I always tried to steep at around 155F. This was just the temperature that I found in many recipes.
The hot break won't occur until you've added malt and/or grains. My process for brewing an extract was.
Bring water up to 155F and added the grains to be steeped. Let it steep for the required amount of time. It's just like making tea.
Remove the grains, letting as much of the liquid drip out of the grain bag as possible. I never rinsed the bag and never squeezed it.
Bring it up to a boil, turn off the heat and add the amount of extract that you want to add, stirring it until it is all dissolved to prevent scorching on the bottom.
Bring it back up to a boil and add your 60 minute hop addition.
Add any other hop additions at the appropriate time.
At 15 minutes left in the boil, turn off the heat, add the remainder of your extract and stir until dissolved to prevent scorching.
Turn the heat back on and bring back up to a boil. Once it has started to boil, start your boil timer again and add other ingredients (yeast nutrient, whirfloc, hops, etc) at their appropriate times.
If you have an immersion chiller, treat it like an ingredient and put it into your boil pot with 15 minutes left in the boil to sterilize it. I always put my chiller in right after I added my late addition extracts, just before putting the heat back to it. Now that I'm all grain, I put it in when I put in my Irish Moss or whirfloc. Be careful that the plastic tubing doesn't hang down and touch your pot (it will melt...ask me how I know!)
Finish your boil.
Take a gravity reading of the hot wort (don't forget to account for the higher tempterature) and make any adjustments for gravity by adding more extract. This is difficult to do when doing a partial boil though and probably not as important as it is with all grain brewing.
Hook up your wort chiller to your cold water line and start running cold water through it, letting it go down the drain, if in the kitchen or down the street if you are outside. Stir gently while the wort is hot. I start stirring more vigorously when the wort gets down to 100F. If you stir to vigorously when the wort is hot, you'll introduce oxygen and create hot side aeration which isn't a good thing.
Oxygen in hot wort is bad. Oxygen in cooled wort is good (actually it's necessary for the yeast to multiply enough to create a good fermentation).
Once it's down to pitching temperature, rack the wort or pour it into your fermentor. Then pour the oxygen to it. I use an aquarium pump and diffusion stone for this. Others use pure oxygen. Some just splash the wort back and forth from one sanitized bucket to another sanitized bucket. Others swirl and rock their fementor. Best is pure oxygen for a short period of time (1 minute or less). Second best is an aquarium pump. I run mine for about 20 minutes. Third best is pouring back and forth from bucket to bucket. Least best is swirling and rocking the fermentor.
Pitch your yeast on top of the foam of the oxygenated wort. No stirring or blending of the yeast into the wort is necessary.
Attach an airlock and enjoy the show.
Note**--If you use a carboy with very little headspace, you might have the krausen coming out of your airlock. If you think this might happen, you can put a blow off hose (large plastic tubing) into the hole in place of the airlock. Run the other end into a bowl of water or properly mixed water and starsan (make sure the free end is under about 2 inches of liquid). As the krausen rises it will come up out of the carboy into the tubing and flow into your water or starsan mixture. This will work like an airlock, but allow the krausen to escape without creating a mess. I went to 8 gallon bucket fermentors for primary so that I don't have to worry about a blow off tube. I hated losing up to a half gallon of beer through my blow off tube!