>After 30 seconds I open the door, spray the sides and top of the oven
>quickly and generously (the pressure sprayer comes into it's own here) and
>close the door. I repeat twice more at 30 sec intervals and then let the
>loaves finish baking.
John,
I use almost the same technique. I crank my oven up to full heat for about
1/2 hour before the bread goes in, and I figure that this deals with the 50
F or so drop that I'll experience putting the water and dough in the
oven. I've got a convection oven, and it has a vent at the top and you can
see the steam pouring out of it while the bread bakes.
I stopped mucking around with the spray bottle, though. One thing I
noticed was that no matter what I did, once the water was in the bottom I
couldn't get the oven to go over 450 F. The reason, I believe, is that the
constant influx of new steam at 212 F was forcing the hotter air and steam
out the top of the oven and at about 450 F the rate at which new steam was
being produced was about equal to the maximum output of the elements in the
oven.
Now, to my mind, this is enough steam and I would wager that more steam is
lost opening the oven door than will be generated by the subsequent
spraying. I find that I lose about 25 F each time I open the oven
door. Also, I use just less than 2 cups of water on a jelly-roll pan and
it is all gone by about 10-12 minutes. This means that about 1/6 of a cup
of water evaporates each minute, and if you compare that the amount of
water you are adding with each spritz it makes the spray bottle seem even
less important. Remember that steam in hot air is invisible, when you see
vapour that is because the steam is hitting cold air and it is moving back
to a liquid, so you shouldn't be fooled if you look in your oven and don't
see any steam.
For me, I just put the dough in, add the water shut the door, turn the oven
down to 450 F and watch the steam pour out the top. There is so much steam
coming out it shorts out the touch-pad electronics on the back of the
stove. I use the microwave timer now because once when I used the one on
the oven I couldn't turn it off, so I had pull the oven out from the wall
unplug it and plug it back in again to stop it beeping at me. I don't
recommend rolling a 450 F oven around the kitchen.
thanx,
dave.