The Fugue

So we got a toaster oven. The primary motivation was that I like to make biscuits and gravy, but preheating the big oven takes way too long. Plus I wanted to bake little one-day loaves of bread some mornings, with the same problem.

But always wanting to push the limits, I also wanted to try a larger loaf in the toaster oven. This is actually half the size I usually make, but it's about the limit of the size of boule I'd make in a toaster oven. Too much bigger and the top will burn.

Here are more pictures of the process. I moved a couple of tiles from the big oven to the toaster oven to make a nice baking stone, and I preheated the toaster oven. Then I put the bread in (conveniently on parchment paper, though in the future I think I'll trim the parchment paper for better convection airflow). There is noticeable oven spring, and it was fun to have such a clear view of it. Eventually it started to brown, and when I figured it should be about done I took it out. I found that it had actually browned quite a bit more in the back than in the front—maybe some tinfoil on the door next time to aid the radiation? The crust was a bit boring, but that may have been partially due to my using a slightly drier dough than I usually do. In any case, the crumb was as good as ever and the experiment was a success. As in the large oven, I definitely recommend some sort of stone setup though.

A few more experiments will be needed to know for sure, but it's possible that the close quarters will help in the steam department. However, it's a convection oven and I'm not sure whether that would counter any steam tendencies. As I said, this loaf was a bit drier than usual, so more tests are in order. Incidentally, I had a loaf in the dutch oven come out with the same boring crust the other day, and I think the hydration was about the same as with this loaf.

As for biscuits, it works great. I turn it down slightly from the called-for temperature but otherwise there's nothing to it.

No-knead bread is simple and painless. So why do we still put it off or decide not to make it because of five lousy minutes of effort (and a few dishes)? Because we're lazy, that's why. So here's how to bring your laziness to the next level: freeze that dough.

Here's a scenario: it's half an hour past your bedtime, and in the morning you'll leave the house about 40 minutes after you wake up. But it would sure be nice to have some hot, fresh bread for breakfast. So you take a bâtard out of the freezer, take it out of the freezer bag, and put it in your greenhouse on a piece of parchment paper. Then you climb in bed and start sawing sheep. The next morning, you stumble into the kitchen and turn on the oven. You go do some morning stuff and come back in 10 minutes and put the bread in the oven. More morning stuff, and the bread is done just in time for breakfast. Your day turns out 134% better.

It really is that easy, I did it a few times over the past week. Sourdough and baker's yeast work equally well. Here's how you freeze it: begin as normal, but after the first 12–18 hour rise chop the dough into 3 or 4 pieces, shape into bâtards (or boules or whatever), lightly dust with flour and freeze (in freezer bags). I'm sure it will work just as well with normal-size loaves too (though you may have to adjust the thaw/rise time). Less mess, less time, less stale bread. A big winner all around.

How much does it cost to bake a loaf of bread? Or put another way, how much money might you save baking your own bread (which will taste better anyway)? These figures will give you a ballpark idea. As always, I'm following my recipe.

• 425 grams of King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour: about 60 cents
• 8 grams of kosher salt: about 1.5 cents
• Sourdough culture and water (practically free)
• Preheat (my) oven with baking stone and dutch oven to 450°: 20 minutes at 2585 watts at 11.482 cents/kWh = 10 cents (I leave the baking stone in because I'm too lazy to take it out. Actually, it's 6 unglazed clay tiles, but that's another story)
• Heating element on during bake, including restoring heat lost when oven door open (yes, I watched the little light with a stopwatch): 10 minutes = 5 cents

Total cost: about 75 cents for a 1½ lb loaf of absolutely terrific artisan sourdough bread. You'll pay 4–5 times that for bread that's not nearly as good (nor as good for you) at the grocery store. So if you save say $2 per loaf you might be able to buy yourself a used iPod after a year. Then again, you might eat 4 times as much bread…

The take-home lesson here is never let anyone give you a guilt trip for baking bread. It costs under 25¢ in electricity, and even if you place a high price tag on pollution it is dwarfed by your air conditioner, refrigerator, etc. One very real issue is baking in the middle of the day in the summer, either making the A/C work that much harder or making you that much hotter. This is mostly a concern in places like Las Cruces where lunatics like myself live. Most of you will have air conditioners that can handle it just fine, though it would be interesting to figure what that cost would be (if you do so, let me know).

