One of the amazing things about the craft of artisan bread making is the endless variation we can get from the same three ingredients: flour, salt, yeast. We baker-geek types play around with temperature, mixing technique, time, water amount, flour type, and cooking method to end up with an endless array of finished products---all from what's essentially the same dough.
There are a lot of different ways to bake bread, but the most ancient one--the hearth oven--is still the best method for achieving the taste and texture artisan bakers prize. There's many variations on the hearth oven theme, from wood fired to all-electric to propane powered on a food truck (see where this is leading?) but they all work because of the same basic principal: radiant heat from all sides, and lots of it. The bread gets a fantastic initial rise in the oven, giving it an airier crumb, and finishes fast, allowing it to retain its moisture and keep fresh longer.
For example. Here's a photo of our flatbread dough baked as a crusty loaf in my home oven:
Same dough, different method.
We started out cooking our flatbread on a griddle because of the limitations of our pop-up setup: we needed something portable.
But then we got the opportunity to throw a piece of our dough into the lovely wood-fired oven of Pizza Politana, and we were hooked. Thus, our mobile hearth. Here's what happens to the same dough in the brick oven on our truck:
Same dough, different method.
We started out cooking our flatbread on a griddle because of the limitations of our pop-up setup: we needed something portable.
But then we got the opportunity to throw a piece of our dough into the lovely wood-fired oven of Pizza Politana, and we were hooked. Thus, our mobile hearth. Here's what happens to the same dough in the brick oven on our truck:
Not only is that cool to watch, but we now are getting a real, old-world pocketbread, and we really like the way the sauces of our sandwiches soak into the crumb inside. And of course, we hope you do too!
