Loaves look great from the outside, good ear, decent oven spring, but every one has a dense slightly sticky layer along the bottom third that smears on the knife. Cooling on a wire rack for four hours before cutting. Baking in a covered cast iron pot, 20 minutes covered at 240C, 25 uncovered at 220C. Internal temperature when I checked was 96C. What causes a band specifically at the bottom?
Four hours cooling is plenty, so it is not that. If you want to prove it is bake and not ferment, cut a loaf in half and look at whether the gummy layer has the same open structure as the rest, just wet, or whether it is dense and closed. Wet but open means bake. Dense and closed means the dough compressed, which is a shaping or handling issue.
Second candidate: too much moisture trapped under the loaf. If you are baking on parchment inside the pot, the paper holds steam against the base. Swapping to a light dusting of semolina on the hot pot surface changed my bottom crust completely.
Same experience, though parchment is much easier to handle. A compromise is trimming the parchment close to the loaf so it does not form a bowl.
If your pot is very thick, preheating it 15 minutes longer helps too. A cold-ish base means the loaf sits and spreads before it sets.
@indent_error_ivy · 7mo ago · 3 replies
A band at the bottom specifically is usually underbaked base rather than a fermentation fault, and 96C internal is on the low side for a sourdough loaf. I bake until 99 to 100C in the centre, which usually means another 8 to 12 minutes uncovered. The base is the hardest part to cook because it is against a hot mass of iron for the first half and then insulated by the loaf's own steam. Try lifting the loaf onto the bare rack for the last ten minutes and see if the band vanishes.
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@costbasis_carl · 7mo ago
Also worth checking your oven with a separate thermometer. Mine ran 20C cool for two years and I blamed my starter for all of it.
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@quietpackets · 7mo ago
Never occurred to me to take it out of the pot for the last stretch. Trying it this weekend.
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