It is the fall and I’m excited to get bread making again. I started up a sourdough starter using sprouted whole wheat flour from Anita’s. It went so fast! Within a week I had an active usable starter!

I also splurged on a Bread Lame and a banneton (link below). Definitely worth it!

At around the same time, I knew from this bread experience back in May

that I needed to figure out how to bake these breads better. And it all had to do with the oven. So I did some reading and each sourdough website referenced a dutch oven.

Onward to dutch oven research.

I settled on this one from Amazon.

The reasons I chose it was because:

• it was cast iron, so no matter what I did to it, it would always recover
• The lid could be used by itself as a pan
• The lid could be the bottom and the belly of the pot could be the top, so it was reversible
• I could use it for bread, cooking and other baking
• The price was fairly consistent with others that I saw. I didn’t need the fancy colours, red, purple, blue, yellow. I was more interested in its functionality, and that it was iron meant that I would also be getting some much needed iron into my diet. I’m not a meat eater so that part is always a bit dicey.
• I can pass this pot on down to my children when they become an age where they’d like to bake and/or cook.
• Shipping was free because we are amazon prime subscribers, so that’s a benefit too.

I put this pan on the pizza stone I bought back in 1992 from The Pampered Chef. Putting the dutch oven on the stone gives even heating to the bottom. In the bottom of the actual oven is a pyrex dish with water in it to help with steam in the oven. I probably don’t need to do that now that I have the Dutch Oven, but better safe than sorry and it is a good habit to get into.