[Bread Baking and Mold Making]

Name: Nicole Basile
Date and Time: Saturday, February 4; 5pm
2016.[2].[4], [5]:[00][pm]
Location: Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Subject: Feeding #1
After reading a bit about starter feeding online, I decided to give it a try. I measured equal parts water and white flour (half a cup of each) and mixed it in to an equal part of starter. (I also fed the leftover starter and set it aside for some friends who also wanted to give sourdough a try.) After a couple of hours sitting on the counter, the starter began to bubble--it was eating. I had successfully fed the starter!








Name: Nicole Basile
Date and Time: Sunday, February 5; 8am
2016.[2].[5], [8]:[00][am]
Location: Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Subject: Feeding #2 and 1st Attempt at Making Bread

For the second feeding, I repeated the steps and again it yielded a happy, bubbly well-fed starter. I then tried my hand at bread baking. For my first attempt at making sourdough, I watched a video of the Chad Robertson, of Tartine Bakery, which was more intimidating than helpful. I also read Sam Sifton's recipe for no-knead sourdough, and Robertson's Country Bread recipe (both can be found at nytimes.com.) From both recipes, I fashioned my own, combining 3 cups of white flour, 3/4 of a cup of starter and combining until it formed a smooth dough. I let the dough proof twice--once overnight, and a second time for two hours before baking. To bake, I scored the outside with a knife and then flipped it face down into a dutch oven. With the over at 450, the bread baked in about 30 minutes. It had a thick, crunchy crust and small to medium sized air bubbles on the inside. Overall, this first loaf looked and tasted like sourdough.











Name: Nicole Basile
Date and Time:
2016.[02].[19], [10]:[00][am]
Location: Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Subject: Bread Baking and Mold Making

Starter after 1 week of feeding (about 2x a day):

After consulting various sites (food 52, nytimes, king arthur flour blog), I decided to begin feeding the starter twice a day starting on the week leading up to the bread mold making. I consistently added 25g. white flour, 25g whole-wheat flour, and 50g lukewarm tap water to 15g of starter. (The remaining started I stored in my fridge and fed once a week.) Over the course of the week, the starter became more and more active and elastic in texture. At one point it bubbled over the rim of the glass.

Bread mold process:
For my bread molds, I decided to make two different loaves: a manchet from a 17th century medical manual and a whole-wheat sourdough inspired by a 17th century recipe by John Evelyn and a contemporary one from Sam Sifton.

Manchet:
Ingredients: 450 gr. King Arthur Whole Wheat Flower; 300 ml. Pasteurized Whole Milk; 1 Extra-Large Egg; 25 gr. butter (salted); 40 gr. Sourdough Starter

The first was the manchet from Lady of Arundel’s manchet from Choice Manuall or Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery (1654). My reasons for following this recipe were two fold: in terms of historical-approximation, it is dated less than a century later than MS. Fr. 640 and, with respect to method, this seems to be a dense bread with a compact crumb and so I thought that it would make for a good mold.

For the manchet, I uses 100% whole wheat flour, as that is what the recipe called for. The original recipe yielded a much larger amount, and so I significantly reduced it. In order to keep the ratios the same, I did use a scale to measure my ingredients.

First, since the recipe called for warm milk and mine was just out of the refrigerator, I warmed in up for 30 seconds in a pan over the stove. Then, I added my starter and mixed them for another 30 seconds. They did not combine well, but I figured that the reasoning behind mixing them together was to allow for the starter to reactivate.


Second, I mixed together the whole-wheat flour, beaten egg, and butter. (Though the recipe called for salt, I did not add any since I used salted butter—as it was the only butter in my fridge.) I combined the ingredients with my hand, until they formed a nice light crumb. This took about 1 minute.

Third, I added the milk-starter mixture and combined everything together by hand. This took between 1 and 2 minutes. It formed a very moist and dense dough. Since the recipe did not call for kneading the dough, I let it sit. It rested for only 30 minutes, as this is what the recipe called for. Based on my experience with sourdough, I knew this would not be enough time to really allow for the bread to rise, but I followed the instructions anyway. It seems that these little rolls were supposed to be dense and hearty. (This would have made them good for traveling—they do not take up much space in a bag but are certainly very filling.)


Fourth, after allowing the manchet to rest for half an hour, I put it on a floured baking sheet and formed it into the shape of a large roll. The recipe calls for baking the bread at a low temperature. This is counterintuitive to what most bread recipes state. For my previous loaf, I heated the over to around 450F. For this one, I heated the oven to 350F and I baked it for 1 hour. It rested for about 10 minutes.
Raw:
Cooked:
As the picture below shows, the loaf was very dense and slightly undercooked in the middle. I used the bottom portion of a loaf half for the bread mold. While it was still hot, I pressed into the crumb a Lego man, a coin, and my mailbox key. I applied pressure about 3 times to each object. The impressions did not give after having removed the objects from the bread.



The sections of undercooked bread made a smoother impression of the objects.



Basic Sourdough (loosely based on John Evelyn's "Best Bread of France"):
Both Evelyn and Sifton direct you to proof your dough the night before. And so, on Saturday night (at 1am), I mixed equal parts flour (.5 whole-wheat and .5 all purpose), lukewarm water and 15g starter. Then, I let it sit overnight in a bowl with tea towel over it. At 10am the next morning, the dough had doubled in size and there where little holes perforating the surface.

