3 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:I know the Levain style is thick, but maybe you need to flatten yours just a tiny bit before baking. If they were just an eighth of an inch less thick your problem might be solved. That said, another thing to try would be to bake on silicon mats instead of parchment. The mats insulate and will prevent so much heat transferring from the pan, lessening the browning of the bottoms.
Another thing to try would be cooling racks. I know the Levain recipes say they don't use cooling racks, but, you might get better results with cooling off the sheet pans to reduce cooking the bottoms. At any rate, with raw centers, you clearly need to go for a longer bake, try reducing the temp a little and going 4 minutes longer with either silpats or cooling racks.
I'd bring my own sharpie (pink!) and make my own mark on that dial when I get to the perfect temp, doubt that anyone will notice.
Thanks for the help! The bottoms aren't overly brown in person so no issue there. I realized cutting with a knife, as I did before taking pictures, makes them appear pretty raw. They don't seem like that when just torn apart as someone eating one would. I also looked at videos/pictures of Levain and they definitely leave theirs extremely raw. I think that's just how it's supposed to be. What I noticed is that mine completely lost exterior crispiness once packaged. Today I tried again but this time removed them to wire racks after 10 mins and made sure they were 100% cool before packaging. We'll see if that helps! If not, I might need to turn the oven even hotter to get a more crispy exterior. However, that would require altering my recipe to spread more. As-is they don't spread much at 350 in the commercial oven. Any hotter and I doubt they'd spread at all. Maybe more butter or sugar? Either that or maybe I should put back the baking soda I removed and let them get a bit darker on top without changing anything else?
