Bread Molding Reconstruction
[For an abridged version, see Isabella Lores-Chavez's field notes.]
Table of Contents
Date and Time:
2016.09.19, 04:10pm
Location: Stronach Center, SchermerhornSubject: Primary Plan
Target recipes: 140v_1 and 140v_2
Aims/Objectives
- To create a “neat mold”: what does “neat” mean?
- To understand what makes a good mold
- To understand why bread was used as one possible molding material
- To get a sense of the labor/process of making the mold and casting from it
- To test our ability to verbalize the experience of making bread
Practical challenge: we are both going away for the weekend. We need run the entire experiment (and get satisfactory results) in 3.5 days.
Strategies: making a liberal use of field notes from FA14 - we consider them as accumulated info that we can (and are allowed to) depend on - to save time on certain decision-making processes.
Questions
- p140v_1 “mold whatever you want into it & let it dry & you will have very neat work” - mold and leave it to dry before taking out the model? How to dry? Using heat (oven)? Ambient temp?
- We can do two attempts: one, we dry using the heat of the oven, and the second we dry just in ambient temperature.
- p140v_2 “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 bread straight 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.” We cannot think of any bread that would shrink to such a noticeable degree. What kind of bread is this? Does this have anything to do with the porosity of the pith?
- Was “bread” in the manuscript specifically made for this use? Or could it be any bread? In urban areas of C18 France, most bread had to be procured through bakers for reasons of price regulation. Was this the case in the C16? Is the bread basically what is now referred to as pain de campagne (the term, however, was created in the C20)?
- How hot does the pith have to be to impress the pattern? “The bread straight from the oven is best,” suggesting that hot pith is more effective.
- In p140v_1, the author writes “To cast in sulfur, arrange the pith of the bread under the brazier.”
- In p140v_2, he writes, “Mold it with the pith of bread just out of the oven, or like that aforementioned,” suggesting that the aforementioned--putting the pith under brazier--is an alternative to using bread directly from the oven. This indicates to us that the bread pith needs to be hot to be most effective.
- To what extent are we to manipulate the pith from a freshly baked loaf? Can we knead it? Otherwise, the bread from the oven will have a texture too porous to allow any “neat” impression of the pattern. Are we to compact it, pressing it against the pattern to form a denser mass? How does the oil content in the manchet going to affect this (manchet has butter and milk)?
- How should we cut the pith once it is dry and has the pattern impressed into it? How neat do the cuts have to be? We will use an X-acto knife.
References
Link to Roze’s Wiki: __https://making-and-knowing.wikischolars.columbia.edu/Bread+Molding+Reconstruction+Field+Notes__
Bread Recipe 1 (From Roze)
Lady Arundel’s Manchet, c. 1654, from __http://historyofbread.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/lady-of-arundels-manchet/__
450gr strong white flour
1 egg, beaten
25gr unsalted butter, softened
Pinch salt
40gr sourdough starter/5gr of dried yeast (mixed up with the warm milk and 100gr of the flour into a ferment, or add straight to dough)
300ml warm milk
Combine the first five ingredients thoroughly and knead for ten minutes until a good dough, fairly slack, this needs to be a soft, pudding type bread although definitely not a cake. Let rise for half an hour (or for a better, if less accurate, bake – around two hours) and bake in a greased tin for around 45 mins at 180C or until brown and crusty all over.
Name: Charles Kang & Isabella Lores-Chavez
Date and Time:
2016.09.20, 11:20am
Location: Upper East SideSubject: First Meeting
Sourdough starter is out of the fridge. Feeding seems necessary. Using the feeding info from __here__.
1st recipe (Rye & Whole Wheat Sourdough)
3 ¾ oz. stone ground whole wheat flour
3 ¾ oz. rye flour
Approx. 4 oz. sourdough starter
½ tsp salt
We set the dough to rise for the first time at 12:15 pm, after kneading it by hand for about 15 minutes. We put the bowl with the dough in the living room to leave it to rise.
At 5:40 pm, we are beating the air out of the dough after it has been rising for 5 ½ hours. Kneading it for 4 minutes, we are finding that it is really sticky and feels almost like clay. It also smells very sour. We’re setting it rise again as of 5:46 pm, and it will sit rising overnight.
When we bake it on the evening of Sep 21, we will cook it at 475 degrees for 30 minutes as per the recipe, and then we will cook it at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes--5 minutes less than what the recipe calls for, in efforts to create a slightly undercooked pith.
