Boyd - Bread Molding Recipes - 9/15/14 - The No-Starter Day
Table of Contents
DATE AND TIME: 9/15 /14 Afternoon
LOCATION: 20th floor apt, Brooklyn
SUBJECT: BMR
We have decided we will be working with the recipe from 140v as our primary recipe.
We will try to create a dough without starter since it is not called for explicitly in the recipe.
"like bread pastry" - bread used as a descriptor rather than as bread itself - from 29r stucco for moldings
What if "bread" in the workshop is different than bread in the kitchen?
We will make several assays with the same dough, allowing them to dry for different amounts of time.
If working without starter is an utter, dismal failure, we will attempt a batch with starter tomorrow.
One question that comes up is whether the medal to be cast is supposed to have a reverse and an obverse of just an obverse?
140v: The Manuscript Recipe (with Questions & Observations)
"To make a clean cast in sulfur, arrange the pith of some bread under the brazier, as you know how to do. Mold whatever you want & leave it to dry & you will have a very clean work.Try sulfur passed through melted wax, since it won’t catch fire & won’t make more little eyes.
Molding and reducing a big piece
Mold it (WHAT? Assuming this means an object small enough to be molded in the pith of the bread. How big is the bread? Unclear. Is the object being molded only on one side, or both?) with the pith of the bread just out of the oven, or like that (WHAT? - I honestly don't know what is being referred to here, although I have included the recipe directly before this one, above. It is still unclear to me what is being referred to as "that" here...) aforementioned, & and in drying out it will diminish & by consequence so too the medal that you have cast (IMPLICATION: THE OBJECT HAS BEEN REMOVED BEFORE DRYING OUT). You can, in this way, in lengthening out or enlarging the imprinted bread (ON PURPOSE? Or is this referring to a process that happens automatically or by accident?), vary the figure & from one face make several quite different ones. The bread straight from the oven is best. And that which has been reheated twice (DOES THIS MEAN THE OTHERS ARE REHEATED ONCE? Or not at all?) shrinks more. You can cast sulfur without letting the imprint on the bread dry (IMPLICATION: CASTING ANY OTHER MATERIAL MUST LET THE BREAD DRY. POTENTIAL FURTHER IMPLICATION: if you want to make a thing the same size as the original, you must use sulfur as your medium because it is the only medium that works with a mold that is not yet dry. All other mediums will require the mold to be dried out.), if you want to cast it as large as it is. But, if you want to let it diminish, let it dry ( "LET" SEEMS TO IMPLY AN INACTIVE SLOW DRYING, RATHER THAN ACTIVELY HEATING IT AGAIN) either more or less."
We are going to use the description of dough from 029r, minus the tragacanth gum, for our first experiments.*
*Addendum 9/22/14 Please note that at the time we decided to use the description of 029r, we did not realize that 29r is actually a recipe for making stucco to mold with, not using bread to take a cast of something, as 140v is. It was only once we had acquired tragacanth gum and began to seriously parse that recipe on the 17th that we realized it was a recipe for a totally different process and therefore not necessarily strictly relevant to molding an object to cast in bread.
Iteration 1
Using a plastic mixing bowl and a wooden spoon, added ½ cup of cool NYC tap water (henceforth, "water") to 1 cup of flour - trying to obtain consistency described in 029r: "You can reckon when it can be stretched without breaking, and if it is not strong enough it can’t be well detached." The dough broke easily so we added ¼ cup more water. This made the dough much more like a batter- very wet. So we added another 1/4c flour and Jef took over beating for 2-3 minutes (might not have been long enough?). This seemed better but still not quite right, so we added another 1tbsp more flour.The dough was still pretty sticky but it stretched a reasonable amount, so we decided to give it a shot in the oven and see how it turns out. We put it in a bread pan (which we greased with Kerrygold Irish butter because we didn't want it to stick) because it didn't really look like it would hold up on its own, and began baking it at 350 degrees. The "bread" went in the oven at 2:15 and we plan to take it out when the top looks browned or is hard.
We removed the "bread" at 2:35 and immediately cut it in ½ horizontally - this had to be done carefully and was difficult to do evenly and "cleanly" because it was difficult to get a good grip on the object because it was so hot, we either had to hold the hot object in our bare hands, or use an ungainly oven mitt. There was enough space to make obverse molds of 4 objects, which we did: a commemorative coin, a locket, a caribiner clip, and a military badge. We pressed the objects into the "bread" - although they pressed in easily, the molds broke apart where we pressed. The objects also became very hot. We left them in the bread mold for between 2-5 minutes, and pried them out gently with a knife (which could potentially leave a mark). We shall let the molds cool and see if/how much the molds shrink.
