There are many soft delicious bread recipes out there. By soft bread of course, I’m talking about breads that have a very soft and often spongy, or even velvety exterior. These are great because they often have such a fine finish on the exterior that seems a little bit leathery. Their whole appeal, of course, is that when you bite into them, they are very soft to the touch and the taste of the bread itself is very fluffy.
These soft breads make for great side dishes when you’re preparing stews. When you prepare a rich beef stew for example, you can soak up some of the sauce with your bread. You can even cook clam chowder or some sort of thick soup and use these soft breads, provided they’re big enough as bowls. You just carve out the middle and make sure that the bread bowl is thick enough and you can just spoon in the clam chowder there without worrying that it will leak through.
Make no mistake about it, soft breads are amazing. They’re also very versatile. You can enjoy them under a wide range of settings. Whether you are just enjoying some coffee or you are treating yourself to a full course meal, soft breads bring a lot of taste and texture to a table.
With that said, soft breads can be quite boring. If you make it a point to serve pasta dishes or Italian dishes with soft bread, it may seem like it’s just an unimportant detail. It’s too easy to overlook the soft bread. In many cases, you might just choose to enjoy the main course of the meal and dispense with the bread altogether.
This really would be too bad because the bread does bring a lot of flavor and soft texture to the table. If you want to mix things up and if you want to reawaken your passion for breads that you serve with your meals, you might want to consider baking your next soft bread in the best bread cloche.
What are bread cloches and what are they used for?
Bread cloches often look like ceramic bowls. They come in varying sizes. They accommodate different sizes of dough. This dough of course, when baked, turns into a loaf of bread made in a bread machine. A bread cloche is used to trap the moisture that rises from the fresh dough. Your dough has a lot of moisture in it, thanks to its wet ingredients. Whether we’re talking about milk or water, there’s quite a bit of moisture trapped in that dough.
When the moisture rises normally from dough set on a bread pan, the moisture quickly disappears because of the intense heat of the oven. It doesn’t really work its way through the outer crust of the bread. It just dissipates quickly. A bread cloche manages the rate in which the steam rises from the interior of the dough. Instead of the bread having a fairly uneven or even a rough exterior, bread cloches can actually pump up the exterior of your bread.
The reason for this is when the steam comes out of the bread, it’s trapped for quite some time in the bread cloche. It doesn’t just vaporize due to the heat. The steam then fluffs up the exterior crust of your bread and instead of a very simple one dimensional crust, you get a nice layered crust where it’s nice and thick outside, and then as you bite into the interior of the bread, the crust graduates in thickness and resistance. You get a nice nuanced texture that goes hand in hand with amazing taste if your bread recipe.
Put simply, your bread cloche can wake up your soft bread. You love soft bread that’s why you bake it all the time. Soft bread does have a nice range of flavors. Pair up that flavor with some amazing texture versatility by baking your bread in bread cloches.
Bread cloches are also great for conversation pieces. When you take out a bread cloche from your oven, it usually has burn marks on it. People can’t help but look at this amazing ceramic or clay pot. People talk about it. It definitely lends an old world charm to the bread that you are preparing. Instead of your meals being a simple matter of people just sitting down, cutting into their bread, and calling it a day, it becomes part of an eating ritual. It becomes part of a complete feast that people can fondly look back on and talk about.
Never underestimate the power of optics. When you turn what would otherwise simply be a straightforward and fairly boring and routine process of baking bread and taking it out of the oven and serving it in front of people into a ritual, thanks to your bread cloche, people have developed different feelings over the meal. It becomes ritualized. It becomes part of a special ceremony. It may not be anything formal, but at the very least, there’s a certain level of emotional engagement there that you won’t get when you just whip out bread from the toaster or worse yet, take out bread from a plastic bag.
Do yourself a big favor and really mix things up a bit by baking your next bread using a bread cloche. You’d be surprised as to how often people would talk about that time that you served that bread. You’d be surprised as to how many times people refer to your use of a bread cloche. It’s definitely unusual, but it can wake up people’s interest and excitement over baking bread.
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