Rocket Bake Oven With Steam

[narottama]

I'm an avid sourdough bread baker, and have dreamt of a rocket bake oven with steam. I have seen rocket mass heaters or cabin stoves with small black or white ovens as an add-on, but not a dedicated bake oven.

The only commercial venture I've ever come across is this www.aromatic-embers.com/artisan-3000-bakers-oven/ which looks great but is also complex and expensive, not to mention needing to be shipped from Australia. While I would love to own one I thought it might be worth hopping onto this forum to ask whether a simpler rocket bake oven had been prototyped or perfected as far as anyone knows?

My thought is that the central heating boiler built by Rémy Bakker and shown here batchrocket.eu/en/applications#chb could be adapted for bakery. A BBR core with an insulated bell which transfers the heat into a white oven could work. Are there any such examples that all of you good people may know of in this vein? I wouldn't need this oven to be a mass heater or anything other than a bake oven, which I hope would keep the design simple.

Thanks for your knowledge and support!

[Deleted]

The simplest and safest way is to place an open container with water in the oven.

[narottama]

Thanks Karl, any thoughts on the rest of the design or an idea of someone who has created a rocket bake oven? I know permies put out a barrel design for a white oven, which is great if a little small.

[Deleted]

Once there was a video in this forum of a huge french bakery oven with a round dome of several meters in diameter.
A round hole in the center connected it with the firechamber below.
Once the fire had died a metal pot with water was placed in the center hole.

[whazzatt]

I've just baked banana bread and cookies in my rocket oven. They came out great. I put a stainless steel kettle of water in the oven at the same time. I use the water for dish-washing afterwards. There is definitely a lot of vapour in the oven when the goodies come out.

Here's the oven:

donkey32.proboards.com/thread/3610/basic-tube-rocket-barrel-oven

One might be surprised at the number of loaves of bread you'd be able to fit in there. With two racks, I think ten loaf-pans would it. Maybe nine if one leaves room for a container of water, which I would position right above the hottest area of the inner barrel.

The trick will be to get used to the performance of your oven. The thermometer in the door of mine is safe for most baked goods when displaying between 140 C to 150 C, though I think the actual temp in the oven is hotter than that. There's a certain trick to getting the flame just right for this range. The J-Tube approach has proven to be very handy in this regard - add a stick here, take one out there, see what happens.

Learning any bake oven's tricks will take some time. Maybe start with pizzas because they are quite forgiving in the temp-range arena and you can learn about an oven's idiosyncrasies in this manner.

A completely different approach would be what the Belfry Kitchen, in South Africa, does. They have a huge bread oven (pizza oven style) in which they make a big fire for about 2 hours every morning. Someone who works there once told me that they can bake "all day" thereafter. Here's the only link I can find to a picture of the oven:

www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g4878487-d9730252-i168282209-The_Belfry_Kitchen-Joubertina_Eastern_Cape.html

[ronyon]

I'm inspire by this:
www.permaculturenews.org/2012/10/16/rocket-oven-a-permanent-wall-mounted-kitchen-oven/
It's a salvaged conventional wall oven,heated by a rocket stove.

For my oven, I plan on running a water line into the oven itself, so I can drip water onto the oven floor.

If you find an electric oven with a glass cook top, you can use the glass for the burn chamber on your batchbox.

If you get a double oven, you might even be able to fit your batch box into the bottom oven.

[whazzatt]

Apr 8, 2020 12:03:30 GMT -8 ronyon said:

I'm inspire by this:
www.permaculturenews.org/2012/10/16/rocket-oven-a-permanent-wall-mounted-kitchen-oven/
.

Pity about the metal Jtube. Cast core and a 5 minute riser would be be good for longevity...

[chrisz]

Apr 8, 2020 12:03:30 GMT -8 ronyon said:

I'm inspire by this:
www.permaculturenews.org/2012/10/16/rocket-oven-a-permanent-wall-mounted-kitchen-oven/
It's a salvaged conventional wall oven,heated by a rocket stove.

I'm looking to understand this a little better... the rocket feeds the metal oven, so its a "black" oven, and then there is an exhaust somewhere worked in to it also? Would you need to put a diffusion plate, of some sort above the rocket's entrance into the stove to diffuse the heat path around the oven?

cz