Driving heat across the cooking floor

[texassourdough]

There is no real need to fully saturate most ovens for a single batch but it will affect the temperature cooling profile and that will impact the bake. Not necessarily negatively - depends on the bread being baked and how hard the oven was heated.

Let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's say you have perfect insulation and you heat the inside of your oven to 900 degrees and the outside of the refractory is just warming to 100. For simplicity lets assume the heat profile through the refractory is linear so that in the center it is 500 degrees (half way between). If we close up the oven the heat will spread out so the whole refractory is 500. When we load the oven we will drop the temp in the oven to about 350 (my guess) The hearth surface may actually cool to near 100 or so - well below water boiling. The heat that makes the temp 500 in the refractory will then flow back to the oven to bring the temp back up to 450 or so during the bake - to give you a pretty crust.

Note: we started with a NONSATURATED oven. Normally the oven is pushed long enough that the refractory is more loaded than my example and that is important for the insulation isn't perfect - at least not very close in mine. The trick I think in partially loading the oven is that it will be "cooling" through the entire bake at an accelerated rate. So we probably need to load at a higher temp and bake a bit longer (maybe a lot). The other issue would be that it would be hard to be consistent partially loading the oven and that would make the whole process more variable. In the end it may come down to what your expectations are for your bread. If it is too variable for your taste you will probably shift to longer heat loading... But...every oven is different so...

Good question!
Jay

[GianniFocaccia]

The other issue would be that it would be hard to be consistent partially loading the oven and that would make the whole process more variable

Jay,

Great explanation!

Given the fact that I have way more knowledge and experience yet to acquire (with both bread dough and my oven), the simplest approach is to fully saturate the oven, time the final rise to coordinate with the oven equalization, and viola! Testing may begin! Oh drat! I forgot - I have a soapstone floor that's supposed to burn bread bottoms! Hmmm... parchment?
John

[texassourdough]

Hi John!

Probably a good idea.... It will let you bake/cook with a slightly lower hearth temp for it is supposed to have a higher heat conductivity (which means it can send heat to the surface faster and thus more easily burn but it also means it could cool faster.... Don't know the heat capacity for soapstone vs. refractory - but then it is over refractory so???)

On pizza you may want to have the hearth just a hair cooler. Four seconds on the semolina test might be right???

Good Luck!
Jay