Steam Punk

After the thoughts I'd noted in the previous post I was determined to see improvements in bread appearance.

Last week's loaf (shown above) sports a very satisfying, rugged tear right down the middle. Clearly there's still room for improvement but what gave the loaf a shove in the right direction? A generous blast of steam from my water sprayer every ten minutes. Normally the loaf just gets one quick spray before being hurled into the oven.

I've been pretty hesitant about creating too much steam. While it must be true that a lot of oven cooking generates moisture, I'm not convinced that your common domestic oven has been designed to cope with high levels of steam. I want to make cool looking bread but I don't want to wreck my oven.

I did a google search on the subject. I expected to find forum titles such as "When I'm baking bread I like to steam out the oven with gay abandon and now my ovens gone all rusty boohoo!" But no. No reported steam/rust complaints.

Well, I've got an engineer coming round to fix the pilot light on the cooker in a few weeks time so I'll ask him what he reckons. If the Smeg man says, "Steam BAD! Smeg man SMASH" then I'll know I'll have to tolerate bland bread.

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This weekend I baked nine small, tasty baquettes and a big barleycorn loaf (300g strong white flour, 200g barleycorn flour, 350g water, 10g yeast, 10g salt / mix in bowl, knead for five mins / rest ten mins / knead a little more, form into a ball / rest 60 mins / shape / proof 60 mins / bake 30 mins 250ºc). No photos as they weren't the prettiest loaves you'd have seen. They did however, taste fantastic.