Those of you that have tried my recipes and know my baking style, know that
it's been my habit to do cold starts. Over time I've altered all of my
recipes to accommodate that method. However, for the last few months I've
been fooling with my latest Coccodrillo recipe. The quantities I use, the
size of my oven, and the amount of pre-bake rise I get necessitates that I
make two loaves. That means two separate baking events. My preferred
method is cold start; however the second loaf gets a hot start since it
follows it's partner by 30-minutes into the fires of hell-on-earth...(:-)!

The cold start loaf is ALWAYS higher, and has larger evenly distributed
holes. The second loaf gets done about 5 minutes sooner. But it's always a
bit smaller, and the interior structure always shows a top-weighted (larger
at the top), asymmetric hole structure. And no, I've never found a flavor
difference between the loaves.

I know that many of you will *only* bake into a hot oven, and that's fine
with me. It's just that in my experience I find the cold start both easier,
quicker, and (for those reasons) superior. Obviously, YMMV...

Dusty
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"Wcsjohn" > wrote in message
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> <large snip>
>
>>Peter Reinhart recommends pre-heating the cloche base and top too. Despite
>>my immense respect for his contributions to the bread world, I thought I'd
>>give cold starts a trial. Just pure dumb luck I suppose. And in fact... to
>>repeat myself, a cold start works great with cloches. But it does go
>>against
>>the grain of accepted practice. Most experienced bakers think you're nuts
>>for suggesting it. Commercial practice is a strong influence.
>
> Correct. Adapting a commercial bakery's operation to cold start would, I
> suspect, be a little mischancy. But there is an attitude, prevalent
> amongst the
> members of any profession, which says "If we don't do it, it can't
> possibly
> work."
>
> I collaborated with Ed Okie on developing cold starts for Reinhart's Pain
> a
> l'Ancienne and had considerable success BUT I was using a fan oven with a
> 10
> minute, room temperature to 250C, heating time.
>
> My current oven, crude, gas, no fan, cheap (which is why we've got it,
> cash is
> short at the moment) and heats to 300C so it's great for hot starts but
> the
> heat time to 250C is over 20 minutes. And the hot air flow from the
> burners
> at the back burns the top of the bread.
>
> Ed was weary of the usual, "Cold start? For Bread? I wish I had some of
> what
> you've been smoking!" reaction as I became, in time.
>
> John
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