I made a loaf of my Wonder Bread recipe today, but when it came time to bake it, I tried something different. Rather than bake it on a cookie sheet or in a loaf pan, I baked it on a cast iron griddle that I preheated in the oven. In essence, I was trying to simulate wood-fired stone oven baking.
With much of my reading about bread baking, one common theme I’ve come across from professional bakers is that their ovens are HOT. Real hot. Not only that, but the bread isn’t baked on pans, it’s baked right on the floor of the oven. As near as I can glean, this accomplishes a number of things necessary for good bread. For one, it caramelizes the bread- which is a fancy way of saying it gives the bread a nice crust. For two, placing the bread on the oven surface (which is HOT) causes steam to form in the oven. The steam humidifies the oven a bit allows for oven spring to occur in the bread.
So how did it work? Well, there are some glitches to work out. For one, I cooked at 450 (I typically cook this recipe at 400), which probably isn’t hot enough since I didn’t get a lot of steam formation when the dough hit the cast iron griddle. For another, I didn’t have corn meal to use on the peel. This was almost a deal breaker, because by the time the bread finished proofing on the peel, it was stuck. I had to use a spatula to loosen it up, which caused it to start deflating.
However, I did get some nice oven spring. In fact, it was more than enough to counteract the rough treatment the dough got while I was putting it in the oven. Also, the crust turned out real nice. One thing I did to simulate the wood-fired oven thing was to turn the heat down to 350 after about 10 minutes of baking. Basically, I was mimicking the cool down of a wood-fired oven. This was to prevent the crust from burning while the interior of the bread finished cooking.
So while it was hardly a glitch free attempt, the results were promising enough that I’ll likely continue to work with it. Oh, the rest of the family liked the result as well. Always an important threshold to achieve.