The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Ovens for start-up bakery

dave35's picture
dave35

Ovens for start-up bakery

Experienced home bakers looking to commercialize a bit. Focus will be mostly hearth breads and some pan breads and buns and such. Production will be fairly small to start. Trying to keep capital investment lower at this point. Previous commercial wood-fired hearth baking experience, but no space for a WFO this time.

Anyway, we need some ovens.

Options:

-Stackable pizza deck ovens with added stone deck liners -- hard to find built-in steam injection, easy enough to improvise non-pressurized steaming or hand-spritzing. These are cheap used. Electric is easier to find than gas, but both are possibilities. Concerned about too-small deck heights for tall hearth loaves, especially for electric elements.

-Tall convection ovens with heavy stones on each level (Fibrament or similar) -- can get one or two of these very cheap used. Steam with lava rock pans or similar -- not ideal. Would use convection-off mode for steam phase.

-$$ lightly used proper taller-decked steam-injected deck ovens intended for bread. REVENT 649 (4 pans/~24-32 loaves) or similar seems to be common on the used market.

Thoughts? Ideas? Concerns?

drogon's picture
drogon

How big/how many loaves at a time?

I have a regular electric domestic fan oven and 2 small commercial ovens - one a Lincat EC08 - it's a 3.1Kw electric fan oven - 2 fans the type with the heating element round the fans. It has 3 x GN1/1 shelves which I've swapped the grids out for 10mm thick steel plates. It has water injection - crude but effective. Bakes 12 small loaves of 6 large ones at a time. Height between "decks" is limited though - no tins unless I remove a plate - I sometimes drop the top plate down to the middle then put tins there with space for free-form on the bottom plate.

The other is a Rofco B40 - 3 "decks" of about 470mm square - it's a weird size but designed to fit in a standard UK/European kitchen unit space of 600mm. No steam injection, but a hand-held sprayer works well. This is also 3.1Kw. Bakes 12 large loaves at a time or up to 18 smaller ones.

The limitation for me is power - it would cost me a lot of money to run another 45 amp circuit to the bakehouse and an eye watering amount to run in 3 phase )-:

I'm not sure about pizza ovens - height may be an issue as well as temperature control of both the top and bottom of each deck.

Hope it works out for you!

-Gordon

rayva's picture
rayva

Hello,

I have been baking sourdough at home for about 6 months, nothing that I want to share pictures of yet, but it's getting better even baking in a very old (circa '60's small electric oven), and while drooling over some of the recipes and threads on this site learned (thank you Drogon) about the Rofco ovens and dream't of owning one some day.

Living in Australia, the cost of a Rofco B40 oven is about AUD$5,000 to which one would have to add shipping which would be quiet significant considering the oven weights about 80kg! On my budget this would be way to expensive to contemplate.

Providence (or whatever you may call it) has lent a helping hand and I found a brand new Rofco B40 oven at auction on eBay in Australia with a 'buy it now' price of AUD$900. The oven unfortunately doesn't have the baking stones (someone obviously decided they would be great for pizza and stole them). Anyway, as it was an auction I called them to discuss and they advised it would cost $20 to pack it ready for shipping and to make an offer.

So I offered AUD$780 which by the next morning was accepted by the seller!! Who added $20 or the packing so I had to pay AUD$800.

Now, you're just going to laugh! I had a 15% discount voucher from eBay that expired the day the offer was accepted, so using the voucher and paying with PayPal I only paid AUD$700 in total for the oven.

All of this happened in the last week so I don't have it in my possession yet (difficulties with the first courier, trying a different courier this week).

I'll write a post when it arrives and hopefully have time to post the journey as I get it up and running.

Cheers

Leah's picture
Leah

Hi Rayva,

Did you start your micro bakery?? I am also in Brisbane and love the sound of your Rofco bargain! Are you still baking in it?

Cheers,

Leah.