Asteroid Strikes Kentucky

Here’s one key observation I’ve made after months of fiddling with my new brick oven: these things get really, really hot inside. So hot in fact that a cheerful round of bread dough can be transformed into lump of smoking, blistered ash in as little as eight minutes. But what else to do but risk it when your dough is over-proofing but your oven hasn’t yet cooled down to baking temperature? This is the problem I referenced a few weeks ago when I talked about the difficulties of marrying a firing schedule to a rising schedule: the dough and the oven don’t always meet at the right moment in time. A more fortunate friend, who showed up late (after the oven had cooled down a couple hundred degrees), took home something that actually resembled bread:

Nice herbed ciabatta. I think I’ll be late to my own bread baking party next time.