burnt tops Hearth Bread and Flatbread Discuss burnt tops in the Brick Oven Cooking forums; This past Sunday we cook 10 loafs in 3 different breads, Dark Rye, 12 Grain, and Raisin Walnut. The first ...

[Humdis]

This past Sunday we cook 10 loafs in 3 different breads, Dark Rye, 12 Grain, and Raisin Walnut. The first two came out beautiful but the Raisin top was very blackened. The flavor was very good if cut the top off and it along with the other loafs were cooked just right. The oven walls and floor were between 500 and 550 degrees. I believe this is because there is more sugars in the Raisin bread. Is there a way to avoid this? I have thought maybe waiting to cook the Raisin as a secound batch when the oven is slightly cooler or maybe putting a piece of foil over the top tent fashion. Any help would be greatly appreatiated as this has happened the three times before when we have cook the raisen bread. We tried putting the Raisin bread in bread pans this time. The sides and bottom were fine.
thank you
David

[texassourdough]

Hi David!

You didn't say what the other bread was, but the culprit is clearly the sugar. Sweet breads need lower temps. Easiest way would be to put them in after you take the others out. Tenting may help a little but cooler oven is a surer bet.

Good Luck!
Jay

[Humdis]

So should I shoot for wall temps in the 400 to 450 range?

[texassourdough]

You've got me? I don't do sweet breads in the WFO. Sounds about right surely someone else on here will have experience to provide guidelines.

[Salv B]

Hi David,

I made a batch of walnut and raisin boules just the other day - I have a walnut tree which produces an abundance of walnuts around this time every year. I baked at a little over 550 F and the boules were 75 % white bread flour and 25 % whole grain. I didnt add any sugar, butter etc.. - only yeast, salt and the walnuts and raisins. The bread came out very nice and wasn't blackened at all. I will post some pics if you like once I download them from my camera. Hope this helps.

[Humdis]

Made 6 Multi-Grain and 6 Portuguese Sweet Bread loafs yesterday. We did the Multi-Grain first with the oven at the normal 550 degree walls. Then did the Sweet bread about an hour latter when the walls were 440 degrees. After 15 minutes we opened it up to take a quick look and the tops were browning too fast so we put foil tents on half of the loafs. We took them out at 40 minutes. The ones with the foil look like the pic in our book and the others were a little darker then I would have liked, but still very good flavor. They were not nearly as blacken as the raisin bread from last week. So I think we will start our sweeter breads at a lower temperature then our regular rye breads. Thanks for you help.
David

[Humdis]

Here is a pic of the two loafs. The right one is the sweet bread without the foil top. The left is the Multi-grain.
David