Home oven efficiency

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Hi everyone,

I'm an avid home baker looking to increase the size of my bakes in my home oven. Its a standard size home oven (i think 28in wide?) which is relatively limited in space. I can fit 2 dutch ovens in there at one time to make 2 ~700g loaves or I can use a baking stone/steel which at most can get about 3 smaller (500g?) loaves. I haven't been able to find a baking stone/steel that maximizes the potential baking surface in the oven. 

My goal is to figure out ways to increase the baking surface area in my home oven and I was wondering if the community here had any tips or tricks. I'd love to be able to bake 4 decent sized loaves (700-800g) at one time and steam the whole oven as well, though steaming is a whole separate conversation lol. Any insight is greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you :D 

 

 

It would be expensive,  but 2 Fourneau ovens would help if you have enough space to fit them on one rack, and do the second part of the bake on a different rack.   fourneau  At the time I bought mine,  I justified the quite high price by telling myself it was much cheaper than a Rofco.  BTW ,  I was not a fan of baking it on the silcone mat, I didn't like the texture, so instead I just used a peel and loaded it without the aluminum tray and mat.  It is possible that if you used a stone on the lower rack, you could use the silicone and aluminum tray and get good results.  To be clear, you would load one loaf in each Fourneau for the steaming phase, then remove and place on a lower rack and add another set of loaves.   Depending on how long you bake inside the Fourneau  ( 1/3 in 2/3 out )  it would be more time efficient then just using 2 DO, but  unless you can fit all 4 loaves on the lower rack, it would only save you about a 1/3 of the time. 

I had a construction welder friend cut me a piece of scrap 1/4" steel plate to the inside dimensions of my oven (I recommend giving plenty of space around the edges for airflow), then I polished the scale off and seasoned it like cast iron or carbon steel. It works pretty well to bake four 900-950g loaves at the same time, as long as you rotate them to expose the close sides toward the end of the bake. It helps to have a peel that's also big enough for all the loaves, but you can also load them one at a time. Once you have that and a method for steaming, it's just a matter of dialing in the right oven temperature settings, which will be different than they would be with a dutch oven.