Another N Texas Noob

[redcabinsteve]

Hidy! I need an outdoor oven primarily for bread baking. My wife and I have built a log cabin near Denison which is about an hour north of Dallas. Our property has a lot of trees and I'm a chain saw guy. Recently I acquired a chain saw mill and a bandsaw go to along with woodworking stuff. Building a cabin is a great way to get more tools than one had before.

Thanks to the Texas Cottage Law we can bake and sell bread at the cabin without a commercial kitchen. My two regular propane ovens simply do not heat up enough. Enter an outdoor oven. Yesterday I browsed thru the forum and was, as a friend from Georgia would say, 'blowed away' with the quality and quantity of info here.

Here's my plan:
1. keep my 30 quart Hobart mixer that nobody wanted to buy.
2. continue to focus on Italian breads with preferments
3. build a fire the night before
4. make doughs the next morning, build gluten etc.
5. rollout focaccia, ciabatta, hearth loafs, etc, place in proofing cabinet(s)
6. roll cabinet outside across deck to deck railing, hook cabinet to a winch lift, swing over railing and lower about three feet down to ground to roll to bake station/oven
7. bake, wrap, sell to fine folks coming to cabin and deliver later in day to those who won't pickup
8. have 6 scheduled bake days per month, two per week plus maybe an occasional festival
9. if successful with gardening in newly built 50' x 16' high tunnel, sell tomatoes
10. if successful with milled wood and woodworking, sell slabs and end tables, etc.

In the past I had been hesitant to build an oven because many you tube builders I see tend to be kinda experimental. Here y'all have an exact formula. It looks like a 42" Pompei is best although it's unclear how many bakes it takes to produce 50-100 loaves. I don't yet know if I need extra insulation to light the oven at night and bake the next morning. I wonder if Forno will sell a kit without the bricks that I can probably get locally at a more efficient $. There's a ton of other questions, I just can't think of them now plus I gotta go build some raised beds. Thanks for any and all input, need all the help I can get.

Steve

[Pizzarotic]

.
It looks like a 42" Pompei is best although it's unclear how many bakes it takes to produce 50-100 loaves. I don't yet know if I need extra insulation to light the oven at night and bake the next morning.
Steve

Steve, for a commercial bread oven I would consider a rectangular barrel oven design rather than Pompeii. Easier and cheaper to build and has a higher capacity for the same floor area. For multiple baking you need thermal mass to absorb the heat and very good insulation to maintain that heat after the oven has been fired. A well insulated door is also critical. You won't need to fire the oven overnight as, depending on the size of your oven it should only need a few hours to get to temp. You could fire it the night before and then you would still have a lot of residual heat in the morning and could get up to temp much quicker if you are going to bake early.

[redcabinsteve]

P, I like the support on the forum for the igloo model but I want to build an effectible model. The cons I've seen here are: barrel style needs more reinforcing and uses more wood. Those aren't deal busters. Have you seen plans for the barrel?

[david s]

The problem with a hemisphere and bread baking is that your loaves near the walls are likely to hit the dome. For larger quantities of bread baking a rectangular floor is also superior to a circular one.
A low large radius vault sitting on straight walls is usually the solution for a bread oven, but the drawback with that type of design is the enormous outward thrust on the low vertical sidewalks. This must be countered by steel bracing or the regular expansion and contraction will soon challenge the structural integrity of the form.

Go to the attached link for the Ross Bakery and look at the link at the bottom of their title page. It details the rebuild of their 100 year old oven. It should give you plenty of food for thought and design.

https://www.rossbakery.com.au/ourbakery.html

[hillscp]

david s Thet was a fun read!

[redcabinsteve]

Pizzarotic and David,

I was under the impression the dome has better heat distribution vs a rectangle?

The idea of firing at night for a morning bake is appealing especially since I'm a one man op. I'll be plenty busy in morning. A ready fire would help.

Will the night firing along with maybe increased insulation increase heat distribution by early morning?

If I insist on a dome what if I use full upright soldiers on the first course? That would allow more room for bread at the edge. Extra bracing required of course.

hilltcp yeah that was a good read! Those guys had a tight schedule.

[Giovanni Rossi]

I know a fellow who built a backyard oven based on the book: The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens. He makes pizza for the family and bakes bread on a scale to support Civil War reenactments. It may be worth a look for your needs.

[AndreasP]

I'lf you want to fire in the evening and bake in the morning you will certainly need a lot of thermal mass and excellent insulation.

Here is what I have and what performance I get from my build. Your results of course may vary.

I built a 32" some oven.
Dome:

• 2" cast able concrete for the dome (home few, mixed myself from info on this forum)
• 2" ceramic fiber insulation
• 2" 9:1 vermicrete (9 parts vermiculite, 1 part Portland cement, as little water as possible)

Floor:

• 2" foamglass
• 2" CalSil board
• Firebrick

When I make pizza in the evening I normally

• Heat oven over a 2 1/2 he period or so to get to 850 -950F
• Make pizza for 2 hrs at 900F or so
• Place insulated door into opening once done, let's say 9pm
• Next morning 9am the oven is at about 350F to 400F

I found that that's a bit too low for baking bread, so i just start another small fire, wait an hour or so and then make the bread. It doesn't take long to start the fire, especially with the tip down method.

