October 8, 2023 - 5:00am
Dense on the Bottom
All my sandwich breads form a 1/4" dense bottom that is not part of the crust. I use KA bread flour, SAF yeast, distilled water with a 64% hydration rate, a well preheated baking stone with an oven temp of 400F with steam and get great oven spring. It gets denser through time and we store it with the sliced side down. The bread itself is fluffy.
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Could you insert the picture again? It didn't make it through on your first post. Make sure you click on the "Upload" button, and make sure it isn't too big (I think that 2 MB is the limit).
Picture uploaded now.
The problem with the picture appears to be the size of the file name. Looking at the name in MS Word shows it takes up 243 pages (!) and has more than 900,000 characters!
Sounds like the picture data got inserted into the name somehow.
Picture uploaded now.
Let the message set for a moment and all those characters go away. A photo is now uploaded.
Nice looking loaves - but - they look very underbaked to me, just going by the color. Could you upload a picture of the cross-section so we can see the dense bottom you are asking about?
This is not a sourdough loaf so maybe that's way it looks pale, plus the lighting. On this particular loaf I take the internal temp to 203F. MarkS weighed in and posted a suggestion that fixed the issue.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the expected result of baking an enriched bread on a stone. Try it on a baking sheet. The dense heat of the stone is cooking the bottom of the loaf faster than the top.
It happens with and without a stone. It happens much less with the stone, but it happens. This not a sourdough loaf and has 3% butter. Thank you for weighing in.
Post the formula.
HEY!!!! Your comment about the "dense heat of the stone is cooking the bottom of the loaf faster than the top" led me to try something. I normally bake this particular loaf at 400F and go for 203F internally. Today, preheating the oven too 400F, with an infrared thermometer the stone was 430!!!! I lowered the oven to 375 and kept the stone around 400F. It made such a difference. I had to bake the bread a couple of minutes longer but the thickness along the bottom is gone!!!!
Thank you for thinking outside of the box and fixing my issue!!!
Glad to help!