On Wednesday, I went to the Fort to do some interpreting for a home schooling group. I always love when I have homeschoolers in, because they ask the BEST questions. This group was a fantastic one, and it included a bunch of kids who were very obviously not normal students but who nonetheless were engaged and engaging. I loved their questions, their interest, and their sharing of their own successes and failures.
This particular week, I decided I was going to try a new to me bread recipe. This is a 1750s “receipt” that came to me from the internet, and the original poster received it by way of people in Illinois, who got it from French settlers, who were originally from the New France area during the Fort’s era. With such an illustrious ancestry, I decided this was THE recipe to work with. Also, the recipe only makes a single loaf instead of two, which is nice because I’m rather afloat in bread right now.
It’s an easy loaf, very simple to pull together, with half the kneading required of my other bread. I was excited to give it a try! I got into the Fort, started up the fires to warm the oven and hearth, and pulled out all the items I needed to make my bread: flour, yeast, water (very warm to the touch), and honey. Like I said, simple recipe. To that, I added my big mixing bowl (a shiny wooden bowl with such a fine grain that the dough barely sticks to it) and a wooden spoon for stirring.
As the kids and their accompanying adults trickled in, I started the process of mixing together my ingredients. As a baker with a bit more experience, I started with my water and yeast, rather than the flour (it’s much easier to add flour if your dough is too wet, but much more difficult to add water if it’s too dry). I put 1.5 cups of water into the bowl, and sprinkled it with about a tablespoon of dry active yeast. I explained to the kids that they didn’t have dry active yeast in the 1750s, and most likely would have used either a bit of salt rising (a golf ball sized bit of the last bread dough you made, saved in a bowl of milk and kept in the salt barrel until needed) or the barm off the top of the beer vat as the source of their yeast. Once the yeast started bubbling, I added in a dollop of honey (about 1.5 tbsp) and stirred until it was dissolved.
I started adding in the flour, a scoop at a time. I estimate my scoop gives me about a half to 3/4 of a cup of flour at a time, but I’m at the point in my bread journey that I can guestimate well enough to not need a measuring cup. I knew from the pictures on the website that this would be a very “batter-like” dough, and so I knew approximately when it was ready. This lumpy, yeast-scented blob got left to rise near the fire, in my wooden bowl covered with a floured couche.
About an hour later, I had a lovely, active blob that was about twice the size of the one I’d started with. I punched it down and added more flour, a bit at a time, and began to knead. It didn’t take long to incorporate the flour to the point I thought it was right. I started kneading in earnest. I kept it up until the dough made that lovely change into something smooth and ever so slightly tacky. In my regular bread, this would go back to rise again, but this is a quick recipe and it goes right into the oven at that point.
Therein lay my downfall. The oven really wasn’t up to temperature. I could both see and feel this, but I wanted to get the bread going. I opted to bake the bread in my cast iron, atop a trivet to avoid burning the bottom. I left some very hot coals in the oven, hoping it would compensate for the lack of hot bricks.
The short answer is, it did not. I had my bread in for well over an hour, and while it looked gorgeous and puffy, I knew it wasn’t ready. It was time to leave the Fort and head home, though, so out it came. It appeared stuck in the pie plate I’d had it resting on, so I overturned the loaf onto my cutting board.
The outside crust came off in one piece, and the rest of the dough just slopped out, looking rather like overcooked oatmeal. Oy.
Yes, I had a failure. I know for certain that the oven wasn’t hot enough. I should have baked the bread on the hearth, surrounding the cast iron around with hot coals. Even there, though, I was lacking. I hadn’t built the roaring fire I normally do, and unlike an actual woman of the 1750s, I didn’t have an overnight of hot coals just randomly sitting around waiting for use.
This kind of failure teaches me things. Yes, it taught me I need to get to the fort earlier so I can get the fire going earlier. More than that, though, it reinforced the knowledge that people of the time kept their hearths hot even in the blazing heat of summer, because it was the only way to cook, heat water for cleaning and other things, and to keep the moisture out of their homes. I probably added a little bit much water, considering the moisture in the air, though that’s not a big deal in this case.
I ended up tossing the entire mess. Normally, I wouldn’t do that. I would have scooped up the dough from the interior and popped it into a fry pan and made fried bread. You don’t waste resources in the 1750s! As it was, we were on our way out the door. The dough wouldn’t have made it through the trip home, so in the garbage it went. To the other fort denizens, I reiterated: were I not leaving, this would still have become part of lunch!
Today, I’m back up at the fort again. It’s the last of the school classes for the year. I plan to attempt my bread recipe again. If I succeed, the world will be wonderful. If I fail, I’ll learn more. There is no negative in the failure I had. Honestly, it’s the first major failure I’ve had with bread in many years! I consider myself lucky to be given the opportunity to learn more, especially from such an old recipe.
What failures have you learned from, recently?
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