Crusty Crust - Certainly Confused

Hello all.

In the early 1970s we sometimes bought bread from a small bakery.  It was just plain white, square, unsliced bread - very light and soft inside - but outside the crust was HARD, yet thin.  It took some chewing - the rest of the sandwich was often long-gone but you were still chewing the crust!  The rounded artesian breads I see with a 'crackled' crust (like the earth appears in drought conditions) - the crust wasn't as hard as that, nor crackled - it looked just like a plain supermarket loaf.  But it was certainly far harder than typical white bread.

I've only used a bread machine so far.  Which I have tried on it's darkest crust setting.  Yes, the crust comes out dark, but also quite thick (and not really any 'crustier').

The FAQ states lots of steam in the first 5 minutes of baking makes really crusty bread - and that many home ovens are not designed to handle that kind of steam.  To me, that statement implies modern commercial baking ovens have a water connection, and a reliable method of creating steam, whilst maintaining oven temperature.

Now maybe ovens with water connections and methods of reliably creating steam were available in the early 1970s...  But if so, I don't believe that tiny bakery would have owned one.  By the way - that same bakery no longer produces the same kind of crust today.  So now that they're able to easily install an oven that can do it, they don't - but in the 1970s with a plain-vanilla oven - they did!

Q1: So how would they have created the required level of steam?  Just place a large tray of boiled water in the oven below the dough?  And how would they maintain the steam for those few minutes after they opened/inserted/closed the door?  (Surely it would have taken those few minutes to steam-up the chamber again - by which time it would have been too late, according to the info in the FAQ.)

Q2: I suspect their crust was a side effect of something else, more than their goal.  So I'm wondering are there other factors can produce - or come close to producing - the same effect.

Q3: If steam really is the only answer - how do home bakers practically do it.  i.e. How do they modify their ovens to achieve the steam required to produce a thin, hard crust?

Q4: Is possible to achieve in a bread machine, and if so, how?

(My first thought was to drill a hole into the baking chamber of the bread machine - find a way to seal that part off from the electronics section, maybe even by physically cutting it in halves if necessary - then connecting a hose to the outlet of a pressure cooker... but I'd like to hear what others have to say.)

Q5: Finally, I may be moving 'off-grid' (no electricity) in the future - cooking with wood-fired stoves, solar ovens, masonry/earth/firebrick pizza-type ovens.  How to achieve crust/steam then?  Place a tray of water in the bottom, a rack over the tray for the bread to sit on, and put the bread in only once the water boils?  Again, are there other influencing factors?

Thanks for reading.