[Bread Molding Reconstruction]

Name: Sau-yi (My partner: Ben)
Date and Time: 2016.9.22, 10:00 pm
Location: My apartment on 119th
Subject: My sourdough starter crisis

Ben and I decided to meet on Friday morning to make the bread at his apartment. I have been pretty busy with other work this week and I did not pay a whole lot of attention to my sourdough starter since I got it on Monday. When I checked out my starter just now, I found that it has become a little bit watery and there is some brown liquid on the top of the starter. Did I do anything wrong? Did I mess it up because I did not put it in the fridge? I did a little bit of research on Google and finally I found a video teaching me how to "feed" my starter and reactivate it before baking.

I figured out all I need was flour and water, so I rushed to the grocery store at 11:00pm to buy flour. Following the instruction of the video, I poured out the brown liquid from the starter. I took out 1/2 cup of the starter and mixed it with 1/2 cup of water and slightly less than 1 cup of unbleached flour. I put the mixture in another container but I did not close the lid tightly as some air would help activate the starter. I put the new starter in the kitchen and hoped that it would become active tomorrow morning.

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Name: Sau-yi and Ben
Date and Time: 2016.9.23, 10:10 am
Location: Ben's apartment on 113th
Subject: Making bread

Bread Recipe

To make French Bread the best way
“Take a gallon of fine flour, and a pint of good new ale barm or yeast, and put it to the flour, with the whites of six new laid eggs well beaten in a dish, and mixt with the barm in the middle of the flour, also three spoonfuls of fine salt; then warm some milk and fair water, and put to it, and make it up pretty stiff, being well wrought and woked up, cover in a boul or tray with a warm cloth till your oven be hot, then make it up either in rouls, or fashion it in little wooden dishes and bake it, being baked in a quick oven, chip it hot.” (pg. 238)

Author: May, Robert, b. 1588. Title: The accomplisht cook, or The art and mystery of cookery Date: 1671 Reel position: Wing / 1918:16 Copy from: British Library
Accessed via EEBO: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=99829397&FILE=&SEARCHSCREEN=param%28SEARCHSCREEN%29&VID=33836&PAGENO=146&ZOOM=FIT&VIEWPORT=&SEARCHCONFIG=param%28SEARCHCONFIG%29&DISPLAY=param%28DISPLAY%29&HIGHLIGHT_KEYWORD=param%28HIGHLIGHT_KEYWORD%29

Bread molding-- Bnf Ms Fr 640

p140v_1 To cast in sulfur
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.

p140v_2 Molding and shrinking a large shape
Mold it with the pith of bread just out of the oven, or like that aforementioned, & in drying out it will shrink & consequently so will the medal that you will cast. By these means - lengthening out or enlarging the imprinted bread - you can vary the shape & from one face make several different ones. The breadstraight from the oven is best. And the one which has been heated twice contracts more. You can cast sulfur without letting the imprint on the bread dry, if you want to cast it as large as it is. But, if you want to let it shrink, let it dry to a greater or lesser extent.

Sourdough Starter

We used two different starters (Ben’s and Sau-yi’s) to produce two separate loaves of bread using the above recipe.

Ben’s starter: Ben put his starter in the refrigerator on Monday 9/9/16, fed it at 11:00pm on Thursday night with 4oz. water and 4oz. unbleached all-purpose flour and left it to sit unrefrigerated and loosely covered in plastic wrap overnight. By 11:00am the next morning, the starter appeared very bubbly but had only modestly increased in volume.

Sau-yi’s starter: Sau-yi put her starter in room temperature since she received it on Monday. She fed it at midnight on Thursday night. On Friday morning, her starter looked only slightly bubbly. (See Sau-yi’s field notes on 2016.9.22)

Ingredients and methods for making bread

“Fine flour”: We use unbleached non-GMO all purpose flour instead of whole wheat flour, as May’s recipe specifies that the flour should be fine in texture
“Good new ale barm or yeast”: We use our sourdough starter
Eggs: Only egg white
Salt: We assume that modern spoons are not hugely different from early modern ones
Milk and water: We use regular whole milk as we could not find unpasteurized milk at our local grocery store. The recipe did not specify the quantity, so we experimented with different amounts for our two trials, drawing upon (limited) previous experience with baking bread to achieve what we felt was a good dough consistency.