Just a reference...

Andreas

[david s]

Pizzarotic and David,

I was under the impression the dome has better heat distribution vs a rectangle?

The idea of firing at night for a morning bake is appealing especially since I'm a one man op. I'll be plenty busy in morning. A ready fire would help.

Will the night firing along with maybe increased insulation increase heat distribution by early morning?

If I insist on a dome what if I use full upright soldiers on the first course? That would allow more room for bread at the edge. Extra bracing required of course.

hilltcp yeah that was a good read! Those guys had a tight schedule.

A hemispherical dome has a very good circulation during firing, but if left for several hours the whole interior thermal mass evens out. A low dome or vault, whilst reducing volume and therefore fuel consumption does not circulate the fire as well as a hemispherical dome, but is better suited for a bakers oven that requires lower baking temperatures than those required for pizza.

[Pizzarotic]

Pizzarotic and David,
I was under the impression the dome has better heat distribution vs a rectangle?

Only whilst you have an active fire, for baking, zero difference.

Will the night firing along with maybe increased insulation increase heat distribution by early morning?

The heat will be distributed as you are firing and will only take a short time to full saturation once you reach temp. Leaving it over night won't achieve any more noticeable heat distribution. It just saves you time.

If I insist on a dome what if I use full upright soldiers on the first course? That would allow more room for bread at the edge.

Yes, that will work fine but you will still have less usable area and a much more difficult and expensive build especially in the size oven you are contemplating.

Barrell vaults are very simple to build, just as strong, perform equally well, give better access and provide more usable space.

[JRPizza]

You should reach out to SableSprings . Mike bakes lots of bread in his oven and is great at sharing his techniques. Hopefully he will see this post and weigh in.

[Kvanbael]

Bread oven, baking at least twice a week… your oven will never fully cool down. All the more reason to insulate like crazy, regardless dome shape.

[UtahBeehiver]

I would look at Karangi Dude latest build, it is a large barrel type oven, done very well with well thought out design. His focus is more towards the baking end. You can do a search under his blog name.

[SableSprings]

In the past I had been hesitant to build an oven because many you tube builders I see tend to be kinda experimental. Here y'all have an exact formula. It looks like a 42" Pompei is best although it's unclear how many bakes it takes to produce 50-100 loaves. I don't yet know if I need extra insulation to light the oven at night and bake the next morning. I wonder if Forno will sell a kit without the bricks that I can probably get locally at a more efficient $. There's a ton of other questions, I just can't think of them now plus I gotta go build some raised beds. Thanks for any and all input, need all the help I can get.

Steve

Welcome to the forum Steve! I have a 39" Pompeii and normally do once a week baking for my neighborhood. I plan those weekly bakes for 15-20 loaves in my oven on Friday afternoons. I fire up my oven Thursday night, damp it down and in the morning the wood load has burned and my oven's nicely heat saturated. Temps are too high for bread in the morning, so I pull out the ash & few remaining coals. Generally I go from 700°F down to my baking temp target of 575°F by leaving the fire door slightly open and monitoring the temps with an IR gun. Once I reach about 600°F on the floor, I'll close up the oven and let it equalize to my target of 575°F and have worked, shaped, & proofed my doughs to start baking between 2-3 in the afternoon. I only have half bricks for the dome and laid the cooking floor "normally" so there's about 2.5" of firebrick thickness to retain heat. My insulation is not great (about 4" of 5:1 perlcrete underneath and 4" of 10:1 over the dome). My largest bake was for 33 loaves on a single firing. I generally start with baguettes and work my way down to whole wheats which don't bake well until I get the oven down to 475-500. That's still a bit on the high side if I've got a sweet dough, so they'll go in after the whole wheats.

Working the Pompeii for larger batches of bread is somewhat problematic simply by the physics of loading & working the oven. You put in the first loaves obviously to the back and they are done before the last loaves (that are in the front). Getting a peel "over" the still baking loaves to the back is difficult (if not impossible...at least for me ). Because of this loading/working the baking bread, I have found that my optimum oven load is for 8-10 baguettes or 5-6 rustic (1-2 #) loaves. I bake each batch and then transfer them onto cooling racks near the oven.

As Russell noted above, check out Karangi Dude's thread as he's really built a classic, vault bread oven that would be more along the bread volumes you're projecting. The oven's most used in this forum are black ovens (meaning the fire is built in the chamber to heat the oven) and not geared to such large bread bakes. Most commercial, wood fired bakery ovens have much larger mass, lots of insulation, and use loading mechanisms to drop/place larger batches of bread onto the oven floor. It is also more common to see the white oven style in commercial ovens. In these ovens, the baking chamber is heated by a separate firing chamber. That system allows better control of temperatures and less work/time loss dealing with refiring/ash/coals. The trade-off is that white ovens are more complicated to build properly. Again, I love Karangi Dude's vault oven and his thread would be well worth your time reading. Here's a link to that thread:

https://community.fornobravo.com/for...rel-bread-oven

Sorry this turned into such a long post, but I hope that it helps you develop a plan that will work for you...good luck and I am looking forward to seeing you start a thread on the forum to let us all watch and learn from your efforts.