One Baker Production Capabilities and Oven Advice
So I'm trying to spool back up into a small production bakery supplying farmers markets and local door-to-door. Thanks to Texas "Cottage Food" laws, I'm going to be putting this oven either inside or just outside my 600 square foot space behind my house that I'm going to use as my bakery.
Does anyone have any real experience on the upper limits of 1.5 # naturally leavened loaf production capacity for one person? I'm targeting 70+ loaves per load and then doing 3 loads, but the more per load the merrier. That's about 100 pounds of dough...is it manageable to mix that by hand?
Does anyone have any suggestions on managing larger production capacity loads? I'm thinking of trying to acquire and old Dutchess Dough Divider and possibly a sheeter/roller for other breads, bagels and pretzels. Also thinking a retarding cabinet might be necessary.
What about oven suggestions? Gas deck/hearth preferred, open to small carousel and gas/WFO, but mobility of the oven eventually is somewhat of a concern. In my dreams, I have a gas/wood fired commercial capacity oven on a trailer, but a multi deck oven seems to make the most sense.
Thanks in advance.
~christopher
Get a spiral mixer. Get 2.
But what can you knead by hand... Well, I can knead a single load of 3Kg of dough by hand, but that's my limit.... However I can hand-knead more by using a sort of no-knead approach.
So mix up one bowl of flour/water/yeast/salt. (2Kg flour + water, etc) Tip it out onto the bench and mix a little more by pushing/folding back. Cover with bowl. Move onto 2nd bowl, do the same, then the third. If you're 6 minutes per bowl, then it's now T+18 minutes. Take a break, or mix up a 4th bowl so you're now 25 minutes since the first one.
Go back to the first load on the bench - stretch & fold a few times. Re-cover. Move onto 2nd load, repeat for 3rd and 4th. have a break, go back to first.... I give each load 3 sets of stretch & folds, then into bowls/tubs and left to ferment.
So doing that you can have 4 loads of 3Kg (~6lbs) of dough fermenting. say 25lbs, but that's taken you 45 minutes to do - maybe more as you need to weight out the ingredients, etc.
You can keep going - providing you have the stamina and strength.
The tricky part is scheduling the proofing. Say you now have 4 lots of dough, you need to scale/pre-shape/rest/shape/proof ... Unless you're really slick that might take half an hour... repeat if more loads then into the oven once proofed, but you now have batches at different proofing times... However sourdough is a little more forgiving here.
I have the mixers (an A200 and a cheapish 18Kg spiral) but I'm only making a fraction of what you're after - 30-40 loaves a day, no bagles, etc. but occasionally a batch of buns, croissants, etc. If you are going to do croissants regularly then get a sheeter and a dough divider will certainly speed up the scaling part of it all too.
Personally, I think at the capacity you're after, you'll burn yourself out fairly quickly - unless this is a once weekly thing... I bake bread 5 days a week. I reckon I could double capacity but that would really be stretching it.
-Gordon
Thanks for the advice, Gordon. You're idea of doubling up on the A200 mixer would give me 40 pounds of dough each batch, and that might be a good way to space things. That'd give me 60 loaves to manage which I think gets close enough to the target. Basically 3 rounds of mixing hits the daily mark. I can easily see hitting capacity demand though, so I'm wondering about oven possibilities and reducing load while increasing throughput. Larger mixer, larger oven...I think with the right equipment combination, you or I could hit 100 loaves a load.
Yeh we have 2 people, and we do 65 loaves on market day, baking is the easy bit, mix day is busy and we do bathes of 4 or so loaves by hand but all else goes in the mixer, wed love to have 2 or at least 2 mixer bowls. We hope to do more soon, just getting all certified.
the limiting factor for me is mainly oven space - and what I actually want to do. I work from home, and have a small utility room converted - Over the 3 electric ovens I have, I have the capacity to bake 20 large loaves at a time, or more smaller ones - so this morning I baked 3 rye loaves fairly quickly in the small oven while the others were heating up, then 6 more loaves in the small oven, 12 small loaves in the middle oven and 12 large loaves in the bigger oven... so 33 loaves. I could do 2 runs (or more) through the ovens and reach 100 loaves, but it's almost an hour per run - so wanting to get the bread out the door by 9am, I'd have to start loading the ovens at 6am which would mean getting up at 3:30-4am to start the scale/shape/prove process on the overnight fermented dough...
