bread in the Pompeii oven

[gracielbowling]

Hi, all! I'm considering building the Pompeii oven, but my primary use will be for sourdough bread, with some roasting and pizzas of course! In your experience, does the Pompeii oven do a good job baking bread? Anything particular I should consider? It seems like a barrel-style is recommended for bread, but I'd love to build the Pompeii if it would work. Thanks!!

[SableSprings]

I have been using my Pompeii shape oven for almost exclusively bread baking. It does a fabulous job...the biggest issue is timing bread baking temps with the dough being ready to bake. I keep track of every bake on an Excel spreadsheet and after just over 10 years, I've put through 7,296 pounds of dough (pizza, crackers, cookies, bread, etc.) and a total of 5,456 loaves of bread. I do mostly a baguette (sourdough/commercial yeast mix) for my neighborhood and lots of whole wheats with & without my sourdough culture (Chef Bill...doesn't everyone name their sourdough?).

My oven is a 39" diameter, stubby beavertail floor design (helps in removal of ash into my ash dump container). I can only load about 10 baguettes comfortably at a time, but have done 33 loaves from one firing. I think you need to ask yourself how many loaves are you thinking about and you will need to have some serious space for ingredient storage (I currently have 250 pounds of flour in my prep room ), and room for mixing/shaping/proofing as well as for cooling after a bake. All in all, I have never regretted my oven design for what I do. If I had lots of money and an engineering background, I would probably have tried to build a gray oven (separate fire chamber that vents through the cooking chamber to the chimney) instead of this classic black oven-- which I love!

p.s. It would help us all to reply and give you "tailored" answers if you would go to your User Settings, Account, & about halfway down you'll see Conversation Detail Options with Show Signatures, Show Avatar, & Edit Signature. Choose the Edit Signature and put in at least your general location. That way, your general location info is always showing on-screen with your posts. Then if someone has local knowledge they can more effectively get that info to you.