A typical oven loses a lot of heat when the door is opened to put your loaves in. Some of this heat loss is due to hot air escaping, and some of it is because of the cold dough you are adding.

The more thermal mass your oven has, the less heat it will lose.

The less heat that your oven loses at the start of baking, the better start your bread has towards getting a caramelised crust and beautiful oven spring.

How to provide thermal mass

• Baking in a preheated cast iron dutch oven achieves both thermal mass, conductive heat, and steam.

• Baking on a thick pizza stone or bakers steel creates some thermal mass (and if you bake directly on the surface of this, you’ll get some of the conductive heat benefits that you get from baking in a preheated dutch oven).

• Lining the bottom of the oven with bricks, or putting bricks on a rack in the oven somewhere will also create thermal mass. You probably don’t want to bake directly on this surface though.

• If you have a wood cookstove, these usually have better thermal mass than electric and gas stoves, but the above tricks will still help.

Conductive heat

A further benefit of thermal mass is being able to cook loaves directly on the hot surface, using conductive heat to cook your bread. Conductive heat rapidly transfers heat from the hearth to your dough, helping it to rapidly expand and bake to its potential, and giving some of the qualities of traditional wood-fired bread ovens.

A workaround without thermal mass (or if the tips above still don’t work for you)

If you don’t want to bother (or don’t have space) for a bunch of bricks or other thermal mass in your oven, or if you bake a lot of loaves at once and find that the oven loses a lot of heat even with the thermal mass, you can preheat your oven to hotter than what you actually need to bake, and that way, when the temperature drops, there will still be enough heat to bake your bread.

May your bread be beautifully baked. 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.

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