Iteration 2
We started out this time with equal parts water and flour. This left us with a dough that was really more of a batter, which we didn't think would really be suitable, so we added another ¼ cup of flour. It was still pretty batter-like, so we poured the mixture into cupcake tins so that it would keep a usable shape. These we baked for 15 minutes until they were just firm. We sliced them in half, leaving us with 8 molds, and molded our 4 objects. These took much better than the previous and there was less tearing, although there was one mold (the badge), which we had pressed very hard on, that did tear a bit at the side. We learned that pressing slowly down on the object to be molded was much more effective than just squashing it down quickly. It was much less likely to tear when pressed slowly.Iteration 3
We used the mixture quantities from mixture one again, and cooked it in the same way, to try and reproduce the mold we created, so that we could experiment with a "twice reheated" version of our original mold. We molded the same four objects, but this time, it did seem that a) the dough had more bubbles/pockets/"nooks and crannies" than the first go around, and we weren't sure why. Additionally, it seemed like the items were more difficult to imprint - the mold was less yielding and pliant, although we thought by recreating the proportions of the first recipe, we would make it pretty much identical. It seems like perhaps the fact that we added the ingredients all at once and then stirred for a while, as opposed to adding them in dribs and drabs and then stirring them in, might have been the reason for this discrepancy.We placed the molds, once they objects had been removed, back into the oven to accomplish "reheat"ing them twice, to see if the molds would shrink as it specifies in 140v. We baked them again at the same temperature (350) for 10 minutes, then let them cool for ten minutes on the stove range, then placed them back in the oven at 350 again for 10 minutes, thus reheating them twice. We noticed after the first round of reheating that the mold had shrunk a bit - it was barely noticeable on certain molds, but when the tried to place the caribiner back in its spot in the mold, it did not fit, so we know they certainly shrank at least a bit. After the second time, the molds began to get a bit crispy around the edges - looked to me like an english muffin that's been in the toaster. This time there was a small but noticeable discrepancy in size between the size of the molds and the size of the original objects - we estimated around 10%, and measurements were as follows:
Actual Badge: 2 and ¼ inches
Actual Caribiner: 2 inches
Actual Locket: 1 and ¼ inches
Actual Coin: 1 and 13/16th inches
Badge Mold: tip to tip: 2 and ⅛ inches
Caribiner Mold: 1 and ⅞ inches
Locket Mold: 1 and 1/16 inches
Coin Mold: 1 and 9/16 inches
9/16 Homework Questions:
Can we see any taxonomy built around these materials (other materials used for molding) in the sixteenth-century written sources?
012r: Good: "Soot black" "Yellow Sulfur of the best kind" "whitest and thinnest is best" "the more freshly cooked, the better..." Bad: "greyish natural sulfur"
029r: Good: "Rye flour which is better than wheat flour": Bad: "wheat flour"
081v: Good: "Black lead of the first melting works very neatly"
082v: Good: "Latten cleaner than copper" Bad: "Iron does nothing but turn the matter sour"
Any other sorts of relationships among them evident in these sources? In addition, think more about how a 16th-century artisan understood molding materials--what kinds of meanings and values did s/he endow them with? Please use examples from Ms. Fr. 640.
091r: Cuttlefish bones prone to dampness? Really? Or is that humoral?
http://www.instructables.com/id/Cuttlefish-Casting/
http://www.pennabilli.org/tecniche/CUTTLEBONE.htm
Boyd - Bread Molding Recipes - 9/17/14 - The Starter Day
NAME: Emily Boyd & Jef Palframan
DATE AND TIME: 9/17/14 1:20pm
LOCATION: 20th floor apt, Brooklyn
SUBJECT: BMR
We have experimented with three more iterations of bread molds based off of 140v, this time using sourdough starter and three different kinds of flour.
First, we had to decide on a recipe for the bread. In class we discussed the simplicity of the breads and bread recipes of the time, and the fact that perhaps they are left out of ingredient books because they were so simple to make that it was not necessary to include a recipe for them. Professor Smith urged us to just try using the four ingredients (starter, flour, water, salt) and see what happened. Because neither of us had any prior experience with sourdough, we consulted several modern recipes on the King Arthur's Flour website (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/bread/sourdough). We saw that most recipes we saw had a ratio of about 3:1 for flour and starter, and the same amount of additional water as starter, plus about 2 tsps salt per 3 cups flour. Because we didn't want to end up with a ton of extra, we ended up with a recipe of (per batch):
1 cup flour (see below for which kinds)
1/3 cup starter (room temperature)
1/3 cup water (cool NYC tap water)
2/3 tsp salt (sea salt)
We decided to try this recipe with three different types of flour.
