Why do some bakers recommend baking as high as 500ºF? And why do some recipes say to bake at 350ºF?

These temperature recommendations are mostly to do with personal preferences, and also whether the bread is enriched with butter, sugar, milk, or anything else.

A perfectly baked loaf

A brown, caramelised crust will mean that the crumb of the bread will also have more flavour, as the crumb ‘breathes in’ flavour from the crust. For that caramelisation to happen, there needs to be some residual sugars left in the dough that haven’t all been used as food for yeasts, so a perfectly baked loaf also has to be a perfectly fermented loaf.

The temperature of the oven also needs to be high enough to achieve that caramelisation, and steam will help your bread to rise to its potential.

How hot does my oven need to be?

Fahrenheit 451 (233ºC) is the temperature where paper spontaneously combusts. Before the invention of oven thermometers, the standard test for whether bread was ready to bake was done with a piece of paper. If the temperature was hotter than Fahrenheit 451, the paper would immediately burn when it was placed in the oven, this meant it was too hot for most bread.

If the paper slowly blackened and disintegrated into brittle pieces, then it was close to 451ºF and the perfect temperature for baking hearth loaves.

So in short, if your loaves are basic lean bread doughs and are not huge, if you can bake at around 451ºF (233ºC), you’ll be baking at the traditional temperature and will get beautiful caramelised (but not overly dark) crusts. For baguettes, pita, and lean rolls, you can bake a bit higher than this.

The larger your loaf, the longer it will need to bake, so for a double batch boule, you will want to bake at a slightly reduced temperature, so that the outside does not burn while the inside is still baking.

For most breads I prefer to bake somewhere around 220ºC to 230ºC (428ºF to 446ºF). This is a great temperature for encouraging caramelised crusts, while still being able to bake long enough to get large loaves fully baked in the middle without burning the crust.

Adjusting baking temperature and timing

The hotter the oven temperature, the sooner your bread will be done, so if you are following the recipe of someone who likes to bake at 260ºC (500ºF) and you don’t like your crusts to be very dark, as well as reducing the oven temperature, you’ll also need to bake your bread for a bit longer than the recipe says.

Likewise, if you prefer a very dark crust and your favourite bread dough recipe isn’t getting dark enough, if it’s a small loaf, you can get away with baking it hotter if you reduce the timing.

For pan loaves and large boules, I like to bake them for around an hour at 220ºC (428ºF), for smaller boules, around 50 minutes is good.

As always, look for the signs of done-ness, and adjust things around to find a temperature and timing that works for you.

May your bread be baked to your own personal idea of perfection. Floury regards,

Kate

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P.S. If you'd like to access an archive of all previous Floury Friday emails, simply visit http://katedownham.kit.com.

P.P.S if you were wondering if you missed an email from me, tech problems prevented me from sending one last week, so if you got the pizza dough email 2 weeks ago, then you're all up to date.

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