[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[David Friedman]

I'm wondering if the ten pounds of leavening is being set aside but not 
added to the flour. Then you add to it 3 lbs 2 oz of water (does 
"refraichir" imply water?), which gives you 13 lbs 2 oz of softened 
leavening, which you then add to the flour for both kinds of bread. That 
explains why the numbers add up. Could "pour le levain mestre" (or 
nestre--the printing is unclear) mean something like "for the leavening 
master," referring to what is going to be made by combining leavening 
and water?

I am still left with the problem that there isn't nearly enough water in 
the dough to work. But if we interpret the 3 lbs 2 oz as water for 
softening the leavening, it then makes sense that the amount of 
additional water to make the dough might not be specified, which solves 
that problem.

But we still have too much flour. 58 pounds of flour plus some leavening 
plus some water is somehow giving us only 53 pounds of bread coming out. 
I'm wondering if the 58 pound weight could include some part of the bran.

Here is my (not very plausible) theory:

You start with 79 pounds of ground and sifted wheat. You seive and bolt 
it, producing 38 3/4 lbs of white flour plus 40 1/4 lbs of "bran" —not 
bran strictly speaking, but what didn't go through the process that gave 
you the white flour.

You divide that in half. One half you rebolt several times, to get 9 
pounds of pretty good dark flour for the dark bread. What didn't go 
through is very heavily bran (checking a modern source, 79 pounds of 
wheat should give about 12 pounds of bran), so no use for baking. The 
other half, which is a mixture of flour and bran, you put aside for 
other uses.

You now have 38 3/4 lbs of white flour plus 19 1/4 lbs of dark flour = 
58 lbs of flour. Plus 9 lbs of "good dark flour to be used to make dark 
bread" and 12 lbs of ~50% bran, adding up to your original 79 pounds.

Combine 10 pounds of old dough for leavening with 3 pounds 2 ounces of 
water, put 10 1/2 lbs of the mix into the white flour, the rest into the 
good dark flour. Add 22 lbs of water to the white flour, to give a total 
weight of about 71 lbs—76 loaves each weighing 15 ounce before baking. 
Bake it, end up with a total weight of 53 pounds coming out.

I think my numbers add up--whether they are consistent with the text I 
will leave to people whose 15th c. French is better than mine. But I 
intend to try making a loaf on those numbers.

On 2/1/16 2:44 PM, JIMCHEVAL at aol.com wrote:
> I believe it's just a regional variation, indicating the specific item used
>   for the (more general) leavening. Cotgrave records "leveton" as a word for
>   leavening and I suspect both have the sense of the specific mass put in to
>   leaven something as opposed to the general function of the leavening. But
> the  term seems unrelated to any standard French term, so this is
> necessarily a  guess.
>   
> Jim  Chevallier
>
> Contributor, Savoring Gotham
> A Food  Lover's Companion to New York City
> Editor-in-chief: Andrew F. Smith  and Foreword by Garrett Oliver
> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/savoring-gotham-9780199397020?cc=us&
> lang=en
>
>
> In a message dated 2/1/2016 2:36:57 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
> ddfr at daviddfriedman.com writes:
>
> I gather  "levain" is leavening. What's the distinction between that and
> "leave?"
>
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-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/