2nd recipe (Lady Arundel’s Manchet)
450gr whole wheat flour
40gr sourdough starter
1 egg, beaten
Pinch of salt
25gr softened butter
300ml warm milk
We kneaded this dough for a little over 16 minutes--very sticky at first, sticking a lot to the sides of the bowl, but eventually came together nicely.
At 1:06 pm we put the dough in a bowl covered with saran wrap to rise for about an hour.
(At 3:14 pm, our sourdough starter is active again.)
3:14 pm the oven is turned on to a little over 350F. We grease a round cake pan and put the dough in it. The dough has been rising for a little over 2 hours at this point.
At 3:45, we are putting the dough in the oven.
4:30, first check. Touched the bread, and the crust didn’t feel hard enough (this is based on my familiarity with bread). It already looks very different from the picture on the blog (add link later), but somewhat similar to the one in Roze’s pictures. Decided that we needed 10 more minutes.
3rd recipe (Whole Wheat Sourdough)
8 oz whole wheat flour
5 oz sourdough starter
Pinch of salt
Water
This version of the wheat dough was easier to knead and came together into a nice elastic dough quickly. (Is it easier because we have trained with the other doughs? Possible!)
We decided to try a recipe that was all wheat flour (no rye flour) but still not as fancy as the manchet.
By the time this dough (#3) was ready, the first dough (#1) had risen substantially. The size comparison was very reassuring--can material itself offer feedback?
We set it to rise at 4:05 pm.
How to mold?
- Wrap an object entirely in the pith, and cut the whole thing using a sharp knife when dry
- Make two pieces out of the pith, and press them together with the pattern in between. Make sure to come up with some method to guide reassemblage (Roze used pencils).
[CK] Assuming that the manchet has finer texture than sourdough, I will press the head of my C18 coin for a single-sided mold. Perhaps finer texture will catch more details? I will first gather some pith and press/compact it.
[ILC] Because the manchet will be the larger of the two breads today, I will use the manchet pith to try the frog as a pattern. I can make the impression by wrapping the pith all around it. As we wrap the pith, we will put a pencil between the frog’s eyes 1) as an indicator of where to cut once dry, and 2) as a channel for casting.
Mold Assay #1
Patterns: a rubber frog, a corked glass jar, an ointment jar, a C18 silver coin (attached to a pillbox), a figurine of Hera
The first bread to come out of the oven is the manchet (#2), which we will both use to make our first molds:
The bread is heavy and noticeably dense. Brown and nicely baked crust, slightly undercooked interior. The pith is uniformly dense, with no noticeable pockets of air. It feels slightly oily to the touch, probably because of the butter. The bread itself is very bland.
The pith is very crumbly when we try to make the molds. We have to really press and pack the pith to get it to stick together. It doesn’t seem wet enough to stick together; it cracks easily when pressure is applied to it. We had to press into thick chunks in order to wrap the pith around the objects.
As we are working, it becomes clear why the pith has to be worked with right out of the oven. If it were any drier, it would be extremely difficult to pack together. Already 10 minutes later, the remaining pith is drier and crumblier; the bit of moisture that it has right after the bread has been sliced is helpful in packing it together. Nevertheless, the heat coming off the pith is disorienting to work with initially.
The frog was too soft a material to press against. Because the bread is soft but also crumbly, making the mold against harder surfaces was easier. We molded the little ointment jar, the silver coin, and the little corked glass jar. The coin and the ointment jar will make two-dimensional molds; the corked glass jar will be a three-dimensional mold. We inserted a pencil into the top of the corked glass jar mold, to create a channel and to guide us where to cut; the pencil is placed against the cork of the jar.
We set the molds to dry (ambient temperature, right where we left them) at 4:51 pm.
As we are watching the molds dry, we are wondering how we will store them until Monday, when we will bring them to class. We don’t want them to crack by becoming too dry… where should they be stored? What temperature? We decide to leave it out to dry until bedtime tonight and then store in glass containers. Refrigerate? Roze’s field notes mention that her molds started to be moldy after a few days, and we have almost a full week to go.
We have some leftover pith so we are going to reheat it (“under the brazier”)––we are putting the pith on a sheet in the toaster oven and broiling it on low for 3 minutes (is this close enough to “under the brazier?”) or until hot to the touch. We will then try to make a mold using this reheated pith.
Hera figurine has now been pressed into the pith that we reheated and is drying as of 5:13 pm.
