October 26, 2020 - 9:05am
small electric oven?
Hello all,
I always bake 4 loaves for the entire week. However, I enjoy much more fresh bread just out of the oven.
The main reason I bake 4 is to heat up the standard sized oven 1 time to reduce energy consumption.
I wonder about the following:
--- Does anyone have a smaller electric oven that allows to bake 1 loaf at a time?
-- if anyone has an idea about the electricity consumption of the normal American size electric oven vs. a smaller electric oven ( table top?) My husband thinks it does not make that much difference and smaller ovens are less efficient....true?
I use Dutch oven for my sourdough and it works the best compared to all other methods I tried. Thank you !
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Some use small countertop commercial ovens - they are sized by sheet pan , and the smallest is a 1/4 size oven - like the Cadco Roberta, which are usually available used for not very much. It has extremely good temperature control, but the fan is always running, so long as you use the DO , you should be fine, but if you try to bake on a stone, the fan may cause the crust to harden too soon. Small non commercial countertops, aka toaster ovens, are not insulated very well and thus are less efficient, though the bigger problem is that in many the upper element is too close to the top of the loaf , and leads to burning of the top, or having the crust harden too soon, and some have very wide swings in temps , one that I had would swing 50 degrees F above and below the set temp .
The electricity consumed by a consumer countertop should be much less than a full sized oven, and the commercial may be a little bit more than the toaster oven. It would be hard to estimate, though I doubt financially it would save enough money to make a difference. If you wanted to do the math, you would preheat your current oven to temp, and time how long that took, then watch the oven for the rest of the baking cycle and determine how often the element ( electric element ) was on, then multiply the watts of the bake element by the minutes of preheat, and add that to the amount of time the bake element was on during baking multiplied by the watts of the bake element, and that would be the total watts consumed , put that in this formula along with the total amount of time the element was on, including preheat, to determine kilowatt hours calculator.com watts-to-kwh-calculator/ . You would then multiply that by the cost of electricity in your area, and that would tell you the total cost of baking a loaf of bread. My wild and completely unsupported guess is that a toaster oven would use 1/3 to 1/2 of that amount , but again, the difference in cost would be tiny.
A friend just bought this and so far, likes it. I have no personal experience.
https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision-oven/
We have one of these. Doubt running this 4 times is less energy than baking 4 at once. I wouldn't call it small either. Our Brevelle air works well and is probably a better value if one wanted to continue using a cloche.