September 17, 2011 - 11:04am
Anyone used sand instead of stone?
I want to try and use a baking tray filled with sand instead of a stone. My thinking behind this, apart from the cost of a proper stone, is that sand may take less time to heat up because of all the air pockets, thereby saving electricity. I've got a bag of horticultural sand sitting around somewhere, I'm assuming it shouldn't have any chemical residue to make it unsafe.
Has anyone tried that before? I'm going to give it a go tonight, but any feedback is greatly appreciated.
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It takes less time to heat up, but it doesn't retain heat as well as stones/pebbles, does it? Once water is poured on to it, the temperature goes down with it very quickly because each grain of sand is so small, while with stones/pebbles, only the outer parts gets cooler but the temperature recovers relatively quickly because inside stays hot, which generates the steam.
Just my guess. Never tried myself. Let me know when you experiment with it. I'm quite intrigued. ;)
lumos
well I'm not planning to pour water onto the sand, I pour water into a pan that sits on the bottom of the oven, whereas the tray with sand will be a notch up.
In that case, what's a role of the sand? Are you using it in place for a baking stone?
So what's the plan? Loaf directly on sand? Parchment paper? Aluminum foil? Baking sheet? So why not also add sand to the bottom water pan?
Curious Jim
loaf on paper, on top of sand. I don't fancy picking sand off the bottom of my loaf!
could add sand to the pan, too, but since for this bake I only need the steam for the first 10 min or so, I won't bother this time
Pouring the steam water onto sand may help to prevent splashing. What do you think?
in a similar fashion...
I seem to remember an Austalian TV surfival type series where bread was baked in the hot ashes and sand of a campfire.
yeah well I'm assuming any medium that will retain heat should work. Solid slab of stone, small stones, brick/pottery, thick metal, sand... ambers... the question for me is, will sand heat through decidedly more quickly than a baking stone? I really hate the thought of the amount of power I'll be wasting by pre-heating the oven for an hour, so if sand heats through in say 20-30 minutes that'll be fandabidose.
If it heats quickly... that also means it cools quickly... which means low thermal mass and high thermal conductivity. Which is pretty much precisely the opposite of you want.
um.. it was still very warm 2.5 hours after I switched off the oven... i don't know how long a baking stone retains heat, but this is certainly better than a baking tray alone! Besides, it does take time to heat, just not as much as a stone would.
i baked jacket potatoes in campfire ambers many, many times... sweet memories!
It might be worthwhile to peruse the several threads here on baking on a sheet without any baking stone at all. The most common argument seems to be that home ovens don't have enough power to reheat the stone fast enough to make hardly any difference (for bread, not for pizza); that the use of a baking stone for bread is a holdover of a custom from the original Julia Child transplanting of baguette baking from Paris to Cambridge but without much scientific evidence behind it. I'm sure there are plenty of passions on both sides of the issue (and for myself I use a baking stone despite those arguments:-) ...but maybe it's worth perusing those threads and considering those opinions.
I had baked breads without a baking stone for donkey's ears before I even knew of the existence of such a thing as a baking stone. It was only 7-8 (?) yrs ago when I started using it, and the difference it made in the oven spring was quite significant. Eespecially when I bake breads like petit Pain Rustique or baguettes that is smaller in volume and is baked in shorter time than a large loaf, a baking stone makes a huuuge difference in the crumb.
As for saving the energy for pre-heating, I try combining other cooking requirements of the day with bread baking as much as possible, using the pre-heating to cook other things; like baked potatoes, roasted vegetables, cooking casserole, etc. (My oven is gas with multi-cooking zones when the fan is not used, which helps cooking at different temperatures at the same time) So I try scheduling to make baking breads and cooking meals and eating the meal go in one smooth(-ish) flow, meaning I choose the menu for the day which I can fit into that schedule as easily as possible.
Also, I use a cordierite kiln shelf as my baking stone which takes less time to heat; about 40 minutes is usually sufficient, a third of energy saved already.