We took the coin out of the mold and found virtually no impression made in the bread pith. No profile of Louis XV, none of the inscriptions. We looked at the mold closely and we sense that the whole wheat flour is perhaps too grainy to allow for a “neat” impression. Did the author-practitioner have access to some kind of finely-ground flour? (Referring to RL and JR’s field notes, we notice that they used unbleached white whole wheat flour, sifted). It remains to be seen if this first bread’s pith was too dry to begin with: if we were to undercook the bread slightly, would the pith be doughier and therefore more amenable to accepting an impression?
We will try a fourth bread, using the manchet recipe and bleached white flour, finely ground and possibly enriched.
Next, we took the ointment jar out of the mold. The impression was nice in places, but broken at the very bottom. We had pressed the jar into the mold to such an extent that the jar ended up breaking through the bottom of the mold (and touching the table surface). The contours of the ointment jar did set nicely into the bread.
We tried cutting the 3D mold of the corked jar using the pencil as a guide and it was much more difficult than expected. We could not successfully cut the mold in two--it started to break as we cut. Compacting had also moved the jar, making it even more difficult to determine where to cut. There were a few places where the impression of the jar did take, but otherwise a completely unusable mold. We think that the pith is too crumbly and too grainy.
CK suggests we need to think more about the actual physical work of molding an object. We were pressing the objects into the pith on the tabletop, and trying to pack the pith around the objects. The problem with that is that we focused on a downward application of pressure, which distracted us from how deeply the object was pushing into the pith; with the ointment jar, this means that we pushed the jar far enough into pit that it burst through the other side. We are considering keeping the pith in the crust, using the crust as an armature of sorts, so that when we press objects into the pith, the bread offers some resistance, helping us press from the opposite direction and preventing the object from coming through.
We are discouraged by the crumbly status of our failed molds, and hope that the pith we work with tomorrow morning will be much more moldable.
We also have to think about the choice to use “stone ground” whole wheat flour. The granules are larger than regular white flour, and they become bigger as they absorb moisture during the dough-working process. This is why the end result has a bite to it when consumed, but it makes a poor material for taking a “neat” impression.
Name: Charles Kang
Date and Time:
2016.09.20, 06:47pm
Location: Upper East SideSubject: Preparing White Sourdough
I am fascinated by the fact that the manchet with stone-ground whole wheat flour turned out to be such a poor molding material. The pith turned out to be too crumbly and coarse to work with. Does this really mean that the author-practitioner had access to bread made with finely ground flour? Or is this a problem specific to the manchet recipe? Fearing that the grind of the flour may have contributed to our difficulty during assay #1, I prepare some white sourdough with bleached, machine-processed, possibly enriched flour that I have around in my kitchen.
4th recipe (White Sourdough)
8 oz white all-purpose flour
5 oz sourdough starter
Pinch of salt
Water
7:30 p.m. Dough #4 is now ready to rise for the first time.
As of now: #1 is all set and sitting until tomorrow; #3 needs to be reworked at around 10 p.m.; #4 needs to be reworked right before bedtime. This is making me very anxious.
Name: Charles Kang
Date and Time:
2016.09.20, 10:02pm
Location: Upper East SideSubject: Reworking Doughs #3 & #4
10:20 p.m. Both doughs have been reworked. Due to personal reasons, I had to postpone our next meeting to the evening of Sep 21. I put all 3 doughs in the fridge so that they would develop more slowly. I will have to determine when I should take them out in preparation of baking. Even with some baking experience, I have to say that I am for the first time acknowledging that a piece of sourdough is a living thing, and that I need to accommodate it.
10:48 p.m. Texting with Isabella. I suggest two things: 1. Staggering the baking of loaves so as to allow ourselves enough time to mold; 2. Starting the baking of the first loaf before Isabella’s arrival so that we can mold with it soon after she arrives. Isabella suggests underbaking the loaf #1 (rye & whole wheat) to see if that works. I suggest cutting the loaf in half when it comes out of the oven. We will carve pith out of one half to mold as we did earlier today. We will then cut the other half horizontally and mold objects (three dimensionally) with the crust on. One question that has to be answered: when we do this, do we weigh the whole thing while drying?
Name: Charles Kang
Date and Time:
2016.09.21, 07:51pm
Location: Upper East SideSubject: Preparing to Bake Dough #1
Turned on the oven to 475F at 7:33 p.m. The dough looks a little flat after almost 24 hours of slow proofing.
