March 26, 2022 - 10:23am
Baking times & temperatures
Hi folks
Is there any kind of guide as to what temperatures & baking times to use depending on the size of the loaf? For my standard loaf (500gm flour, 320gm water etc) I bake for 25 minutes at 220c followed by 15 minutes at 200c but what if I bake half that ingredients? Obviously not half the temperatures for half the time. Presently I simply guess but it would be interesting to hear other folk's views.
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Color is a good indicator.
If you are experienced with a recipe and your ingredients, kitchen and oven, you can confidently bake by color. Which means to say increase or decrease the baking time compared with the recipe with which you are familiar, using color as the judge of doneness.
And it is not out of the question to require a test bake or two to calibrate time, temp and color for a new quantity of ingredients.
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, although that's somewhat subjective perhaps. I guess coming from an IT background I'm used to details rather than intuition/guesswork. Of course, at present when baking different size loafs I do use guesswork but isn't it the case that although the colour may look right you can still end up with under or over baked bread?
Another thing I'm a little confused by is a main bake followed by a shorter, reduced temperature bake.
Is this strictly necessary & why?
Precision is possible if you have a precise command of ingredients, method and equipment (oven). Otherwise some variation is inevitable and experimentation, trial-and-error and guesswork enter into the picture.
As stated earlier, once you have a reliable recipe and method that delivers results that please you, scaling ingredient quantity up or down, and using more or less baking time combined with color judgment will allow you to find the new baking time. You are free to conduct a design of experiments with a sensitivity matrix on each variable, then plot a response surface and seek the local maximum.
Or you can use color and go from there.
Oven time and temperature have alot to do with the oven (most consumer grade ovens are very imprecise) and recipe variations. High hydration doughs requires generally longer, higher temperature or a combination of the two. Starting with a high temperature is thought to help oven spring, then reduced temperature gets the bread internals cooked while avoiding burned or tough crust.
Or you can start with one temperature, and let it go until the bread is done.
Thankyou for your very helpful answer.
Experimentation is the order of the day.
Bake on.