. Whether it will actually be able to hold beeswax as a two part mold, however, is not clear. As a backup, I made a one-part mold of a simple metal key with the remaining pith from the first part of the loaf. By this point, although I tried to make an additional mold of a quarter, I was unable to get much detail from the pith as it had begun to dry out and the coin has very subtle decoration. As I was out of warm, pliable pith by this point, I stopped here; hopefully at least one of these will prove successful in terms of retaining at least a fair amount of detail tomorrow. (As a backup, I made another mold by wrapping pith from one of the two loaves I baked in my third attempt around a fox figurine, so hopefully that mold, at least, will work. Despite the open crumb and its age, when enough pressure was applied the pith still managed to become gummy enough that it seems feasible that it could preserve a reasonable amount of detail as a mold)

Name: (Also the name of your working partner)

Date and Time: 

2021.[Month].[Day], [hh]:[mm][am/pm]

Location:

Subject: