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After hours baking

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bronxboy

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We’ve got a Marsal double deck brick-oven that we fire up from 9 Am to 9PM 6 days a week. It’s driving me crazy to think that all that residual heat we paid a lot of money to produce, is going to waste every night.

Does anyone have suggestions on what items, and how, we can bake un-attended throughout the night, when we’re closed and gone? Our shutdown temp is around 550-600 degrees, and in the morning when we come in, it’s around 110 degrees.
 
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That’s an interesting thought, but I can’t think of anything that won’t be char with that long a cook time. I mean, just to see - go ahead and leave a little bit of dough in there. It’s gonna disintegrate on contact in the AM.

Though if you leave in a peice of pineapple, the carbon form found the next day makes me think that if you did it right, you could probably make a diamond.
 
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I agree, but had been thinking more in lines of larger rustic breads, roasted meats, stews, possibly roasting vegetables down for toppings or sauces, etc.

We operate what we call a Pizza Bistro, and have a number of non-pizza items on our menu. To some degree, we’re a wannabe restaurant, but without a stove. We make fresh soup every day on an induction stove top, but we don’t have either enough heat to saute, or a hood. So, anything that we can bake, or roast, we do. We even grill steaks in the oven on a cast-iron ribbed grill.

I’m looking for some guidance on how to utilize the oven throughout it’s nightime shut-down mode, without burning the products up in the first few hours.
 
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To get any idea of possible products to put in, you would probably need an hourly temp profile to know how quickly it drops off. If you get a quick drop to, say, 400F in the first hour, then to 300F in the next hour, that is different than a slow, gradual decline that stays consistent.

Once you know temps and times, you can determine if you can drop a couple large pans of osso bucco in there overnight to braise. I set pot roasts routinely in the oven at 250F overnight at my house . . . this oven usage is an intriguing challenge.
 
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Nick,
Thanks for your comment. You’re probably right, but being lazy, and not wanting to stay through a night to record the temp drops, I was hoping somebody had already been down this path and could provide the ‘Cliff’s Notes’ for me. I’ll try and figure out how to get that information so I can follow your thought path.
 
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Hey Bronxboy,

Your thread has reminded me of stories of my parents growing up in Italy where their ovens were huge, thermal mass behemoths. These ovens were composed of thousands of pounds of special cement mix and bricks, which translate into thermal mass. The more thermal mass an oven has, the more it maintains its temperature without drastic SHORT-TERM heat loss once the fire burns out; I believe it stays hot longer without as much heat loss as our modern metal, brick-lined ovens, like the Marsal. But I don’t know for sure so like Nick said, do some testing.

You can slow-cook an item by turning down the temp to 200 F; roast beef and ribs would be great. Get some books on slow-cooking with low temps, i am sure you’ll find alot of stuff.
 
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Y-Yo,
Thanks for your input. Actualy, it’s knowing that European bakers used to bake the rest of the village’s food in their ovens after they finnished baking their own bread, that got me thinking aboout this.
My problem is finding some product that can start off baking / roasting at shutdown, around 9PM, with an oven temp around 550 degrees, and cool down over time to around 100 degrees when we come back in around 9AM the next day - without any assistance, and without running afoul of the temp requirements for a safe product. If it was just cooking something for that time period at a low 200 degree temp, I wouldn’t have a problem. It’s the start at high, finish at low that has me stymied.
 
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put some ice and timed where the ice will melt completely and the food will start warming and a lower temp idunt know how practical that is
 
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