[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[David Friedman]

If you assume 58 lbs of flour and 9lbs of bran (not actually bran but 
flour with a good deal of bran in it) plus ten pounds of leaven, how do 
you end up with a total weight of bread, white and dark, of only about 
68 pounds? Even if you assume that, at some point in the process, ten 
pounds was pulled out to leaven the next batch, which I don't think the 
text says, you have 67 pounds of flour producing only 68 pounds of bread.

And it's even worse for the white bread, where you have 58 pounds of 
flour (plus salt and perhaps leaven) producing just under 53 pounds of 
bread. Not possible. Which is why my interpretation starts with 
substantially less than 58 pounds of white flour.

I was assuming that your version of the leaven added flour and perhaps a 
little water to the old dough, left that over night to freshen the 
sourdough, then added that and water to the main flour to make the 
dough. But I gather that on your interpretation, the leavening goes into 
the main body of flour, with water, rises over night, then a little more 
flour is added.

I'll be trying it on my assumption tomorrow.

On 2/1/16 9:10 PM, Terry Decker wrote:
> Right.  Assuming 58 lbs. of flour, 9 lbs. of bran and 6 oz. of salt 
> with a total shaped dough weight of 84 lbs. 7.75 oz. make right at 17 
> lbs. of water.  That means the white bread is about 3.4:1 flour to 
> water by weight. A little heavy by modern standards but lighter than 
> the manchet recipes I've worked with.
>
> My thoughts about rasfraichir come from experience.  Modern practice 
> is not to let dough collapse.  It usually occurs when the yeast is too 
> active. I've had it happen and recovered by adding flour to stiffen 
> the dough. Letting the first rise collapse or come close to collapse 
> when working with sourdough ensures the dough is thoroughly leavened.  
> By my reading (which may be shaky) the dough was assembled (water, 
> flour, leaven) on the 25th of February and allowed to rise and (maybe) 
> collapse (probably 8 to 12 hours). "Lendemain," "the next day," the 
> 26th of February, the "paston," "dough roll," was refreshed with 3 
> lbs. 2 oz. (of flour).  The salt was then added. The prestir was 
> recovered.  The dough was then divided, shaped and allowed to rise 
> (about 2 hours) until the bakers declared it ready for the oven.
>
> Bear
>
>
>
> On 2/1/16 7:34 PM, Terry Decker wrote:
>> Without a measure of the liquid in the dough, there is no way to use 
>> this description as a recipe.
> The description includes the weight of the dough before you put it into
> the oven. Subtract the weight of the flour and leaven and salt and you
> have the weight of the water.
>
> Your reading of raifrescir is interesting. It would explain why you seem
> to do this the day before you add the leaven to the flour.
>

-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/