Maine18's blog

I have been reading a bit about the various ways in which home bakers use a cast iron combo cooker to produce some spectacular loaves, and was struck by the posts by people who skip the "pre heat" step (either for safety or fuel efficiency purposes), and seem to see no issue in the final bake.  Given it would seem much easier to work with a room temperature combo cooker vs a 500 degree version, I wanted to do a side by side comparison to see if there was much of a difference in the finished product.

So I figured after 6+ years of dedicated TFL reading & researching, I'd finally start providing a bit of content to the discussion.  Below is a grab bag of recent bread experiments to get caught up, with precious little commentary, for which I apologize in advance.  Happy to answer any questions, of course, and in the future, I'll try to post one or two such experiments at a time, with a bit of explanation of what I was attempting.

Cheers, Drew 

Pain au levain (FWSY recipe)