Iteration 1: Mixing Stone Ground Flour
We mixed the tap water with the sourdough starter (generously provided by Professor Smith from her personal supply. All ingredients were room temperature. We then added 1 cup of Wild Hive Farm Soft Wheat Pastry Flour, an old fashioned stone ground flour. In this iteration, because we forgot we had to grind the salt, we added it after I had mixed the flour in for a bit, because it took Jef a minute or two to grind it. I don't know if that affected the chemistry of the dough, but I thought it was worth noting. The dough quickly congealed into something very much resembling my idea of what a bread dough should look like (from my admittedly limited experience making bread). We shaped it into two balls roughly the size of the objects we had to mold, and we left it to rise for 90 minutes.
Iteration 2: Mixing Rye Flour
We mixed the tap water with the sourdough starter. We then added 1 cup of Bob's Red Mill Organic Whole Grain Dark Rye Flour Stone Ground.
All ingredients were room temperature. We decided to try a version with Rye Flour specifically, because in 029r, the manuscript author states that rye flour is better than wheat flour because "it is more humid" (although it is unclear from the construction of the grammar in English which is more humid - is the the rye flour better because IT is more humid, or is the rye flour better because the wheat flour is more humid? It's confusing because the next part of the sentence exhorts the reader "don't make the batter so dry." Although that recipe is for stucco and not bread-molding, we still thought rye flour would be interesting to explore. As before, the ingredients quickly mixed up into a bread dough, although this time it seemed slightly more dry. Since we tried to keep the same proportions exactly for each iteration so that the flour would be the only variable, I think that is quite interesting. It seems as though the manuscript author may have been correct about rye flour - the rye flour certainly was different from the wheat flour and also since it seemed that this iteration was more dry, perhaps the author meant that rye flour is better because it is more dry - which doesn't make 100% sense to me because, as discussed above, of the fact that the second half of the sentence praising rye flour exhorts the reader not to make the batter dry. In any case, as before, we shaped the dough into two balls roughly the size of the objects we had to mold, and we left it to rise for 90 minutes.
Iteration 3: Mixing Whole Grain Italian Flour
We mixed the tap water with the sourdough starter (generously provided by Professor Smith from her personal supply. We then added 1 cup of a specialty stoneground whole grain Italian flour, "MACINA" grano tenero biologico macinato intero a pietra naturale. All ingredients were room temperature. The ingredients mixed up quickly into a dough (this one seemed wetter slightly than either of the previous two iterations), shaped the dough into two balls roughly the size of the objects we had to mold, and left it rise for 90 minutes.
All Iterations: Baking
In none of the cases did the dough rise in any noticeable way. I suppose we could have measured it before and after the 90 minute period, but we didn't think to do so because we just assumed it would rise significantly and visibly. I don't know if we somehow managed to kill the starter, or if this is not a starter that causes dough to rise, but all the modern recipes we found prescribed letting the dough rise for 60-90 minutes, kneading it, and then letting it rise again. However since our bread did not rise at all the first time, we made the leap that it probably wouldn't rise the second time, and decided to cook the bread directly.We cooked the breads for 20 minutes each on a 10 minute delay (as each batch was finished 10 minutes after the previous, this delay also allowed them all to be left to "rise" for the same amount of time (90 minutes)). This also allowed us to have them coming out of the oven at different times, thus enabling us to have removed our objects from the previous iteration in time to mold them again.
All Iterations: Molding the Objects
As before, cut the breads open immediately upon removing them from the oven, slowly pressed the objects into their pith, and left them in for approximately 3 minutes, before slowly removing them. We cleaned the objects after each use so that no residue from the previous bread would effect the quality of the next molding. We elected not to twice-bake any of these molds because it would affect the uniformity of our experiment, which in this case was really about how breads made with starter from different flours would take a mold, compared to our "breads" made from only flour and salt.Conclusions:
I found this process somewhat frustrating because there were so many factors to juggle that I felt the experiment stopped being truly helpful as research into this manuscript. This is especially true given that creating the mold is only half of the project. The other half is pouring the cast. Given that we had no concrete referent for the original ingredients, we wanted to try several types of flours, and to attempt molding a few different objects to see how fine of a cast the bread could take. However, in order to also try several methods of pouring the wax/sulfur mixture, as we will attempt in class, we would have had to make several versions of each mold of each object in the breads made from each flour. If we were to try, for example, three different methods of wax/sulfur casting/pouring etc., we would need three different versions of each of our four objects in our three flours. That's 36 molds! I definitely see how these kinds of experiments lead to more and more other experiments - and perhaps this is partly our fault for tackling both different objects and different recipes/flours in our mold making process. In practice as a tool for studying the manuscript and for reconstructing this historical object-making practice, it seems like literally a whole semester could be spent in attempting various reconstructions of just the recipe for bread molding on page 140v.Informal Template for Reconstruction:
Purpose: knowing your goal: why do this particular reconstruction? For what level of authenticity are we striving?
