Easy Bread Anywhere: "Baking" bread in a pressure-cooker

Step 6 Appears like you can bake any kind of bread!

Today I baked Sourdough for the first time. It was pretty good!

I cooked some in the oven and one in the pressure-cooker to see what would happen.

The oven breads were cooked at 450F for 10 min, then 425F for 15 more.
The pressure bread was cooked at pressure for 15 min.

Note the much more open crumb of the pressure bread (bottom slice). It really does allow for much better spring, though you sacrifice the crispy crust, which is, unfortunately, one of my favorite parts of the sourdough.

You can see it over there at the right of the second pic looking ugly. It tastes good though, it's the same bread without the crust.

Lost crust notwithstanding, it appears I can now bring sourdough with me in my van with nothing but a jar of starter, sack of flour and salt, and that is pretty good news to me!

Comments

[ekazal]

Incredible! Do you think that I could pop the finished PC loaf into the oven for a few minutes to crisp the crust? What temperature would you recommend? I wouldn't want to dry it out too much, but "oh" what a combination!

[Rectifier]

Haven't tried it, but give it a shot and get back to me! I think it's a little unlikely to replicate a true 'crust' as the crust has already been cooked and toughened into a membrane of sorts. As far as I know, browning (and crisp, brown, tasty crusts) are caused by the Maillard browning reaction. This takes place at a temperature higher than reached in the pressure-cooker, I believe ~150C rather than the 120C in the pressure cooker. This reaction can only take place after the water has boiled out of the crust, which otherwise keeps it at 100C. So a short time in the oven is unlikely to result in a good crust. If I were to try, it would probably be in the toaster oven on "Broil" (or "toast?") and try to radiatively heat the crust hot enough to react without drying the rest of the bread out. Effectively you are toasting the outside of the bread (the color and flavour of toast also is a result of Maillard reactions)

[macrumpton]

I wonder if you could do most of the cooking in the pressure cooker, but leave the last 15-24% for the regular oven to finish up. I am sure the energy savings would be significant.

Supermarkets that want to have fresh high quality bread buy parbaked (partially baked) loaves from bakeries and do the final bit of cooking at the store. I believe this allows them to store the parbaked loaves frozen and ready for when they need them.