Watching a guy at the Ohio State Fair pull bread out of a 400 degree oven with his bare hands
He told me his hands were just used to it after 30 years, but what really got me was he checked doneness by tapping the bottom and listening, not by temping it. I tried that tap test at home on my next 6 loaves and it works better than my instant read thermometer for sandwich bread. Does anyone else go by sound instead of a number, or am I just late to this?
Been doing the tap thing for a few years now after a baker friend showed me. My oven runs hot in the back corner so the thermometer never matched anyway, and once I got the hang of the hollow thud sound it was way faster. Now I don't even pull the loaf out half the time, I just tap the top with two fingers and you can feel and hear if it's done. Thin crust breads like ciabatta are trickier though, they sound done when they're not. For anything in a pan, the tap has never let me down.