No corn meal!

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chavezc07 on 1 Apr 2020 at 10:45

I can’t find corn meal or rice flour. Does anyone have recommendations on something else I can use to dust my load with before baking it in my Dutch oven so that it doesn’t stick on the bottom????

  1. put parchment paper on the inside bottom of the dutch oven.  I cut mine in a circle to fit.
  2. lightly sprinkle semolina, polenta, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, whole millet, whole caraway seeds, or similar,  under the parchment paper to create tiny air spaces that help insulate.  And/Or put some on top of the paper.  Or use these without paper.
  3. move the dutch oven to a higher position in the oven, so that it gets less "radiant" heat from the bottom heating element.  Radiant heat varies inversely to the square of the distance.
  4. Put a cookie sheet, or other pan, or baking stone, or a sheet of aluminum foil, on the rack below the rack holding the dutch oven,  to "shade" the dutch oven from the radiant heat ("sunshine" heat) of the lower heating element.  Just like your car stays cooler in the shade than in the sun on a summer day.  "Convection", transfer of heat via air, stays the same, but "radiant" is another thing.  Those bottom heating elements "radiate" just like the sun.

Hope this helps.  Bon appétit.

I have also found that even if a loaf is stuck completely fast to the baking vessel, if I let it sit for 10 minutes it will usually release without a fuss. 

that I usually find useless is sometimes useful - - the other time was when it cracked rye berries into cracked rye. So, it still has a place in my kitchen. :-)

 

Yippee