Dough #1 goes in at around 8:17 p.m.
Name: Charles Kang & Isabella Lores-Chavez
Date and Time:
2016.09.21, 08:35pm
Location: Upper East SideSubject: Second Meeting
Mold Assay #2
Practical Goals
- Bake 3 loaves: rye-whole-wheat sourdough, plain whole-wheat sourdough, white sourdough. We will have to be very vigilant about timing.
- Mold
8:47 p.m. Lower the temp to 400F and bake for about 15 minutes--5 minutes less than what the recipe calls for, in efforts to create a slightly undercooked pith.
9:03 p.m. Loaf #1 out of the oven. The pith is behaving much better than yesterday. The bread is flatter than I had expected, while still dense.
At 9:40, we put Loaf #3 in the oven. We took the objects out of the molds and the results are much more encouraging. The key, although it will not work as a three dimensional mold, at least had clear impressions on one side. The impression of Hera is neater than yesterday’s, although it’s still hard to tell because it’s a small objects with many details and the bread pith is pretty dark. The impression of the tooth-shaped floss case is decent, although the shape itself is not terribly interesting.
At 10:10, we have lowered the temperature on Loaf #4 and will remove it in 15 minutes.
At 10:25, Loaf #3 is out of the oven. This really looks like bread! The crust is hard. We are using all parts of this loaf to try our method of pressing two halves (with crust attached) to create 3D molds. For this try, we have used the tooth-shaped case, the Kylo-Ren figurine, and the key. We stuck a chopstick into the mold for the tooth-shaped case sideways in order to create a channel. Using the crust on also make it easy to align the two pieces of each mold. At 10:45, we are putting Loaf #4 in the oven and we are taking a look at molds.
The key mold did not take as well as the last one. CK pressed much harder on the first try than on this one, and it seems to have really made a difference; the key’s details were much neater and clearer in the first key mold. One side of the pith with crust on did not take the key impression almost at all.
CK took this half and pressed the key into it again, to create a new mold. This impression is still not as good as the first one. CK is tempted to oil the key, but we have to remind ourselves that the manuscript does not suggest any kind of preparation to the object before making the impression in the pith. It’s frustrating because we feel that with each trial, we are experimenting with the process ourselves: just by doing these successive trials, we feel the urge to make our own recommendations in the efforts to improve the procedure.
The Kylo-Ren mold looks pretty good, although it’s hard to tell what details have actually impressed into the pith. This is probably a case where we won’t know until we cast it. It’s an interesting result; one half of the mold has a much deeper impression, probably because ILC pressed harder into one half than the other.
The tooth-shaped case made a really nice mold this time. Like the Kylo-Ren mold, one half has a deeper impression than the other.
Loaf #4 came out of the oven at 11:35. We are making impressions of the key (3D), Hera (3D), the corked bottle (3D), and Kylo-Ren.
The corked bottle impression is excellent! In general, though, the bread seems to be too porous. This may be why the corked bottle is the most successful mold with this loaf: its hard glass surface really pressed into the bread pith and made a good impression. The Kylo-Ren impression is good but the structure of the mold is questionable; it may fall apart. We’ll have to re-evaluate when it dries.
As we pressed the key and Hera into the same piece of bread (with crust on), it became clear that loaf #4 had a much springier and porous texture than the previous three loaves. It’s very disconcerting, since no matter how much the bread was pressed, it would spring back a bit upon release. While the pith had much finer consistency, it also had far more and larger bubbles. As we took apart the mold, crumbs got stuck to the key, making the mold practically illegible. Hera, on the other hand, did come off cleanly but the impression does not too promising.
During our first trial (with dough #2), our big concern was that the coarser ground of the whole-wheat flour would prevent the mold from taking “neat” impressions. With our second trial (with dough #1), we realized that the size of the grain did not affect the ability for the bread to take impressions. It appears that, when fresh out of the oven and pressed against an object, the larger grains can still pack closely and smoothly around its surface (e.g. the key impression, which even registered the engraved numbers on the key).
During our third trial (dough #3), however, we noticed that pith would get stuck to the key. After the last trial (dough #4), we realized that the key corroded gradually. Is this because of the sourdough starter? Is there something acidic in this? We have learned that one should never put a key in hot bread pith.