Materials/Equipment

Conventional gas oven
Microwave (for warming milk/water)
2 non-stick pie pans
Plastic mixing bowl
Pyrex measuring cup
Wooden spoon
Plastic cutting board for kneading

Notes on Procedure

Oven temperature: Though the recipe says to bake in a “quick oven”, which seems to imply a high temperature, we decided on an a temperature of 350 degrees fahrenheit, adopting Ken Albala’s suggestion for baking when faced with such early modern ambiguities: “when unspecified, take as a rule baking between 325 and 350 degrees.”[1]

Baking time: Also lacking a specified baking time in the recipe, we opted for checking our loaves after 30 minutes and then ultimately taking them out at 50 minutes, following the rule of thumb of approximately an hour offered by an English “manchet” recipe from the late 16th century.[2]

Discrepancies between trials and Errors in Execution: See Table 1 below for a summary of the ingredients used for each trial. As one can observe, significant differences exist between the two trials and between our reconstruction and the original recipe. As explained below, 1 and 4 were carried out intentionally, while 2 and 3 were mistakes resulting from poor planning and implementation.

1. Milk/water mixture: the recipe being ambiguous on this quantity, we called upon our limited experience with baking in determining how much milk/water to use. started ¾ of a cup of the warmed milk/water mixture, and for the second we used 1 cup of the milk/water mixture, having observed that our first batch of dough was rather dry and difficult to work with.
2. Starters: unfortunately, while juggling the tasks of reconstruction and documentation in the hectic environment of a small and cluttered kitchen, we committed a glaring error in the measurement of our starters, accidentally using ½ pint (i.e. 1 cup) of starter for each trial rather than the ¼ pint called for by our scale of ¼ of the original recipe.
3. Salt: additionally, we completely forgot to add salt during our second trial.
4. Olive oil: though not called for by the recipe, we coated the bowl used for rising of the dough in Trial 2, having a slightly stickier dough than in Trial 1. We also used a light amount of olive oil to prevent potential sticking on the baking pans.

Table 1: Summary of Ingredients/Amounts Used for Each Trial

	Trial 1	Trial 2
Flour	4 cups	4 cups
Sourdough Starter	1 cup (Ben’s starter)	1 cup (Sau-yi’s starter)
Egg whites	1.5 egg whites (roughly ¼ cup)	1.5 egg whites (roughly ¼ cup)
50-50 Milk/water mixture	¾ cup	1 cup
Salt	1.5 spoonfuls
Olive Oil (to aid with sticking)	Applied a thin coat on the baking pan.	Applied a light coat in the bowl used for the dough’s rise, and a thin coat on the baking pan as well.

Preparing the Dough

Weather conditions: at the time of preparing the dough, the temperature outside was 77 degrees fahrenheit and the humidity was 52%.

Trial 1

11:00 am:
We put 4 cups of flour into a mixing bowl, then added one cup of Ben’s sourdough starter, one and a half egg white, one and a half spoons of salt. We mixed the ingredients together with a big wooden spoon. Having warmed up a 50-50 milk/water mixture in the microwave for 1 minute, we added ¾ cup of the milk/water mixture into the mixing bowl little by little and mixed all the ingredients well. We took the mixture out of the mixing bowl and started kneading it on a cutting board. We put a piece of wet cloth under the cutting board to prevent the board from sliding on the countertop.

11:18 am:
We thought the dough was ready after kneading for about 5 minutes. We put the dough into a bowl. We then covered the bowl with a wet cloth and we decided to let it sit for two hours for rising.