And at the moment, I like to think of it as "low impact" ... It's not my main source of income - yet... If it were to get to that stage, I'd be looking at a small industrial unit locally with 3-phase electricity so I could run a big deck oven.
-Gordon
I think it would be a lot of work to mix that much dough by hand. Makes me think of this video. The baker is mixing all her dough by hand in a trough: https://vimeo.com/34325967
That's exactly what I thought of, too. The initial dough being so exceptionally wet probably helps with mixing. I don't understand any French, but I assume she also uses an autolyse and late/long ferment to allow time to partially hydrate the flour and develop the gluten.
It does look like she works with high hydration dough. She is mixing flour and water together first. I don't know if she lets it autolyse before she adds the starter. She adds more flour after that.
In contrast, I ran across this video of a woman working with Italian Sicilian bread. It looks like a lower hydration dough. Her kneading technique is interesting as she is mainly folding and punching the dough. The shaping technique is interesting too. Looks like a top. But after the final rise, the loaves look rather flat for a lower hydration dough. I wonder if the flour has a lower gluten content.
i always wondered how a thin girl could get this done every day and then knew why she was thin:-)
Derek, (yozzause) the now retired baker / instructor from a Australia had the best ovens i have seen with all glass doors adn many shelves to bake on
Varda has a new oven too for her home bakery but I don't have a picture of it
So I'm reading "The Bread Builders" and it talks about Alan Scott producing up to 250 loaves. His method is to work with 100 kg of dough at a time, divide it down into 3 pieces, give each 15 minutes of kneading, and then go from there. He ends up with 60 loaves. I suppose if you ran 4 loads, you'd get 240 loaves. I could see doing it by hand with a helper for sure.
I'm not opposed to mechanical mixing...I like starting fires too. I could get into the rhythm of the whole WFO process as long as I had a gas backup option I think. The whole idea is to be able to scale the business up and ideally be able to though. I've been down this road with the farmers markets and wholesale and not being able to meet demand but not being able to afford bigger equipment. This time, I trying to start out with equipment that would get me a bit further than my old double deck 10 loaf Bakers Pride and 20 quart mixer.
The videos KathyF posted are inspiring. Thank you for those. My favorite recent baking video is of happy baker Vincent Talleu at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuKstAWof4
... bulk fermenting and proving. It might be be worth thinking through where are you going to bulk rise all the dough. And where you are going to prove batches at the same time. I see you're in Texas, so you can reckon on huge seasonal swings in ambient temperature and humidity which can wreak havoc on a production schedule. You definitely need the kind of temperature control a proving chamber delivers. Without it you'll be forced to bake both under- and over-proved loaves as your oven timings come under pressure.
And an awful lot of bannetons too! :)
All really good advice. I'd been in an un-airconditioned commercial baker space for years and we managed the temperatures by managing our schedule mostly. Same with the food trailer. It takes some juggling, but I used to make pretzels at Six Flags, outside in freezing weather.
For consistency sake this go round, I'm taking what you say very seriously. The cottage is temperature controlled and I'm planning on insulating the closet and converting it to a large retarding cabinet using a "Coolbot" (http://storeitcold.com/). I'm considering locating the oven outside the building (and I may not have a choice).
We currently use a double deck oven, electric in our house fits about 15 free form loaves per deck at a time. We autolyse and bulk in large plastic tubs, dough bulks in the fridge @ 17C. The fridge we have you can set to whatever temp you want so when we need it for retarding overnight we set it at 4C, the thermostat runs between 4 and 7 (3 degrees fluctuation) We do 8 varieties of bread and we have 80 bannetons. We do 100% sourdough for everything even croissants and brioche scrolls. We have a Hobart mixer from 1959 and we mix some by hand and we have an ingredient fridge :)
Check it out here... https://www.facebook.com/Levadura.organic.artisan.sourdough
Wow...amazing work. Your social media posts are beautiful and "Levadura" is a really cool name for your bakery. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Wow...amazing work. Your social media posts are beautiful and "Levadura" is a really cool name for your bakery. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Thanks so much :) ever a work in progress