Earning my stripes | The Fresh Loaf

I was loading my second loaf of the day into the oven when I heard a loud crack and then an electric buzzing sound. I looked down to see this:

broken oven coil

Hmmm... that isn't good, is it?

broken oven coil

45 minutes of running around and I was able to find a new coil.

The irony is that I was testing the Steam Maker bread kit today, which is supposed to help you protect your oven from damaging it with improvised steam creation. I'm not suggesting that it is what killed my coil, I just found the timing amusing.

The bread? Just a basic pain sur poolish. Pretty wet today, around 75% hydration.

pain sur poolish

I didn't do a great job of shaping it, but it looks like it turned out alright. Since the oven was dead we grabbed take out burritos instead of having the quiche I was going to throw in the oven after the bread was done, so I actually haven't tried it yet.

Does this mean you might be considering building a bread oven? I'm off to China next week and back to my baking schedule. We will see if my sourdoughs survived since August. Mini Oven

I wish. We're not in a good location to build one though.

Floyd:

Before I retired, I manufactured and sold electric heating elements. I am a metallurgical engineer. Something obviously dripped on your element and burned down to carbon. Your element runs with a suface temperature around 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, and at that temperature, the carbon diffuses into the stainless steel sheath causing embrittlement, and eventually a crack forms. This allows moisture to get into the ceramic insulation, causing a short.

The answer of course is to scrape the drippings off of the element before turning it on.

George

Yeah... this is an 8 year old oven that I've taking poor care of. I've definitely had sweet potato goo drip all over it recently. Thanks for the info. I'll try to be more careful with this one.

While I don't set out to intentionally destroy them, I have personally always considered the heating element in a home-use electric oven to be a semi-consumable part.

sPh

I'd like to know how to attach pictures to my posts. Or at least to the pic. section. Why is there no apparent link to you on your site? Ron

I expect that Floyd has a job, family, community responsibilities, etc, and isn't on-line here 24 hours/day. There is also a forum specifically for asking questions about this site, which might be a better place to put this question.

That said, you can try here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2164/how-upload-pics-gallery

sPh

Check the footer of every single page of the site. It includes my email address. No, it isn't a link, but you should be able to figure it out. Yeah, I dared to step away from my computer long enough today to get my car repaired and my taxes done. Sorry I let you down.

The reason I thought there was no way to contact you is that I tried the address at the bottom of the page and it got bounced. I hadn't seen it at the btm but somewhere else on the site. In my reading I came a cross the add content button as a way to start a blog. I wasn't trying to do that at the time and didn't try the button till today. I'm in a different browser today and have to change the prefs. It's like I'm writting for eight year olds to read. Ron

Ron, There are plenty of ways to contact me without being rude. Plenty of other people, technical and non-technical, have done it just fine. If you need help, myself or any number of people on the site are happy to help. But I don't appreciate someone new being rude to me on their first or second post. You are a guest on this site; a little courtesy is appreciated.

Hi Floyd, I'm curious, which part did you find rude? Unless I didn't reread the right post, the only part that I saw that could be construed as rude was earth to Floyd. If you thought that was rude I'm surprised. That was not the intent. I had been trying to get started here over a period of two days and figured you for an absentee owner. Thanks for the info on the browsers. I'm in Safari now and having no problems. I will try to upload another oven pic to the gallery to see if I have troubles as others have described. I do tons of browsing and have never had Safari crash before. Ron

Yes, I would consider "earth to Floyd" rude. If you figured me for an absentee owner you figured wrong: I'm on this site many times a day. But even if I do happen to step away, I'm not quite sure how you'd come to figure that meant I was absentee. I'm not your bus boy or waiter. If you aren't able to get the service you want here, you can go elsewhere. This site is a net loss for me, financially. It is a labor of love. I don't have the time or energy to be treated rudely over it. I do my best make it useful and simple to use, but clearly there are still places where improvement is needed. I spend on average 40-60 hours a week browsing, since it is what I do for a living. I like Safari too. Adding TinyMCE to the site has seemed to, for the most part, help people with adding mark up, pictures, bullets, etc., but one of the downsides is that some Safari users are experiencing crashes since I installed the latest version. Hopefully the TinyMCE team will fix it, but for now there are some simple work arounds.

We were joking that you can't consider yourself a serious home bread baker unless you've managed to damage or destroy at least one oven. Hence the title of the thread.

a serious bread baker ;-D I haven't broken my oven yet. But, the year has only just begun. Lots can happen in ten months. Hell, if I fry the coil, I have an excuse to replace the range unit. Yes, I know I can replace the coil, but what other excuse would I have to buy a new range?

Steph