BAKING STONE

  For Bread with a really great crust you need a Baking Stone

 

 

Baking bread  

Breadmakers are great for baking bread. They make the whole process pretty straight forward                  

                Decide what sort of bread you want to bake  

                Choose a recipe 

                Put the ingredients into the bread maker 

                Turn it on 

And a few hours later you get great tasting bread. 

I’ve used bread machines for years. Firstly a Prima and then a Panasonic SD-2501WXC. They were both great and saved me a lot of time and money as well as producing a variety of great loaves that the whole family enjoy, but sometimes I like to go a bit further and make bread by hand.

I don’t usually go so far as to mix and knead the dough completely by hand (that really is hard work) but once the dough has been kneaded in my breadmaker or mixer with a dough hook, I shape and divide it by hand.

The advantage of doing this is that I can achieve the shape of loaf that I want and can then bake it in my oven to achieve a fantastic crust.

It’s this last point where I become dis-satisfied with breadmakers – I like bread to come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and most of all I like it to be crusty!. My Panasonic breadmaker does bake a crusty loaf, but not as good as when I bake the dough in the oven on a bread baking stone.

Baking a Crusty Loaf

I’ve found that to achieve the sort of crust I’m looking for on my bread  means that I have to first of all get the dough right. It has to be well worked, smooth and airy and then left to prove properly, but not for so long that it dries out or forms a skin on top.  

When the dough has been shaped the top then needs to be slashed with a lame or grignette. This allows the gas within the dough to escape and burst through the top of the bread as it is being baked. I’m sometimes quite adventurous with the patterns I slash using the grignette but that’s just for  fun; it doesn’t matter what the slashes look like so long as they’re there.

Now comes the really important bit; the dough has to be cooked at a high temperature, preferably with some misting.

Some people use a pot or tagine to achieve a high temperature but I use a baking stone.

Baking stone

A baking stone for bread is nothing more than a flat stone upon which dough is placed prior to baking. A pretty simple definition but even something as simple as that comes with complications and a host of decisions to make, such as

                What shape  do you want

                How thick do you want it to be

                What dimensions will fit into your oven

                What should it be made from

                What weight is acceptable

Shape

Generally speaking those available to buy are square, rectangular or round. I chose rectangular because that is the shape of my oven, and allows me to maximize the usefulness of the available space. I like to bake more than one loaf at a time (to save on heating costs) and I can get at least two loaves on my recatangular stone. Round stones tend to be used more for baking pizzas, as that is the usual shape of a pizza – but remember that round pizza bases can still go on rectangular bread stones.

Thickness

Pizza stones tend to be less thick than bread stones; maybe less than three eights of an inch, but this is not thick enough to bake a really crusty loaf. My baking stone is one inch thick and it works fine for me, but there are stones on the market that are twice that thickness. The advantage of having a thick stone is all to do with thermal mass. The thicker the stone the more heat it retains, the faster the dough bakes which gives more oven spring and crustier bread.

Of course the thicker the stone the longer it takes to heat up in the first place. I find that my one inch breadstone already takes at least 45 minutes to reach heat. My bread stone  weighs 6kg, so anything thicker would be quite a weight.

Dimensions 

My rectangular baking stone is 15.75 by 11.8 inches – odd numbers but it came from Europe so is really 30cms by 40cms. This comfortably fits in my oven and still leaves room for air to circulate around the sides. It’s best to leave around 1½ inches of free space between the stone and the sides of the oven. 

What should it be made from 

This is tricky. There are quite a lot of different opinions about what material makes the best bread stone, and  at the end of the day it’s probably down to personal preference.  

Possibly the most fundamental split in opinion is whether the stone should be impervious or whether it should soak up excess moisture. I’m inclined to think that the stone gets so hot when it’s being used for baking that it won’t soak up moisture whether it’s impervious/sealed or not. The moisture will just evaporate. Having said that, when I chose my baking stone I decided that I wanted something similar to what would be found in a traditional bread oven. I therefore dismissed cast iron baking stones (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms) as well as granite stones.  

I looked at some of the posts in various breadmaking forums and saw that some people advocated using unglazed quarry tiles or a potters kiln shelf. I did think briefly about these options but eventually decided that as I was going to be cooking things on this base that would I would be eating, I wanted to be sure that whatever I was using was suitable for food use. It therefore seemed best to buy something that was made specifically for use as a baking stone. I chose this baking stone and am glad that I did. It’s basically a fire brick but has been specifically made for use as a bread or pizza stone. 

I always pre-heat my stone before putting the dough onto it. This is very important. 

Weight 

Baking stones are heavy. Cheaper, thinner models mainly designed for cooking pizzas often come with a metal stand to make it easier to lift in and out of the oven. My thick fire brick stone weighs 6kg and is really too heavy to keep lifting in and out of the oven. I solved this problem by always leaving it in. This works well. The stone doesn’t get damaged nor do I find that it gets in the way. Cleaning is no problem as it just needs wiping down with a damp cloth, when it is cool. 

The baking stone will inevitably get discoloured with use, but that is to be expected and is not a problem – particularly as it’s out of sight in the oven. 

Where to buy 

I bought my baking stone from Amazon. It came complete with a pizza paddle. I was very happy with the sevice I received from the supplier but be warned that the stone comes from Germany and mine took 3 weeks to arrive.