When I was young there was a pub near me that only sold what they called doorstep sandwiches*, which were toasted using only the crusty ends, cut very thick. I did wonder what they did with the rest of the loaf.
*or maybe it was doorstop sandwiches
I bake bread, as a hobby. There have been several good ideas presented here, but basically you are asking for the most crust for your buck.
This is obvious impratical in many ways.
However. If you know a local artisan, and a thrift store, you could conceivably have a number of breadpans cut up and welded into a star shape to get maximum crust. I would imagine sixteen sided would be good.
You would get a far better ratio of sliced bread to crust, albeit harder to slice.
In fact, I may just attempt this, if my local second hand shop is open.
(Note, the mathmatical solution: just use a round pan and you get crust all around the perimiter - this may not be what you need. The circular formation reduces the area of crust, whereas a star formation increases it, but on a logarythmic scale. At some point your gain in crust may be limited by physics, if not by practicality.
That was where I first learned about tesseracts.
How about just taking a smallish loaf – like a bun intended to make a small sub-type sandwich? Like four inches long, maybe three inches top to bottom and side to side (sort of roundish.)
But instead of the normal way of cutting it, basically parallel with the table top, you cut it vertically BUT from one small end to the other.
At that point you have two chunks of bread, each of which have crusty sides the full length of one side plus half of the crust from both of the original ends AND a couple of inches of the crust from the original top and bottom. Crusts galore, and there simply isn’t “rest of the bread” to deal with, so no waste.
Mathematically, the “best” solution is a fractal like the Sierpinski tetrahedron, which has infinite surface area and zero volume (and thus has the advantage that you can make it using no dough!). But since that object can’t exist in our universe, you can only get arbitrarily close to it. So there is no actual best answer, it depends on the limits of your tools etc.
Pity the images don’t show on my browser, otherwise I’d know whether a brezel (an original German one, not the small snacks) is the closest or the furthest thing to what the OP means:
Equally a pitta fits the bill, doesn’t it?
(Or if you have a local Turkish shop, a Pide is the same sort of thing but on a much larger scale).
j
That sounds novel, if not for the existence of the boule,
Actually, it’s a tesseract unfolded into 3-space, the same way that this shows a cube unfolded into 2-space:
I would think the ideal shape would be an asterisk with maybe sixteen spokes depending on thickness
One thin baking sheet, with an edge. One recipe of bread.
Press the dough down as flat as you can. All the way to the edge.
Now you have one large piece of bread with all crust.
No fancy rigged up pans needed.
Oh, wait. That is pizza crust.
No need to re-invent the mousetrap, here.