Breaking Bread with the Past: Making an 18th Century Dough Bowl
The Art of Chipping Away at a Block of Maple Until Something Useful Appears The finished bowl, ready for use. A dough bowl, also called a kneading trough, is a wooden vessel traditionally used for mixing, raising, and kneading yeast dough for making bread. It was hand carved from a single piece of wood. It could be oval, round or rectangular in shape, and vary in size and width—typically from 24" to 36" long, 10" to 18" wide, and 3" to 8" deep. It often had small handles or grips on either end. Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings often depict bakers using a similar vessel to knead dough for bread making; in literature, they are mentioned as early as 1386 in Chaucer’s The Miller's Tale. This type of dough bowl was typically used by home bakers for small batches of bread; large scale commercial bakeries or bread makers for large households used a much larger, lidded, framed container called a dough box or dough trough. A good dough bowl ...