Brick oven-style bread

Baking bread is a race between the expanding force of the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast, which makes bread rise, and the stiffening of the crust as it dries, which keeps the loaf from expanding. You’re rooting for the expansion to run ahead of the stiffening as long as possible, which will give a nice, high loaf.

The brick oven -- an ancient invention that’s still the best baking environment -- does this beautifully because it’s a sealed chamber. The water that evaporates from the heated dough stays in the oven, keeping the air moist and steamy, so the crust stiffens slowly.

But the home oven is not sealed -- it’s heated by a continuous blast of hot air rushing through it, which sweeps that steam up the vent pipe. So the crust stiffens up early, and either the bread comes out heavy or the crust splits wide open late in baking and you get a rock-hard shell of a crust with an unshapely bulge of over-risen crumb (which will stale quickly, since there’s no crust to protect it).

Another of the brick oven’s virtues is that it’s a “falling” oven. It’s heated all at once, by burning wood or charcoal in it; the fuel is raked out before the bread goes in, so the temperature gradually falls during baking. This also slows down the stiffening of the crust. You can reduce your oven temperature during baking, that’s easy enough. The problem is the lack of a steamy oven atmosphere. Some home bakers put a pan of water into the oven in the hope that this will create sufficient steam, but it’s only moderately effective.

The late Elizabeth David suggested a much better technique, because it recreates the environment of the ancient brick oven. It’s to put the bread on a cookie sheet or pizza brick, rather than an oven rack, and cover it with a lid that can withstand oven temperatures. There’s your sealed chamber full of steam.

Dedicated covers of this sort (sometimes called baking bells or cloches) are commercially available, but you don’t need to buy one. A stock pot or a stew pot will do the same job. Your range still won’t look like a brick oven, but you’ll be working in that same ancient tradition.