Le Creuset Bread Oven Review: Beautiful Loaves, for a Price

I try not to be a total sucker for looks, but on a trip to Chicago for my favorite cookware convention, I was not the only one enamored with Le Creuset's latest. In the center of the French manufacturer's booth stood a podium with a new offering and a sign asking people not to share photos of it on social media. The PR guy gave up on enforcement when I got there.

This was Le Creuset's new bread oven, custom made for the circular domed loaves of bread known as boules that all of your friends who wouldn't shut up about the sourdough they were making are going to go nuts for.

The bottom of the oven is 9 inches across the top and curves down to the pan floor. The cloche is a dome that creates a sealed environment where dough becomes bread. The interior of the cast-iron is black and the exterior is Le Creuset colors that make us fall in love with it. Hey, Marseille! When you put your dough in the bread oven, you'll get a pillowy interior, along with a crisp, flaky crust. The bread oven is a showpiece.

The Lodge combo cooker is already a well-established king of the category, and it costs less than the bread oven. You could just use the Dutch oven you already own, which would still make great bread.

I got out the recipe for my go-to loaf of boule, which was popularized in the late 2000s by New York City baker Jim Lahey. Instead of kneading it, you just stir together flour, salt, yeast, and water and let it proof on your counter overnight. After an hour or two, you can form the boule, and it will be ready to bake. I use a weight-based recipe that yields a 1-kilo loaf for speed and precision.

It was apparent that the bread oven delivers. When the bread came out of the oven to cool, the crumb had a pleasant chew and the inside was small and evenly distributed. The cast-iron oven was light and maneuverable. The theatricality of lifting off the lid was something I loved. The oven was great, but it still seems like it's functionally the same as the combo cooker.

The bread oven and combo cooker work well. Even heat in your home oven is provided by anoven orcooker made for baking bread. The steam oven is created by the heavy lid shutting tight to form a seal, which helps the dough stretch as it rises. This shows what a sharp cookie my grandma was, even though cast iron was her favorite pan material.

There is a bake-off.

I went to the man who helped me figure out everything in the last paragraph to ask him about the book. I was curious to get his take on the bread oven since he was the one who turned me on to the combo cooker.

When I arrived in the kitchen, I found four loaves of sourdough that had been baked on a cooling rack, two of which were scored from Le Creuset and the other from the Lodge. It was difficult to distinguish between the loaves. We looked at the cross sections after Migoya cut into one of the loaves.

For as long as we stared at them, we really couldn't find anything to set them apart. The thickness of the crusts was the same. They might have been from the same loaf, because he cut pieces off for taste testing.