A single firing, and hours of loading for a whole day’s production.
The secret? Understanding and exploiting the temperature curve of your bakery wood-fired oven. It’s an age-old skill that even today enables you to reconcile performance, energy savings and a wide range of products. It’s this experience that I’d like to share with you in this second article. Follow me!
As an artisan baker working with a wood-fired oven, I’m talking to you today about a subject that has never ceased to amaze me since the first day I opened my bakery. When I look back after several hours of baking, and see the number and diversity of products I’ve been able to bake thanks to a single firing, I’m fascinated indeed.
Every baking day, over 200 kilos of products come out of my oven.
The information given below concerns the “4 m²” baker’s oven. If this oven has been heated the day before, it will take about 2 h 15 to reach the ideal temperature for successive loading operations. As with any wood-fired oven, you should also let the oven “rest” (i.e. come down slightly in temperature) before you start loading.
Over four hours of cooking time, without intermediate heating.
Wood-fired ovens tend to bake “higher” than electric ovens. So, first, at around 290°C on the hearth, I bake fougasses, focaccias and rolls on trays for a dozen minutes.
Then, my laser thermometer reads around 280°C when I start baking my loaves. This is followed by two ovens of bastards, weighing in at 1.2 kg.
After unturning them, the oven still easily registers 250°C, and I continue with another fifty or so 1-kilo loaves, which will also bake for an hour. It’s already been almost three hours of baking, and still these loaves come out perfectly baked!
The oven temperature of around 200°C is particularly suitable for baking brioches, muffins and cookies.
The next day, the oven temperature is still around 160°C.
Without having to heat up the oven, I can still bake quiches and cookies, or roast the seeds I’ll use in my breads, thanks to the residual heat.
The furnace’s 11-tonne mass and the quality of the materials used in its manufacture explain its incomparable inertia.
Outstanding performance
To bake all these products, less than half a stere of wood is needed. As well as reducing the cost to my company, this saves a lot of wood handling, which is a major advantage in our business.
Wood-fired oven: adapting and perpetuating our baking traditions
As you can see, the possibilities are endless, and the variety of products in your range is no obstacle to the use of a wood-fired oven.
The secret of these successive loadings lies above all in the baker’s ability to adapt to the baking characteristics of his oven at any given “moment”.
Adaptation is definitely at the heart of our craft. It’s also a way of being connected to an ancestral baking tradition.
Our elders, like us, have adopted the same type of organization, in order to optimize each baking cycle as much as possible. The only difference was that, due to the lack of inertia in their ovens, they often had to heat the loaves in between baking cycles.
The wood-fired oven combines the words energy resilience, independence and ethics with our baking tradition, and is more than ever a modern baking method.
Here are a few more valuable pointers:
The indications of your front panel thermometer, coupled with those of your laser thermometer, will enable you to start baking your loaves at the most opportune moment. On a mass-produced oven, the chamber temperature must be at the right temperature, and the temperature of the oven mass must also have started to drop slowly, before you can start putting your loaves in the oven. Keeping an eye on these two parameters will help you enormously!
The temperature displayed on your laser thermometer when aiming at the hearth should always be considered in relation to other parameters that influence the heating and inertia of the oven: temperature rise time, speed of loading, size of pieces to be baked (large pieces require more time and energy).
I also recommend that you always aim for the same area on the hearth. This area should be located at the edge of your hearth, to the right for example, so as not to be located in the axis of the focus (radiation from the focus distorts the data displayed on the laser).
By taking all these parameters into account, you’ll be able to combine all your cooking processes in the best possible way, while also achieving excellent consistency.
