Preheating ovens is a waste of time

It’s snowing here today, so I figured it was an excellent day for stew and fresh crusty bread. And, as I didn’t have any fresh crusty bread it was time to make some. So I did.

This is a simple 65% loaf, with 500g of flour. No big deal, pretty standard, but the thing here is I got really lazy baking it. I’d heard that you could skip the oven/dutch oven preheating step and just toss the loaf into the oven cold. Since the loaf had already risen well before baking I figured my worst case was an OK loaf, but… this one worked out really, really well.

Baked in a 450F oven on fan, inside a french oven. (Which is just a dutch oven only without the lip on the lid to hold coals) Put the loaf into the cold pot, put the pot in a cold oven, turned on the heat, and let it go for an hour. Then I took the lid off and let it go for another 10 minutes to finish.

This worked great. Seriously, lovely loaf, the crust was all crackly while I took this pic and I’m quite looking forward to dinner and a chunk of this. I don’t think I’m going to bother preheating the oven ever again, at least not for simple lean loaves like this.

Also, entirely separately, the Fellow Ode grinder in the background remains awesome. Silt-free french press coffee is lovely and my only regret is not getting a nice grinder earlier on in our communal zombie apocalypse.