Baking Times and Temperatures
Hey there,
These are some of my observations regarding baking times and temperatures as related to different products. Please feel free to add your own observations as these are based on my own equipment, ingredients, and techniques.
These are convection oven temperatures, so in a standard oven, I would add 25 degrees to each. I'll be referencing the photo below and referring to both tables above.
Here are four types of bread that were cooked in the oven at the same temperature at the same time: (top left) Rustic White, (top right) Kalamata, (bottom left) Sour Rye, (bottom right) Multigrain. All 12 ounce loaves were cooked for 22 minutes, all 24 ounce loaves were cooked for 35 minutes except the Rye (33 minutes). All were misted before they went in (the Rye had an egg wash) and steamed when they went in the oven.
As you can see from the picture and the color table, most of the coloring came in the first 22 minutes. However on both of the top loaves there was a 'browning' that occured in the final 10 minutes that created a crispness and cracking in the loaves that didn't occur in the 12 ounce loaves. Since I was baking a variety of loaves with low volume, I decided to compromise and end up with (in my eyes) perfect loaves and pretty good 12 ounce loaves, in order that I could 'save oven space' and minimize the time I had to fuss with the bread. If I were to want smaller loaves with a similar crust and structure, I'd need to jack up the temperature to speed up the coloring timetable. Keep in mind, it would still progress in the same fashion, just speeded up. If I wanted to, I could cook all of the rolls or small loaves at once at a higher temperature, cook the small stuff on the top rack of the oven to give them more color...
These are all work-arounds to get what I want, but in this case the easiest was what I did which happened to be a compromise that probably only I will notice.
Hope that answers some questions, but if it opens up some new ones, feel free to ask.
-Mark