Best Home Oven
Hello everybody,
I've been wondering whether you expert/ home-pro bakers have any thoughts on what makes the best all purpose family oven (to bake sourdough bread, ideally 4 pizzas at a time, 4 baking trays of biscuits, 2 baking trays of bread buns, an occasional cake or sweet bread, as well as roast meat and veggies).
I'm relatively new to baking. I only have experience with 'mid range' Bosch/Electrolux electric ovens. I have never tried a steam oven or anything more professional. Should I invest in a better oven, will I get better results? Sourdough bread and pizzas should turn out better if I am not mistaken?
What oven would you opt for? How about if I go for 2 ovens? (Maybe a regular oven and a pizza oven?)
Thank you for your opinions/recommendations/links.
Happy baking,
JK
Hi JK
I use an electric oven. I rarely bake bread without a dutch oven (using either a lodge combo cooker or a creuset with lid). For pizza I use a thick pizza stone. My oven's a good oven that I've had for about 11 years. But at the end of the day I'll get more improvement from my baking by focusing on technique than the oven itself. That said, all of your ideas are great. But I'm not sure i'd buy anything different when my oven breaks down. Then again I only bake one to two loaves at a time and pizza only a few times a year. Maybe others will have a different perspective.
Good luck!!
JK, depends on what type of pizza you want to make, https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/ but for certain types of pizza, having the right oven is critical. Pizza ovens can be spendy if you want electric and high power , if you can go with a smaller pie and gas , there are some great options for not much money by Ooni and Roccbox . As for bread, I think the process is more important than the oven, though having a way to keep in steam can help.
SOURDOUGH
I must agree my oven did a wonderful job at baking sourdough bread. My only complaint is that I cannot bake 2 loaves at a time. No way I could squeeze 2 dutch ovens in. However, I haven't tried to bake sourdough directly on the baking tray and adding ice cubes or using other tricks I've read about to make steam.
Do you have any experience with 'combination ovens'? Those are supposed to allow you to let steam in. It sounds like a good idea... if it works?
PIZZA
Thank you for the 'pizza' link. I'll surely investigate this weekend.
Do you only bake 1 pizza at a time on the baking stone? Have you ever tried putting 2 stones in (one on top of the other) to bake 2 at a time? Or more?
My family wants me to prepare pizza every second day, but I'm limiting it to once a week. Since they love it so much, I'm planning to gradually improve on my recipe. The dream is to make a good Italian style pizza, try out some sourdough pizza recipes, you name it. It would be a shame if I was prevented from trying out recipes because my oven wasn't good enough.
Based on your comments, my current thinking is: to begin with, buy a very good electric oven, maybe combination oven, and figure out a way to bake 4 pizzas at a time in it. Buy a pizza oven once I grow more confident in my skill.
I have a combi oven, and it does okay for bread, though I can't say it would justify the price . You may want to look into the Anova Precision Oven, it is a countertop, but much more affordable than a 240 volt combi oven.
As to pizza ovens, if you can find a used Blackstone Pizza Oven, and don't mind cooking outside, it has a very powerful burner, a rotating stone so the pie cooks evenly, and it will take around 90 to 120 seconds to fully cook a pie - and as soon as the first one comes off, you can load a second one. You can make pies in the 15 to 16 inch size. I would think that would be fast enough for your family. If you can't find one of those, an Ooni or Roccbox will be pretty quick, probably 2 minutes or less, though it may need a few minutes to recover its temp between pies, the pies will be a bit smaller, and you will need to rotate the pie as it cooks. A combi oven, IMO, is not a great idea for any pizza - the built in models top out around 440 F, and the countertops don't go much higher. That may be fine for a deep dish or Chicago style pizza, for most other pizzas you want a much higher temp - usually 600F up to 900 F.
These are great suggestions, indeed. Thank you!
I didn't think about an outside pizza oven but it does make perfect sense, especially since we only get 3 months or so of rainy winter weather. Not that it stops us from having a barbecue. I'll get one of these the moment I find a good deal.
As for the indoor oven, the Anova Oven sounds amazing but it is a bit small. I've read some really convincing arguments why this might be better for bread baking, and baking in general for that matter. However, I do wish for more space to squeeze more food in. If our current oven didn't start failing us, I'd probably just buy this one as a second oven. Heck, maybe I should buy it, as well as a classic convection oven - one with 4D hot air technology, or something along the lines.
Really good to hear your thoughts. Especially since this is my first time buying an oven.
If you want to go with an inside pizza oven, electric is safest, but to get the high temps, you either have to put up with a very long preheat and recovery, or make smaller 11 to 12 inch pizzas. This one is pretty pricey, https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/breville-pizzaiolo/?pkey=cbreville-ovens but can cook a pie in under 2 minutes, and not much in the way of preheat times.
As to combi oven, I should mention I have one of the earlier ones, and it is no longer made, it is possible other manufacturers make combi ovens that are better for bread. I use my combi oven as a straight convection oven all the time because it has a small cavity and preheats extremely quickly.