after a few years of baking all our breads at home, and now getting
into sourdough breads I've come to realize that standard ovens are
poorly equiped for such activity.

We're about to embark on a major remodel of our home and one of my
presents to myself is going to be an oven specifically for bread.

Unfortunately it seems that most ovens in this category are solely
professional. It's really difficult finding one under 20K :/ This is
definitely out of my price range in several orders of magnitude.

I have come across two oven which seem to fit but I'm curious as to
whether any of you other home-bakers have any suggestions.

The model I really want is made by Gaggenau but it's still pretty
costly. It's a positive pressure steam and convection oven with
misting capabilities. It definitely looks like the ticket. One of the
features it has that I haven't found on any other residential level
oven (which there are only two others) is that it has temperature
settings as low as 70 degrees which enabled it to be used as a proofing
oven. at 70 degrees you can also control the humidity from about 50%
to 100%, which seems like it could really do well as a starter
activator and proofing oven.

The unit is still pretty costly so I'm wondering if anyone out there
has found anything they prefer.

the gaggenau model is the ED220 and you can see it at www.gaggenau.com

-Scott