tartine receipe with premio2g100?

[mark l]

I am in process of purchasing a bread oven and wonder if this model has sufficiently sealed environment to allow for no steam loss when baking? Using the Tartine bakery method you need a closed baking chamber. Any thoughts.
Thanks, Mark

[SCChris]

Re: tartine receipe with premio2g100?

The consensus is that a 42” oven needs about 16 to 18 lbs of dough to create the needed humidity for ideal crusts. The oven that you’re interested in is a 40” oven and isn’t going to be very different in this regard. As far as being tight enough to produce Tartine like breads I’d say yes. Do you want to produce 16 lbs of bread or just a few loafs?

Chris

[david s]

Re: tartine receipe with premio2g100?

My oven is small and I only cook a few loaves at a time (how much bread can you eat?). I used to fill a small pie tin with hot water, but someone suggested throwing in ice cubes. I find that easier so now throw in 4 ice cubes as soon as I place the bread. I think my bread is as good as the beautiful bread we used to get from the boulangeries in France. Apparently there is sufficient moisture in the bread dough if the oven is really heavily loaded.
Also heard that some bakers will use screwed up damp newspaper jammed around the door to get a better seal, but I've never bothered with that method.

[sjdritz]

Re: tartine receipe with premio2g100?

I have that oven. With the door on it is sealed very tight. Sometimes the door expands and gets a little stuck. Probably my fault for using to much sand under the floor tiles when I built the oven.

Scott D.

[texassourdough]

Re: tartine receipe with premio2g100?

Hi Mark!

My experience with Tartine and WFOs suggests sealing the oven will be one of the lesser problems you will encounter. But...just as steam leaks out of indoor ovens and commercial ovens, steam will leak out of a WFO. Steam actually drives much of the air out of an oven when a properly humidified.

As Chris pointed out, an important factor in getting good oven humidity is fully loading the oven. You can do workarounds and augment the humidity in a variety of ways but in my experience it is very difficult if not impossible to get GREAT crust in an underloaded oven. Good? Yes! Great? I haven't! Maybe you can! In any event the bread you get from a WFO will be hard pressed to be substantially better than from a cloche in an indoor oven. Different? Yes! Better? Maybe - depends on your criteria and metrics.

You will need to get your Tartine timing consistent and you will have to learn your oven for you will be striving to put the bread in the oven in a fairly narrow temperature window if you are going to match the look/crust of the Tartine Bakery bread. Chad bakes his bread very dark. The oven needs to be heated, equalized and rather hot (exact temp will depend on the oven characteristics and heat loading/equalization/steam augmentation method) when the loaves are loaded. While you can get away with baking the loaves a bit underproofed, if the loaves have to wait for the oven to cool to the right temp and overproof the results will suffer. Given the need for predictable proofing times you may find you need to calculate water temps for mixing and control the proofing temperature to get reliable times.

It is an admirable goal, but it is far more complex than using an indoor oven and sealing the door. The door is a minor problem. You can build a door and you can close gaps with a wet towel.

Good luck!
Jay