December 27, 2022 - 12:23pm
Electric Bread Oven for Home/Commercial Use?
I'm looking for an electric oven capable of baking 4+ loaves. I'm always on the lookout for a Rofco going up for sale, and I've looked at some pizza ovens on Vevor (link here) but it's hard to tell if those would work for baking sourdough loaves.
Any recommendations on which electric bread oven to buy?
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The description on the Vevor site was pretty confusing in that it doesn't say how high each chamber is. Normally, a pizza oven has a low ceiling, and that might make it tough to bake bread. Also, a pizza oven needs top heat to brown the cheese and the upper part of the crust, but that can make the top of a loaf of bread firm up too soon and inhibit oven spring. Since it has 3 thermostats, my assumption is you could turn off the element at the very top in the upper chamber, but the middle element is probably under the top stone, so it would provide top heat for the lower chamber, and if you turned that down or off, you probably won't get much heat in the upper oven. So I don't think that would be a great option.
Rofco and Chandley both offer a non convection based system, where a long preheat is used to store heat in the oven, and that mimics in some way the old wfo , and you add water to create steam, and the oven is well sealed to keep it in. I rarely see them for sale, and IIRC, Rofco's are on backorder.
Some have had some success using countertop commercial ovens that have convection - like a Cadco Unox, Moffat, Doyon - some of those models offer a bake element so you can use that instead of convection, and many believe that will give better oven spring than a convection oven, which can again dry out the crust. Some of the larger ones have a steam button, which just injects water into the oven , and uses the heat from the oven to convert that into steam. 4 loaves would be a weight lifting exercise if you used DO, but that would allow you to create a sealed environment in a convection oven for the first part of the bake, which is essentially what you get from a Rofco.
Another option is a non convection oven, like a Baker's Pride or similar. They are not as tightly sealed as the Rofco, at least the one I had wasn't, but some come with a higher ceiling, which is much better for bread than the Vevor. https://bakerspride.com/bp-products/p24-hearthbake-series-electric-commercial-baking-ovens-p24bl/