I bake wholewheat loaves using pate fermentee and sometimes light rye sourdough starter and sometimes a combo of each. Just because I can. . . .
In my electric fan forced oven I bake 800-900g loaves for 43 minutes from 250C dropping to 200C. Always works just fine. Moist enduring loaves.
Sometimes I use my wood pizza oven and that’s totally unpredictable as oven base and oven top temperatures vary widely. So the browning is an important indicator, or blackening as occasionally happens. The oven spring from the pizza oven is occasionally over the top when it’s too hot. Instead of batards I recently got footballs. But the crumb was amazingly light.
If I want a more developed crust I add a small amount of sour dough starter to the held back dough and the difference is quite noticeable.
Anyway, thanks for an interesting article; I’m going to take my bread temperature today.

• Reply