Hello Boris,
Of course it is a good idea to bake a bit more, with the oven already warm. You do have a few options. See which one would work best fro you. First you could bake the first batch slightly under-proofed, especially with the baguettes, the bake is not that long. Keep the second batch in a cool spot for the duration. Or you can use your fridge for the second batch to slow it down as soon as it is just about right for the oven. You can also let batch one proof at a higher temp (use your slightly warm oven for a while) and the second batch can proof in a cooler spot.
Hope it will be good and you can bake your two batches both to perfection!

Thanks
Boris

Hello Petra,
The way we bake with steam in our oven is to preheat it and when it is nearly at the required temperature you turn on the steam function, so you have a few minutes of steam creation before the bread goes in. Then we bake with steam for around 8 to 10 minutes, until you see the first color on your bread, then turn it off and bake without for the remainder of the process.

Hope it will be great!
Ed & Marieke
WKB

Hello Sandra,
We always use the conventional setting for all our bread baking, so the top and bottom function, also for preheating. You can use the fan function for pastry like croissants. We know that it depends very much on the making, model and quality of your oven how well it can be heated and how well it is sealed for the temperature to stay at a higher level. One tip would be to always preheat the trays you use and maybe use a stone in your oven to create more mass. Always make sure to quickly open and close the door to reduce heat loss.
230 is enough for most bakes, the only real challenge is making pizza, for which you would need to go much higher.

Thank you Tim, for these excellent tips. Very useful for many home bakers and a great method to handle the dough, especially if you are not (yet) used to the sticky quality of wetter dough.

many put a [nominal] 24″ x 7″ sheet of parchment paper and a small cutting board/anything flat on top of their proofing bowl/brotform, tip it over, and place the loaf in a dutch oven/bread dome/pizza stone.

and refrigerate your dough for at least an hour even if you’re not going for a long cool proof. the cold dough ball holds its form much better.

Hello Val,
We are not the absolute experts on using the Dutch oven, because we mainly bake in our stone oven, but we do no something about baking and moisture.

The first thing is to make sure your loaves are properly baked. If there’s still too much moisture in the bread it will travel to the surface and make the crust soft. A guideline to check if your (high hydration) loaf is done baking is to measure the core temperature with a digital probe thermometer. For wetter dough the core bread baking temperature should be around 96C/ 205F. The ideal average bread core temperature should read 93.3C / 200F.
Secondly if your surroundings are very humid this could also have an impact on the crust of the bread.
You could return the loaf to the oven (preheated at 175C / 350F) for 5 minutes before you want to eat it.

Just to make sure, I presume you know that you should always let bread cool on a rack so moisture can escape from the bottom too, otherwise your crust will get soft very quickly.
And as a natural process bread will first be crusty, just out of the oven, then it will soften a bit after an hour because of a little bit of moisture still left and then it will get crustier again.

Hope this helps.

Happy baking!

Marieke & Ed

I was wondering how to use perfectly a dutch oven.. I often use it and put the loaf in a preheat dutch oven (250°C) for 22 min with the lid on and then 22 minutes with the lid off (sometimes i put down the temperature at this moment at 220 °C)… I also let dry the bread sometimes a few minutes with the door oven open…

I am not sure to use it perfectly to have a wonderful crust. Sometimes the crust become softer when the bread become cold. Any tips to keep a good crunchy crust? Thank you for sharing your experience and sorry for my bad english)

Val

We know you need very good oven gloves and the loaf will deflate a bit but with the right recipe and flour the bread will get the oven rise it needs and come up again. You can use a proofing basket to proof your dough and turn it out into the pan. You can also look for ‘no knead’ bread recipes that use this method and carefully follow their instructions. But always beware of this very, very hot pan, so no distractions!

Sounds like a great technique. But I’m wondering, how do you transfer the loaf into the blazing hot dutch oven without a. burning your hands and b. totally deflating the loaf?

Most bakers ‘complain’ about the top of the loaf burning or browning too fast. So in that case, where the top is too close to the top heating element, the advice would be to, if possible, keep it a bit further from this top element. Of course if the problem is a burning of the bottom you need to take that into account. Lowering the oven temp for the second halve of the baking time, after reaching the right coloring is also a very good option.

Sorry but “baking on the bottom tier” directly above the heating element just doesn’t seem to make sense. One might think better to take it high above the heating element to avoid burning? Furthest away from the heating element, the better? No?

Hello Bram,
First of all good luck with your upcoming move to Holland. Yes, we have been using Rofco ovens for quite some years now. With the B40 you can bake 12 loaves of around 700-800 grams in one go (B20 is for 6 loaves). They are made in Belgium and you can get more info on prices at rofco.be
Price for the B40 will be somewhere around 2200 euro we think.
Second hand ovens are offered, we guess about once a month, mostly in Belgium.
This article also contains some info that you might find useful:
www.weekendbakery.com/posts…ven-users/

Hope this helps!

Ed & Marieke

Hi Again,

I just saw that you are now using a Rofco B40 oven, which does look very appealing to me. Where would you suggest to buy this and what would it cost (second hand would of course be fine as well 🙂 )

Bram

I live in San Francisco and have picked up the fantastic art of baking sourdough loaves! I will be relocating the Netherlands soon and I am looking for a semi-professional oven to ramp up my baking to multiple loaves at a time. Is there anyone here who has some experience and tips for the use and buying of semi-professional ovens and which type to buy (specifically in the Netherlands)? I have looked at the differences between convection and deck ovens, gas or electric, etc.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Bram

Thank you Chrissy for your enthusiastic feedback and for sharing your method. We agree, this is such a great method to get direct heat and steam to the loaf, often not achieved in a household oven, which often already loses a lot of heat when opening the oven door and putting in a cold piece of dough for instance.

Happy sourdough baking!

Marieke & Ed

Hi Leah,
It is no problem using a fan oven, but always keep in mind to adjust the temperature compared to conventional of course (lower by at least 10%) and when baking your loaves, as soon as the crust has the reached the desired color, temper your oven so the bread will still be cooked but the browning will practically stop. So temper the oven to 170 or 180 C probably after 15 to 20 minutes and bake for the remaining time on the lower heat (so do not shorten the time).

Hope this helps,

Happy baking!

Marieke