After spending some time with the Haussler, it was back to the combo cooker for sourdough bread baking.

Here are some batards.

And the cross section. Slightly overproofed, though it didn’t feel that way with the finger/pressure test. Guess I’m not as good as I think I am 🙂

Sometimes baking bread over the weekend simply isn’t enough. While my week night sourdoughs don’t have the same panache as the weekend loaves, they are still satisfying to bake and eat.

The week night boule also highlighted that my bread knife needed sharpening. Its cutting ability can only be called “tearing.”

The Haussler bread oven, food as mighty as it is, troche had been recently relegated to pizza parties. And to be honest, it only makes so so pizza (or more likely, I can only make so so pizza in it). This weekend, I decided to use the oven for what it’s good at – baking bread.

After last bake’s too quick browning, I decided to lower the temperature to the recommended manufacturer setting for the top – 290 deg. Celsius. For bottom, I raised to 200 deg Celsius from the recommended 190. This would promote the proper bottom browning of my bread as the recommended temp left them pail.

With 4kg of dough, I made a combination of large boules, small boules, and batards. The breads are too blond, but they had been baking for over 30 minutes so I thought to take them out.

Here’s the family picture. For my non-baguettes, still finding it difficult to produce pronounced ears. My shaping technique isn’t different from when baking with a Lodge Combo Cooker, so my issue is managing the oven to produce the same results.

I have a lot of bread baking books that I don’t bake enough with. To change that, order I opened Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “the bread bible” and selected her Raisin Pecan bread as it’s a “favorite” and when baked, shop it’s the “centerpiece of [their] dinner.” Unlike my usual bakes, approved this bread required more work – the grounding of nuts, to make pecan flour, and the presoaking of raisins and reuse of the liqueur.

Since I was baking with the Lodge Combo Cooker, I used the standards times for my oven as opposed to the book. The higher temperature resulted in the outside raisins turning into carbon charcoal, but overall the bread worked.