Temperatures recorded in the oven during a dutch oven sourdough bake. 20 minutes at 500F with the dutch oven lid on, 20m at 400F with it open.
Green = oven temperature throughout. Blue = baseline kitchen temperature (thermocouple cold junction temp).
- Before 1st blue line: preheating. Yellow line = inside a cold cast iron dutch oven. Oven was already warm from baking something else.
- 1st blue line to 2nd: baking with lid on. Yellow = probe in the loaf here onward. I was surprised the internal temperature has pretty much maxed out by the end of the first 20 minutes.
- 2nd blue line + 20 minutes: baking with the lid off.
- After 20:27 / green line dropoff: oven open, loaf cooling. I know you're supposed to cool to "room temperature", but even at 150F the crumb was pretty stable when I cut the loaf, with no obvious tearing or sticking to the knife.
Compare to the previous bake where I forgot to reduce the oven temperature after the first 20 minutes. The crust was black/inedible, but the interior was still totally fine.
I'm using a type-k thermocouple with a stainless steel tip from Adafruit with a MAX31855 thermocouple amplifier read by a Tasmota device. The stainless steel tip is pretty short (1") so I just pushed it entirely into the loaf. It got a little gunk on the fiberglass braid but that seems to burn off harmlessly. I don't know if I'm getting much heat conducted into the bread; there was some char around the probe where it was in the bread but I think that's due to past gunk on the stainless steel since the ~200F being reported by the thermocouple shouldn't be charring anything.
Yeah, that sounds like it would get a better read than I got. My probe was pretty long, so there was a lot of stainless steel sticking out of the loaf.