as far as crumb structure, what is the difference between baking on a
professional hearth with steam and baking in a home oven with a baking
stone?

dougcullen wrote:
> as far as crumb structure, what is the difference between baking on a
> professional hearth with steam and baking in a home oven with a baking
> stone?
>
In most professional hearth ovens, the hearth is directly heated. As a
result, it is at the desired baking temperature, and will maintain the
desired baking temperature. The steam generators in professional ovens
are designed to not lower the temperature of the oven.

In a home oven, the tiles are heated in the same way that anything else
in the oven is heated. As a result, they are not quite at the desired
baking temperature(unless you let them heat a long time), and they do
not recover their heat quickly when the oven door is opened, when cold
dough is put on them and so on. Similarly, when you put a cast iron pot
in the bottom of the oven, fill it with lava rocks, and then pour water
- even boiling water - on the preheated cast iron skillet, your oven
will cool considerably.

Further, a commercial oven has a lot more Btu capability than your home
oven. Burners with 185,000 or 500,000 Btu capacity are not uncommon. A
commercial oven - even a big one - heats up fast and then HOLDS the
temperature. In comparison, a GE oven has 14,500 Btu's, or less than
10% of a commercial oven.

None of this is to suggest you won't like the results better if you use
oven stones and steam your oven. But you can't enter your family
station wagon in the Indy 500.... the results from the oven won't be as
good as from a commercial oven. However, a lot of the reason that a
commercial oven is designed the way it is, is so the baker can put in
batch after batch of bread all day long, without worrying that the oven
temperature will dip when the door is opened, without worrying that
hitting the steam button will cool the oven. Are you planning on doing
200 or more loaves a day?

Another consideration - Peter Reinhart suggests that the oven only
contributes 10% of the final bread's quality (though I feel it can
subtract far more than that if the baker doesn't use it well). The rest
of the loaves quality comes from the selection of ingredients and the
technique of the baker. The home baker can put time into a loaf of
bread that is totally impractical for a commercial baker. I once
wondered why my olive bread was so much better than the loaf at the
local bakery. I knew the baker, and knew he was good. I did some
looking and realized that I was spending more on my olives than he was
charging for the loaf of bread. He had an upper price limit of what his
customers would pay, and had to tailor his recipes, or formulas, to that
price point.

A commercial baker might have a better oven (though there are some
excellent ovens available for home use), but home bakers have the
advantage that
their time doesn't have to be accounted for and they can take the time
to make the best bread they can.

Mike

PS - there's no reason to submit the same message to the newsgroup
several times. It takes time for people to see, and reply to, a
message. And if no one feels like replying, a second almost identical
message won't change that. Mike

--
Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day:
Vodka + milk of magnesia: Phillips screwdriver...

Mike Avery wrote:

> In a home oven, the tiles are heated in the same way that anything else
> in the oven is heated. As a result, they are not quite at the desired
> baking temperature(unless you let them heat a long time), and they do
> not recover their heat quickly when the oven door is opened, when cold
> dough is put on them and so on. Similarly, when you put a cast iron pot
> in the bottom of the oven, fill it with lava rocks, and then pour water
> - even boiling water - on the preheated cast iron skillet, your oven
> will cool considerably.

Mine doesn't, but then again, it's a 1927 solid cast iron "Spark" and
has a heat mass the size of Venus.

> ...The home baker can put time into a loaf of
> bread that is totally impractical for a commercial baker. I once
> wondered why my olive bread was so much better than the loaf at the
> local bakery. I knew the baker, and knew he was good. I did some
> looking and realized that I was spending more on my olives than he was
> charging for the loaf of bread. He had an upper price limit of what his
> customers would pay, and had to tailor his recipes, or formulas, to that
> price point.

Another reason the wanna-be professional-lookalikes miss the mark.

B/