I already blogged about finishing my brick oven, but I was perhaps a bit premature in that I hadn't actually had a real success actually cooking in it. But I was so confident that not only did I blog it, but I invited some friends over yesterday for a pizza party. We weren't disappointed.

About 1630 I lit the fire in the oven. I had about 4 2–3 inch pieces laying down in the back, and smaller pieces in front of that, and kindling in front of that, and a newspaper tied in a knot in front of that. It quickly caught on, without much tending at all. The transition from small to 2–3 inch pieces needed a bit of help—I needed more medium small pieces or I needed to arrange things differently. But a few well-placed pieces of kindling kept things going until the bigger pieces were blazing away. The fire was just about to die down to embers at 1730, a whole half hour before my guests were to arrive. The top of the oven was just barely starting to get white, so I'm not sure if it was hot enough at that moment to cook pizza or not. For timing reasons in any case I threw a bit more wood on. In the future I'll get even closer in timing and amount of wood guessing, but falling a little short is a whole lot better feeling than falling a lot long as I have in the past.

They arrived, I showed them the oven and we talked about it for awhile, and then the fire was down to just about the right spot for cooking pizza (and the white spot was now about half of the ceiling), so we began making the pies and I began moving the coals to the side and making sure we'd still have some flame.

My dough was too wet, probably because it's been really humid and I didn't adjust for that. It was hard to manage (sticky) but manage we did. We got the first pizza in the oven and held our collective breath. It didn't turn out to be a 3-minute pizza—more like 6 minutes—but it was a roaring success. The edges were browned and slightly charred, the toppings were brown and crispy (mmmmm! crispy pepperoni), the dough was cooked through.

The bottom, although cooked through, was not browned or charred as one would hope. I think this might be because the dough was too wet, but it might also be because the floor isn't getting hard enough. I think the latter is the case because of the bread experience (coming up). I think the heat is being drawn down into the concrete foundation (aka my patio) and ground, and I would have to fire it for a quite long time to saturate that, especially since less heat goes into the floor than the ceiling anyway. So the next step will be to get some cinder blocks and perhaps pour another slab (if I must), and get some insulation (in the form of air) underneath that floor.

We did 4 excellent pizzas (about 12 inches each) without any problem. I did of course have to keep adding small pieces of wood to the coals to keep a little flame going. Finally after the pizza was done I spread the embers out over the floor and let that soak for a few minutes (not very many). Then we scooped the coals and ashes out and put the bread in and closed the door. Half an hour later we pulled out some delicious sourdough bread. It too did not have the expected hot-hearth effects, but it was cooked through and the top was crispy and brown. The oven thermometer accompanying the bread read 425°F when we took it out. A hotter hearth would have been nice, again, but still a success. Honestly, I get better bread out of my dutch oven in the house oven, but I think it's a matter of getting the floor hotter and practice.

I estimate the cost for firing the oven was about $1, maybe less (at summer firewood prices). The pizza was fantastic (better than I can pull off in our oven with baking tiles), the bread was just fine, and the house didn't get hotter. Success!

I've written up the things I've learned about firing a small brick oven, like the Anasazi. I've also reorganized my brick oven pages slightly. http://hans.fugal.net/brick

Well, I did it. You probably already knew that because I've been in the process for some time and I've told just about everyone on the planet. I've written up the things I learned while building my oven, so you can see just what all it takes.

Does it work? Yes, indeed it does. I can make pizza and follow up with a batch of bread. But it's a bit more tricky than the ordinary large brick oven. In a large brick oven, you have lots of room and lots of oxygen for a roarin' fire. You don't need a lot of fire-tending skill to successfully fire a big oven. But this oven requires quite a bit more skill. I'm going to write up exactly what I've learned about firing a small oven Real Soon Now™, but in the meantime I'll just tell you the secret: small pieces, lots of oxygen, and start at least ⅓ of the way back in the oven.

