Hi, we're at the Center for Cooking Equipment Excellence here at Blodgett Corporation, and I'm Tim Klauder. I'm going to be showing you the new XR8 rotating oven. Now the XR8-G here stands for XL, rotating, eight-pan, gas-fired oven.

Now, let me introduce the control to you. Basically, we've made the unit extremely easy to operate, so that any skill level can operate it. You've got the on-off switch here, pretty simple, a digital readout. Okay, and then the central dial. So if I want to set the temperature right now, it's at 450, I can make that adjustment as high as 525 degrees. Now we're going to cook our French bread here in a moment at 450, so I'm going to bring it back to 450. Very easy to do.

Now the timer is the same thing. I can set it for as much time or as little as I want. You just turn the dial. I'm going to be cooking my French bread here today at about 25 minutes, so just let me set that up. The faster you turn it, the faster it goes, and then as you slow down, it's very easy to get the exact time that you're looking for. Pretty simple.

Next to the steam. Very important for baking: steam injection. Now in this particular situation, I'm going to use 25 seconds of steam. No more. That's going to be the perfect amount. Now, when you're in a bakery oven and you need steam injections, sometimes it's important to have this button right here, which is called fan delay. We're going to slow the fan speed down for about three minutes and let the steam do its thing and really allow the bread to proof up a little bit, finish proofing up and put a nice skin and texture on the dough before we continue to bake.

Now next to that is a vent. Venting is very important specifically with breads to get that humidity out of the cavity when you need to. Now, when we hit the vent button, it takes about 30 seconds to open up and then we will start venting. In this case, we're going to be venting for about six minutes or more, and we'll make an adjustment because it's manual and then I have a start and stop button. Very simple. Great.

Now what we're doing is Sarah is our baker expert. She's going to be, what would you call that? Slicing, putting the little, scoring the bread, putting the little slits in it. We're going to get this all scored up and we want the oven. It's preheating at this very moment. One of the things that we notice, you have a gas on-off switch, and most of the Blodgett appliances today have that on-off gas switch. It's really smart. This way, if you ever have any service issues, you can shut the gas or the circuit breaker off right from the front of the appliance, which is really a good thing to do. Okay, we're still scoring our french bread here.

We've preheated, so let's just check the temperature settings real quickly. Again, I'm at 450 degrees. That's where I want to be baking at. 25 minutes, I'm going to give 25 seconds of steam, okay? The fan delay is going to be for three minutes, and then as I get, as I'm looking at the bread, probably five to six minutes left of the bake cycle, I'm going to open that vent. And again, the vent takes about 30 seconds to open, and then we just put it in and cook it and the results will come out. You'll see them shortly. Okay, we ready to load? Okay, I'm going to open the door.

As you open the door, the rack always sets right in place. That's why it's always important to preheat. So let's just fire this up. Sarah, would you hand 'em to me as we put 'em in? On the inside here, we have adjustable racks so we can make adjustments for the size of different types of loaves of bread that you might want to do. Pretty much here, the setting that we have is perfect for French bread, bagels, and most of those types of food items. Here we go. It's all loaded in. Just close the door. Okay, we hit start, and now what's happening is the fan delay is coming into place. Then that slows the fan down. Steam injection is coming in to do work.

It's magic with the bread, and we're pretty much done. Okay? It comes right around to stop right there. Boy, they look pretty good. This thing just baked so evenly. Look at that. What do you think about the ears there? Huh? There? It's good color. Extremely even on every shelf. Now, what do you call those little bubbles? What did you call those bubbles? Fish eyes, little fish eyes. Look at that. Beautiful, perfect, one pound French bread. Here we go.

Now while we got it, you know what? He's got the sheet cake. Gary, why don't you roll over the sheet cake and we'll just load that up here. Let me preheat it and we'll run that as a sample too. We're going to cook these sheet cakes at 325 degrees, so just turn it down to 325. Very good. There we go. Give it 20 minutes there, and I don't need steam. I don't need fan delay. The cool thing is as I get towards the end of the bake and if it needs to be evened out, I can open up the vent and enhance the browning. So it'll come right around. This looks really, really well. Okay. They are beautifully cooked. Can you see that? Okay, that's the bottom one.

Now, our digital and programming version will actually just be almost menu-driven. You'll just be able to turn the dial to cake and hit start, and all the parameters will be set up for you. That's the XR8. It can't get any easier, easy to operate, easy to use, and incredibly high-quality results. Have a great day.

Blodgett XR8 Rotating Rack Oven Overview Video