Home Oven Management
Hi,
I am currently baking sourdough bread at home, I have recently also started making hybrid baguettes from the weekend bakery website. I really enjoy baking and was looking for advice, as I currently use a domestic oven which has 1 level currently that is covered in terracotta tiles for a bake - 1 large sourdough bread at around 900g, I could potentially fit 2 small sourdoughs in with a small peel but it could be quite cumbersome.
What do people do when they are managing one small baking space like a domestic oven, how do they manage dough and proving. I know the answers are obvious however say for example I bulk fermented 4 small loaves at 450g how I could then manage the prove so I could get all 4 loaves in for 1 baking session and stop the loaves over proving ?
Currently if I am sharing a bake I'll give my mom 1 loaf and myself the other. 1 is usually baked slightly underproved at 2 hours in my kitchen, then I'll bake the other loaf 40 minutes later - both with steam from the kettle.
I'd love to bake 4 loaves - all of them looking beautiful for my family, 2 for my brothers family, 1 for my mom and dad and one for my own home.
Any tips or ideas ?
and they will all be very good ideas. Here's my pennies worth.
1. Retard the loaves overnight and take one (or two) out at a time to bake.
2. If you don't wish to retard overnight then shape them into bannetons and proof one completely at room temperature, and stagger the rest so you can pull them out of the fridge as the previous one has baked.
3. Make dough, do stretch and folds, bulk ferment at room temperature. keep one loaf sized dough and proof in banneton and put bowl with rest of dough in the fridge. Let's say it takes 2hrs to proof and 30min to bake. Proof the first one at room temperature for two hours, 30min into the two hours take another loaf sized dough out of the fridge and begin that proofing. 1.5hours later bake the first one. Half an hour into proofing of second loaf take the third loaf out... etc.
3 variations of the same concept.
I only ever bake one loaf at a time so all theory.
I have a domestic oven - 68 litres I think. I can get 2 grids in it with 3 small loaves each or 2 large ones.
I don't use tiles, etc. just steel baking sheets in that oven.
video here to give you an idea of the size: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v_v9fahGlk
those are 2 large loaves. (800g)
I typically let my dough ferment overnight and before I got my big oven, I'd be running 3 batches through the other one - so I'd scale/shape/prove the dough in the order it would go into the oven and if the last lot fermenting was looking like it was going a bit far (find poke test) then it would go into a cold part of the house or the fridge for half an hour.
You could mix/knead separate lumps of dough an hour apart the night before too.
It's just a time management task. Think it through and stick to the order.
And you might not want to use a peel - but use a transfer board - cut and sand some plywood to the width of the oven and chamfer one end - tip the risen doughs onto the board (floured), 2 at a time, then use that to transfer the doughs into the oven - sort of like a full-width peel.
Have a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qssE3pmKmhM
at about 1:40 in she's using the board to load up the oven. I use something similar to load up my big oven. (but watch all of that video - it'll inspire you ;-)
Cheers,
-Gordon
Hi Gordon and Abe,
Thanks for the tips, I bake on to terracotta and get a reasonable bread rise so I would like to keep that. I think I could fit 2 big loaves in there, or look at getting a smaller peel and load 2 smaller loaves in - any advice or place to purchase a small peel for a single small loaf, can't seem to find anything on the net ? I might look at developing different loaves, say 2 sourdough/2 rye tin loaves and then another 2 sourdough 'specials' say flavoured one. When I am bulk fermenting with cold water I usually get an 11 hour bulk ferment when it's fully risen. I think if I went slightly earlier, there may be lesser of a flavour/more of a flavour but not much.
Perhaps do 6 loaves, each batch of 2 gets 40 or 2 bakes at 40 minutes (probably pushing it) in the oven and so forth. Just needs to be written down to avoid confusion and perhaps placed in different zones in the kitchen also !
on baking more then one oven load I would just start one before the other, or use colder water in one, or as abe said proof em in the fridge and take one or two out at a time (if you are naturally fermenting I imagine the tolerance for a bit more time is there). As for a peel, I use a broken one from the bakery I work in. It split neatly down the middle making it a good fit for one large loaf in a home oven. I'v seen small bins of similarly broken peelsin a number of places so if you have a bakery in town that bakes on a hearth/deck oven (they will have peels) and bakes at a relatively high volume (they will have broken peels) I would just go in and ask if they have any they might pass on to you.