I've been baking in smaller cast iron pots, so I can fit more than two in the oven at a time. Here's the set up with four 2.5 litre enameled pots. The exciting thing is, I can actually fit eight of these in my oven at once, on two shelves! Very exciting, and good results. This is the Overnight White from FWSY, baked this morning.
Those loaves look amazing! I wish my oven was big enough to bake multiple loaves but basically I can get two in there and I have to watch so the bottoms don't burn. I do have a question for you: How do you prevent the bottoms from burning on the loaves on the bottom shelf and what do you do with all of that bread? Well that was two questions. Oh well. Ha ha!
Sometimes the bottom crust is a bit 'bold', for sure! If I only have four pots in the oven then I can move the shelf up higher, and it's not such a problem, but if I do eight at once then the bottom ones will have to be very close to the oven floor. I haven't done that yet, so we'll see how it goes. I also pre-heat to 475 then turn it down to 450 as soon as I put the pots back in, loaded with dough. That seems to help. I'm wondering if a pan of water on the oven floor might help too? Not needed for steam, but it might absorb some of the heat from the bottom element.
I have a micro-bakery, so I bake for customers who pre-order bread (that was today's bake), for my own little shop (on Saturday afternoons) and will soon be baking for a local farm stand as well. If I can do eight loaves at once that helps a lot. I can do eight long loaves in the perforated Italian bread pans, putting them on the granite slabs on two shelves, and now I can do eight round loaves too!
It wouldn't be the easiest thing to do but I wonder how the bottoms would be if you swapped the pots from one shelf to the other mid-way through the bake.
Yeah, I've thought of that, but having the oven door open (at 450 degrees) while taking out 4 loaded pots, moving 4 other loaded pots to a different shelf, then loading the first 4 pots back in...not sure about that. We'll see how it goes when I actually try with the full eight-pot load.
how large are your loaves in grams. Thanx
I scale all my loaves to 750 grams of dough. This fits perfectly into the 2.5 litre cast iron pots (assuming the proofing basket is the right size / shape).
I've just started using my dutch oven for baking - a 6 qt. Who makes the small ones that you have?
I have 2 enamelled DOs that are about this volume, a Cuistot (sp?) which I think is French and a Kitchenaid (made in China?), plus I have seen at least 3 or 4 other brands what offer this size plus or minus a bit.
They're all Lagostina. I have four of the orange enameled ones and four seasoned black cast iron. They're all the same size (2.5 litres) but the orange ones are slightly wider and not so tall as the black ones. They're pretty pricey but Canadian Tire (our lovely sells-everything store here) puts them on a 70% off sale fairly frequently, so I've been buying them up. They should last forever!