[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[David Friedman]

I've been trying to make sense of some detailed instructions for making 
bread on Jim Chevallier's blog, coming out of a 1499 account of a bread 
trial in Limoges. So far as I know, it's the only detailed bread recipe 
we have from period outside of the Islamic corpus. The following is my 
version, reduced down to a single loaf:

Combine 12 oz of white flour with 2 oz of sourdough.

According to Jim, the sourdough is simply old dough from a previous 
batch--not the sourdough culture that we use now.

The next day add .66 oz water (~4t !!!) and .08 oz salt (~ 1/3 t)

"To prepare both white and brown "besides the 10 pounds declared for 
leavening in the paton, 13 pounds 2 ounces" were added"

(the recipe is making white loaves from the bolted white flour, brown 
bread from the bolted bran. The flour for the white bread weighs about 
six times the flour for the brown bread. My best guess is that this is 
adding more leavening, divided between the two batches of dough. Scaled 
down to one loaf of white bread, it comes to a little over two ounces. 
But that isn't how I have interpreted it in my experiments, for reasons 
that should become clear.)

The dough for the white loaf now weighs 15 ounces.

Let it rise and bake it.

It will occur to bakers that this recipe is impossible. You can't make 
dough by adding four teaspoons of water to three cups of flour. The 
sourdough doesn't help, since it's presumably the same mix of flour and 
water as the dough.

I tried making it on the assumption that the addition was not sourdough 
but water, which gives me an extra quarter cup or so of water. That 
still isn't enough to make a dough, although it comes closer. Adding a 
quarter cup or so more water gives a very stiff dough, but not 
impossible, and baking it gives something not too unlike french bread.

Several possible solutions occurred to me:

1. French bread was apparently made from soft wheat. Our standard bread 
flour is from hard wheat. Hard wheat is said to absorb more water than 
soft wheat. So I tried doing it with pastry flour, which is from soft 
wheat. It still needed more water than the recipe said.

2. The flour in the recipe is fresh ground. Perhaps that's moister than 
our commercial flour. I tried grinding wheat and sieving it, probably 
not nearly as well as they did—the "white" flour was still pretty brown. 
Still didn't work.

3. Perhaps Jim is wrong about the sourdough and I should be using my 
sourdough, which is half water, half flour. That gets an extra ounce of 
water at the beginning, but that isn't enough--and if I assume that the 
later addition is leavening, which seems the natural reading of the 
text, that part gives me an ounce less water than when I assumed it was 
water. I haven't tried that version.

Another possibility is that the water in the recipe is what you add 
early for some reason, and that it is taken for granted that you later 
add whatever is needed to make a suitable dough. But the text I'm 
working from is a very detailed description of a bread trial, presumably 
part of the process for regulating what bakers did. Further, it 
specifies pieces of dough weighing 15 ounces each, which is almost 
exactly what I get if I follow the instructions straight.

The simplest solution is to assume that, for some reason that hasn't 
occurred to me, the flour they were using was relatively damp. That 
provides the extra water while still being consistent with the final 
weight. I'm running an experiment now, adding 1/4 c of water to the 
initial flour (reduced by two ounces to get the total back to 12 
ounces). That ought to make the initial fermentation, done before the 
instructions add any water, work better.

Another possibility is that the text I have is wrong. Perhaps Jim made a 
mistake in translation, or perhaps there is a scribal error somewhere. 
But it's hard to see what error could leave the final weight of the 
dough almost exactly equal to the weight of the ingredients that go into 
it.

Suggestions?

For anyone who wants to look at the text I am working from, Jim's blog is:

http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2015/09/french-bread-history-making.html

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