The second loaf was actually a combination of John Evelyn’s recipe for “the Best Bread of France” from his MS and Sam Sifton’s no-knead sourdough recipe from the New York Times. We have discussed that there is a dearth of bread recipes from the 16th century and that this is probably due to the fact that it was such a common practice, that no recipe was really needed. In the spirit of relying on former knowledge to carry out a certain task, I decided to use these two recipes as guides but to ultimately employ my understanding of bread making for this second loaf.



After 1st proof:



Both recipes also call for a second proofing of the bread. At 10am, I place the dough out onto a floured cutting board and shaped it into a rounded loaf with a seam on the underside. I then placed it back on the board, as I needed to step away from the kitchen for a few minutes. Upon returning, the loaf had changed form a bit and so I continued to round it and place the corners up under the seam before placing it back in the bowl for its second round of proofing. What I found is that I had overworked the dough and created a tear in the upper part of the loaf. This exposed the seam underneath and the whole loaf fell apart and lost its shape. Given that I was pressed for time, I tried to fix it as best I could with more flower and water. Then, I decided to just place it in the bowl, lined with paper towel and flour. I let it rise for another 2 hours.



The second proofing was 2.5 hours long, as I waited for the manchet to be finished baking. For the “French-style” sourdough, I raised the temperature to 450F. I baked it on a cookie sheet, coated with a bit of butter and flour to allow for easy removal. As I plopped the loaf on to the sheet, it spread out into a large, amorphous mass. It had risen for the last 2.5 hours, but it had not formed into anything resembling a loaf of bread.

Still, since the point was to use this for the molds, I didn’t worry too much about it—it had a nice height, and so I figured it would rise enough to use it for this purpose.

After 1 hour, the loaf was a rich brown on the outside. I allowed it to cool for about 5 minutes, as it was too hot to handle. Then, I quartered it. Initially, I wondered if there were be too many air bubbles in this loaf to use it for the molds, since it was not as dense a dough as the manchet. However, the crumb had only tiny air bubbles and was still quite dense.


I cut one of the quarters in half to use for a 1-sided mold. It was still moist in the center and very hot. I placed a perfume bottle and my mailbox key into the bread. The impressions were good and they retained their shape after removing the objects, though the crumb did give slightly (especially compared to the manchet), thus shrinking the mold a bit.



What I ultimately found by improvising a loaf (based on my very limited knoweldge) was that I had trouble following my instincts and often second guessed myself. The result was that, in my overwhelmedness, I forgot a central step to both the Evelyn and Sifton recipes: to put the bread in a container (i.e. a dutch oven) before placing it in the oven. Still, as my end result was to create a bread mold, the unfortunate shape of the loaf was not really an issue in the end.

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Name: Nicole Basile
Date and Time:
2016.[02].[20], [12]:[30][pm]
Location: Chandler 260, Columbia
Subject: Mold Casting

Sulfur Molds:
The two manchet molds—the Lego man and mailbox key—were cast in sulfur. In order to stabilize the mold, before pouring in the sulfur I created a base with wax. This leveled the mold, so that it would not spill after the casting. Since the mold impressions were also a bit shallow, I built up an outer rim around both molds. This allowed me to fill the molds up to the top with the sulfur without it running over the crust.

The Lego man was first coated in pork tallow. In a section title “Founders of small tin work”, the author-practitioner writes, “Before casting, they rub the mould over with tallow, and it [the mould] absorbs it quickly because it is hot” (80v). Here he is talking about a practice for casting objects with fine detail. Presumably, the tallow would allow for easy release of the object from the mold. I melted two thick shavings of pork tallow in a metal can and coated the Lego man mold with the melted tallow using a fine point brush. Instead of melting right into the bread, with in about 2 minutes, the tallow in the mold solidified once again.

The melting point of the sulfur is 115C. While melting it down, it was necessary to break up the hard crystallizations. Once it was fluid, I poured it into both molds and set it aside to harden.

Wax Molds:
The two John Evelyn-insprired sourdough molds—the perfume bottle and the mailbox key—were cast in wax. Again, before casting the molds, I build up the bread with clay in order to level it. The perfume bottle mold was deep enough that I did not need to secure the outline with clay. However, the mailbox key was much more shallow of an impression, and so I repeated the same method as with the sulfur mold and formed some clay around the perimeter of the mold.

The melting point of bee's wax is 144C. The wax pearls melted very quickly and more fluidly than the sulfure. After casting the molds, I set them aside to dry. As you can see in the picture, the key mold began to harden very quickly.


ASPECTS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN MAKING FIELD NOTES

• note time
• note (changing) conditions in the room
• note temperature of ingredients to be processed (e.g. cold from fridge, room temperature etc.)
• document materials, equipment, and processes in writing and with photographs
• notes on ingredients and equipment (where did you get them? issues of authenticity)
• note precisely the scales and temperatures you used (please indicate how you interpreted imprecise recipe instruction)
• see also our informal template for recipe reconstructions

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