Quarantine Bread
You do not, repeat <i>not</i> have to preheat anything before putting your bread dough in the oven.<p>Starting with a cold dutch oven makes it much easier and safer to get the dough in. Just bake for an extra 20 minutes at the start. If in doubt, overcooking is better than undercooking for bread.<p>I’ve done this myself several times and it works great. Here’s the needed citation: <a href="https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/07/05/baking-in-a-cold-dutch-oven" rel="nofollow">https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/07/05/baking-in-a-...</a><p>Also... I think the reason why most recipes call for preheating is very interesting! It’s all about reproducing the conditions used by professional bakers. A professional will use an oven that can inject steam to keep the bread from drying out; baking in a dutch oven simulates this. And a professional baker will keep the oven on through the whole working day; preheating simulates this, so you can use the same timings. But if you’re only baking one loaf every couple of days, rather than 200 loaves a day, you don’t necessarily have to do all this stuff.<p>To use a classic HN analogy, it’s like a startup using all the same technology and processes as Google. Some of them are a good idea (keeping steam in the oven), some of them are premature until you’re operating at a massive scale (preheating the oven).