I baked a loaf of sourdough bread starting in a COLD OVEN. This is what happened…

people always say you need to preheat your oven for at least 30 minutes when you're baking sourdough bread today i'm gonna find out if that's just straight up a lie i'm gonna be baking this loaf of sourdough bread in a cold oven i'm gonna put it into my dutch oven pop it right into my cold oven and then turn the oven on i'm gonna bake it up until it's fully cooked and see what it looks like when it comes out and then i'm gonna be comparing that with this loaf of bread that i'm gonna bake according to just my standard procedure i'm gonna preheat the oven pop it in the hot dutch oven and bake it like i normally do i'm gonna compare the two loaves and see how they compare basically both of these loaves follow my standard sourdough bread recipe it's just a straight white dough 450 grams of bread flour 300 grams of water 100 grams of starter 10 grams of salt that's a 70 hydration dough these have been cold proofing in the fridge overnight for about 18 hours actually exactly the same dough i'm just gonna be baking them a little bit differently okay this is going to be the loaf that i bake in the cold dutch oven and in the cold oven so i'm just going to score it like i normally do using the arc long from wire monkey shop if you're curious okay i scored it with just a long simple slash like i normally do that's the same thing i'm going to be doing with the other loaf let's pop this into a cold oven and see what happens i am making sure to use some parchment paper on the bottom of the loaf i'm going to do that for both especially with a cold dutch oven i don't want anything to stick on the bottom i'm afraid that that is going to be a risk factor it's going to be very likely to stick to the dutch oven since there's not high heat cooking it right away so make sure to use parchment paper if you give this a try yourself move this to the dutch oven okay just transfer this to the dutch oven i'm gonna pop the lid on everything is cold the oven is cold the dutch oven is cold i normally bake my lobes for 20 minutes with the lid on than 15 minutes with the lid off so for this loaf i'm gonna give it 50 minutes with the lid on and i'm gonna set my oven to 500 degrees fahrenheit pop the loaf in put the dutch oven lid on and then now i just started preheating my oven so let's see what happens in 50 minutes while the other loaf is baking i'm gonna move this one back into the fridge just so it doesn't warm up too much we want it to be as close of an even comparison as we can so that's going to stay in the fridge until i bake it okay it's been over 20 minutes of baking i've got 27 minutes left on the timer i'm just now coming up to 500 degrees fahrenheit so we'll see how this works out it's been 50 minutes normally after 20 minutes baking in a hot oven i've got good oven spring on the loaf i've got a nice ear on a loaf so let's see if i've got anything close to that baking from a cold oven start yeah i would say that's pretty good there's an ear on the loaf i've got good oven spring it's already browning really well after 50 minutes so i'm just gonna leave this in here for about i'd say five more minutes to get some more color on the loaf and then i'll call that good okay it's been another five minutes i'm gonna take this loaf out and just let it cool down on the counter while i bake the other loaf i'd say this loaf is a little bit wider maybe a little bit more stout than my normal loaves but the only way to compare it is to actually compare it side by side to the other loaf so i'm gonna bake that now this should be hot still but i'm gonna put it all back in the oven and let it continue heating for just about five more minutes while i score the loaf i'm gonna treat this loaf exactly like the first one except i'm going to bake it in a hot oven this to the dutch oven now i'm going to bake this for 20 minutes in the hot oven with the lid on and once i take the lid off we'll see if there's any big difference in oven spring okay upon taking the lid off i don't really notice any big difference in oven spraying it's pretty much the same loaf maybe a little bit smoother on top i'm going to give this loaf 15 more minutes in the oven to get some nice color and here it is okay here are the two loaves the one i baked starting in the cold oven on the left and the one i baked in the preheated and hot dutch oven on the right i'm gonna let these cool down and do a little comparison so a lot of people say that if you don't have a hot baking surface like i do with the loaf on the right that you won't have good oven spring but this loaf on the left is baked on a cold surface and it slowly got warmer throughout the baking time and it still has good oven spring so that shows us that oven spring is really more of a function of the dough and the fermentation itself rather than just the baking surface although i think the top of this loaf looks a little bit wilder like the one on the right is a lot smoother it's like it busted open in more of a predictable manner whereas the one baked in the cold oven on the left it's just got a lot more going on up there it's like it ripped apart so that might have been because of the temperature it was baked at i'm not sure they do just look a little bit different on top so that's kind of the only difference i can see on the outside of the two loaves i will show you the inside in a minute but i want to look at some of these blisters i've got pretty much the same blisters on this loaf on the left that was baked in the cold oven as the one on the right i have some fermentation blisters on that crust but the one on the right's a lot more crackly i'm not sure if that has anything to do with the baking temperature but the crust cracked a little bit more on that one now for the crumb shot the inside of the loaf that everyone always wants to see here is the loaf that i baked starting in a cold oven and a cold dutch oven it's got a nice pretty closed crumb it's a not available here again is the chrome of the one that i baked starting in a cold oven and here's the one that i baked starting in a preheated oven it's pretty much the same loaf honestly so one thing that i wanted to be upfront about in this experiment is that i burned the bottom of both of these loaves since it happened to both of the loaves i'm pretty sure it just had to do with me putting the dutch oven too close to the heating element at the bottom of the oven it had nothing to do with either the two baking methods when i bake with my dutch oven i usually have a pizza steel underneath as a barrier which keeps the bottom from burning and i forgot to do that this time so that's what happened there but now let's talk about one of the reasons you might want to use the cold oven start method you do actually save a little bit of total baking time the total time that your oven is actually on is only 55 minutes for this method whereas with my regular method where i preheat the oven it took me a total of 65 minutes so you do save about 10 minutes of total time that your oven is on so i guess that saves a little bit of energy honestly that's not enough to convince me to start using the cold oven start method full time it doesn't really save that much time and i just like the results i get from preheating my oven but it is cool to know that you don't actually have to have a preheated oven and a hot baking surface to get good oven spring or even just good sourdough bread if you have good dough and good fermentation you're going to get good sourdough bread whether you preheat your oven or not if you want to give this cold oven start method a try go ahead and use the same recipe i used for the dough in this video this is my master sourdough bread recipe and the video is right here

Channel: Grant Bakes

Views: 101,407

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Id: FPU4cJqUWhw

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022