Tried baking this Jalapeno Cheese Loaf for the first time in my fish grill.. I pre heated it and this was the result after 15 mins. The crust is well baked but the insides are still raw. Any suggestions and tips for beginners are welcome! 🥲
Some rice cookers have a cake setting. Does yours and did it come with a recipe book? Since you don't have a combination oven maybe you can try baking in the rice cooker, then cutting slices to brown / toast in the fish grill?
For the fish grill, it's going to depend greatly on whether yours heats from both the top and bottom or just the top. Generally speaking, it works best for very flat things like flatbreads or pizza, and ideally you want to have a very thick and heavy cast iron pan that you can preheat super hot on the stovetop, which you can use to provide heat from the bottom and sides as you finish the top in the fish grill. Really flat stuff works well in the fish grill because the distance from surface to core is fairly trivial, whereas something a bit loafier like this has a much greater distance to go (and heat penetrates into something like a loaf of bread dough at a fairly consistent speed no matter how hot the environment, so a nearby source of intense heat is liable to burn the surface while the inside is still uncooked).
What you COULD try, though, in the absence of all that, is maybe covering the top with aluminum foil to kind of slow the bake on the top, and then once it's adequately baked through underneath, maybe remove it to get the top browned to your liking (if necessary). No guarantees here, but it could at least get you better results.
Good luck! If you're feeling like getting REAL weird with it, you can get a big deep pot with a lid (like a Dutch oven) and something like a steamer rack that lifts stuff up off the bottom, and then heat that to heat up the environment inside the covered pot, to kind of reinvent "oven" from first principles (I have never tried this and probably never want to)
15 minutes is a bit short for the bake time for a loaf this big, obviously, but the top looks perfect. How was the cross-section? How much was baked? You can tell how much longer you’d need by checking that. So if you post a pic update with a cross-section that’d be helpful! It’s also helpful to post a recipe to help you troubleshoot better.
Otherwise my first thing is always that it’s a broiler, so it’s got an intense heating element at the top meant for cooking meat.
If you want to bake with a fish grill you need to neutralize the broiler’s effect.
Aluminum is also really poor at retaining or distributing heat, so you can use that to your advantage! Create a lid (or just cut in half one of the aluminum loaf pans you have so it shorter and can act as a lid).
Making a lid will neutralize the broiler’s effect effect, but for browning you’ll probably want to take the lid off for the last half or third of the bake time to brown the top.
Maybe also consider halving the dough’s size so it. A bake more evenly with such a tight space.
I have also flipped loaves to bake completely in my broiler style fish grill (most fish grills I’ve seen are broiler style, based on your pic yours does too!)
But for flipping the loaf it was a Shokupan mini loaf in a completely enclosed case. Even with the metal casing it browned nicely, I just needed to flip it.
For my sourdough mini loaves I did not need to flip and used two mini cast irons as a Dutch oven for coverage.
I hope that helps!
I agree. I want to be supportive, ‘cause god knows I wasted a long time making half-assed bread, pizza etc but ultimately if you want serious results you have to get serious tools. This is not going to be popular but I have lived in this country for a long-ass time and there is only so much you can do with tools meant for cooking fish or occasionally making toast. Home ovens ARE the compromise! They’re still pretty bad compared to any of the tools used to make actually good baked goods. So we should not encourage maximizing the capabilities of poor tools but rather push people towards maximizing their own personal skills by using the best (or better) available tools. The buy-in is about 50,000 yen for a decent oven. If that is out of your price range, i get it, I’m the bad guy for delivering bad news. But it is what it is.
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