You’ve mixed your dough, let it rise through bulk fermentation, divided and shaped it, proofed it, and scored or otherwise finished it. It’s ready for the oven, where it will transform into bread.
Our Favorite Way To Bake Bread at Home
Home ovens can be finicky. Our favorite way to create steam in a home oven happens to be the simplest: baking the dough in a cast-iron combination cooker (see page 130 of Modernist Bread at Home)—the results are amazing. You can learn more about this technique in our blog.
Evaluating Doneness
Color is one way to check for doneness. We divide loaf color into three categories: blond, brown, and bien cuit (which means “well done” in French). Technically there’s a fourth category: burnt. That’s a category we want to avoid. It may seem simple, but it takes some practice to differentiate them.
BLOND
A blond color occurs when the dough’s surface starts to get hot enough to initiate the Maillard reaction. The crust will likely be soft and flabby, even if you have vented the oven, because the dough still contains a lot of water. The crumb is just baked, but there’s a gummy consistency and little to no flavor at this point. If you were parbaking bread (see page 13), this is when you would pull it out of the oven.
BROWN
Let the loaf bake longer, and it will begin to brown. You will notice an amber-brown across the entire surface, with perhaps a few darker traces along the scores and at the narrower edges of a pointy bâtard or short baguette. This is the color that most people believe indicates that a loaf of bread is done. This is also the color that many people prefer. There will be a significant development of flavor, the crust will be crispy/crunchy (for a lean bread), and the crumb will be moist without being gummy. This color produces a rather thin crust.
We like this basic brown for many of our enriched doughs because when they get overly thick, the crust dries out too much. You also run the risk of burning an enriched crust if it bakes too long because of the additional sugars in the dough.
BIEN CUIT
Bien cuit is even darker. The loaf will be very dark brown, just short of being burnt. Most professional bakers think this the ideal color for bread, and some will keep the bien cuit loaves for themselves. The dark bake imparts a slightly bitter tanginess to the crust’s surface, where the surrounding heat deeply affects the sugars and proteins in the dough, transforming them into something completely different. A darker bake goes hand in hand with a thicker crust.
Bien cuit is our preferred bake for many of our breads, including sourdoughs and ryes, but it is not recommended for enriched doughs. To be clear, bien cuit does not mean burnt—and that distinction is not open to interpretation (though it can take some practice to get it right).
You can learn more about doneness on page 142 of Modernist Bread at Home, including some tips on troubleshooting.
The oven you use plays a major role in how your bread turns out. In fact, one of the biggest differences between home baking and professional baking is the oven itself. That’s why we tested every recipe and technique using our trusty, well-used home oven—and the results were just as delicious. Along the way, we developed simple tricks to help you get the most out of your own oven.