pizza stone

After reading this site (and many others) for some time, I have read and learned many tricks and tips from fantastic bakers on how to make a better loaf.  My goal is to just keep improving and making my loaves a little better each time.  I don't really make them for anyone in particular.  My wife will have a piece once in a while but I usually make bread for myself.  I think I've achieved a pretty consistent recipe that yields a fairly consistent loaf, and I would like to use this blog spot to discuss the different cooking vessels for baking the bread.  Although the cooking vessel won't necessarily improve the flavor of the loaf, it's interesting to see what kind of difference these things make while baking. 

In the next few post, I plan share with you all the results of my baking so that we can all see what an average (or sub-average) baker with readily available (and relatively inexpensive) tools and equipment can make in his home kitchen.  In particular, I will use my standard recipe as a control and will bake the loaves in: a sheet pan, on a pizza stone, in a dutch oven, on some newly-acquired fire brick, and maybe even on my grill with some of the aforementioned vessels so that we can all actually see what we get when we cook bread using these different techniques.

I hope to start in the next few days and will use the following "Plain as Jane" white bread recipe for all future loaves in this series:

4 cups AP flour (unbleached, of course)
1 1/4 cups water
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs salt
1 packet of yeast

This has produced a somewhat bland but soft and tasty loaf for m and I will use it as a control in my upcoming "experiments".

After this series is over, I will explore different recipes in order to expand the flavor of the loaves but, as Alton Brown says, that's another show.

I decided after a few sensible, somewhat alarmist, posts here on TFL that i would not buy unglazed flooring tiles (terracotta, saltillo, etc) for use in my oven. There are too many health concerns involved with the manufacturing and raw material differences between flooring tiles and bakeware. Any cause for concern should not be ignored. It's likely that flooring tiles could be perfectly fine to bake with. On the other hand, maybe not.

It helps that I'm getting a good amount of money back after taxes, which I decided to spend on a baking stone and other baking equipment. And to keep track of what I could get, I'm putting together this list:

Sur La Table, (Best Manufacturers) $42, 14x16x5/8

Old Stone, (via Amazon) firebrick, $29.95, 14x16x?

Breadtopia, Fibrament, $51, 13x17.5x3/4, $69, 15x20x3/4

Ace Mart, American Metalcraft, Corderite, $44, 14x16x1/2

Central Restaurant, Fibrament, $58.49, 15x20x3/4

i never thought i'd see the day that sur la table looked like an economic option!