Table of Contents

Bread Molding

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.18, 08:56 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Bread Molding

Molding and shrinking a large figure

Mold it with bread pith coming from the oven, or as the aforesaid, & in drying out, it will shrink & consequently the medal that you will cast in it. You it can, by this means, by elongating and widening the imprinted bread pith, vary the figure & with one image make many various ones. Bread coming from the oven is better. And the one that is reheated twice retracts more. You can cast sulfur without leaving the imprint of the bread to dry, if you want to mold as big as it is. But if you want to let it shrink, make it dry, either more or less.

In preparing my molds, I believe that I did, at least in a very general sense, as this entry instructs: I took bread pith straight from the oven, and cast two items into it. There is no discussion of how the pith should be prepared, but I attempted to squish it together with my hands such that it was gummy/doughy and more likely (it seemed to me) to actually retain a detailed impression that would be useful when molding. I also made one mold that did not follow the instructions, as I waited until the bread had been out of the oven for several days before using the pith to make a mold; this was not intentional, but I had only been able to mold two objects (only one successfully, i thought) with the bread I had baked specifically for the purpose of making molds. All of the molds were left to rest overnight and seem to have hardened substantially.

Name: Mackenzie Fox

Date and Time: 

2021.05.18, 10:30 am

Location: Home Kitchen

Subject: Casting

Together with the class via zoom I used melted beeswax to cast 3 items: a key, a fox figurine, and an astronaut figurine. The process of actually making the molds has been described in my bread-making field notes, but to briefly recap the key and astronaut figurine molds had been made with still-hot pith from a manchet loaf (the astronaut mold was two part, but I did attempt to actually use it as a two-part mold when casting, as it clearly was not going to be able to stay together closely enough to avoid leakage), while the fox figurine mold was made from ~2 day old pith from a sourdough loaf (see bread-making field notes for details of the breads in question - the manchet loaf is labelled attempt 4, while the sourdough loaf is labelled attempt 3).

As far as procedure is concerned, I used an empty, clean, and labelless tin can to heat the beeswax pellets on my stove. As I have a gas stove, I placed a 12-inch cast iron skillet underneath the can to prevent it from coming directly into contact with the flame as Prof. Smith suggested over Zoom. I decided to first cast using the mold I had made of the fox figurine, as I knew it would likely require the most wax and thus take the longest to cool off. Before pouring the wax, as I noticed that the mold had rather large seams along the edges, I decided to mix some water with all-purpose flour to create a sticky paste, which I then used to plug the seams to the extent that I was able; I also used some masking tape to bind the mold together to reduce the pressure being borne by the dough. I also used the provided brush to apply some canola oil to the interior, though it was difficult to see how much surface was actually covered as I could not open up the mold without likely rendering it unusable.

After preparing the mold with dough, tape, and canola oil, I poured ~¼ of the provided beeswax into the mold. This initial pour, which filled it about ⅔ to the top, produced almost no leakage (there were some very minor drips in one or two places, but the vast majority of the wax stayed inside the mold). The dough that had been used to glue the mold together seemed to have hardened after the wax was poured; this may have been an effect caused by the heat of the wax, or it may have simply dried out by virtue of having been exposed to air for ~10 minutes. After melting another ¼ of the provided wax, I attempted to top off the partially-cooled wax from the first pour, but much of this wax unfortunately spilled out onto the plastic plate beneath.

After pouring this second bit of beeswax into the mold (or indirectly onto the plate) I let the mold rest for about 30 minutes before peeling the bread away, during which time I repeated the procedure with my remaining one-piece molds, oiling them first with canola oil before pouring wax into them.

After letting the wax rest in the molds until the color seemed to have returned to a deep gold or amber (the wax was first somewhat syrupy when melted, then dried to a pale straw color, before cooling all the way to a deep gold/amber hue), I pulled the bread away from each of the molds, leaving the fox figurine until last as it was difficult to determine whether all of the wax had fully cooled from the the opening on the top. The key was the most successful, and the wax captured more or less all of the detail from the original key (looking at the molds in advance, this was the mold that seemed most likely to be successful, and indeed it turned out to be). The astronaut was more or less a failure as the front half of the mold was too shallow, which led the wax to break into pieces when I attempted to pull the bread away. Despite this, much of the detail of his backpack (the bulk of the back part of the original two-piece mold) managed to come through. Finally, the fox figurine was a partial success; about half of its face, its arm, and its tail came through, though there was clearly a great deal of “noise,” or additional wax whose form didn’t seem to have anything to do with the original figurine. The process of drying and of attempting to re-seal the mold before casting may have destroyed a fair amount of the original detail, though it is difficult to guess exactly what went wrong.

Reflecting on the process in light of the results, I think that the objects I attempted to mold/cast decided much of the success and failure of the procedure. Clearly bread, particularly if dense and still warm when an impression is made, is capable of retaining a surprising amount of detail when used as a mold. There are, nonetheless, some limits to what it can produce. The simplest object that I molded, the key, was also by far the most successful. The more complicated figurines, each of which were truly three dimensional and fairly intricately detailed, were far less successful, as it was difficult to create a two-piece mold capable of retaining a detailed impression. It is difficult to say whether the breads used played a decisive role given that the pith was impressed under different circumstances (one bread was still warm and fresh from the oven when impressed, while the other was several days old), though if I were to try again I would likely favor the Manchet bread as, at least in a modern context where white flour is readily available and fairly inexpensive, it is just as cheap as the sourdough though far less time-consuming to make. A denser crumb, moreover, still seems the most likely to retain a clear impression, though without comparing molds of the same object made using the two breads it is difficult to judge whether this is merely an impression.

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