Can I bake sourdough without a Dutch oven?

I’ve been learning how to make sourdough bread over the past few months, mainly following the Tartine Bread book as well as Ken Forkish’s “Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast”. They both recommend using a cast iron dutch oven or combo cooker, and that’s worked very well.

Another way to bake sourdough bread without a Dutch Oven is to bake it in a loaf pan. The trick here is to have 2 loaf pans. Then you can invert the second pan over the top, effectively creating a mini steamy environment for your sourdough. You can clip the loaf pans together if you have an oven proof clip.

The Steam Assist Mode combines the dry heat of a convection oven with steam to create a humid environment for cooking, enhancing the flavor and texture of foods. It is ideal for items like cheesecake, breads, and a whole chicken or turkey, as it results in a moist interior and perfectly browned exterior of the food.

Spraying sourdough with water and using steam is a really good way to bake and finish sourdough so that it looks the best it possibly can along with a tasty and crispy crust.

The best way to brown and crisp your bread’s bottom crust as well as enhance its rise is to bake it on a preheated pizza stone or baking steel. The stone or steel, super-hot from your oven’s heat, delivers a jolt of that heat to the loaf, causing it to rise quickly.

Bread Loaves made with over-kneaded dough commonly end up with a hard crust and dry interior. Often upon cutting, slices will crumble. If your perfect bread loaf turns into a crumbly mess, don’t worry. The overworked dough will work great when used as croutons or breadcrumbs.

Sourdough starter and sourdough discard are the same thing. The discard is just the sourdough starter you’re not currently feeding or baking with. It’s called discard because it often gets “discarded” during feeding.

At cool temperatures, yeast produces carbon dioxide more slowly, so refrigerating the batter allows yeast to leaven at a slow and steady pace, providing more time for a more complex-tasting combination of flavor compounds to develop.

Method 1: Put the dough and pot in the center of a cold oven. Set the oven to 450F, turn it on, and set a timer for 30 minutes. When the timer goes off, remove the lid and allow the bread to continue baking until it’s a dark golden brown, probably an additional 25-30 minutes.

If your crust is becoming soft too quickly and not staying crispy you simply need to bake the bread longer. The best way to do this is to lower the temperature of your oven slightly and bake a few more minutes to achieve the same color you would have at the higher temperature.

If dough is left to rise for too long it will cause issues with the taste and appearance of the bread. Excess fermentation occurring in either the first or second rise can lead to a sour, unpleasant taste if the dough gets left for a long time. Over-proofed loaves have a gummy or dense texture.

Baking bread in a combi steam oven definitely has some major perks. The biggest plus is the fantastic texture your loaf will have, but along with that you should find your bread proves and rises evenly. And because the crumb is more moist than when cooked in a conventional oven, it stays fresher for longer.

Sourdough bread is often dense when a weak starter is used. An un-ripe starter doesn’t have enough lactic acid bacteria and yeast cells to produce the gas required to raise the loaf. Another cause is the gluten structure may be undeveloped and can’t stretch to retain the gas that’s produced.

When the temperature of the crust hits 50-60C (122-140F) in wheat bread, the starch coagulates (hardens) and the set crust cannot rise further.

If you don’t own a Dutch oven, you can always bake the bread on a heavy baking sheet or pizza stone instead. Preheat it in the oven for 30 minutes before baking your bread. To create that steam, you’ll need to preheat a metal rimmed baking pan under the baking sheet as well.