Chimney installation

[Dotan]

Hi all,

I have built an oven for baking bread, wood fired. It all goes well so far.. but I have a problem with the smoke inside the oven. It's too much and the bread is kind of "smokie". I need a someone who knows about the smoke venting. where do I place the chimney? how do I manage to get the smoke out and not losing a great amount of heat? is it depends on the type of wood I am using?

Thanks Shana Tova as well
Dotan.

[maver]

Re: Chimney installation

The conventional wisdom here is that you don't really vent the smoke, you burn it off. With bread baking you usually heat up the oven for a few hours until the dome burns clear (you can see the bricks, no soot on them anymore). This takes a big fire. Usually after 20-30 minutes of a big fire there is no more smoke - the oven gets hot, the combustion is more complete and clear gasses are released rather than smoke. Once the oven bricks are hot through and through, then the fire is allowed to die down and the coals are raked out. The oven is then allowed to moderate (let the temperature drop to your ideal baking temp, often 550-600 for baguette, a little lower for larger loafs). At this point the bread goes in to a clean oven - no smoke. There's lots of info about this in the forum and in the wood fired oven e-books, check out the one on bread baking.

All this is information based on the usual ovens here - 'black' ovens where the fire and teh bread cook in the same chamber. I have little knowledge of design of white ovens as you are using. Sorry, I posted this, then read your other post. I'd be interested to know how you work this out. My guess is you still should use a bigger fire to get it to burn clear - then let the fire burn down to coals to maintain heat if needed. This presumes the oven draws well - if it doesn't draw well you will have poor oxygen supply to the fire and it will smoke.

Shalom,
Marc