August 21, 2015 - 12:44pm
Hard Crust Please
hello and thanks in advance for your help / advice.
I am baking a white sourdough made with stiff (80%) rye levain, retarded for about 12hours and baked in a deck oven (stone) for about 23min (17min on on 235C top 225C bottom settings and 6 on 150C top 225C bottom).
The bread come out looking great and perfectly baked with a hard crust when coming out of oven, but the crust quite quickly softens.
Retarding the breads for longer seemed to have helped in the past, but i am still not pleased with my soft crust.
Any help / advice would be great!
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with the door cracked open for another 5 min. No need to keep adding heat so turn it off. That should do the trick.
That's a very quick bake, in my opinion. I usually bake my retarded loaves for 42 min.
thank you both for your help! i ve tried and am now baking for 35min but still find them too soft. Will try again with a longer baking time. Do you think it is more the matter of the length of the bake rather than the heat?
i will try to go up to 42min :-)
ps: bread is about 1150g dough.
thanks!
xx
will take some time to bake. i don't know what the outside looks like or how you steam but large loaves require a bit more moderate heat, say 435 F and baked for a longer time probably around 40 minutes. You just aren't driving enough moisture put of the middle of the bread and ,as the remaining moisture redistributes, it softens the crust.. Make sure they are baked to 210 F on the inside, thump done and then let them sit in an off oven for 5 minutes with thee door open
That should take care of it,
Happy baking
thanks for this! I steam manually with a small hand spray as well as a tin full of water left in the oven while baking (removed after 2/3 of the time. i always check that the breads are minim 203F degrees.
am not sure what you mean by 'thump done'? do you mean with a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom?
thank you!
xx