If you just can't wait, may I recommend visiting the excellent woodheat.org site which has excellent information on building fires, especially the Concise Guide to High-Performance Woodburning and Top Down Fever.

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!

If I gave you a copy of my no-knead bread recipe, throw it away and download it again. I made a mistake in calculating the amount of start needed for the sourdough variation. The 3 tablespoons I told you to use is too much for a 12–18 hour ferment. You'll often end up with "raggy" dough that won't keep its skin or rise properly. Basically, the effect would be the same as using too much yeast, though I think the sourdough culture byproducts might be harsher to the gluten than just yeast.

The effect is more pronounced with whole wheat, which has a higher ash content which means it can absorb more of the sourdough byproduct (lactic acid among other things) before the ph reaches the level that inhibits sourdough growth. This is why whole wheat sourdough is generally more sour, all other things equal.

The correct amount of start for that recipe is about 1 tablespoon of start. This is roughly 2% of the whole weight.

By the same token, if your room temperature is closer to 90° than 70°, as mine is during the summer, you might find that you need to reduce the fermentation time considerably or your dough will go to rags. This is because yeast (and sourdough culture) grow much faster in the mid 80s than in the 70s. I've talked about this before, with a pretty graph.

As a bread fanatic, I've often dreamed of having my own brick oven. At first I thought it was a complicated and expensive endeavor, and that I couldn't build one because I'm renting. But then I got creative and designed a couple Brick Ovens for the Cheapskate, and I think that I can build a great oven for about $65, which is portable enough to appease the landlord.

I know I've admonished you to weigh your flour before. I've done mean things like put all my recipes in grams and mocked you whenever I heard you mention measuring flour by volume. But if you'll bear with me I have a very interesting anecdote, and it just so happens it happened to yours truly.

I've been trying to refine my recipe before I inflict it on our unsuspecting ward relief society in their cookbook. So I've been measuring my flour like a "normal person", by volume, to make sure it at least comes close.

Thursday I measured it out and it was wet. Way too wet. Like thick pancake batter wet. I added some flour and managed to get it only a little bit too wet, but due to a minor crisis (running out of flour at the wrong moment) I wasn't able to accurately measure how much more flour I had to add to get a decent consistency. And then the bread went to rags, I think partly because it was still too wet. It was a bona fide disaster. So the next loaf I tried with heaping cups of flour, and still too wet (though not as much too wet). This is with my recipe that should give 74% hydration, but I promise you this was not 74%, it was much higher. And, my recipe uses less water than Bittman and Lahey call for in the NYT No-knead bread recipe. (By my calculations Lahey's recipe comes to 83% and Bittman's comes to 90%)

Today I demonstrated the technique at a friend's house, though instead of the overnight rise we did a few stretch and folds. 3 cups flour (again, scoop & shake like Lahey does in the video) and 1⅓ cups water. Dry. Way dry. So I add about another ⅙ cup water, and it gets sticky and soft. It worked fine, but it was a bit on the dry side after all, giving a tight crumb and holding its structure. It was good, but it wasn't wet enough for the true artisan style.

So on the one hand, way too wet. On the other hand, too dry even when following Lahey's recipe. Same person measuring. Same weather. Same city. Same week. I think it's obvious. Measuring flour by volume is just plain silly.

This week I'm going to do a binary search and find just the right hydration, by weight, for the artisan bread that Lahey and I want you to have. Then if necessary I'll update my recipe, using the 5 oz per cup conversion, hopefully putting things in the middle so that on the average, average Joe/Jane will get reasonable results. I'll probably err on the side of too-dry-for-artisan-but-still-makes-good-grandma-bread, because people are much more likely to be satisfied with grandma bread than the seriously frustrating experience that is trying to manage dough that's tooo wet.