Frankly, I don't know WHAT I want, that's the problem. I just want to bake bread. My thanks for the link to the video. It gave me some answers and finally led me to some bread baking blogs that indicated that for good bread I only want steam for about 15 minutes. So, steam injection or just throwing some water in the bottom of the oven at the begiining of baking, which is what I have been doing. Unless someone has other experience, looks like I just need to get a nice oven and do what I have been doing - not chasing after a $4K oven.

Hi, I am also experimenting with my steam oven. I have made bread several times with auto steam bake. While the bread came out good, I agree, not fabulous. Last time I tried using the Wolf Gourmet "Bread" feature. I thought the bread turned out better and will use this feature again. One caution, once you selet "bread" you then select level of doneness (I think it was light, medium, dark). I selected medium and checked the bread once the aroma of freshly baked bread filled the kitchen. Happy I did as the bread was definately done! Best of luck. I hope more owners share their baking and cooking experiences with the Wolf steam oven. I will say, so far I love it! MJ

For stir-frying, burner shape is as important or even more important than burner power. I test drove the Miele and Dacor cooktops as well as the BlueStar rangetop we chose. (Not an apples to apples test but at first I was hesitant to give up the space to a rangetop - then when I found out how much better the BlueStar performed for stir frying I changed my mind.) The 15K BTU burners on our Bluestar that are about the same power as the Miele and Dacor burners stir fry much better because they are much more efficient at delivering heat to the bottom of the wok and they do it very evenly. The 22K BTU burner on our BlueStar is even better. When I tested the Dacor and Miele with a chicken stir fry, I put in half the chicken at a time to sear to not overload it and it still wasn't a perfect sear. When I tested the BlueStar, it was a hot day and my DH had packed the ice chest so carefully that the chicken was mostly frozen when I took it out to start cooking. But if I was going to sacrifice my drawer to the rangetop it better be good so I put in all the chicken at once and the BlueStar immediately had it sizzling and seared perfectly. The food really tasted different cooked on the BlueStar. I highly recommend calling around the appliance stores to see if you can find one with the types of burner you are considering hooked up so you can try a stir fry recipe on the burner. I took the same wok and recipe ingredients to each cooktop/rangetop I was considering and learned a lot by doing that. If Bluestar offered a single burner version of their rangetop, that is what I would recommend to you. If you don't have a chance to do that, what you want to look for is a burner that has a shape to deliver heat efficiently and evenly to the bottom of a wok. An example of a bad type of shape is the sealed burner like on the Dacor and Miele cooktops. These have a flat circular top and flame comes out of the side of the circle. The higher you turn the burner up, the more the flame shoots out to the side; no flame goes up in the center of the burner. An example of a type that works really well for a wok is the BlueStar burner shape where the flame comes straight up out of the burner. The burner shape has a circle of flame at the center of the burner and 8 star rays of flame coming out from that circle. The center grate comes off the burner so that the wok sits right down into the flame and heat is delivered to the whole bottom of the wok. This is very similar to the wok arrangements I saw in China. A friend has the DCS wok burner and that does a very good job. We have the Miele oven. I'm very happy with its cooking performance but I find its controller kind of annoying at times. Its heating is very stable and accurate. It cooks bread well. Things I don't like: Maximum timer setting is 59 minutes and 59 seconds. I'd gladly give up the seconds to have a timer that times longer than an hour. If you put in the time and then forget to hit the button that starts the timer, it waits a bit and then cancels the timer. Too many modes - for example they have a proofing mode that only allows two temps (both higher than I would usually want to proof at) and a defrost mode with a wide range of temps (which is what I use for proofing because I can set it to 80 or 90 degrees). One ends up having to learn little tricks like which baking mode lets you set the temp up to 550 degrees (most of the modes stop at 500). If the BlueStar ovens had been available when we were choosing, I'd have been very tempted to choose them. I'm short and the side opening door would be easier for me. The one downside is that they aren't self-cleaning and I'm rather addicted to not having to clean my oven. How is your breaker box occupancy? Ours is full. If you want to add that other oven at a later date, will you have a 220 V breaker spot open? That might be one reason to choose between gas and electric ovens.

We had a nice sunny day today, late morning and afternoon. Did some running around, so never did try the bread manually. When I mentioned setting it in the sun.....I meant the sun streaming in through the window. (in winter I get full sun, summer.....no sun in my apartment). Like Cynic, I preheat my bread-machine pan with hot water and heat up the milk in the microwave. I've read that the light bulb in the oven is all it takes to make bread rise, but that's hard to believe. But what do I know. Even if I never do remember to bake it in the oven, that's fine with us. We love the bread out of the machine. Hole and all. lol Hmmmm dinner rolls, though. That's a possibility! Oh, how much is 2 packets of yeast (as per the recipe above). I buy my yeast in bulk and put 2 1/4 tsp of yeast in my machine.