"Tom Stanton" wrote in message=20
...

I have an electric oven at home.=20

I do not know about electric ovens. The atmosphere in a gas-burning
oven starts out mildly moist due to water vapor from gas combustion.
But I could not guess exactly how much that is worth.

Now I spray with a fine spritzer and I get pretty good results.

Compared with non-spritzed? Are you spritzing the doughloaf
or the oven walls/stone/whatever?

I've never tried baking without a moisture addition.

I have tried it every whichaway. Throwing a cup or two of
water onto a red-hot frying pan gets enough moisture to gelatinize
the doughskin to the extent that the slash-edges melt. Also gets me
thrown out of the kitchen if Mrs. Adams finds out what I am doing.

Do you have a theoretical reason for not adding moisture?

My theoretical reason is this: The amount of moisture that you can
induce in your oven with sprizing/ice cubes/etc. scales roughly to the =
stink you can rise in the Grand Canyon by farting (even with a
battalion of Boy Scouts to help out).

One thing that I have found efficacious that not everybody does is
to rise the doughloaves quite much (up to 5-fold volume increase) in
an extremely humid atmosphere. Then the dough-loaf surfaces are
glistening wet when the loaves go into the oven, and not much
further rise due to "oven-spring" is expected.

One needs pretty good dough (i.e., optimally developed gluten)
before that is possible. The usual experience is that the loaves become
"overproofed", whatever that may mean, at ~2-fold volume increase,
and get then tossed into the oven in hopes of "oven-spring".

I'd agree with Ed that optimal development in a KA mixer takes
ten or more minutes at low speeds. On the other hand, if preferments
are overdeveloped, ten minutes in the KA can tear the dough to shreds.

According to the reading I've done and my experience in the
bakery - you need moisture to gelatinize the carbohydrates in the =
crust in
order to form a nice thick crust (or this crust if you prefer to not =
let it
dry out).

True, no doubt. The amount of moisture under discussion probably
varies by several orders of magnitude, between gentle spritzing, and
what Kenneth could get with his Bongard if his lady would let him use
the "steam".

(Not everybody knows that the "steam" serves primarily to thicken
the crust. People have different ideas about why the "steaming" is
done, mostly dumb ideas.)

Do you have some other information of which I am unaware?

Nah, I just make it up as I go along. Didn't you know?

: )

--=20
Dick Adams
firstname dot lastnameat bigfoot dot com