[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/1/2016 4:44:25 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
ddfr at daviddfriedman.com writes:

Then you  add to it 3 lbs 2 oz of water (does 
"refraichir" imply water?),  
I'm,pretty sure it does. Liebaut explicitly uses it in that sense at one  
point.

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?

That makes sense to me.


. 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.  
Not necessarily. The poor quality bread could be VERY poor quality. A  
statute from another region describes the local bread as “coarse dense poorly 
baked, heavy and little  risen”.

The 
other half,  which is a mixture of flour and bran, you put aside for 
other  uses.

In fact, that is usually what made up the middling quality of bread.



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. 
My own guess is that all the direct instructions are meant to apply only to 
 the good white bread (the object of the test). Everything else is put 
aside to  be processed separately. But that's only 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