Baking Time/Temp Differences in Commercial Oven vs Dutch Oven at Home
Hi TFL,
Long time lurker here - have had great success baking artisan loaves for myself and for friends and family, and this site really helped me get started. I have been baking with a cast Iron dutch oven at home, and the result is excellent.
I've been at it for about a year and a half, and I am in the process of renting some commercial kitchen space so I can produce a larger volume of loaves to sell at a farmer's market.
Please help me understand how I should be changing my baking times/temperatures to account for the different oven I will be using.
Is it any different? My understanding was that the dutch oven was meant to simulate commercial oven conditions at home. For artisan breads, I typically bake at 475 degrees F for 30 minutes covered and then ~15 mins uncovered as per FWSY.
I did search, but if there is already a topic for this, please link me to it, and pardon the double-thread.
Please help me out!
Thank you,
- G
However every oven is different - you're going to have to do a test bake to see how the big oven works and compare it to your home one.
For me - an oven is just a box with heat - I have a standard UK domestic fan oven - bread goes in at 250°C and I reduce it to 210°C after 12-15 minutes (No 'DO', Cloche, etc just dough in, splash or water on the bottom). I have a commercial fan oven with 3 steel plates I had made for it - same process as the smaller fan oven, but it has a water injector button (crude, but effective). I also have a Rofco B40 - closest thing to a commercial deck oven - that's set at a fixed temperature (220°C top, 210°C bottom) because after a week of playing with it, that's the settings that seem to make the bread I want.
My bread bake time is closer to 35 minutes than 45 though.
-Gordon
Thanks for the response Gordon - I'll definitely do a test bake first, and I acknowledge that every oven is different. I'm still scoping out different commercial kitchens, and I may not be using the same oven/kitchen every time.
It seems that I may be able to reduce the baking time a bit in a commercial oven.
Thank you,
- G
My experience is that a large part is down to the thermal mass of the oven. This is why bread/desk ovens have stone or sometimes steel plates in them - and for my Rofco, although it only has a 3Kw heater, it can take the shock of 12 large loaves at once - imagine telling a 3Kw kettle to boil 12 liters of water - that's effectively what it's doing. My little oven dips from 250°C down to 170°C when I load it up with 6 large loaves - it only has a 2.2Kw heater. The Lincat with it's 2 x 1.5Kw heaters dips too, but the 10mm thick steel plates mitigate this.
So check the oven - if it's a big fan or fan assist, then it might still take as long.
Good luck! I sometimes do the small market thing and it can be a lot of fun. Hard work though.
-Gordon
I recently made a similar shift, and there really isn't a way to address this ahead of time...first you need to decide on an oven, which is a really big one...then you need to figure out how to work with the oven you get, and there will be plenty of idiosyncrasies that you just need to work through.
That said, I do pretty much what I did before (except I vent much later than when I took the lid off of my dutch oven).
Thanks for the comments, I think at this point the question is answered.
There is not a simple formula, and it is down to the individual oven, but ultimately the times/temperatures will not be drastically different.
I'll be visiting several kitchens over the next week, and I'll look closely at the specs of the ovens therein, and after I decide on a place, I will certainly schedule a test bake run to figure it out
- G