I had notes on these bakes, but I just upgraded to MacOS Sequoia 15.1 b5, and somehow opening Notes on my Mac erased what I had on my iPhone. For two bakes! Wonderful. I wonder what else was deleted.

I do have pics and the dough recipe however.

October 3rd:

• I raised the shelves in oven and added two firebricks on the floor in the hopes to maintain heat. I needed to raise the shelves to make room for the bricks. (I had firebricks lying around because I had plans to make an WFO in my yard someday. I never got around to it though).
• I used boiling water instead of ice cubes and regular spray in the oven, and I only did this twice. Once at minute 0, and once at minute 5.
• I turned the heat down from 550°F to 510°F once the loaves were inserted.

So how were they? Pretty good! Much better than last time:

October 4th:

I'm kind of getting sick of bread at this point. But I'm driven to make the same kind of bakes as I would when using a cast iron combo cooker. Is it possible? Maybe not. But I still want to get as close as possible.

For this batch I raised the starter from 4% to 10.25%! That's a giant jump, and here's what it looked like in the morning:

I went too far on the starter though, or maybe I didn't bake the loaves soon enough. They ended up being over-proofed, which made them flatter than I'd like. I think I'll drop down to 8% to see what happens next time. Maybe I'll also just bake them sooner.

• Six loaves all in at once. 550°F down to 510°F after 8 minutes or so because I forgot to do it right away.
• Still using firebricks and boiling water for steam.
• The baking smell was certainly more sour, and so much so it honestly creeped me out a little bit. But the end result tasted fine.

What exactly is happening to all this bread? Well the October 3rd batch went to neighbors who were super happy to have some bread. The October 4th batch went to the climbing gym with me. Except for one loaf which I threw out my car window at striking Boeing Machinists. (I did ask if they wanted a loaf first. And they did!).

At this point, I've baked somewhere between 40 and 50 loaves in a little over a week. So I'm taking the weekend off.