[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[Terry Decker]

Very interesting.

Let's eliminate any weight discrepancies.  The French livre (or pound) was 
set in 1350 and was retained until replaced by the metric system.  It 
consists of 16 oz. or 2 marcs (8 oz.).  It is about .08 lbs. more than the 
standard American pound and comes in at 489.5 grams.  There is no issue of 
conversion in the ratios describe and they can translate directly into the 
American standard measures.

The directions specify the following ingredients:

58 pounds               flour
10 pounds               leavening

  3.125 pounds        water
    .375 pounds        salt
13.125 pounds        "other"

  9 pounds               bran


This recipe makes no sense unless "other" is liquor (water, milk, etc.). 
That makes the ratio about 3.5:1 flour to water by weight.  Stiff, but 
workable.

Then there is the question of whether the levain is hard or soft.  I'm going 
to assume a soft leaven of 1:2 flour to water by weight.  A hard leaven 
needs to be broken apart in a warm liquid before use.  In fact, for a recipe 
like this, I would have used the 3.125 pounds of water to break apart the 
soft leaven to get a better spread of yeast through the dough.

All of the ingredients weighed together excepting the bran are 84.625 lbs..

The dough for the white loaves weighs 71.25 lbs..  The dough for the coarse 
loaves weighs 13.23 lbs. minus 9 lbs. of bran giving 4.23 lbs. of dough. 
75.48 lbs. total.  Subtracting that from 84.625 lbs. yields 9.145 lbs. or 
about what is expected when recovering the levain from the current batch of 
dough.  These measures suggest that coarse bread is made 2:1 bran to dough 
by weight.

Bread loses roughly 25 percent of it's weight in baking with some variation 
for moisture retention in various flours.  The total weight of the finished 
bread (just over 66 lbs.) is approximately 78 percent of the total dough 
weight plus the 9 lbs. of bran.

The weights I would experiment with for a white loaf are:

480 g.                     flour
  85 g.                     starter
  26 g.                     water
110 g.                     "other" water
    3 g.                     salt

And a baking time of 40-45 min. in a 400 degree F oven.

This should produce a loaf of roughly 1 lb. 2 oz., a little larger than the 
ones described, but still in the ball park.

I am of the opinion that the smaller amount of liquid is used to hydrate the 
starter no matter what the description says.  I have encountered a 
description of a modern French baker transporting his levain, about the size 
of a soccer ball, half way around the world.  The levain was used to leaven 
commercial batches of bread and recovered from the dough created, so I have 
no reason to doubt Jim's description of the starter.

I wouldn't worry about the differences between soft and hard flours moisture 
content, but the freshness of the flour might cause a problem.  Resting the 
flour for three days before bolting lets some of the excess moisture escape. 
You should also consider that this is a whole wheat flour and has a higher 
fat content than white flours.

I don't know what you used for sieving, but medieval flour for white bread 
usually went through a coarse sieve, a fine sieve and a cloth sieve.  That 
last one makes for some very finely ground flour, but it is labor intensive.

It should be noted that no times are given for the time of the first rise, 
so we don't know how long it sat after the dough was mixed before shaping 
although the actual test began on the 25th and ingredients were added the 
next day.  The second rise was two hours.  Other than those, we have no idea 
of the timing or on what day the test ended.

A transcription of the original text would be of interest.

Bear




-----Original Message----- 
From: David Friedman
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2016 2:21 AM
To: Cooks within the SCA
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

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/

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