Steam injection success!

[diulin]

Today I activated the steam injection system I've been tinkering with for about a year now based on some suggestions from many years ago here on this forum. I've posted a photo and a video here, because they are too large to upload to this message. As you can see, this system generates a massive amount of steam. I'll be happy to share the details of how I built it with anyone interested.

But if anyone has experience with actual steam injected ovens, I'd love to hear how you do it: do you just give it a blast before or after the dough goes in? For how long? How many more times after that? With what intervals? Or do you maintain a steady flow of steam for the first, what? five minutes? ten minutes? Understandably, the recipes out there, even for serious home bakers deal largely with how to reproduce the next best thing to steam injection in a home oven, using spray bottles and trays for boiling water. Now that I actually have the capacity to fill the oven with steam, I'm looking for recommendations on how to use it.

[diulin]

Follow-up: I baked three batches of bread in my brick oven with steam and learned a lot. Two loaves of Craig Ponsford's ciabatta (from Maggie Glezer, Artisan Baking Across America), two NY Deli Rye from Peter Reinhart's Breadbaker's Apprentice, and a batch of chewy sourdough rolls from KAF. See a picture here.

I learned that the steam injection works! And that I can either give it blasts every few minutes or I can maintain a steady stream of steam. I need to tighten and perhaps re-tape one of the hardware joints on the pressure cooker. I'm looking forward to playing with it more and would love to have any comments or suggestions I can get from folks on this forum, particularly if you have experience with steam injection, or questions about how I built mine.

[UtahBeehiver]

Interesting, there have been a couple bread makers on the blog that have experimented with steam injection (Faith in Virginia - Not active in forum anymore but her threads are still out there) and Sable Springs does a lot of bread making but I do not believe he does steam injection but might be interested. PS photos can be attached if under 1.25 mg per photo up to 5 mg per post. I know most phones take much higher resolution so you have to resize the jpg.

[diulin]

Yes, it was a Faith in Virginia whose posts inspired me, but I had to do a lot of tinkering to create something like what I thought she was describing. For a long time, I was stuck on how to find or make a T that would accommodate the straight threads of the pressure canner's pressure release valve.

[Giovanni Rossi]

Thanks for posting. I sooo want to do something like this. My door has a 1/2" hole for the thermometer that would provide a good access point. Just not sure I want to add that much complexity to my bread making set up?? Wonder if a connection to a steam wand on an espresso machine would work???

[rsandler]

Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread has instructions for steaming with a full steam-injection setup; the book makes token nods to the home baker, I assume to increase the sales potential, but is primarily aimed as a manual for professionals (and is a little intimidating to approach initially, as a result). Could be worth picking up a copy! His baguettes with poolish are still my go-to, and there's lots of other good formulas in there.

That said...with a brick oven, if you make a large enough batch to fully load the oven (say 6+ lbs of dough in a 36" oven), and have a well fitting door, I've always found that the trapped steam coming off the dough does the trick (at least as well as any of the steaming hacks in my conventional oven). Same idea as a cloche, or the recent trick of baking a single loaf in a Dutch oven. I only bother with steam pans in the brick oven when I bake baguettes, since the geometry of a round oven doesn't allow enough mass of dough to build up a head of steam.