>My favorite daily bread loaves come out of the oven with beautiful
>color and a taut, smooth top. An hour or so later they're all
>wrinkled on top rather than staying nice and smooth.
Sorry to be late to the party, but:
If the top is smooth upon completion of baking, but wrinkles later,
it suggests that it was not completely set and the cooling process
contracted the surface. If you get wrinkles rather than a uniformly
shrunken top, it suggests that the layer just beneath the crust had
not fully set. That inner layer contracted, forcing the crust to
buckle and wrinkle.
The mystery is why this could happen if the bread is indeed fully
baked to an internal temperature of 190°F for enriched loaves or
200°F for lean loaves (just flour, water, yeast, salt -- no
dairy). Are you sure the bread is reaching this internal
temperature? (Carry-over cooking might get it there by the time it
finishes cooling, so you might not know the difference.
By any chance, is your ceramic baker a covered vessel? If so, you
might consider removing the top for the last 10-15 minutes of baking,
and tenting with aluminum foil to prevent over-browning if that
becomes a problem. It will let more heat into the bread but still
keep direct rays from turning the top too dark.
Another possibility: are you slashing the dough just before it goes
in the oven? I can imagine some situation where the top crust sets
before it has fully expanded, leaving the dough just beneath the
crust wanting to expand and not being able to do so, retaining more
heat that then pulls the crust down during cooling. I can picture
it, but it doesn't seem as likely as the other -- but even so, a
simple slashing of the dough before it goes in the oven would solve
that problem. I get more cracks in unslashed bread than in slashed bread.
Those are my only ideas; I hope one of them works.
--Matt