This post is rather late. Sorry.

On Sunday I made another attempt at dutch oven bread, this time an unenriched loaf. I didn't have a lot of time, so I couldn't do pure sourdough. But I did want some sourness, so I used some starter in addition to poolish as a pre-ferment.

I wasn't really working from a recipe or anything, so I just kinda improvised. I ended up with about 400g each of poolish and sourdough starter. To that I added about 600g of bread flour, some salt, some instant yeast, and enough water to bring it to about 70% hydration.

I let it rise in a plastic tub, then moved it to the dutch oven to proof. After an hour of proofing, I placed the oven in a preheated 550°F oven to bake with the lid on for 20 minutes. Then dropped the temp to 450° and uncovered for 20 more minutes.

It turned out just fine. Not exceptional, but quite tasty (if large. 12in is just too big for a loaf.)

posted: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:57 | permanent link to this entry

OK, so not exactly plain.

It has been a while since I've written anything about bread. And since I've baked bread, too! I wasn't up for a full sourdough cycle, so I decided to try a quick experiment: simple, fast, direct dough white bread, but baked in a dutch oven.

It worked just fine. I got a 12in diameter, 2in tall disk of perfectly tasty, and very fluffy, bread. I mean, it isn't award winning or anything, but I didn't really expect much from 3 hours of fermentation.

The dough was pretty standard enriched white bread, probably about what you'd find in most bread-maker recipes. Perhaps a little wetter than average, but not by much. The dutch oven was a cast iron 12in Lodge camp oven (some of my readers probably know this oven well). I let the dough proof in the dutch oven, then put them both in our kitchen oven, preheated to 400°F to bake. I baked 20min with the lid on for steam, then uncovered for about 20 more minutes to generate top crust. That seemed to work out decently, but of course the sides touching the iron directly had a much crispier crust.

The loaf came out of the oven perfectly, so there was minimal cleanup required. I may be testing out the dutch oven baking technique more throughly over the coming days. It certainly is easy.

posted: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:40 | permanent link to this entry