April 10, 2017 - 12:58pm
Baker's Method, Oven or Ingredients?
What do you suppose is the cause of breads beautifully browned and curved up nearly like a cheese wheel in this video? Pretty amazing!
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What do you suppose is the cause of breads beautifully browned and curved up nearly like a cheese wheel in this video? Pretty amazing!
but you can come darn close in a home oven too! Use good fresh ingredients, a healthy lively starter and a very hot oven with some of way of steaming the loaves. It could be covering the loaf with a pan and baking on a stone, or baking the loaves in Dutch ovens or putting water in a pan to produce steam. And the most important is to bake the loaves long enough so they are dark, dark, dark!
Well, I think I have hit all the marks you mention above. I think my bread tastes pretty good. I do not get anywhere close to those spectacular looking loaves. There seems to be a lot of surface tension built up in their dough. My breads have more the shape of a Hershey's Kiss than those colossally great boules.
if you are taken by the profile of those loaves, the relatively low hydration and the use of high gluten flour both help them stand up tall...
On shape, the short answer to the question is method, and specifically the methods at 2:23-2:52 and 3:54-4:32 of the video.
Hydration (I'm squinting at the recipe at the end) looks to be about 66% and will feel a bit less because of the rye. So it's a very kneadable dough, and you can see it gets throughly kneaded. So the first question would be whether you're kneading to the point of passing the windowpane test.
Even without skillful shaping, a well-kneaded and not-overproofed loaf of that kind should dome up nicely in the oven. The video shows you additional skilled shaping to get a taut skin for a taller and rounder loaf. It gets slashed before going into the oven because otherwise it would bust open during baking.
Anyway, if you're doing these things and still not getting the shape you want, I'd suggest posting a picture of a cut-open loaf, because folks here are wizards at diagnosing loaves from the crumb.