1,535 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Steam for baking bread

What does steam have to do with bread-making? This is not only a bakers' secret, it is something you might not think of at all: if you make bread and bake it like a cake, you will end up with bread, but pale and with a thick, hard crust – a long way from the golden-brown crusty loaf you had in mind.

This is because, when baking bread in an oven, it is vital that right at the start, the loaf goes into an atmosphere that is hot, of course, (around 480°F or 250°C), but also very humid: saturated with steam, in fact. Some of the water suspended in the air inside the oven will settle out evenly on the bread and will react with the dough to form sugars (in the chemical sense). These will help brown the crust in the famous Maillard reactions, producing this bread a more appetising colour, but that is not all. It also helps to form a thin, crisp crust.

146 K 4.5/5 (38 reviews)

Last modified on: June 16^th 2021

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Steam for baking bread

So steam is indispensable: there are no beautifully browned, crusty loaves without it. You should note that once the crust is formed in the oven, after about 15 or 20 minutes, the steam is no longer necessary, so there is no need to keep adding it for the rest of the cooking time.

Creating steam in the oven

Professional bakers have the advantage of a special "Steam" control on their electric ovens. This injects water into the oven, which lands on very hot metal elements and vaporises to create the steam. They simply press a button and “pshhhh!” , that's it.

For amateur bakers like us, things are rather different, but here are a few ways to achieve a similar effect:

Conventional kitchen oven

For this set up, preheat the oven with an empty oven tray sitting directly on the bottom (oven floor or sole) and leave it in the oven to heat up.

La lèchefrite dans le four

When you put the bread in the oven, before closing the door, pour a large glassful of water into the burning-hot tray (do be careful not to scald yourself),

De l'eau pour faire de la buée dans le four

then close the door quickly.

On ferme la porte du four rapidement

The water hitting the hot tray will vaporise and create the steam in the oven, just as required.
If all the water has evaporated in under 15 minutes, add a second glassful.

Bread oven

If you are fortunate enough to have a proper bread oven, you will need to use a special technique, shown on this page which explains the Steam Machine.

To sum up: Without steam, no beautiful, good bread. You need to have steam in the oven during the first 15 minutes of baking.

Breads cooked with steam

Lasts posts

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20257055

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025715

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,2385

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,2263

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20256,7555

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

A few tips for effective kneading at home

When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.
June 23^th 2021283 K 23.8

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202136 K4.5

Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not?
February 28^th 201844 K4.3

Cooking time for pasta

What is as good and simple as pasta? Not much, I think, and it's so easy to prepare: boiling water, salted (or not, depending on your taste), a few minutes of boiling and it's ready. The only "difficulty", so to speak, is the respect of the cooking time and the risk of, unfortunately, overcooking...
July 18^th 201923 K4.6

The 3 secrets of Parisian flan

A flan Parisien, or boulanger, is a simple yet delicious cake. A cream, a mixture of milk, eggs and sugar, is poured into a raw pastry base and baked in the oven until the pastry and cream are cooked. This is the simplest version of the recipe, probably the original one, but nowadays the cream...
July 21^th 202315 K4.7