Problem getting bread to brown with Miele H5240BP oven

Hi

I have just replaced a 12 year old Scholtes (French) oven with a new
expensive Miele. The old oven temperature had become erratic and it
was too expensive to repair. However I did make great bread with it.

I find with my new oven that I am unable to get the crust to go brown.
The instruction book for the oven says to bake bread at 160 to 180C
which seems very low, for 40 minutes which seemed very long. I tried
this and the bread came out a light biscuit colour. I then reverted
to my more traditional 220-240C and 30 - 25 minutes but it still comes
out an unattractive light biscuit shade. I have tried, fan,
conventional, combination and all kids of setting with no good
results. I have increase the time to 35 minutes and still no good -
the bread is overcooked but still a poor shade.

Any ideas?


Thanks

tiger wrote:

I'm going to begin with the presumption that you haven't changed
anything about the way you make bread--same flour, same formula, same
technique--and that the oven is the problem, as you say.

Can you describe the differences between the old oven and the new oven?
Material, fuel, BTU per hour rating, geometry, how you're loading it
(position in the oven, etc.)?

For example, is the old oven cast iron with black enamel and the new one
shiny stainless steel? Is the old oven wider, allowing more space around
the sides of your baking tiles for convection?

Also, have you calibrated the new oven with a thermometer, so that you
have some confidence that it is actually as hot as what you've set it for?

Just shooting in the dark here. Maybe something will trigger a thought.

tiger wrote:

Tiger,

It looks to me that the oven is not getting hot enough. My oven
has a special bread setting that gives the oven extra time to
get hot. Are you sure that the oven is heating to the
temperature that you think it is. Use an oven thermometer to
check it out. (But don't trust a cheap thermometer too much!)

Is there any way that you can get the vendor to check the
operation for you. This oven is very expensive and should work
correctly from the start, but sometimes they break right away.
There should be a warrenty on it for at least one year. One of
the vendors on the internet indicates there is a 2 year warrenty.

Browning occurs in part from the radiant energy from the oven
interior. If the temperature is OK, you might want to add a
pizza stone on the rack above the bread. I assume you are
baking on a stone to start with. If not, you might want to add
a pizza stone under the bread. The stones become radiators that
help the bread bake. They also take more time to get hot. It
might be worth while to verify the oven temperature using the
thermometer before you put the bread in to bake.

Are you using steam? I use a cast iron frying pan in the bottom
of the oven to create steam. The pan takes a while to heat up,
too. But it generates a lot of steam quickly without cooling
the oven too much.

Let us know what you find.

John Andrews, Knoxville, Tennessee

John Andrews wrote:

Tiger,

This reminds me of what I left out in my earlier list of questions, and
John makes a good point.

I asked what the old oven and new oven were constructed of. One of the
important considerations is how long you preheat the oven. The more
massive the oven body, the longer it takes to preheat, and if the newer
oven is the heavier of the two, that could be the only problem you're
having.

Dick

Thanks to both of you, Dick & John,

I am suspecting that it may be a temperatire problem, depsite that
fact that the Miele literature says that their ovens are very fast at
hitting their temperature and very accurate.

I did try to calibtrate it from abpout 130C to 200C and it appeard to
be about 5 degrees low- probably not enough to casue the probelm - but
as John sasy dont trust cheap thermometers and I think mine is a
probably a cheap one. I will get the shop to come out and check it
out. It does not go above 200C

I am still making bread the same way - I am sticking with plain white
yeast bread as a starting point. Both ovens are plack pyrolitc
interior. I am not using a bakign stone - but that spounds liek a good
investment any way - I thin I will look out for one.

Cheers

T

Dick Margulis wrote:

tiger wrote:

I'm not sure what country you're in. In the US, we'd send you to Home
Depot to get some CHEAP unglazed clay tiles, rather than paying catalog
prices for a brand-name baking stone. The main consideration is that you
do not want to cover the entire surface of an oven shelf; you want an
inch or preferably two inches all around to assist with air circulation
(convection) in the oven.

I still think you may want to preheat the new oven longer than you did
the old one. See what happens when you preheat for an hour.

On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:01:48 -0400, Dick Margulis
<[Only registered users can see links. ]> wrote:



The temperature goal itself, as well as the pre-heat and thermal mass
of the oven may affect the loaves.


I had an adventure yesterday about an hour before I was to bake some
bread. I shattered the glass baffle sandwiched in between the inner
glass and outer door of my main oven (don't ask).

At that point, nervous about using the oven, I pre-heated my microwave
convection oven, which is quite decent size. Although it allows a heat
of up to 450 F, it never quite makes it and this was a bread that
needed a high heat. Additionally, the M/C oven loses a tremendous
amount of heat if opened. I'm a mister and the small oven would not
have been able to keep up with misting

The M/C oven has a turntable that is of a stone-like material, so I
plopped the loaf directly on it, but with parchment in between.

Still, I had to do something with the loaves, so I popped one in, a 2
pound loaf of whole wheat, rye, white, steel cut oats, corn meal and
enough seeds of various sorts to keep a canary happy for a week.

The loaf baked well enough, the slashes opened somewhat, but the
crust had that dull look, that one sometimes gets when a loaf is over
proofed. This loaf was not over proofed, though, as witness its twin
sister, that I decided to toss caution to the winds with, and fired up
the regular oven and to bake.

Photos here, as Multi-Grain Two Ovens

[Only registered users can see links. ]

The bread, by the way, is mighty fine. Sourdough based, with two
separate preferments over 24 hours, before I mixed the final dough,
and I ended it with a long, cool proof in the fridge. Since this had
so much whole wheat and rye, I also added in a bit of vital wheat
gluten and ascorbic acid. My, oh, my, did the dough fly with that.

Boron

Dick Margulis <[Only registered users can see links. ]> wrote in
news:[Only registered users can see links. ] m:




This sounds like it's not a matter of a few degrees, but of 30-50C, which
would prevent the Maillard reaction from taking place. This is somthing
for the factory to check out.

The home fix is to reorient the control knob, but this works only for a
small error. Since you have the factory on the hook, I wouldn't bother
with this.

Barry