Bread Oven

The spring planting season is rushing upon us, so I’ve been working through my list of things I want to do before we get busy.

One of those things has been to try baking bread in my Jay Rosswurm Signature Big Stone Cooking Area. A Saturday with nothing much going on was a great day to try it.

About 3 hours before I wanted to start baking I built a fire in the bread oven.

By baking time it seemed hot all right, you could feel the heat radiating from several feet away. I popped our oven thermometer into it to see just hot it was. The thermometer goes up to 600 degrees and the needle was pegged at the far end of the scale.

That probably should’ve been a clue to me that it was too hot, but I assumed that more heat was better when it came to baking bread, so I popped the bread in the oven.

I was using the Cooks Illustrated ‘Almost No-Knead’ recipe that has you bake the bread in a cast iron dutch oven covered for 30 minutes and then uncovered for 20 minutes.

A little uneasy about the blistering heat, I checked the bread after 20 minutes.

Oops. It was the moment of realization that I should’ve cooled things off a bit. But after trimming off the burnt crust, it was just splendid.

It tasted delicious!

An hour after baking the oven was still at 500 degrees. I’ve read about people baking stews in the bread oven after they’ve baked their bread. That’s what I’ll try next.