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I finally stopped opening the oven to check my bread, thanks to one line from a baker in Tulsa
I used to hover by the oven like a hawk, cracking the door open every couple of minutes to peek at my sourdough boules. Last spring I took a weekend class at a small bakery in Tulsa and the guy teaching it watched me do this twice before he said, plain as anything, "You are not baking bread, you are letting the heat out." That one sentence hit me hard because I had been blaming my flour, my starter, my scoring, all of it, when the real problem was me fidgeting with the door. He showed me how to trust the window on the oven door, use the light, and set a timer based on the recipe instead of my gut. My loaves went from flat and pale to tall with a real crust in about three bakes after that. I also stopped preheating my Dutch oven for a full hour like some recipe had me doing, which saved me time and honestly made no difference in the crumb. Last week I baked two loaves for a neighbor's birthday and she asked what bakery I bought them from. So my question is, does anyone else have a bad oven habit they had to unlearn, and how long did it take before you actually trusted the process?
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morgan.jason12h ago
That line about letting the heat out is exactly right, and I remember reading a piece from King Arthur Baking that said the same thing, every time you open the door the temp drops 25 to 50 degrees and takes minutes to come back. My bad habit was slicing into loaves too soon because I could not wait for them to cool, which just smears the crumb and makes it gummy inside. It took me about a dozen bakes before I stopped poking at things and just trusted the timer, so give yourself a few more loaves.
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