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I have a Zio Ciro “Subito Cotto” wood fired pizza oven that allows me to obtain a floor temp of 700-750°F for beautiful pizzas. I would like to try some bread in it, but I'm unsure of what floor temp is ideal for sliding a bread pan or free standing sourdough loaf onto. 

When using a wood fired oven, do you feed it with wood during a bread bake, or do you get the temp high, stop feeding wood, and then slide the bread to be baked into the oven on the cool down?

I suppose bread is no different than pizza, in that it constantly has to be rotated so as not to burn on the side closest to the burning wood. 

How do you find the smoke taste the burning wood imparts to your bread? 

Thanks for the info before I get started on this new venture!

I'm new to this whole milling thing which has given cause for confusion and what seems like hundreds of questions. 

First, is there such a thing as a good book on the subject to help clear up the confusion?

Considering that there are so many different berries available, such as, 

• Hard, Red, Winter Wheat
• Hard, White, Winter Wheat
• Hard, Red, Spring Wheat
• Hard, White, Spring Wheat
• Soft, Red, Winter Wheat
• Soft, White, Winter Wheat
• Soft, Red, Spring Wheat
• Soft, White, Spring Wheat
• how does one even begin to decide which berries to mill. Shoot, a person could become berry poor if one started ordering 25# bags of all these varieties!! I'm sure it comes down to type of bread and taste one prefers. In order to make this discussion simple, let's take into consideration a white table/ sandwich bread with a robust taste. Something the complete opposite of that mushy, tasteless Wonder Bread found at my local grocery. Many thx for the enlightenment!!

Hi!

I recently made the "Lifted" Country Boule from Ginsberg's "The Rye Baker". I was intrigued by it because it promised a fully realized rye loaf in about 6 hours; pre-ferment included. It achieves this by the use of "Berliner Kurzsauer" or "Berlin Quick Sponge" that ferments for 3-4 hours at 95 F. In order to achieve this temperature I calculated the water temperature by using the DDT method from Hamelman. This method has served me well. However, in this case, after I mixed the ingredients the temperature was almost 10 F higher, at 104 F. Since I use 5 F as "friction factor" (FF) if I mix by hand as in this case, should I just make that 15 F next time? But I'm worried that I might overshoot it in the other direction (undershoot it?) as I find it quicker to cool the dough than to warm it up but ideally would want to be on target. Another thing was that the calculated water temperature was 160 F! I usually disperse the sourdough starter in the water but this was a high temperature and I didn't want to kill the microbes so I mixed the flour and water first. But then I realized it might be high enough to gelatinize the flour and I don't know if that's intended or beneficial for this method? In any case I added the starter after that and went on with the rest of the recipe. I must report the bread came out very good but am am unsure if I achieved the intended result. Neither Ginsberg nor homebaking.at (which seems to be the source of the recipe) discuss how to achieve that temperature and possible pitfalls and none of my questions are addressed in the recipe. They only mention that maintaining that 95 F temperature is imperative for the sponge to develop properly. Did anyone make this bread? Or used this sponge and can offer any insights or observations?

Several years ago I visited a baking laboratory in Moscow and I mentioned my interest in trying some of their cultures. I had been baking sourdough rye with a homemade culture that I made simply by grinding some rye grains and letting the mixture wait until I got some sourness and wild yeast action. I saved the dried cultures I got from Moscow and never bothered to use them because my results were good with my homemade culture. The Moscow cultures were like hard, dry lumps of flour and I put them in my freezer.

They gave me these two cultures:

1. saccharomyces cerevisiae 69

2. lactobacillus delbrueckii D-30

I finally decided to try the cultures out a day or so ago and took a little pinch of each and added them to a mixture of water and whole grain flour (rye and wheat) and now I have a bubbling result.

I had no recipe or guidance, so I'm wondering if I should wait until the mixture smells sour to use it. Also, did I use the correct procedure in combining these two cultures. Is the first one just equivalent to commercial yeast?

Thanks for any comments.