The revolution continued

The bread revolution first noticed on 2nd May continues.

First step was to explore our local Lakeland where I was able to buy two ceramic dishes for baking pizzas. A rather coarser and lighter material than that of which the BH pizza baking stone was made and with rims. I thought that these last might be a good thing, the dough otherwise having a tendency to flow over the edge of the stone, which could be a bit messy. The other good thing was that they were £10 or so a pop, which is a lot less than BH paid for her stone.

Second step was to try them out. All went well until it came to getting the hot loaves out of the hot dishes, which resulted in rather a mess. The bread looked OK, with a Greek rather than an English shape, but the hot, fragile bread was rather broken up getting it out of the dishes and dried out rather more quickly than was desirable.

So what to do? Third step was to try oiling the dishes. This went rather better, although with the dough rising outwards rather than upwards, there was still a tendency to stick to the insides of the rims. But at least this could be dealt with with a palette knife without doing serious damage.

Fourth step was introduced by BH, who bought me some sort of teflon coated baking sheet, the idea being to cut it into the bottom of the dishes. This I promptly did and the teflon worked, at the cost of giving the bottom of the bread a rather different texture, rather in the way that frying an egg in oil rather than lard does something unpleasant to the appearance and texture of their bottoms; all crackle and crunch vanishing from around the edges.

Fifth step, was to continue to oil the rims of the dishes. This seems to work OK and we now have rather good, low rise wholemeal bread. Usually, but not always, best eaten three or four hours out of the oven. Freshest is not bestest.

And today I take the sixth step, substituting some rye flour from the windmill at Swaffham Prior for some of the Waitrose organic wholemeal. Flour which has everything: stone ground by renewable energy. We await the results as I type.

For all the gory details see, as ever, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls.

PS: and while we are on the flat, an honourable mention for a flat pork pie from BH. A sausage meat pie, sausage meat cut with a little onion and a few herbs, pastry top and bottom. Tasted good, and surprisingly like a proper pork pie. With eyes shut and mouth full, the only give away would have been the lack of the spices and other stuff put into the pork of a pork pie.