The beauty of a pullman loaf is the perfectly shaped slices. If you don’t want to take a chance on a loaf that has a slightly irregular shape, then this is the pan for you. It makes for a perfectly square sandwich loaf or movie-worthy toast. Any of our bread doughs will work in this pan, but some rise more than others, so you will have to adjust the amounts. In this post I used a 100% whole grain oat bread from The New Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which will rise less than our recipes using only white flour from The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. You may need to experiment a little, but I will walk you through the process below.Read More
People think of artisan-style loaves as being free-form, but my high-moisture, stored-dough method also works beautifully in loaf pans. Read on to hear more about getting great results with traditional un-coated loaf pans.
In the books, I’ve tended to be on the careful side about loaf pans. Since this dough is so wet, I recommended non-stick pans and even so, to grease them well. Yet a very heavyweight aluminum pan works beautifully too– all you have to do is grease it well (I like olive oil even for American-style breads but you can use any liquid or solid shortening you like):
… and be sure the formed dough is well dusted with flour before putting it into the pan— it shouldn’t feel all sticky as it goes in. If it does stick a bit, just let it sit for 10 minutes after taking it out of the oven and it will “steam” itself out. I love this pan, and when I say it’s heavyweight, I mean it. The pan weighs a full pound…
This was a big loaf 2 pounds, 5 ounces of dough, using my Master Recipe. Loaves this large need to rest for 90 minutes after shaping, and they tend to need extra time in the oven. For this size, a lean dough needs 45 to 60 minutes at 450 degrees F, and enriched doughs will need about an hour at 350. Or more. If you’re finding that there’s over-browning or scorching in your oven at this temp, try again 25 degrees lower (Fahrenheit) and increase the bake-time by 10 or 15%. Go by the loaf color and the firmness of the crust:
A reader recently asked about REALLY big loaves, in a 16-inch long pan (but still 4 inches by 4 inches h*w), in a pan like this one. That’ll work too, but you need a lot of dough: 54 ounces / 1530 grams, almost a full batch of my Master recipe. Have a great fall, and follow on Twitter, and on Facebook too…
Red Star Yeast (Lesaffre Corp) sponsored this post, and supplied yeast for recipe testing.
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Istanbul, Greece, Naples, Rome and all the stops between were beyond my wildest expectations, but this pizza oven is where I fell in love. I rented a particular house in Tuscany, not for its stunning views, or proximity to wine, cheese, olive oil, gelato, pasta, pastries, all of which were minutes away, but for this oven. For the first three weeks of our journey we ate hundreds of pizzas and flatbreads, as research for our upcoming book on the subject, and now, in Tuscany I finally got back in the kitchen to do a little creating of my own. With a bit of help from David, our trusted culinary guide and keeper of the oven, I set out to bake pizza in Italy, an admittedly ballsy move. Read More
I’ve been collecting pizza stones in order to recommend the best ones to you and because I have never met a piece of kitchen equipment I could resist. I have been surprised by some and disappointed by others. Here is my review…the stones are in random order. Read More
So many people have asked about baking dough inside a closed cast-iron pan (see a post on that). The cast-iron pan method is based on a much older method, where bread is baked inside a closed clay pot (or “cloche,” meaning “bell” in French). Both methods depend on trapped steam from the dough to create a perfect crust, but the clay pot has the added benefit of being porous, so moisture is trapped, but also conducted away from the surface as the bread bakes. I tested the Sassafras brand “La Cloche” product, and I’m very impressed with the crust I’m getting –take a look at the picture above; this crust is thin and shatters when broken (the burned bits are perfect in artisan loaves; that’s how you know you’ve baked long enough). Keep in mind that these crust results are hard to re-create with loaves very high in whole wheat (because of oils in the wheat’s germ). The bread above is about 15% whole grains– it’s a light version of the Peasant Loaf on page 46 of the book. Whole grain breads perform beautifully in “La Cloche,” but the crust tends to be softer and thicker.
For crust aficionados, I think the “La Cloche” results are a little better than what I get inside closed cast-iron. I didn’t put these two methods in our first book, because we wanted to keep things as simple as possible. But with results like these, they’re going into he second one (publication date is 10/13/09)! Read More
