Baking – Does the weather outside make a diference in oven temp. for baking

My knowledge of how to make bread is almost entirely from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which cannot be praised too highly.

To make a crackling crisp bread crust, preheat your oven to as high as it will go with a pizza stone inside and a heat resistant pan capable of holding 8 fl. oz. of water elsewhere on the rack or on another rack (I do mine on the rack below). Shape your baguette on a pizza peel or cookie sheet (not a jelly roll pan with sides) on top of lots of cornmeal. As your oven is close to being done preheating, boil 8 fl. oz. of water (doing this in a tea kettle works well.)

When the oven has preheated slide the baguette or baguettes off of your pizza peel/cookie sheet directly onto your pizza stone. Pour the 8 fl. oz. of boiling water into the pan. Using a spray bottle, mist the sides of your oven with steam. Do all this as quickly as possible to avoid loosing heat.

After 30 seconds, mist the sides again. Repeat once more. Then turn the temperature down to whatever is appropriate.

Not only will this technique promote a great crust, it will also promote oven spring which improves both taste and texture in your bread.

Cool your bread completely (recipes usually call for 30 minutes but up to 2 hours) on a wire rack. This will remove any sensation of doughiness as the cooking process completes. It also keeps the bread from sweating, which is what it was doing in plastic bags. Store in a cool dry place, preferably a brown paper bag.

Ok, I'll play along. ;) The moist, hot environment improves oven spring by transferring heat more rapidly to the dough (moist air is more thermally conductive than dry air), keeping the dough surface from drying out and getting stiff. It improves crust quality by gelatinizing the starches on the surface of the dough, causing them to brown better, and form a more distinct "crust", rather than just a skin of browner bread.

To get more steam in your oven, in addition to the simple methods you noted, spritzing and pans of hot water, you can:

• Bake inside a vessel like a dutch oven preheated in the oven. Gives both thermal mass for browning, and traps naturally produced steam around the bread. Remove the lid for the last 10 minutes of baking.
• Cover the baking bread with a large bowl or pan for the first 10-15 minutes of the bake to trap naturally released steam.
• Use one of several commercial steam injection kits (most look like a steam cleaner that allows you to blast some steam manually into the oven when loading).
• Build your own steam injector, like this handy baker. The gist is that they use a pressure cooker with a flexible metal hose attached to an output port and directed into the oven. Boiling water in the pressure cooker produces steam. Pre-steaming the oven for 10 minutes before baking and for the first portion of the bake produces impressive results.

In addition to getting more steam in, you can improve the crust and oven spring by using delayed or cold fermentation, which creates more sugars (better browning), and more extensible dough (better oven spring).