Looking Out To Sea

This is one of those I should have been doing this ages ago posts that will have other people rolling their eyes and muttering “well, yeah”.

bread
© ian

Last week I made a batch of low-yeast bread which was allowed to develop over the course of an evening. I moulded them and let them prove overnight in the fridge.

Not only was it easier and less hassle to bake first thing in the morning but I also had the satisfaction of making some of the nicest loaves I’ve made in a while. Helen and I took a baguette each and a box of sandwich ingredients to work, which also cut down on my effort in the morning. No more making sandwiches!

I’ve been too busy to do this again lately — I tried again on Sunday but the yeast was more active than I assumed it would be and it would have been over-proved after a night on its own. So I just baked that night. But I’m looking forward to doing this again.

I’ve been on a quest for some time now to get a baking stone for making nice crusty bread in our domestic oven. Most of the baking stones to buy are small and expensive, particularly the ones branded as “pizza stones”, which are actually circular and so of limited practical use for long loaves.

A few people sell more conventionally-shaped slabs of stone for your oven, but they are still awfully pricy. (I found one at a garden centre for thirty pounds. For some reason it’s always the garden centres that sell these things.) Until last week, when I stumbled across an alternative: a “worktop saver”.

Now, I honestly don’t know what a worktop saver is. They seem to be made of glass or stone. You can’t use them to put hot pans on, because the thermal shock would do for them pretty quickly. And I can’t imagine anyone using them as a chopping board unless they wanted to blunt their knives in short order.

But whatever the original purpose of these things, you can get a lump of granite about the same dimensions as the inside of an oven for between ten and twenty pounds. The one I bought was £20 from Debenhams because Asda didn’t have any £10 ones in stock. These things are ubiquitous, if you just know what to look for. (Curiously, I’m not the only one to delight in these things — they are useful for stabilising hi-fi equipment.)

I haven’t used mine extensively yet (a few pizzas in one baking session) but it’s holding up fine so far. I was careful not to put it cold into a hot oven, and it takes longer to come up to temperature, but it works well and radiates a lot of heat even when the oven is cooling.

Do it yourself

If you buy a granite worktop saver like mine you’ll probably need to prepare it first. Mine came with six foam-rubber feet on the unpolished side. I cut these off with a pen knife and then sanded down the remaining residue with the coarsest sandpaper I had. You’ll probably find that the unpolished side has very obvious grooves — presumably from where the stone was cut — and scraping/sanding along these ruts makes your job a bit easier.

Give it a quick once-over with a damp cloth to remove the dust and leave it to dry. I have used the stone polished-side up though I will probably try it upside down in future. The marks from the feet are still there, and very obvious when the stone is wet, but there is no smell of burning foam so I’m quite happy!