Steam Steam, Steam

I am new to this site but there is litteraly more content here then you can imagine, just search steam and you can sift though 13000 results

personaly i recommend this method

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20162/oven-steaming-my-new-favorite-way

SylviaH has amazing recipes that are easy to follow and she did all the hard work of testing the diffrent methods for us. When i dont use a dutch oven to make bread i follow her well tested process. So far so good

Since I've (recently!) done the same as you -- posting a question to which I could just as well have found plusieur answers by mining the rich TFL archive -- I feel I owe a decent contribution.

• I second Dave's recommendation of "Sylvia's Magic Towels": the clear top choice of TFL's most accomplished Master Amateurs.  
• There are some exotic (and dangerous) pressure cooker hacks you can find documented on TFL but are best avoided unless you're drawn to confounding baking with playing quien es mas macho?, are an engineer, and/or share Evil Kinevil's death wish (imho).  And, with all due respect to their brave inventors, I've found the crumb of at least some of the loaves thusly produced to be oddly, even uncomfortably uniformly holey.  As if the standard deviation of the normal (bell) curve of crumb alveoli diameter has been reduced by 90% by these poor abused Presto's.
• Misting with a sprayer (a Peter Reinhart recommendation) risks cracking oven lights and window, and isn't very effective anyway since about as much steam is generated that way as escapes by opening the door to do it (again imho).  
• Piling lava rocks or misc steel nuts and bolts in your tray before pouring in boiling water helps by increasing surface area from which water can evaporate.  But that surface area is nothing compared to the fiber surface area of a terry towel a la Sylvia.  That's the genius of her method: high evaporative surface area continuously replenished with water from within the cotton fibers and in the pan in which they're resting.  Brilliant.  Mind you, it's fussy: ferrying burning hot towels from glass dish in microwave to metal tins in oven (= opposite ends of our kitchen).  But look at the products pictured on TFL that result from it:  glossy blistered thick chesnut crusts.  Can almost taste/hear them.
• Robertson's and Lahey's dutch oven (DO) concept doesn't require an cast iron Lodge combo DO or any other Big Iron or ceramic for that matter.  Many are satisfied with inverting a stainless steel salad bowl over 1 kg boules, without preheating the bowl (another discussion topic on TFL: preheat or not).  Given the heat conductivity of thin stainless steel, non-preheated works fine, though not as well as Sylvia's Magic Towels.  
• I've wondered if simply gently forming a sheet of aluminum foil over a loaf (when on the peel and leaving it there when dough hits the stone in oven, then remove it after 15-20 min, which by the way is standard procedure for all these steaming methods) would sequester enough dough-released steam to do the trick.  But haven't tried it because I've feared it might stick.  Yuk.
• You can search TFL for David Snyder's report of SFBI's ice-cubes-on-perforated-pie-plate method.  I've had no experience with it but am intrigued by the concept.  But I'm baking in a small oven and prefer steam to start in liquid phase so as not to draw oven heat to generate it from solid H2O.
• Someday, a clever baker-cum-inventor will devise a simple why-didn't-I-think-of-that? gadget that we'll all buy to put in our ovens that will fill them with hot steam so neatly and efficiently that we'll have a good laugh at lists like this.  Maybe you're the one to do it.

That's a start.  Let us know what works best for you.  Good luck!

Tom

I bake a lot in my Dutch Oven but, I do have one of those Shark steam cleaners I just might have to give that thing a spin around the block and see how it does, hhmmmm.

In an atmospheric pressure oven (which is always at sea level by convention) you can't have a dew point above 100°C, and won't approach that without a steam generator that is powered by a separate heat source than the oven box itself. You can calculate the amount of water you need to keep the oven full of steam and then the amount of heat required to boil water (create steam) at that rate.  Most ovens do not have sufficient power to do that.  The result is that the temperature of the oven drops during steaming and only begins to recover when steam generation stops (without a separate steam generator). This includes the towel trick.  The realistic alternative is to store enough heat in lava rock or some other suitable thermal storage medium to create the steam you need so that the oven power source is not required to supply what is necessary to flash the water to steam (an isothermal process at 100°C) but only to heat the steam from 100°C to the oven set point (which takes a lot less power).  So I opted for a combi oven with a separate steam generator when I could afford it, but before that I tried just about all of the tricks elaborated here - except for the pressure cooker approach (which I am convinced will work, but still requires a big heat source and is dangerous without an appropriate safety valve).

I am drawn to using preheated lava rock and a mechanism that slowly drips water onto the rock - and the best one I have come across is to use ice cubes in a pan with the right number, size, and placement of pin holes, even though the oven does have to melt the ice.  The trick is to balance the stored heat in the rock and the amount and form of the ice while engineering the method of distributing the melted ice so that it drips onto rocks that remain well above 100°C.  If the water perks to the bottom of the rock box, it just sits there and boils at a rate that is determined by other factors.

