Since I am living in the US I crave a good piece of bread and every time I am in Europe I cannot get enough of it. Since a while I try to back my own bread but somehow it is not working out. Lately I would like to make some bread that is airy and has a lot of air bubbles in it. Still without any success so far. Now that my kids grow older and eat more and more I am thinking about backing bread myself because now I can bake two two-pound loafs together making the backing quit economical. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to bring the bubbles into the bread.
Last weekend I tried two variations and both this not turn out well. First I tried to heat up the over as high as possible with a pizza stone in it and then back the bread directly on the stone. Unfortunately the air circulation of the over firms up the crust to fast and so the yeast cannot rise because the hull of the bread is already firm. The other method was to back the bread in a cast iron pan keeping the air circulation out and to keep the water vapor inside to leave the dough more time to rise but to no avail.
The only other options I can think of is to either:
- let the dough rise mulitple times
- back the dough slowly by putting them in a cold over and then start to heat up
My mother told me that the 2nd option might produce a bread that is flat but it is worth a shot.
Have fun - Andy