Trial 2

11:18 am:
We started making our second dough after we were done with the first one. Again we put 4 cups of flour into the mixing bowl and added one cup of starter and one and a half egg white, but this time we used Sau-yi’s starter. We also put one cup of milk/water mixture instead of only ¾ cup to try to add more moisture to the dough. We repeated the same procedures of Trial 1.
The dough however became a little bit too sticky, so we added some extra flour when we were kneading it on the cutting board.

11:34 am:
The second dough was ready for rising. We put some olive oil on the bowl before putting the dough into it because the dough was stickier than the last one.

Noon -1:00 pm:
We had a lunch break while we waited for the doughs to rise.

Baking

1:00 pm:
We came back to the kitchen and checked out the two doughs. They did not seem to be rising very well but we decided to start baking them anyway.

1:18 pm:
We put some olive oil on a baking tray. We put the dough from trial 1 on the baking tray and put it into the oven.

1:34 pm:
Again we put some olive oil on another baking tray. We put the dough from trial 2 on the baking tray and put it into the oven. We also checked how trial 1’s dough was doing in the oven after baking for 15 minutes to make sure that it was in good shape.

1: 48 pm:
We took a look at Trial 1’s bread again. Judging from its condition in the oven, we decided that we should check again 20 minutes later to see if it would be ready at that time.

2:00 pm:
As we were organizing our fieldnotes, we figured out that we miscalculated the quantity of the starter we should use for each trial. Instead of using ½ cup of starter (i.e. ¼ pint as stated in the recipe), we used one whole cup of starter for both trials. Also, we found out that we forgot to add salt to the dough in Trial 2.
We had already used up all our sourdough starter at this point. We could only hope that the bread would turn out well, as both of our starters did not look very active this morning. We also hoped that it would not make a huge difference with or without adding salt to the dough.

2:10 pm:
We checked the bread from Trial 1 and took it out of the oven as we thought it was ready. Its surface was really hard but the bread itself rose better than we expected. Since the baking time for Trial 1’s bread was around 50 minutes, we decided that we should also give Trial 2’s bread around 50 minutes to bake in the oven.

2:27 pm:
We took the bread from Trial 2 out of the oven. Its size was roughly the same as the bread from Trial 1 but its surface was a lot smoother. We wondered if that was because we added more milk/water in Trial 2.
We put the bread aside to let them cool down.

Molding

Both loaves came out relatively dense and with a hard, golden brown crust. However, the Trial 1 loaf had a bit more rise and had more air-pockets when we cut into it, probably due to the fact that the starter we used for this loaf seemed a bit more active. The Trial 2 was thus noticeably denser and had less rise. Although more dense on the whole, however, the Trial 2 loaf had large air pockets and a few distinct layers of pith, seemingly due to the way in which the dough was kneaded and folded. The Trial 2 loaf also had a much smoother crust, possibly because we added more of the milk/water mixture to the dough.




Trial 1 Loaf

3:20 pm:
We started molding using the bread from Trial 1. Sau-yi was molding a ring and Ben was molding a european power adapter. We derived two methods for molding.
First method: We cut the bread into half and we pressed our objects onto one section of the bread without removing or manipulating the pith. This resembles a one-sided mold.
Second method: We tore the pith out of the other section of the bread. We compressed different pieces of pith into the shape, the size and the thickness we wanted and pressed our objects onto the surface of the pith. We also tried to create two-piece molds by putting the objects between two pieces of pith like making a sandwich and pressed the “sandwich” from both sides.



Trial 2 Loaf

3:42 pm:
We cut the bread into half and found out that the texture of the bread inside was not consistent. There were “layers” of pith formed inside the bread, which were more porous than the bread from Trial 1. We figured out that there were problems with our kneading in Trial 2.
After our first trial, we adapted our molding techniques slightly for the Trial 2 loaf. Since the “First method” described above did not produce a good mold, we instead chose to compress the pith before molding in our second trial, having learned that compression created a less porous medium and thus produced a more accurate mold. We used the “sandwich” method described above and tried one-sided molds using compressed pith as well.