Name: Charles Kang & Isabella Lores-Chavez
Date and Time:
2016.09.26, 1:30-3:00 pm
Location: Making and Knowing LabSubject: Casting in Sulfur and Wax
I brought the following molds to the lab:
- Key (Charles): single mold, made with loaf #1 (rye & stone-ground whole wheat sourdough)
- Seated Hera figurine (Charles): single mold, made with loaf #1
- Tooth-shaped case (Isabella): single mold, made with loaf #3 (stone-ground whole wheat sourdough)
- Kylo-Ren figurine (Isabella): two-part mold, made with loaf #3
Appearance served as the criterion for my primary selection. I then narrowed it down to the four above so that each of us would have two molds. The final selection ended up with molds made out of two different types of bread.
In the lab, we decided to cast the key and Kylo-Ren in sulfur, and the other two in wax.
A brief aside: I must admit that my assumption about sulfur influenced my decision to cast the key in this material. The key mold was the most detailed of all the molds that Isabella and I produced: it even registered the finely engraved numbers on the bow. Without a specific reason—although I might have read it one of the field notes from previous years—I thought that sulfur would be better at capturing such fine details. Thinking back now, I find this choice strange, because I have seen detailed wax casts for my own research. Did I make the choice simply because I had never really worked with sulfur casts? Or because the manuscript specifically mentions sulfur? More importantly, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to think about the hopes (and fears) that one may have about an unfamiliar material? How are these hopes and fears generated as we transition from reading about a material to handling it? How do the hopes and fears change as we become more familiar with the material? Is this simply another way of explaining skill building? Reining in hopes and fears—is this a by-product of knowledge, or is this knowledge itself? Can we historicize this?
We started with casting in sulfur. White ceramic plates were used as surfaces to place the molds. For the Kylo-Ren mold, we first enlarged the channel and then joined the two pieces using tape. Because the exterior curvature of the bread had to face down (so that the sulfur can be poured down through the channel and into the cavity), we set up a structure to hold the mold in place: two metal cans filled with sand, flanking the mold on its flat sides like bookends; and two metal objects (a rod and a spoon) on the plate to prevent the mold from rolling. For the key mold, we used a metal rod to level the cavity.
Supervised by Joel, Isabella and I took turns to melt powdered sulfur in a metal crucible, set over the hot plate in the fume hood. We agreed that it was a strange process: some of the sulfur clumped and stuck to the sides of the crucible, while the rest melted into a honey-colored liquid at the bottom of the crucible. We kept breaking the clumped sulfur into the liquid in order to facilitate the process. I also tried swirling the crucible so in hopes that the liquid would pull in some of the clump, but it didn’t really work (hence the process was very different from melting sugar, with which I am familiar). To expedite the melting, Joel suggested turning up the heat. We could see vapors rising from the crucible.
Once I had enough liquid sulfur for the key mold, I poured it. Joel suggested steady and quick pouring. Since the cavity was small, it filled in quickly. It also solidified soon, and I could see some bubbles on the exposed surface. Were these the oeillets mentioned by the author-practitioner? I hoped that the other side—the molded side—would not have so many bubbles, assuming that they would simply rise to the exposed surface.
Pouring liquid sulfur into the Kylo-Ren mold was far more complicated. As Isabella poured the sulfur, it leaked through the gap between the two pieces of the mold—even though we had taped them to minimize this gap—onto the plate. Given that we had used a serrated knife to cut the loaf when it came out of the oven, it was not surprising that the two pieces would not join perfectly (a serrated knife takes off some pith as it cuts through the bread, and we had worked with a very hot loaf).
Upon Joel’s suggestion, we made a second attempt. Since some sulfur remained inside the bread to fill in some of the gaps, we thought a second pouring might succeed. We first taped the mold much more extensively. Joel suggested that we set the mold in a tub of sand. The sand would prevent sulfur from flowing rapidly if it were to leak out of the mold. Isabella poured in sulfur until it filled all the way up to the channel opening. After a few seconds, the sulfur sank down, but we decided to leave it (and hope for the best).
Another brief aside: I am curious to know whether the author-practitioner encountered a moment like this and wrote about the experience. Did he think it would be possible to remove all unpredictable elements from his practice? What is happening when we stop experimenting and hope for the best? I keep thinking of a passage from Cellini’s autobiography, in which he talks about throwing in metal crucibles, pans, and plates into the crucible as he was casting Perseus (a last-minute decision made while he was very sick and delirious). Is mastering unpredictability—not necessarily removing it, but at least responding to it in a particular way—part of what we call artistic bravura?