We are attempting this reconstruction to learn as much as possible about the making practices of the author of BnF Ms Fr 640. We hope to ascertain whether his processes are replicable, and what kind of object our "making" will create if we attempt as closely as possible to perform what is described in one of his recipes. However, we are acutely aware of the fact that our level of authenticity is extremely compromised based on the ambiguity of the recipe and our own lack of knowledge about certain key processes (i.e., bread making).
Context: historical context: reading widely; author: what else did he/she write down; immediate context; recipe families.
We located many various recipes for casting various objects in various media from the books suggested by Professor Smith, such as:
Biringuccio - The Pirotechnia: The methods of Moulding Various Kinds of Reliefs, p. 329-331.
Cellini - The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture: How the above mentioned clay is made, p. 113.
Theophilus - On Divers Arts: Chapter 33. The Rinds of Folium and Their Tempering Media, loc. 1012.
Additionally, we were provided with a suggestion by Dr. Bilak of a recipe, from The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery by Robert May: "To make French Bread the best way", p. 239 (Courtesy of the research of Dr. Bilak).
However we did not find any recipes specifically relating to Bread Molding aside from those included in BnF Ms Fr 640, from which we referenced the following recipes:
‘To cast in sulfur’ (p140v)
Molding and reducing a big piece (p140v)
Stucco for moldings (p029r)
Box mold (p082r)
Molding sulfur (p012r)
We focused on those in our manuscript most closely as they seemed most germane and the other recipes were a bit too far afield to be truly helpful for the nitty-gritty of creating our molds. Particularly, we focused on page 140v, and 029r.
Recipe/Instructions: examine recipe, actions to be taken, what omitted and described?
Please see "140v: The Manuscript Recipe," above, for a word-by-word analysis of what our recipe says and our questions about it. Notably, the recipe for bread itself is missing from the recipe description, leaving us to make the assumption that bread-making was such a common skill a recipe would not have been needed, and any basic bread recipe with a starter would likely do for a starting point (as discussed in class).
Ingredients: their source, how refined, and in what form to be used? Safety vs. authenticity? (Raw milk, hand-ground flour, etc.)
The only ingredients that the recipe actually calls for is bread (with pith that is big enough to mold your object) fresh out of the oven, and the object (with a face) to be molded - probably a medal. As for the making of the bread, as is mentioned above, no help is provided. However, based on Professor Smith's guidance in class, we decided to come up with a simple and generic recipe calling for just the four ingredients she mentioned: starter, flour, water and salt. Please see above for a description of our process generating the recipe.
Metrics/Units of Measure: issues of scale (24 eggs, lbs of flour); how much was an Early Modern lb? were these measurements standardized? time (is it important – not for glue, e.g.); “enough” – how to be consistent when you don’t have a preconceived notion of what “enough” is?
Since no units of measure were referenced in the recipe, we did not have to do any conversions or calculations. We did however, have to do some serious guesswork (as described in the various iterations above) about quantities of ingredients for the bread.
Equipment/Technologies: culinary technologies, kinds of heat etc. (wood, charcoal, peat?) – how to reproduce as much as possible? How do we deal with impurities – do we strive to filter them out? Under what limitations were they working?
We were unable to make this a major concern during this project because of the limitations of budget and safety constraints. We did not want to attempt to create an Early Modern oven in our homes, as we do not have access to a hearth or to outdoor space (or the funds) that would make this feasible.
Reflexivity: filtering out our contemporary understandings and expectations; annotating where compromises were made; not letting the product get in the way of the process.
I think it goes without saying that many compromises were made in the creation of our bread molds. Most notable, as has been mentioned, is the fact that we were unfamiliar with bread-making processes and did not work from an early modern bread recipe. If I attempted the experiment again, I would definitely want to work harder to find a bread recipe contemporaneous with the manuscript, try it in advance so I was aware of its properties, and then attempt to make some to take a mold with. Additionally, I wonder how our process would have been changed by working with an early modern oven or cooking method, as obviously a modern oven is a far cry from an early modern hearth.