Rice Is Key To Avoid Burning Your Sourdough Bread In A Dutch Oven

Have you had issues burning the bottom of your sourdough bread? Dutch ovens run hot, and sourdough recipes usually call for a temperature of 450 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. It's incredibly common to find the bottom of your loaf overbaking or even burning, especially when the Dutch oven is set on the lowest rack of your oven. To prevent the underside of your sourdough bread from baking too dark, try the viral hack of pouring ¼ cup uncooked white rice into the bottom of your Dutch oven before adding the scored loaf.

We tried this hack to see if it was really the secret to the perfect loaf of sourdough. When you're baking your sourdough bread in a Dutch oven, you'll want to be sure the temperature is 25 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than when you're baking with a normal loaf pan. Here's everything else you need to know about baking sourdough bread with the rice trick.

First, we preheated the oven and the Dutch oven (which was empty) for 30 minutes. Then, we added white Basmati rice to the vessel. We flipped the bread dough out of the proofing basket onto a piece of parchment paper, seam side down. (Sometimes we add cornmeal or rice flour to the underside of the loaf.) Next, we scored the loaf and placed the bread dough on the parchment in the Dutch oven. We sprayed the dough with a little water to create steam in the oven and put the lid on top. Finally, we baked this covered at 475 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes, then uncovered for 25 minutes.

The rice took the brunt of the color change in the oven, while the sourdough bread turned out pleasantly browned, especially the bottom of the loaf. There was no sign of burning. Because the rice got so dark, we'd recommend using fresh rice for each individual bake.

The hack took seconds, prevented the crust from going too dark, and helped to create a delicious, well-textured sourdough bread. Rice is almost always in our pantry, and it's an inexpensive addition to the recipe. We'd try this trick again the next time we bake sourdough bread in a Dutch oven. If we were out of rice, we'd use rice flour or semolina on the bottom of the loaf to keep it from sticking.

The only issue we could see is that the bread crust might be on the light side. To get a darker crust, simply remove the loaf from the pan and place it on the top oven rack for the final 10 to 20 minutes of your bake. Not every TikTok hack is a total game changer, but this one is a keeper. Go forth and bake our best rustic sourdough bread, knowing the bottom will turn out just fine.