Finally, we stored our molds in two separate containers to differentiate those of Trial 1 from those of Trial 2. The recipe called for putting the pith under a “brazier”. We did a little bit of googling and figured out that a brazier was a container for hot coal. We thought the brazier might serve to provide some warmth to the bread molds so that they would dry more quickly. We agreed to put our bread molds next to a closed window so that they would dry in the warmth of the sunlight. The molds had dried and hardened significantly even after a couple of hours on the windowsill. They were left by the window for total of 26 hours and then stored uncovered.

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Name: Sau-yi and Ben
Date and Time: 2016.9.26, around 1pm
Location: Making and Knowing Lab
Subject: Casting


We had a number of molds to choose from when the time came for casting. We decided on four: two from the trial 1 loaf that we simply cut in half and pressed our objects into, and two from our trial 2 loaf that we extracted pith from and compressed/manipulated before using for molding.

Due to time constraints, we had to be selective in determining which variables to test for creating a good cast. For the trial 1 loaf molds, we casted in sulfur, and for the trial 2 molds, we casted with beeswax, though ideally we would have tried both wax and sulfur for each. When pouring wax and sulfur into the molds, we found Ben’s power-adaptor molds easier to manage than Sau-yi’s ring in spite of the latter’s relatively simple shape. The ring formed slim, shallow depressions on the bread molds, which required more careful pouring to prevent the wax and sulfur from spilling. However, the pouring also had to be done quickly so that the molten wax and sulfur would not cool down and solidify. The wax ended up flowing over the edge of the ring depression, but the sulfur did not. The problem of spilling was less serious for Ben’s power-adaptor molds because of the adequate depth of the depressions.

The bread had become really dry and hard by the time of casting, which made extracting the wax and sulfur casts more difficult than we had thought. The beeswax molds came out relatively neatly. Because we chose to mold fairly simple objects exhibiting little in the way of intricate detail, our casts replicated the surfaces of the original objects fairly well for this trial. The ring-shaped mold was extracted on the same day as casting, and there were difficulties with keeping the object intact as the bread was scraped away. Sau-yi spent almost half an hour extracting the ring mold from the bread and ended up breaking the ring despite her persistent efforts. She however tried to “repair” by melding the two broken parts together by hand while the wax was still a little bit sticky. Her fingers hurt after the extracting the wax cast as she had been using her nails to scratch away the dried bread pith.

To help with this problem, the beeswax power-adapter mold was left to soak in water until Wednesday, 9/28. By this time the bread had nearly completely dissolved away from the mold, and only small bread particles had to be rinsed off.

Unfortunately, extracting the sulfur casts took more time than expected. Metal carving tools were used to chip and scrape away at the bread surrounding the cast. We realized these casts probably would have benefitted from the soaking method, as the bread medium had dried and hardened (as already mentioned), making extraction of the cast time and labor intensive. Ben became somewhat impatient during this process, which led to some sloppy extraction work that resulted in some cracking on the cast.

Thus, we left our sulfur casts to soak on Monday 10/10. On Wednesday 10/12, Ben extracted his power adapter cast from the soaked mold. Unfortunately, due to the fact that he cracked the cast earlier while attempting to extract it from the un-soaked mold, the prongs on the power adapter did not survive in the final cast. The sulfur cast was noticeably more textured and bumpy than the wax cast was, probably due to the fact that the sulfur mold was made from the un-compressed, more porous bread, while the wax cast was made using the mold made from compressed, smooth bread pith.

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[1] Albala, Ken. Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (2006), p. 25.
[2] “...make your Manchetts, and let them stande almost an hower in the ouen.” In “The making of fine Manchet,” The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin. London 1594, 1597. http://www.staff.uni-giessen.de/gloning/ghhk/

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