If you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for a baking bread with the right texture, and you may not get that in a bread machine. If you’re a big fan of bread, you know that texture means a lot. It counts pretty much for everything for certain recipes. Not all bread recipes produce the same type of bread. Some studies indicate that there are thousands of different types of bread baked from all four corners of the globe. I need you to wrap your mind around that number, thousands. That’s how creative humanity is. It also reflects the fact that we all have different cultures and different expectations regarding bread. While we all need to eat, we fill this need in a wide variety of ways depending upon the type of flour or materials available. This is where culture comes in.
There are lots of bread recipes that require the right texture. Whether we’re talking about a crunchy crust or something harder. This may seem pretty straightforward, especially if you like to eat bread from traditional bakeries. If you get your bread, freshly baked, warm and even steaming from your local neighborhood bakery, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, we would have to get our bread from the store. In many cases, the bread has cooled down. This has a tremendous effect on the crust. If you are looking forward to baking bread with the right, crunchy crust you have to use bread cloches. Bread cloches ensure that your bread recipe comes out just right. This is how it works. A bread cloche is a container for your bread dough. You put the dough in there, and you put on the lid. It’s like a little pot, but it’s lightweight, fairly compact and fits most ovens. It may seem like a regular pot but there’s a lot more to appearances.
Steam produces the right crunchy crust
What exactly happens when you put a bread dough in bread cloche? The bread dough has water, milk and other ingredients that contain moisture. This moisture, when heated produces steam. This steam normally escapes. If you are using a regular baking pan or tray, the steam escapes the dough and evaporates very quickly. In fact, you don’t even see it. That’s how fast steam disappears in an oven. When you put dough pieces in bread cloches, the steam is trapped so there’s a tremendous amount of moisture left in the chamber of these bread cloches.
This produces two things. First, it traps heat. When water and heat mix, it produces a tremendous amount of steam, which actually increases the heat. This is a very humid heat because the water content of the heat is very high. This releases steam after a while. This is very important for certain bread recipes because the trapped steam and increased heat within the bread cloches produce the right temperature and conditions for the right crust to appear. The outside part of the dough gets steamed. Once the steam evaporates and is replaced by just regular high heat, the outward crust becomes harder. This produces the right crunchy texture for many bread recipes.
Bread cloches must be able to absorb a lot of heat punishment
As mentioned above, bread cloches come in many different shapes, sizes, and forms. Be that as it may, they all have one thing in common. They must be able to absorb a tremendous amount of heat. These pieces of baking equipment would have to withstand a tremendous amount of punishment. If you are going to be baking using bread cloches, you are going to have to survive tremendous humidity and heat.
They have to be compact enough
It’s really important to pay attention to the word enough. Depending on the particular bread recipe you are baking, you might need bigger bread cloches. In other situations, you might do quite fine with a smaller bread cloche. What’s important is that the baking equipment you use must be compact enough for you to be able to handle it properly when baking bread.
Must be durable
As you can probably already tell, due to the heavy punishment this piece of baking equipment must withstand, bread cloches must be durable. This means that they have to be made of the right material to withstand the tremendous amount of heat. You can’t just use regular ceramic and expect to bake an awesome bread. It doesn’t work that way. The best bread cloches are specially designed to withstand a tremendous amount of heat and last for quite a bit of time.
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