Poor quality home oven and struggles with Tartine
Hello all. I'm new here - it's my first day so I hope you can show me around!
Basically, I've been baking Tartine loaves for about six months, but I'm struggling to get the correct oven spring/crumb consistency with my home oven, which can't get above 230 C/450 F.
I'm fine (I think!) with shaping/dealing with high hydration doughs, but the inner crumb is always slightly too damp when I pull it from the oven.
I'm using a cast iron combo cooker to cook in and I've pushed the initial cooking time (with lid on) to 30 mins, with an extra 30 mins with the lid off. The oven temp is always around 230 C/450 F.
Trouble is, once I reach 60 mins cooking time, the outside of the loaf starts to burn quite severely. Not the nice chesnut coloured loaf of Tartine-lore, but a proper, charcoal black.
I suppose my question is: has anyone else managed to pull a perfect loaf at 230F? If so, what are the secrets?
I would start out at 450F and after 20 minutes turn the oven down to 400F, then finish baking as you have been.
Jeff
How long are you preheating?
My oven does go hotter than that, but for a while I was having similar problems with bakes starting at 450 because I wasn't pre-heating enough - I was getting the oven up to temperature, but not the baking surface, which takes longer to heat through.
The reason I know its so low is that I have an oven thermometer in there
in terms of starting baking of 450 and turning the temperature down to 400, I'm slightly concerned the inside of the loaf won't be fully baked.
Hard to know for sure without more details of what kind of oven it is, but it's worth a try. I too used to preheat for 1/2 hour, and when the oven thermometer read 450 I thought I was ready to bake. But the oven thermometer only tells you the heat of the air inside the oven - half an hour probably isn't enough to get your baking surface fully heated. I'm not sure how to translate this to cast-iron, but the quarry tiles and/or pizza stone I use need more time to get fully heated - same with the air inside your cloche if you're preheating with it closed. Another 15-30 minutes may make a surprising difference; it did for me. You may actually be able to get the heat *inside* the cast-iron combo up to the 500 you want.
If that still doesn't work, it might be worth scaling down the recipe and making a smaller loaf. Not the ideal solution, but given the limitations of your oven it might be a reasonable compromise.
Bake it until it is done at 400F. The crumb will bake and the crust will not burn or if it does, then reduce to 375F and bake until done.
Jeff
Living in London, I also have no point of reference for what a Tartine loaf is supposed to taste like! Chad Robertson mentions a moist crumb in a few places, so maybe I'm not TOO far off. Hard to know!