Yesterday is almost a year to the day since I "rented" Tartine from Amazon for free and started making sourdough. Coincidentally I changed something up yesterday that really worked for me. I read somewhere on the pit that there were two camps on preheating the dutch oven inside the oven. News to me. Thank you to whoever wrote that. It got me thinking. My bread is not really ever burned on the bottom but it is really tough and difficult to cut and chew. This is despite having a pizza stone on the rack directly below the combo cooker. I decided to preheat the oven until the notification beep went off and then pull the bottom pan of the combo cooker out onto the stovetop and leave the dome inside the oven. This way the bottom of the combo cooker wouldn't be room temp but also wouldn't be 550 F. Not only was the bottom of the boule much less tough, the oven spring was outrageous and the crumb was finally more open.
The only other time I had results like this was when I used my parents convection oven. I think because the heat source in my oven is a gas burner in the bottom there was an imbalance in the heating of the boule that was not only making the bottom of the loaf tough but actually limiting the oven spring as well. By using a cooler pan but still heating the dome I think I managed to correct the imbalance.
This infernal hobby is a lot of trial and error so hopefully someone can benefit from this information. No pictures because these boules were snapped up too quickly. However, my wife has a cold and I can't go to work until she gets a negative covid swab due to the procedure manual, so I am going to see if my results are repeatable tomorrow.
The only other time I had results like this was when I used my parents convection oven. I think because the heat source in my oven is a gas burner in the bottom there was an imbalance in the heating of the boule that was not only making the bottom of the loaf tough but actually limiting the oven spring as well. By using a cooler pan but still heating the dome I think I managed to correct the imbalance.
This infernal hobby is a lot of trial and error so hopefully someone can benefit from this information. No pictures because these boules were snapped up too quickly. However, my wife has a cold and I can't go to work until she gets a negative covid swab due to the procedure manual, so I am going to see if my results are repeatable tomorrow.
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