Yet Another Bread Question

[NashVegas]

Okay. Basic white Italian bread: flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar.

I've got the crust down pat.

How do you get the super moist, super *soft* inner dough?

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

1. do you want both

a 'crusty' crust & a super moist, soft inner dough? I always thought those were two different processes. For a crusty loaf the baker uses water, yeast, salt, flour. For a soft, inner dough the baker uses butter, eggs and/or milk, which doesn't give much of a crust but gives the soft interior. Can you name the bread? Or maybe where you buy it at that has both? Maybe I can narrow it down from there. I'm not much of a bread baker, but I have oodles of cookbooks & maybe I can find something.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. It has more to do with method than formula

Unless the sugar's to feed the yeast when you start it, I don't know why there's sugar in there.

The bread you describe comes out of a steam oven. Not a "Steam" oven, but an oven with steam injectors in it. The loaf bakes for 45 minutes to an hour, but the first 10 minutes it gets live steam injected into the oven.

I wrote a lengthy post about this and it is now in Demopedia.

Go here to read it:

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/DU_Recipes:Tips_%26_Tricks

Let me know if you still have questions.

[NashVegas]

3. What I'm Talking About

Is what gets sold in Northeast supermarkets as "Italian Bread," from their own bakeries. ie, not the real artisan stuff.

And yes, the sugar is for the yeast.

As I said, the crust, I got. It's the inside. I want that super soft stuff.

[Stinky The Clown]

4. Yup, I know what you're talking about.

You say you got the crust. And therein lies the answer and the problem.

The steam at the beginning of the bake prevents the crust from forming. The bead gets **lots** of nice, free, unencumbered oven spring (the gas in the dough expands from the heat, causing the bread to be light and airy inside). Without the steam, the crust forms in a timelime that could be called premature. It stops that initial oven spring by doing what it wants to do ... form! Kinda like trying to take deep breaths while wearing a girdle. Nowhere to expand. So the bread inside stays more dense ... and hence ... not as light.

Try this:

Put a cast iron pan in the cold oven so it heats up with the oven. Before your dough is ready, boil some water. Put the bread in the oven and then *** c a r e f u l l y *** pour the boiling water into the cast iron pan and close the door as fast as you can. Remember that steam BURNS. Badly! Be Careful!!!! Leave the oven closed for 10 minutes.

***Do Not Peek****

At the 10 minute mark, open the oven and remove the cast iron pan.

Bake as you normally do.

The result should be a slightly less chewy, but no less crumby/crunchy crust, but with a lighter interior.