Baking Bread in Someone Else’s Oven

I’ve been baking bread in other people’s ovens for years. It’s a lot of fun. You get to experiment with flour and yeast from other countries, use different ovens, and bake entirely by feel. Forget the digital scale and baking stone, most rental apartments and houses don’t even have measuring cups. And besides, a hand-mixing dough is a lot of fun. It’s therapeutic. A couple of years ago, I even grew a sourdough culture using plums straight from the tree. Looking back, that dough was too stiff and I didn’t give my bread enough time to rise, but I guess that’s a sign that my baking has improved over the years.

One of the interesting aspects of this experiment was that the flours and yeasts in the supermarket (Plodine) were entirely in Croatian. Often you see packaging with lots of different languages, where you can work out what is what. But in this case, I had to get by completely with pictures. So I went for the flour with the picture of a whole wheat boule on the front. haha. Luckily, whole wheat flour and instant yeast is what I got.

Of course with the help of a handy Internet translator, I now know that pšenični brašno are the Croatian words for whole wheat flour. Good guess.

My first trial was only OK. I was fitting it in between going out for the day and breakfast, so I basically mixed the dough, let it proof overnight in the refrigerator and baked it straight from the refrigerator (results shown above). It was OK, but not great, but I didn’t have the time to let the dough warm up and actually do the final proof — and besides, I always like hand-made whole wheat bread better than supermarket white bread, even if it isn’t perfect. Of course the basic white Croatian baguette was a lot better than our local Safeway bread (a lot better). haha.

The second time through I had a little more time, and was able to fold the dough twice and give the final loaf a decent rise before baking it. My dough was sticky, but I was able to work with it using wet hands. Here’s the fun part; take a look at the photo below. The slightly rounder bread at the top of the photo is the supermarket whole wheat baguette and the slightly flatter bread is my loaf. My crust was a little more crunchy and a little denser, and the crumb between the two was very similar. What a chuckle. I clearly ended up using the same flour that they did.

I’m not sure where we’re going next, but I’m looking forward to trying out new flour and maybe someone else’s wood-fired oven.