Isabella and I moved onto wax casting. We melted beeswax pallets in a crucible set on a hot plate. Because the setup was on a countertop outside the fume hood, I felt more confident handling it. Or at least, I came to think of the fume hood as a barrier that inhibited my movement. The wax melted quickly and emitted a pleasant smell. The molds sat more or less level on a ceramic plate, and the cavities were deep. For the reason, we did not need any additional structure to level or secure them. Pouring wax was relatively easy. Isabella talked about gaining confidence from sulfur casting, while I thought that the more direct engagement—without a fume hood—made the process feel easier. Thinking back, I would say that both are true. The wax soon turned from clear to opaque, and we did not see any bubbles on the exposed surface.
Isabella left the lab at around 2:30 pm., so I took charge of unmolding the sulfur casts. The process was surprisingly difficult. The dry bread had retained some tensile strength, but not enough to resist my handling. For Kylo-Ren, I had to break the bread in pieces. It soon turned out that some sulfur seeped out into the gap between the two pieces, filling in irregular openings in the bread pith and holding on to it. The pith was sticking so strongly to the sulfur that I could not get rid of all of it. After consulting with Joel and learning about the insolubility of sulfur in water, I decided to leave Kylo-Ren in a can of water in hopes of loosening the breadcrumbs.
Taking the sulfur cast of the key was a little easier, since I was dealing with a single mold. However, the bread was not tensile enough, and it was sticking to sulfur. I had to bend the mold halfway to release the key, but in the process, the key broke in half. Fearing that any further manipulation would cause more damage, I decided to leave the crumbs stuck to some of the crannies. While it was disappointing to break the cast, I was excited that the cast registered many details. When viewed from an oblique angle, the bow showed some of the engraved numbers.
Name: Charles Kang & Isabella Lores-Chavez
Date and Time:
2016.09.29, 2:00-3:00 pm
Location: Making and Knowing LabSubject: Taking Sulfur and Wax Casts out of Molds
Back in the lab, Isabella and I first worked on Kylo-Ren. The cast had been sitting in water for about 71 hours. I had been worried about this, since I feared that the prolonged exposure to water would affect the cast as well as the bread. It turned out that my concern had been excessive, since Kylo-Ren came out of the long bath intact. Using two sculpting knifes, we carefully removed as much bread residue off of the cast as possible.
Soaking had been helpful, since the crumbs became soft. Although larger pieces were easier to remove, it took more meticulous handling to remove smaller pieces. The difficulty can be ascribed to two factors: some crumbs got stuck in tiny openings, making it nearly impossible to fish them out; because the surface of the sulfur was wet, even loose crumbs were sticking to the surface. As a solution to the latter problem, we tried sweeping the surface with a brush.
Although we could not clear the surface completely of bread crumbs, we could see that the cast had captured many details of the pattern. I would even argue that the process of scraping bread crumbs made us even more attentive to the surface, distinguishing actual details registered by the mold from accidental ones. The cast was particularly impressive in retaining the complex design of Kylo-Ren’s helmet to a great extent.
I agree with Isabella’s insightful comment (see her field notes) that a cast out of a mold is not a finished product. For the cast to look exactly like a pattern, we would have to carve away all the extra sulfur that had filled in the gap between the two pieces of the mold and solidified alongside the main cast. Even though casting is understood as a reproductive process, there is clearly a lot of intervention that would be involved in reaching towards some kind of finished-ness. I wonder whether it would be too anachronistic to use the term postproduction here. To what extent is postproduction necessary to maintaining the fantasy of the perfect replica?
Compared to taking the sulfur casts out of their molds, removing the wax casts—Hera and the tooth-shaped case—was much easier. Even after a few extra days, the bread retained some tensile strength, and the experience was comparable to taking a baked good out of its silicone mold (although a very thick mold in this case). I do have to wonder, however, whether I felt more reassured to handle wax because I was more familiar with it. To some extent, the overall roundedness of each pattern—no thin parts—and its relatively simple shape contributed to my relative confidence. I also was more experienced, so to speak, having had taken both sulfur casts out of their molds. But I now wonder to what extent my preexisting familiarity wax allowed me to feel more comfortable in handling those casts.
Both wax casts came out well, although they too would require some finishing to look closer to their patterns. We had to remove some bread crumbs, but they were much easier to remove. Does this have to do with wax as a material? Or does this have to do with my familiarity with the material? Probably both, I think. In any case, it was very unlikely that the type of bread had something to do with the adhesion of breadcrumbs to cast.
