Bread-Bakers v110.n025.2

"Werner Gansz" <wwgansz@madriver.com> wrote:
>I've been baking deep brown crusts for several years [...]
>
>Note the color of most of the crusts, some are actually a bit burned 
>by design.  Red Hen's breads are delicious; their crusts are thick, 
>chewy and have a nutty sweetness from the caramelized sugars created 
>by long fermentation and the deep bake.

Those loaves look good, though I can almost taste the bitterness in 
the "burnt" crust!

>If your free-standing loaves don't look like these, I think you are 
>missing out on a lot of flavor.

I'd say it depends on the bread I'm making.  It'd be highly boring if 
everything I make look and taste the same!  Indeed, even in the pics, 
I notice that only the bigger/thicker loaves are well-browned.  I am 
surmising that those loaves have to be baked longer at a given 
temperature for their crumb to lose enough moisture/to come up to the 
desired temperature.  Thus it's unavoidable that their crust would be 
more browned.  A side effect of a long bake time would obviously be a 
thicker crust.

In my own baking, I have not yet figured out how to bake bigger 
loaves to the proper doneness without ending up with thick 
crust.  It's not that a thick crust is undesirable.  It's just that 
sometimes, the long bake time required for really hefty loaves 
results in a crust that is a bit too thick and hard.

>Bake them a little hotter and little longer than most recipes 
>suggest.  A bit of "almost black" on the lip of the slash isn't a bad thing.

In my book, it is a bad thing _if_ it ends up tasting bitter i.e. 
like carbon in burnt food.

Andy Nguyen