Hi Faith,
Just a thought: the French brick oven installed at Village Bakery Melmerby uses several tonnes of sand as insulation beneath the stone floor of the oven.
Best wishes
Andy
Right. Yesterday wasn't the best night for baking! Little tikesus kept waking up every 5 minutes so I had to leave it all and rush upstairs!
Anyway, here's what I did. I used approx 1.5 cm of sand in a metal baking tray (the sort that comes with the oven and pretty much fills it wall to wall). Set the oven to 250 C and checked the sand after 20 minutes. My thermometer is a bit slow, and also I didn't want to keep holding its plastic body so near the hot oven door for ages, so by the stage it crept up to 210 C I gave up. My Borodinsky had to go in the oven ASAP so I stuck it in.
Now I have to admit my last two batches were a disaster (just as I though I'd got the hang of it!) I tried a different recipe (one from suave's blog, the method is different from Andy's and I think there's a bit more water in the dough). The loaves came out completely sticky inside. I suspect my starter may have weakened a bit, although it did double as it should, or maybe I kept missing the point when it's most active. Anyway, last night I went back to Andy's recipe with slight alterations (e.g. proved at 27 C vs the usual 22 C to speed things up). Guess what, the dough rose nicely, but after an hour in the oven it was still sticky inside! I must have overproofed it, or else I don't know what's going on :-((( Swearing like a sailor, I shoved the tins back in the oven but then my little one woke up so I turned the oven off thinking the sand would do the job.
I fell asleep!
Two and a half hours later, I woke with a start.. not so much because I was worried about my Borodinsky, but because I also left my polenta and wheat dough sitting there all this time! More swearing, I rush downstairs to find the dough almost - but not completely - overproofed (it had 3 stretch and folds and was going to have one more before being divided and shaped). As I was dying to go back to bed, I just divided and shaped it, and while the oven was re-heating (it was still warm by the way), the loaves puffed up the last bit of rise that was left in them. And in they went.
Then the tike wakes AGAIN!!! must have been the 5th time that night. Knowing I wouldn't be able to stay up, I go back to bed having instructed the hubby (who luckily goes to bed very very late) to turn the oven off in 30 min.
Next thing I know, it's 8 am. The Enemy of Mummy's Bread is all bouncy and happy again. I've been dreaming of weirdly'shaped flat overproofed bread all night :-O Sad, aren't I! To my surprise, the corn and wheat bread is fine, a bit too brown but ok. Quite a bit of oven spring, too, considering how overproofed it was. I'm pretty sure it would have come out much flatter but or the sand.
Oh, it did have small tears on the seam (I often get a tear at the bottom because the top cooks faster than it should) but these were smaller than my last couple of bakes when I didn't use any insulation. Perhaps if I used a thicker layer of sand or pre-heated it for another 10 mins or so, i wouldn't get any tears at all. Although it may also be too little steam, as I only poured water into the oven once before His Crankiness woke.
As to the Borodinsky. When I first took it out of the oven, it had already half-cooled and had a tough crust (no wonder, after so much baking!). I poured some boiling water over it as I always do to soften the crust. By the morning, the crust had softened enough to be chewy, as to the crumb, it came out really dense but it was perfectly baked through! And didn't turn into a brick!
All in all, I think the sand works. Perhaps not as well as a quality stone, but it does take decisively less time to heat through, and with more experimentation (under more favourable conditions!) I may get it to work better.
The only BIG downside is, I did have a few sand particles on a Borodinsky loaf (wtf? it was tinned?).
and it can stick to so many things and get all over the kitchen. Um, I bake without a stone. Us un-stoned bakers are here in great numbers but because we don't talk about stones, the stone bakers seem to get more attention. I'm sure we out number them.
but after an hour in the oven it was still sticky inside!
I usually bake my ryes much longer. I'm wondering if you're not underproofing. The extra times seem to be helping both in rising and baking.