Long Baking Time
I've been eyeing the Westfalen pumpernickel recipe in the Rye Bakers Book by Ginsberg.
I'm kind of thinking this would be the perfect recipe for my wood fired pizza oven. Then again, a 24 hour bake time may even be too long for a wood fired oven. Although it certainly would cut down on the electric bill if it was able to maintain temperature for that long.
With a good initial fire in a pizza oven to warm it up, and then closing it up, how long have you maintained a baking temperature? Understand, that the Ginsberg recipe only requires a 40 minute bake at 300°F, and then a final 24 hour bake at 220°F.
Now typically a loaf of bread only requires a baking period of 30-40 minutes which is considerably shorter than 24 hours and probably more suitable for a wood oven.
Your thoughts?
I've never done it but I've read that the original way to bake pumpernickel was doing it last in the evening and leaving it for the temperature to slowly come down.
Having heard the same, I guess I'm just going to have to close up the oven after a pizza bake and monitor the temp throughout the night to see if it will hold for 24 hours.
I'll be very interested to learn how it works out. I have wanted to taste real pumpernickel bread since I learned that the stuff we buy isn't.
Our brick oven is 500 the morning after pizza if we leave the coals in overnight, and then 300 the morning after that (brick surface temperature). We built ours and it is well insulated and reasonably thick, much moreso than a valiorani or other refractory oven kit, so depending on how yours is built it will be different. Hopefully you have a tight fitting door that is insulated. That will help too. Your surface material will impact cooking temp too due to conductivity and also surface temp is not exactly the same as air temp. For example, I got results in my oven at 675 that I could only get at 750 in my neighbor’s oven.
Trial and error and success is the route to results. Use your wfo for everything! It can be great fun. As a side note we LOVE roasting shrimp while heating the oven. It takes like 2 minutes and it’s unbelievable.