I keep watching for the gagget that we will all buy when it appears - even though I have solved my problem, I am still interested in how and when a really clever solution appears.

An interesting calculation shows that for an average 4.5 cu ft oven, it takes about 1090 lb-°F of lava rock (weight of the rock x rock temperature above the boiling point of water) to melt the ice, heat it to boiling, boil it, then heat the steam to 450°F. so if you are preheating your oven to 500°F (which means that any rock you have in there will be 50°F below oven temperature just because you don't want to wait forever) you will need a little over a pound of lava rock for the first blast of steam plus some more to provide make-up steam as the initial steam escapes.  If your oven leaks one volume per minute (you can actually estimate this from the power consumption) and you want to have steam for 5 minutes, then you need to have 6 lbs of lava rock and almost exactly 1 lb of water (16 oz) dripped onto the hot rock over the 5 minutes (20% immediately after you close the oven door and the rest spread out over the remaining 5 min).  For a number of reasons this underestimates both the amount of rock you need and the temperature you need to heat it to if you are going to create all of the steam with the stored energy in the rock.  This is independent of how much power you oven can deliver (though that does determine how long it takes to heat everything up).  A bigger oven will take more, a tighter oven will take less.

I posted this a couple of months ago. From my point-of-view, I've stopped searching for a better way to create steam, safely, with no downside to loaf development.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/28166/steaming-container-option-update

David G

I just discovered that I started to answer this question last year and never got back to it.

So there is another way to look at it:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/25975/why-ice-steam

Oven recovery time (table below) is an issue and does depend on oven input power. For small ovens (2500W) it is more than a few minutes, but for a 4KW oven it pretty much matches the steaming time you want during which the bread is still below 100°C surface temperature.  This table assumes that the oven operates at 100% efficiency and has no losses so it under estimates the recovery time.  Thus smaller ovens need more help with preheated pebble beds.

Amazon has aluminum roofing nails for less than $10/lb. The packing density is not high, but it might work if you whack them with a big hammer (like a 2 lb sledge hammer) to collapse the head. At 450-550 per pound that is an afternoon's work and a couple of days of pain.

I believe it was dmsnyder who thoroughly tested various breads by baking them with or without steam and showed the photographs.  No detectable difference was noted.

But, I too, fell prey to each and every book touting steam.

The easiest for me is using the Römertopf since the top is being soaked for 10 minutes prior to putting pot and dough into the cold oven. One drawback is the thinner crust which I reinforce by baking the bread - after being done and out of the pot - for another 5 to 10 minutes.

The La Cloche is my #2 choice, simply because I have not mastered forming wetter dough which then spreads in the cloche. To circumvent this, I put the dough into a springform pan which I put into the cloche. I have even put some crushed ice between the springform and the outer rim of the cloche to make extra steam. But a wetter dough doesn't need this much additional hydration.

#3 choice is those tiny loaf-shaped aluminum cake tins which I partially fill with water and set between the heating elements on the bottom of the electric stove while the oven is preheating and 10 minutes into the bake where the bread sits on a wire pizza pan placed on the stone.

Anna

First off, Anna, in my "test" of no steam, the crust appearance and texture sufferred. Without steam, the crust is matte, not shiney. In theory, oven spring and bloom also suffer. The steam is to keep the surface moist and pliable longer. If crust forms too early, it resists loaf expansion.

Second, as has been mentioned, the generation of steam in the oven does cool the oven, but the ways to compensate are really simple. Pre-heat the oven to a higher temperature than your baking temperature and have material in the oven that stores heat and buffers temperature fluctuations. The principal one is a thick, good quality baking stone. I don't think tiles are sufficient. I use a cast iron skillet to hold lava rocks. The cast iron is another "heat capacitor." Use of lava rock or, better yet, steel nuts and bolts, provide both heat storage and a large surface area for the water to hit resulting in more steam generation. Just be sure that your hardware doesn't contain elemenets that vaporize at oven temperatures and are toxic.

I have used other methods including covering the loaf with a stainless steel bowl, a variety of Dutch ovens and covering the loaf with a disposable aluminum roasting pan. All of these work well. I have not tried Sylvia's technique. I have no complaints regarding my current method, but I am very impressed with the results others have achieved with hot wet towels.

Any one's decision among the methods that work (including some others I haven't mentioned) is personal and should be based on effectiveness in the oven one has and ease of use.

David

Perhaps this is what you were thinking of?     http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20024/oven-steaming-using-sfbi-method

I tried David's SFBI method and it works perfectly for me:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam

Am still thankful to him for writing about it.