Poor quality home oven = struggles with Tartine
Hello all. I'm new here - it's my first day so I hope you can show me around!
Basically, I've been baking Tartine loaves for about six months, but I'm struggling to get the correct oven spring/crumb consistency with my home oven, which can't get above 230 C/450 F.
I'm fine (I think!) with shaping/dealing with high hydration doughs, but the inner crumb is always slightly too damp when I pull it from the oven.
I'm using a cast iron combo cooker to cook in and I've pushed the initial cooking time (with lid on) to 30 mins, with an extra 30 mins with the lid off. The oven temp is always around 230 C/450 F.
Trouble is, once I reach 60 mins cooking time, the outside of the loaf starts to burn quite severely. Not the nice chesnut coloured loaf of Tartine-lore, but a proper, charcoal black.
I suppose my question is: has anyone else managed to pull a perfect loaf at 230F? If so, what are the secrets?
so I can't comment on your process. However, I have noticed that when the outside of the loaf gets too dark and the inside is still too cold (thus wetter), I reduce the oven temperature, and this also means an increase in the baking time. I like to consider a loaf fully baked at 208°F internal crumb temperature, I've also seen instructions recommending 200°F, however much time that takes to bake is of less concern to me than its final internal temperature. I bake my sandwich pan bread at 300°F, loaves of about 4 lbs (2041 g), and baking time always exceeds 2 hours. When I used higher baking temperatures, the crust got too dark by the time the internal temperature reached my target. I use steam for the first 1 hour, which is similar to keeping the lid on. I will keep the oven preheat and initial temperature as high as my oven will go, this is to help oven spring, but either at loading the proofed dough, or a few moments or minutes later, reduce the thermostat to the baking temperature I want. It takes 20 minutes for the oven temperature to cool down and for the gas burners to cycle on. Finding this bake temperature required a series of bakes where the thermostat was reduced in 25°F increments, and the time to temperature was then tracked and evaluated. The total mass of the dough, as well as the hydration, are all variables.