One way to bake bread is to use a dutch oven – a heavy iron cooking pot with a lid. The idea is that keeps the bread enclosed in a smaller area and so, rather than trying to fill the whole oven with steam, you can just rely on the water vapour from the bread itself to keep the surface flexible during the expansion stage. If you don’t do that, the bread has a tendency to rise too fast and bulge out in some unexpected place, even if you have slashed it quite deeply.

I tried it today and it did work quite well. I let the dutch oven preheat a bit and I had already lined it with some baking parchment. After about ten minutes, I popped the bread in and put the lid on. After twenty minutes of cooking, I took the bread out and put it back in just sitting directly on my breadstone to finish colouring up.

Generally, it worked well. Total oven time was about the same – longer overall cooking made up for less time spent on preheating. The main downside was the the result was a round loaf – attractive but not the ideal shape for some purposes. I’ll have to see if my loaf tin will fit inside the dutch oven. If so, that would control the shape and perhaps I could batch out two or three loaves at a time, cooking one inside the dutch oven while the previous one is finishing off alongside it?