Wok and Stone

Toast

 

 

 

 

I've been out of the bread making loop since Hurricane Sandy which destroyed most of my equipment and caused me to back-burner my baking hobby. At the time I was trying to perfect food processor baguettes. At this point I'm diving back in am looking to make rye, pump, and multigrain loaves. I need to have a very efficient process due to extreme limitations of my free time.  

I had a Cloche which was lost, and decided that I'd like to avoid using steam at this point. So searching the kitchen for things that fit together to improvise a cloche  I found that my good old wok perfectly fits the aluminum grill pan for my fibrament stone! 

First loaves - Master Recipe HB5.  I preheated all to 500, slipped in the loaf on parchment, 20 min covered, 25 min uncovered.  Pretty nice spring!

I was thinking about buying an Emile Henry or breadtopia cloche, but I may try this technique for a while. 

 

Lol - that's basically what I did. I found a cheap thin fake metal mixing bowl on some shelf in some cabinet that fit the size of my leaves perfectly. There's no heat retention, but it sure holds steam. I was misting the bowl and loaf initially, but there was too much steam, crust was too tough and was slow to brown. I don't bother with water now. Wss thinking about a cloche. Actually, I was looking at them online when I remembered that bowl. I'm sure this isn't perfect, but it seems to work plenty well enough.