Scheduling your time for bread baking.

[SCChris]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Thanks for the tips Chriss.
Do you think that burning 3 hours, without burning the oven the night before, will have the same result, as about saturating the oven.

I use pine or spruce(i'm having a hard time to get clear what tree it is) and the burn really quick and i need to be there every 15 minutes for reloading 2 logs at a time because i don't like the heavy black smoke they produce.
They produce very little coals that they burned veeery quick!

I'm a fan of cooking the night before a bread bake. This has the advantage of bringing the oven temp up well past where you need it to be with hours to spare to adjust if needed. This gives you the advantage of time. Time to let the oven temperatures even out and the time to provide you with enough information to be able to know when the oven will reach the temperature you need it to be during this cooling cycle. If you can push your oven temperatures past your cooking temperature target, still have time for the oven temperatures to even out and glide to where you need them to be, then 3 hours of burning is fine..

As for firewood, a hardwood will provide more heat than the woods your using, but I don't know that you have any access to these.

Chris

[dimitrisbizakis]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Thanks for the tips Chriss.
Do you think that burning 3 hours, without burning the oven the night before, will have the same result, as about saturating the oven.

I use pine or spruce(i'm having a hard time to get clear what tree it is) and the burn really quick and i need to be there every 15 minutes for reloading 2 logs at a time because i don't like the heavy black smoke they produce.
They produce very little coals that they burned veeery quick!

[WJW]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Dimitri...

I would echo Chris' comments about heating the night before. I find it works far better for me. It allows me to heat the oven more gradually and avoid the super high temp spikes I used to do when i'd do when trying to bring temps up with a single morning burn.

As Faith notes, all of these ovens have different personalities. Her oven has seven inches of thermal mass (masonry) and probably stays hot forever...my oven has only 2.5 inches in the hearth and walls, and four inches in the roof arch. As a result, my ability to "loiter" at a given temp is dramatically reduced compared to hers.
For big sourdough bakes (25-35 loaves) I do two burns...one around eleven the night before which I allow to burn completely out with the door wide open, and one when I wake up in the morning right after mixing my dough.

I'm sure if I started my night time burn earlier in the evening and then closed the door before I went to bed, I'd need less burn time in the morning....but I usually bake on Sunday morning and the night before Sunday is Saturday....and my wife insists that I do things other than run an oven on a Saturday evening. :-)

So when we get home from the dinner/movie, or when the guests leave and the party is over, I light my oven and go to bed. So no door is in place on the oven to keep the surface masonry hot overnight....it's open to the air (or mostly open to the air due to a half door made of stacked bricks) when the fire goes out....but the deepest levels of the masonry are well heated and still 550-650 in the morning....and I do a brief second burn the next morning as my bulk fermentation proceeds. That brings the surface masonry back up to temp and puts some more more heat into the deep masonry.

Because my oven mass is less than others, it is important to make sure my masonry is well charged with heat such that the deepest layers of the masonry are heated to something in the 590-650 degree range at time of baking. The requires me to heat the surface masonry well beyond that for the second burn....say 775 to 800 by the time the fire is reduced to coals. By the time I have mopped the floor and let it regulate with the door open for a couple of hours, the surface temps of the masonry will be 580 or so. I close the door, let every thing even up, and let my secondary fermentation finish up.

In my mind....appropriate loading temps for sourdough run from approximately 560F to 460F. If my oven is well charged, and the door is closed, it will take me about two hours to drop from 580F to 560F. With that temp profile and temp at first loading I can do three bakes. The most I've done is 35 loaves, but I'm relatively sure I could do 45.

I'm being overly wordy in explaining all of this, but the bottom line is that if I do a full bore burn the night before, let it burn out, and do a small burn the morning of, and let it burn out, I can bake a lot of bread and never have hearth temps so high that I burn any bread.

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

I started a new thread on the BMIH I did not want to hijack your subject.

[dimitrisbizakis]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Hi Faith,

Photos, please.

Here is a video Dutchess BMIH-36/18/9 Demo - YouTube

[dimitrisbizakis]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Yes, that is an old, old divider/ rounder. Its taking lots of work to get it usable. then I have concerns that once cleaned it will be difficult to keep clean. It's not designed to clean easily. I'm also working on modifications that will make it easier to clean.

Now the BMIH is so friggin' cool all the parts are non corrosive (so no rust) and with 4(four) thumb screws the entire head assembly dismantles for easy and complete cleaning. You can even put it in the dishwasher.

Like most stuff I get this piece needed to be completely dismantled and cleaned. You can't believe how gross these things can get if you don't clean them regular. At the moment the cleaned parts are soaking in some Clorox water for final sterilization.

Wow that seems cool!
Do own a bakery?

[Laurentius]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Hi Faith,

Photos, please.

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Yes, that is an old, old divider/ rounder. Its taking lots of work to get it usable. then I have concerns that once cleaned it will be difficult to keep clean. It's not designed to clean easily. I'm also working on modifications that will make it easier to clean.

Now the BMIH is so friggin' cool all the parts are non corrosive (so no rust) and with 4(four) thumb screws the entire head assembly dismantles for easy and complete cleaning. You can even put it in the dishwasher.

Like most stuff I get this piece needed to be completely dismantled and cleaned. You can't believe how gross these things can get if you don't clean them regular. At the moment the cleaned parts are soaking in some Clorox water for final sterilization.

[SCChris]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

[QUOTE=Faith In Virginia;My new toy is a baking tool a Dutchess BMIH 36 dough divider.
Faith[/QUOTE]



Didn't you have a divider that you were working on?

C

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

No sorry, I did not even bake but I will the next time I bake. I ended up driving to Illinois and back in the same day. 1400 miles in 24.5 hours. Then yesterday I spent half the day sleeping and the other half cleaning my new toy.

My new toy is a baking tool a Dutchess BMIH 36 dough divider.

I will track my times the next time I bake.

Faith

[dimitrisbizakis]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

I get to bake this long weekend...:-) even though I have a part work day tomorrow. If you want I'll keep track of my times and post them for you.

Hi there Faith, did you manage to keep track of the times?

[SCChris]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

If the door does not seal then lots of heat will be lost. Italians used to seal around their doors with screwed up wet newspaper jammed around the sides and the top to seal the oven when cooking bread.

The door is very close to sealing but just misses. The top 60% seals and the sides are good, but it's not so tight at the bottom. The jamb is just a bit out. I still need to cut some stainless and get a gasket on it, Soon.. At least that's what I keep telling myself.. It hasn't really risen to the top of the "to-do" heap, :-)




Chris

[dimitrisbizakis]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

I get to bake this long weekend...:-) even though I have a part work day tomorrow. If you want I'll keep track of my times and post them for you.

That will be wonderful!!!

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

I get to bake this long weekend...:-) even though I have a part work day tomorrow. If you want I'll keep track of my times and post them for you.

[david s]

Re: Scheduling your time for bread baking.

Nice door!! My door doesn't quite seal but it does hold the heat. After I wrote the previous message I realized that I arrange the coals before placing the door, but there is a lot of live coals still glowing in the morning..

Chris

If the door does not seal then lots of heat will be lost. Italians used to seal around their doors with screwed up wet newspaper jammed around the sides and the top to seal the oven when cooking bread.