Temperatures recorded in the oven during a dutch oven sourdough bake. 20 minutes at 500F with the dutch oven lid on, 20m at 400F with it open.
Green = oven temperature throughout. Blue = baseline kitchen temperature (thermocouple cold junction temp).
- Before 1st blue line: preheating. Yellow line = inside a cold cast iron dutch oven. Oven was already warm from baking something else.
- 1st blue line to 2nd: baking with lid on. Yellow = probe in the loaf here onward. I was surprised the internal temperature has pretty much maxed out by the end of the first 20 minutes.
- 2nd blue line + 20 minutes: baking with the lid off.
- After 20:27 / green line dropoff: oven open, loaf cooling. I know you’re supposed to cool to “room temperature”, but even at 150F the crumb was pretty stable when I cut the loaf, with no obvious tearing or sticking to the knife.
Compare to the previous bake where I forgot to reduce the oven temperature after the first 20 minutes. The crust was black/inedible, but the interior was still totally fine.
What kind of temp probe are you using? I’ve used a leave in thermometer to track bread before, but I didn’t get good results cause the part of the probe outside of the loaf was able to conduct enough heat down the probe to give artificially high readings when compared to an instant read. It works well for meat since the density/moisture content is high enough to counteract that effect.
I’m using a type-k thermocouple with a stainless steel tip from Adafruit with a MAX31855 thermocouple amplifier read by a Tasmota device. The stainless steel tip is pretty short (1") so I just pushed it entirely into the loaf. It got a little gunk on the fiberglass braid but that seems to burn off harmlessly. I don’t know if I’m getting much heat conducted into the bread; there was some char around the probe where it was in the bread but I think that’s due to past gunk on the stainless steel since the ~200F being reported by the thermocouple shouldn’t be charring anything.
Yeah, that sounds like it would get a better read than I got. My probe was pretty long, so there was a lot of stainless steel sticking out of the loaf.