17 Cozy Bread Recipes You Can Make in a Dutch Oven (2024)

FAQs

What type of Dutch oven is best for bread? ›

Look for a 6- to 7-quart, round Dutch oven. Anything much bigger will cause the bread to spread out and go flat. The 6- and 7-quart size yields the perfect round shape, with plenty of springy height.

It likely baked for too long at too high of a temperature. Reduce the bake time and temperature until it no longer burns. Use the suggestions in this guide post to help reduce burning on the bottom of your bread dough.

The high heat inside the Dutch oven brings the water inside the dough to evaporate. Because you have the lid on top, the steam is trapped inside and creates a hot and steamy environment. This helps your bread to stay moist and flexible so it can rise and expand easily.

Uneven heat in your oven can be the culprit – if you loaf is nicely golden on the outside but gummy or moist in the inside, it's baking too quickly on the outside. Trying reducing the temperature you're baking at and bake for a bit longer.

Good quality parchment paper is incredibly effective when it comes to baking sourdough bread. It allows you to transfer your proofed dough from the bench and into a hot Dutch Oven. Typically you would tip your sourdough out of your banneton and onto the parchment paper and then use that to transfer the dough.

Usually bread will be dense when there is too much flour. Keep in mind this dough will be sticky and shaggy, do not add any more flour than specified. Other factors that come into play are humidity and age of flour. Little yeast, long rise, sticky dough are keys to a good, light loaf.

A Dutch oven is a catch-all term for enclosing your loaf inside a chamber for the first 20 minutes of the bake and then baking without the lid for the next 20 minutes. Enclosing a loaf like this in the initial part of the bake helps the loaf to achieve really good oven spring.

It's generally not recommended to grease the inside of a Dutch oven for baking, since it can cause your bread to char.

Even among professional bakers, dutch ovens are still top of the list for baking sourdough bread. This is because they heat the bread evenly, which leads to more consistent cooking of the loaf.

So if you were anything like me and you're struggling with hard, dark, or burnt bottoms, there is a solution. So if your Dutch oven isn't currently on a middle rack, make sure you move it to a middle rack. and then take another one of your oven racks. and put it directly below that one.

What does Overproofed yeast look like? ›

Overproofed is when the dough has rested too long and the yeast has continued making carbon dioxide while the strength of the dough (gluten bonds) have begun to wear out. The dough will look very puffy, but when you touch it or move it you may notice it deflate or sag.

Over-kneading has a tendency to result in chewy bread. Here's how to tell if you've kneaded enough. Another possibility—you used bread flour when all-purpose flour would do. If a recipe with bread flour turned out chewier than you like, try it with all-purpose and knead only as much as the recipe directs.

Bread will conform to the shape of the pot it is baked in, especially with wet doughs like the 'no knead' variety. So with an Oval Dutch Oven, your bread will bake in a more traditional loaf shape versus a rounded boule shape that results from a Round Dutch Oven.

It doesn't matter if you use an enamel-coated cast-iron Dutch oven or a traditional black cast-iron Dutch oven. As long as you have a lid to cover it, the bread comes out perfectly every time. I found that using a 4- to 6-quart Dutch oven yields the perfect round shape.

A convection oven can produce very good oven spring in enriched doughs because of the way its powerful fan circulates hot air throughout the oven's cavity. It's actually our favorite oven for baking enriched doughs.