The best thing since just prior to sliced bread

[roadrunnertwice]

I've switched to baking Chonks:

This is because I'm lazy.

I might have mentioned this before, but when I bake a freestanding loaf of crusty bread, I put it in "steam jail" for the first 30m of baking time. Basically, you need the loaf to be surrounded by steam for part of the bake in order to get a respectable and good-lookin crust, but most home ovens can't retain the necessary amount of steam inside the baking chamber (they're designed to VENT steam, not hold it in until they pop), so schemes that involve putting water on lava rocks or putting a wet dishtowel in there generally fail.* But if you can trap a small volume of air around the loaf somehow, the evaporating moisture from the dough sticks around for a while and it'll just steam itself. Most books suggest a dutch oven for this, which works great, but since I already have baking stones, I just plop an upside roasting pan over the loaf and it creates a good-enough seal.

Anyway, my steam jail only has room for a single loaf. I bake with about a kilogram of flour per batch, and when I was splitting it into two loaves, I had to run two separate batches, which is BS.

I've looked around for a wider pan that could accommodate more loaves, but that's still ongoing. But it turns out that my current pan CAN just barely fit a big dumb double-sized loaf, so now I do the entire 1kg batch in one go.

This comes out to about a four pound goliath of bread, which can be mildly awkward to deal with. But! We also usually pre-slice and freeze part of each batch, and it turns out the huge loaf is better for slicing up into uniform-ish pieces! It goes like:

• Eat one end of the round loaf the first night, when it's freshest and nicest.
• The next day, cut out the entire middle section of the loaf for slicing — this'll leave about the same amount you just ate in the heel, and you can pick at that over the next few days.
• Cut the middle section in half along the X axis.
• Put each half face-down (treating the new half-cut as the face) and slice.
• Freeze in ziplocks (which can be washed and re-used like 20 times).

That leaves you with a bunch of ready-sliced bread that toasts nicely right out of the freezer, which you can whittle down over the next week-and-change until it's time to bake again.

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* For most people. If you have an oven where that actually works, bully for you! But you're among an elite few, and the rest of us can't get results that way.

Comments

[watersword]

That crumb is gorgeous.

[roadrunnertwice]

Thank you!! My bread standards are unreasonably high, and sometime around the end of last summer I finally reached the point where I'm consistently meeting my own standards, and tbh I'm still feeling quite smug about it.

[sporky_rat]

I love your achewood icons. The frittata has always made me giggle.

I am a weirdo who doesn't like free form bread and ends up braiding it. The steam is sometimes hard to get but this idea is clever, I'll have to try it.