Do you preheat the pan like a pizza stone?
Yes, I preheated the Challenger pan for 45 minutes (base + lid). I'd be curious to see how it fares with a cold start. Cold starts don't affect Dutch-oven no-knead bread
too much:
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The Challenger oven is a beast! It pretty much does the same job as a $50 Dutch oven, but it's soooooo much easier to work with. Plus you can do oval breads or a pair of demi-baguettes. I did do a side-by-side comparison the other day with doing it just a sheet pan with a tray of water, and it came out a lot better in the Challenger oven - no burnt bottom, more control over the crust, etc. Like, with the crust, you usually bake it for say 30 minutes, then pop the lid off for the last 10 or 15 minutes to brown it up & crisp it up a but, so you get more control that way too. At that point, the handles on the lid make it easy to remove, plus the flat tray makes it easy to load the bread - no more trying to get the dough into a hot & deep Dutch oven!
I'm getting better at demi-baguettes. This one was a same-day no-knead recipe with bread flour, but then I did a cold ferment overnight. Flavor came out
noticeably better with even just a single night in the fridge. A really good pizza dough I use has a 72-hour cold ferment, and I've messed with Kenji's cold ferment method for his Better No-Knead bread procedure in the past. It's amazingly easy between using either the no-knead method or a Kitchenaid stand mixer...like a max of 5 minutes of active hands-on time per day lol. Definitely tearing down some mental barriers about the amount of effort & time required for amazing homemade bread! Having the right procedure & right equipment makes all the difference in the world in terms of actually doing it on a regular basis imo.