The Fugue

Back in July we went to a family reunion and I got to play with making dutch
oven bread in the great outdoors instead of in my great electric oven. It
actually turned out really well. Well, that is, considering everything that
went wrong. Nothing went wrong that had to go wrong, it was just plain bad luck
or stupidity. I’ll let you be the judge.

We were making a lot, something like 6 loaves. Somehow I miscalculated the
amount of water. I mean way miscalculated. Then I did the biggest no-no,
especially when you don’t have extra flour reserves. I dumped all the water in
at once. We would have been eating sourdough soup the next day instead of
bread. In the morning we discussed the options, asked in vain if anyone had any
extra flour lying around in the car, and finally decided to drive back down 20
minutes to Kamas to buy more flour. I got the five pound bag, drove back, and
found that it still wasn’t quite enough. Yes, I miscalculated by that much.
Well, it wasn’t enough for normal bread, but it was good enough to call it
ciabatta, so we went ahead and made it. Then I forgot to adjust the salt on
some of them, so they were a bit too bland. Still, everyone loved it.

So here’s the trick to cooking bread in a dutch oven with charcoal. I used the
standard sourdough no-knead recipe. The
trick of course is heat management. Because the coals are so close to the
bread, you don’t need as high an internal temperature, so aim to get your oven
to 450°. I preheated the oven, then lifted the lid with a nifty lid lifter
contraption and plopped the bread in. After 20 minutes I moved the oven off of
the bottom layer of coals, and lifted the lid to release the steam. I put the
lid back on and baked another 10 or so minutes until done. Actually several
ovens took a bit longer to finish than normal, but that may be partly due to
how wet they were.

You might need to adjust the timing or the amount of dough. In particular you
don’t want the dough touching the top of the oven because that’s where more of
the coals are and it will burn. If your oven doesn’t seal real well you might
want to put a layer of foil between the lid and base (this goes for home baking
too). Don’t leave the bread in the oven for too long after it’s done, or it’ll
go soggy. That’s about all there is to it!