In the previous two posts I described the importance of scoring the dough and introducing moisture into the oven in baking bread. Yet even with these measures in place, the loaf can still split or rise in a lopsided manner. In this post, we look at the potential culprit … the oven itself.

Moisture and Fan/Convection Ovens

Ever baked bread and found that the loaf cooked more quickly on one side? Does getting an even rise require you to turn the loaf around in the oven partway through the bake?

 

 

This was my experience in the early days of bread-making. I would also sometimes get a bulge in the side of the loaf facing the oven door, even after adding moisture to the oven. Turns out it was the oven itself, specifically the fan.

The oven at home that I bake bread in is a fan, or convection, oven. The role of that fan is to circulate air around the oven to keep a uniform temperature inside the cavity. It achieves this by blowing air from the back of the oven to the front, which then circulates around the oven.

 

 

The result is that the crust nearest the fan will dry out and quickly hardens, leading to a lopsided loaf. It’s also why turning around partway through is required to get an even rise, or at least something approaching one.

Getting To Know Your Oven

With a non-fan, or conventional, oven, the moisture imbalance problem mostly goes away as there is no air flow inside the cavity. Some moisture will escape when the door is opened, a few more squirts from a water sprayer can resolve this. Most fan ovens come with a non-fan setting so this could be used for the bake.

However with this setting turned on for the entire bake, the oven will have a temperature imbalance. The top of the loaf could cook too fast and look slightly burned, whilst the base of the loaf looks positively anaemic.

So which setting to use? The answer could be non-fan for the whole bake or a combination of both. This is simply getting to know your oven and comes with a bit of practice.

 

The picture above is of a loaf made using exactly the same loaf tin, techniques and types/brands of ingredients as the loaf in the previous section, but using a combination of fan and non-fan settings as described above. It’s not perfect – the grooves were not deep enough so the crust hardened on top too quickly and the side is slightly split. But it does show a clean rise across the loaf.

On a technical note, I had to delay the publication of this post by a day because the ambient temperature here went up by 10°C/18°F in the intervening days between bakes. I didn’t take this into account and the dough over-proved. That’s a topic for a future post though.