Hi! This is my first post here, I hope someone can help.
I’ve been baking with sourdough starter for a while now, always trying new things, but I got a new oven recently and can’t get what I was hoping for: taste is good, I think crumb is good, and crust is great, but inside is a bit damp, or gummy or moist. I’m rather sure is not undercooked but…
Were you baking this same recipe the same way before in your old oven? It seems to me that the baking procedure has a very long lid on to lid off ratio. Have you tried taking the lid off sooner say after 30 mins and extending the lid off time to 30 mins. That should help dry out your bread so it isn’t gummy.
You are baking your loaf for 60-mins at 250F. That seems a little low and a little slow.
It reads like an inadequate bake, meaning the bread is not fully cooked. When this happens there is too much moisture left in the loaf, the crumb will be gummy. Bread with a wet crumb will spoil faster.
Starting at 150°F and finishing at 180°F is a critical time for the gelatinization of wheat starch. This should happen at around 60% of your bake time. So for a 1-hr bake, the internal temp of your dough should be 180°F at around 36-mins into your bake. You can check it with an instant read thermometer.
At 200°F the crumb has set. Your loaf of bread should have an internal temp of 200°F in the center of the crumb at around 80-90% of the total bake time. For your 1-hr bake, that is between 48 to 53-minutes into your bake. The remaining bake time is for crust development and colorization.
So, with your 1-hr bake in a 250°F oven: 36-mins into the bake the internal temp of the dough should be 180°F. And then 12 to 17 minutes later, the internal temp should be 200°F … achieving that 20°F dough temp increase in a 250°F oven?!?
For a loaf like you have pictured in your query, I recommend a 450°F oven and a 40-min bake. The goal is an internal temp of 200-207°F in the center of the loaf immediately after removing from the oven.
Thank you @Otis I failed to write celsius next to degrees.
I’ve got better results with @Benito 's advice, and I will translate yours into celsius and try to improve that as well, thank you for the thorough explanation!
This is with a little less whole flower, 30 min at 250 celsius lid on, 15 at 250 lid off and 15 at 200 lid off, what do you think?
I’m under the impression there is no benefit to keeping a cloche closed for more than 20 minutes, and I suspect even that may be more than necessary. I’d be interested to hear if anyone believes otherwise.
I bake bread in cast iron vessels and leave the lid on for the whole bake. My experience has been leaving the lid on produces a bread with a reasonably crisp crust, and contrary to the experience of the original query, I have never experienced a gummy crumb.
In general, a cast iron baking vessel is a superb oven. It radiates heat equally from all sides. As Melissa mentions above, the crust is less brown than baked out of a vessel, but not by enough to matter, and the crust is also more evenly browned without any burnt edges on the thin ears of score marks. I pull the bread when it is 204-205°F. When the lid is removed and the bake continues it defeats the purpose of that cast iron oven. If there was ever a need to vent some steam, a simple lift of the lid will allow the steam out, then replace the lid to finish the bake.
Interesting! I wasn’t really considering the action of the cloche on heat (as opposed to steaming). While my oven is certainly not perfectly even (and I typically give loaves a 180 degree turn halfway through), and the edges of my ears are certainly darker than elsewhere, this has never struck me as a problem.
It would also have a moderating effect on the temperature swing caused by the on off cycling of the thermostat, but I’m not really sure what effect that has on bread.
I may have to try leaving my cloche on (perhaps after opening once to vent) to see what happens. I suspect my ceramic and probably more close-fitting cloche will give me a less happy result than you get with your cast iron vessels, but it’s always interesting to experiment.
