Artisan bread recipes for brick oven8/13/2023 In the last hour, push the fire around from side to side to make sure the base of the oven gets heated evenly, adding small branches and an occasional wrist-thick log as necessary to keep a good fire going. Generally speaking, though, your fire should be at least 2 hours old with a good base of coals by the time you put in the bread. See Moderating Heat in a Woodfired Oven for more on this. If your oven is outdoors, as most are, you’ll want to baby it when the weather is cold. Atmospheric conditions, the length of time since your oven was last fired, the type of wood you’re using and how it was cured all play a role. The Fire: There are so many variables inherent in making a fire in a woodfired oven that I’m loath to give specific directions. Shape lightly, tucking edges under without deflating the dough and slash a design with a lame if desired. When ready to bake, turn the loaves out onto floured peels. Form your loaves and put them into the cloth-lined baskets to rise. The perfect weight for me based on oven size is 27 ounces per loaf, which allows some leftover dough for another day. Deflate about half of the gas out of it and cut it into 4 pieces. Once the dough has nearly doubled in size again, turn it out onto a floured surface. These work beautifully as proofing baskets for my finished loaves. Instead, I use plastic bread baskets lined with cloth napkins or dish cloths, with a coating of coarse flour rubbed into the fabric. The Loaves: Bannetons are lovely to work with but are expensive. In another hour, once the dough is showing springiness and a few big bubbles, you can make the loaves. Gradually raise the dough temperature to 70° in the second rise, giving the dough a fold after an hour or so. I let this part happen in its good time, and then slowly warm the dough for the next phase, because once the dough is active, it’s very important to have the oven heated to the right temperature at the right time. With less yeast or a starter, at 50° the first doubling can take 5 hours or more. I’m being deliberately vague, because temperature and time become fluid at this stage. Slow Rising: Once you’ve made a wet dough, you need to let it rise for an ample time. For one recipe that follows this technique, see Lago di Como Bread. I would add to this letting the dough hydrate for an hour before kneading and having a good dough scraper handy for bench work. Making a sponge, letting the dough sit overnight, and using less yeast are all good advice. Joe Ortiz in his book The Village Baker has some excellent tips (page 55) on how to do this. While I don’t recommend a dough quite that wet (it had to be 80-85%), I do recommend bumping up the hydration a bit for woodfired baking. I’ve been working with wet doughs in the 65-70% range for longer than I’ve had a WFO, ever since I saw a Roman baker literally throw the dough out of a bucket and onto a long wooden peel at Forno in the Campo dei Fiori. Instead, in order to get a big round loaf, a good crust and a soft, well-textured crumb, you need to create a dough that is wetter than we Americans think is normal. Either the masonry will absorb the humidity almost at once, or you will be splashing on water, which can crack the hot base. The Dough: Unless you have a complicated steam-injection system as some French bakers have for their brick ovens, you won’t be able to get enough steam into your oven to make much of a difference in the bloom. I have a loose-fitting metal door for my oven, which acts as a damper and which I close when the loaves are baking. Key to success in this kind of baking is to have the floor evenly heated before the loaves go in. The free-standing loaves will bake in a semi-circle around a hot but barely flaming mound of coals pushed to the back. Overview: To bake 4 loaves in a 40” diameter woodfired oven, you'll need about 7 pounds of dough. I baked some lovely loaves in my oven the other day, and as I slid that smoky, crusty bread out and onto cooling racks, I couldn't help thinking of those old European bakers, who've been baking with fire for hundreds of years. The limited size of my oven, however, has led me to adopt some measures that may or may not be part of that tradition. They work for me, and they might work for you too.
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