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pilling up stone, no heat improvement, why not?

jenato's picture
jenato

pilling up stone, no heat improvement, why not?

Hi,

So I have this pizza oven. I use it for bread baking. It came with a 1,5cm thick stone (50x60cm). I tried pilling up an extra 1,5cm stone over half of the original stone.

After a good 1h of pre-heating at 300°C (IR thermometer gave a 290°C for both stones).

I baked 2 pizzas, one on the 1,5cm area the other on the 3cm area.

Results: 

- no visual differences 

- no cooking time differences

- even more strange, after baking both stones read 200°C with IR thermometer (so a drop of approx. 100°C).

So it is as if pilling up stone changed nothing... Any idea why not?

 

David R's picture
David R

... you give it two hours of preheating?

jenato's picture
jenato

I will give it a try. Actually, I wonder if I did not get tricked and only red the "surface" temperature of the stone with the IR thermometer. Especially because the ceiling heating element was on. 

I will try next time. 

David R's picture
David R

... necessarily right, just think you should see what happens when you preheat a lot more. I believe the point is for the stone itself to be quite a lot hotter than the oven setting says, not simply getting close to it. (i.e. the stone being up to 500 being an indicator that it's definitely not ready yet - the stone should be far more. Otherwise it's as if you hadn't used it anyway.)

David R's picture
David R

300, not 500. I need to wake up. ?

David R's picture
David R

Maybe one stone was enough in the first place; maybe you just never really got the first stone hot enough to do its job. And hopefully one stone heats up quicker than two.

old baker's picture
old baker

I think DavidR is on the right track.  If both pizzas came out the same, then one stone is enough.  There's enough thermal mass there and the second stone adds nothing.

jenato's picture
jenato

Long warm up is the next test. I will report

old baker's picture
old baker

If one stone bakes a good pizza, why worry that a second stone makes no difference?  Or is there a problem with the quality of your results and you're looking for improvement?

David R's picture
David R

... you're right - I blindly assumed that the pizza was no good.

 

OP: Was the pizza good? If it was good, then who cares what the temperature gauge said?

jenato's picture
jenato

I baked a few pizzas. They turned out ...ok but they required 10min of cooking while the oven was pushed to the max. Worst than my old oven.

I bought this oven with the idea of baking 6 loafs of 600gr (3,6kg) at once. I am still in the testing phase .

Considering 2 pizzas and 3x 400gr loafs of bread are already dropping the temperature quite a lot I am wondering if the oven will have enought heat in store for 3,6kg of cold dough.

So I was testing things before throwing in all that dough. And I don t see why adding an extra layer of stone does not change the heat stored / thermal inertia...

But as said I will try longer preheating and see where that leads me.