My most decent lean bread and WW bead w/o oven to date!

I love eating and making bread! Even though I don't have an oven, I still find ways to make my own bread; my most preferred method is baking bread in my clay pot. I really had luck with soft, lightly enriched pan breads as you can see in my one and only blog entry http://weightloss-slim.fit/node/40958/cream-sandwich-bread-filled-pork-floss-no-oven%3C/a%3E but have problems with crusty lean breads and whole wheat breads. For lean breads I always end up with pale tops and burnt bottoms and for WW breads and wet and gummy interior with weak structure... I've kept trying until I got these..

For the lean bread; I've mixed 50/50 bread and all-purpose flour and water and autolysed it for 2 hours then I added salt and instant yeast and gave it a bulk rise of 2 hours at room temperature with 3 sets of stretch and folds before going into the refrigerator. The next day I divided it into 2 mini loaves, pre-shaped it into a boule, rested it for an hour then shaped into a batard and proofed it for an hour in my llaneras (local flan molds); finally I glazed it with egg then baked it in my clay pot for 20 minutes; the first 5 minutes with live fire, the rest just embers.

~The dough proofing.. I don't know if I've shaped them properly into batards, I'm not really used to wet 70-ish% hydration doughs.

~Finished breads. Bottom crust is very crisp, top crust is paper thin and somewhat soft.

~Crumb shots

Nice open holes (at least for me, first time to get such nice holes), perfect with some butter.

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For the Whole wheat bread soft sandwich bread, I used 50/50 WW and bread flour, water, salt, instant yeast, honey and oil. No milk, eggs or butter, I kept the ingredients pretty basic and simple as I want to really taste the sweetness of the honey taming the earthiness of whole wheat. I made 3 mini loaves "pullman style" by inverting another llanera over the dough then tying it with a string to keep the dough for pushing it up the baked them for 50 minutes in my clay pot over a slow fire. The result, a bread with a flat top beautifully browned all over and cooked through the center. I'm guessing that the two llaneras supported the structure and provided a more even heat all around the bread. I am planing to increase the WW ratio in future bakes.

~The 3 mini sandwich loaves

~Up close

~Crumb shots

I know I'm still at the start of the learning curve and have plenty of time to practice and improve so any tips, suggestions, comments are more than welcome. Baking is my passion and maybe someday I can get an oven to truly practice it but now I can't stop doing it even in this situation of mine with limited equipment. Thank you very much!

No oven, but plenty of ideas, there's a lot to be admired in that! Your breads are delightful, I especially like the WW sandwich loaves. They must be as tasty as they are beautiful!

Thank you for sharing your journey with us through such lovely photos.

Cathy

bread made over a natural fire but this lean bread is just as good. Now I'm going to get some more wood and get a great fire going in the patio fire pit, get out the CI combo cooker and soak the Chinese sand clay pot and see what happens. How often in the modern world do we get to bake bread in the true traditional artisan way - even if the outcome isn't as artisan as we would like? You have posted one of the most interesting and inspiring bakes we have seen a quite a while - at least since your last one anyway! Well done and

Happy baking