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Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.
“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:27AM (2 children)
Traditional crusty bread (e.g., baguettes, traditional French bread) depends heavily on steam in the first 10 minutes of a bake. Professional bread-baking ovens frequently inject steam during the first part of the bake, which also keeps the "skin" temporarily soft allowing a longer expansion time (and thus larger holes and lighter bread). Ovens are then generally vented during the second portion of the bake, allowing the crust to harden and brown (via the Maillard reaction).
Home bakers often tend to approximate this effect with a "steam pan," i.e., a heavy pan that you pour boiling water into at the beginning of a bake -- and generally pull out after around 10 minutes. Other less informed home bakers do other hacks that aren't very effective, like repeatedly opening and closing your oven while spritzing the sides of the oven with water -- something that not only ruins your oven spring (i.e., the final burst of expansion in the oven in the first few minutes before the crust hardens) by lowering the oven temp from the repeated opening of the oven, but also risks shattering the glass in your oven door... all for little gain. Although it isn't quite as ridiculous as those who chuck ice cubes onto the floor of their ovens, not realizing how much heat they are losing to melt and vaporize that water. If you want actual steam, put hot water in your oven...
Anyhow, lots of bakers are obsessed with steam. It really can make a huge difference for certain types of bread (though the difference isn't that great with enriched breads, such as typical American "white bread") -- I've seen books with photos documenting the extra expansion and crust development with and without steam on baguettes.
Just to note -- "steamed bread" is a different genre altogether. In that case, the oven either contains steam throughout the bake (i.e., it isn't vented) or the bread is baked in sealed containers to effectively "steam" it. This is important for traditional heavy German breads like dark rye and pumpernickel, which is nothing like the American styles of these breads -- they are incredibly heavy and dense, and usually baked for 18-24 hours with steam. It's the long bake that develops the dark color in traditional pumpernickel. Some unusual American breads are also traditionally steam baked, like sweet Boston "brown bread" for example.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:29AM
Thanks - that is informative. My only experience is with American style bread. If I were to experiment, I'd have to find a good cook book or a teacher.
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:41PM
Damn, I just typed out something very similar and thad a lucid moment where I realized that sub responses don't show up in my comments, glad I checked before I was redundant.
A decent idea of common home methods and their effect can be seen here [kingarthurflour.com]
When I think steamed bread I first think of baozi [wikipedia.org] which are a particular love of mine when filled with Chinese style BBQ pork and either called cha sui bao or manapua.