Does your bread do this?
Hi all,
It's been a while since I have posted something here but have kept up with all the very interesting reading. My breads have greatly improved in the last few months - shape, scoring and even oven steaming/spring are now very decent. Actually, my oven spring is pretty good these days. However, I still notice something odd about my breads after I take them out of the oven. Once I am sure that they are fully baked (I usually have a thermometer), I let them cool on a rack. Half way through the cooling stage, I saw that my breads would lose a little bit of their volume. Once the cooling is done, I noticed that they have indeed lost a bit of that beautiful oven spring. Nothing much, but enough for me to see a slight difference between the once hot breads and the cooled ones. I mentioned this to my French baker instructor and he said that it is because the breads are probably not fully done and that a thermometer may not be the best indicator of their readiness.
Has anyone experienced this type of situation? Could my instructor be right? I think that it is odd that my breads aren't fully baked when my thermometer clearly indicates 205 F to 209 F for french breads.