On a handful of occasions I've had bread in a restaurant where the crust is thin but very crispy, almost as if it had a couple layers. It looks crackly and gives easily to pressure. It's not a thick hard-to-chew crust. The inside is wonderful and soft. I'd call it "Italian bread" but I don't think that necessarily describes it.
My crust tends to turn out nicely colored, but 1/8"-thick and sort of soft/damp (like leaving bread out on a humid day) but also not terribly easy to chew.
Does anyone have any tips on how to get a crispy thin crust like this at home?
Bonus: What do you call this kind of crust? (It seems like "crusty" usually means hard thick crust, which is not what I want).
Best Answer
Assuming that this is what you want:
This kind of crust is made with steam injection. Normal household baking methods will give you a thick crust, which is usually also hard. Wetting and covering it right out of the oven will give you a chewy crust. If you bake the bread in a fitting pan and tweak the recipe, you can get thin, almost non-existant crust, but also soft, like sandwich bread.
For what you see in the picture, you need standard French bread dough (60% hydration, AP flour) and a blast of steam in the oven at the beginning of baking. Sadly, homemade steam methods which rely on evaporation won't work, because there is a limit to the amount of water which will evaporate even of high temperatures, and you need to get more steam inside than that. So, you'll either need a pro oven or a steam modding (which only works on an oven with vents, unless you are prepared to drill a hole into the oven cavity).
For extra tweaking the crust, you can use a glaze. We had a question explaining the different glazes and their results.