More Dutch Oven Bread

I've been playing a little bit with the DO bread that I discovered recently. The original recipe called for a very hot oven. By dropping the temperature down slightly to 425, it doesn't seem to get so brown so fast. I think some of it maybe has to do with the seasoning in the DO it's being cooked in, since it browns faster in one of my DOs than in the other. I don't know if there's a little excess oil and it smokes a lot inside the pot if that makes it darker maybe, but the lower temperature seems to reduce that issue.

The other thing I tried was adding gluten and dough enhancer. The following picture is two loaves of bread, exactly the same except that the one on the right has 2 teaspoons of gluten and 2 teaspoons of dough enhancer in addition to the regular recipe, whereas the one on the left is the standard recipe, both with white flour.


You'll notice the one on the right is tall and round instead of flat like the one on the left. They both still taste good, as you'll see the one on the left got cut into before I even had a chance to take the picture.

I don't know the difference between dough enhancer and gluten, so I also made another two loaves, one with 2 teaspons of gluten and the other with 2 teaspoons of dough enhancer. They turned out about the same. When I did those two loaves, I made one with sunflower seeds and the other with garlic, basic, and rosemary (partially because I needed a way to tell the two apart and partially because I just wanted to try something else). Both turned out great. One of these days I'll make some with wheat flour.

For the garlic herb loaf, I cut 5 or 6 cloves of garlic into about 4 strips each and added that with a few sprinkles of the herbs. For the sunflower one I threw in a handful of sunflower seeds and I also stuck some on top when it was just about to go in the oven. Since this is a no-knead, slow-rise bread, you have to put in any extras right at the beginning.