Bread With Jam

Tag: Stone

  • Steam power!


    I baked my second loaf using the oven stone this morning, and as I was getting ready to put the dough in the oven, I remembered Dad saying something about “misting the oven.” This is a step I haven’t taken before, and I’ve noticed a couple things.

    First, when I’ve made loaves in the dutch oven – which helps retain more humidity around the loaf when you have the lid on for the first 2/3 of the bake – the resulting crust is…well, quite crusty (in a good way).

    When I’ve made loaves without the dutch oven, either cooking them on a baking sheet or on the oven stone, the crust is much thinner and softer.

    So I thought, perhaps this “misting” step is important for the crusty crust.

    I didn’t have a mister, but looking in Peter Reinhart’s “Artisan Breads Every Day,” I found the author suggested one can also use a “steam pan” to add humidity to the oven. He recommends adding hot water to a pre-heated steam pan (below the oven stone – be careful not to spill water on the stone) just before putting the dough in the oven.

    Since I was in a hurry, and not reading the directions that carefully (like, how much water?) I put cold water into a baking sheet that just happened to be pre-heated under my stone (lucky break, I often store pans in the oven for lack of cupboard space). It created quite a blast of steam and warped the pan so much I thought I might have a spill. (A little more water and the pan un-warped). Then I closed the door and waited another five minutes or so before putting the dough in (should I have done it right away when there was more steam?)

    The bread that finally came out was indeed more crusty – somewhere between the dutch-oven bread and the no-steam/no-dutch-oven bread. Also, I had to let the surface get quite dark before the internal bread temp finally crested 180 with ease – when I put the thermometer in the first time, the dial virtually crawled from 175 to 180.

    After cooling, I cut into the first couple inches. Crust aside, the inside looked good. A bit more dense, particularly toward the bottom, but this was a 50/50 whole wheat dough. I’ll add some pictures soon.

  • Fibrament Baking Stone

    One of the principles of artisan baking is to have a hot oven. Most ovens do not exceed 550 degrees and that is good for most of the loaves I’ve been baking. For thinner bread products, such as pizzas, pitas or focaccias, it would be better to have even a hotter oven, if you can get it. However the ordinary home oven, even pretty expensive ones, are not going to get you there.

    So, what to do? One option is to install a wood burning oven in your kitchen or back yard. No matter how you slice it (excuse the pun…) that is expensive, if not impossible in many situations. But with that type of oven you can get temps in excess of seven or eight hundred degrees.

    For those thin products, you also have the option of baking on a grill which, by the way, is a lot of fun. Some grills can approach those temperatures. But, again, that isn’t often the best of solutions for a number of reasons.

    So, the next best thing to getting to those temperatures, is to retain the maximum temperature for as long as you can. The key to that is to have a large thermal mass to hold that heat in the oven as you open and close the door. For this reason, you’ll see a lot of baking stones sold in places such as Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Most of these are round and just a little bigger than a pizza, and frankly not all that thick (low thermal mass).

    So, here is the stone to beat all stones for home (or commercial) ovens. I bought one of these a few months ago, and have since purchased them for some of my baking friends. Wow, major heat retention! Each stone is 3/4 inches thick and if you get one sized right for your oven, you should be able to bake a 2 or 3 loaves at a time. You can leave it in the oven nearly all the time (I have left it in during the cleaning cycle, because I forgot to take it out. But I’ll probably take it out in the future. The manufacturer says you can leave it in the oven with certain cautions.)

    Make SURE you understand what size to get before you order it. The one I got is $70, but MEASURE before you order.

    I’ll be buying a new oven soon, probably this week as a result of a kitchen remodel, and I’ll be getting another one of these for the second oven (double wall oven). And one of these days, I’ll get one for the gas grill also.

    This is a good product. Shipping is included and arrives generally within the week.