The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Recommendations on oven for beginning commercial home bakery

nmeijome's picture
nmeijome

Recommendations on oven for beginning commercial home bakery

Hi everyone, new to the community and to commercial bakeries as a whole. I am trying to price out items for a home bakery I am trying to get up and running. I plan to make a variety of items including milk bread rolls, sourdough loaves, pies, roasted pecans, pretzels, cinnamon rolls, etc. What would be the most versatile oven I could get so that I could make this large variety of products? I would be willing to use dutch ovens for the sourdough loaves since I am a small batch baker. Please let me know any recommendations you might have for ovens. 

BaniJP's picture
BaniJP

An oven that I've been keeping an eye on is the Anova Precision Oven. It's essentially a countertop home version of those convection ovens big bakeries and restaurants have. So you can dry bake, have a combination of steam and heat or just pure steam. Apparently it keeps the temperature really steady, which is obviously extremely important for pastries.

I think it's about the size of a normal oven, so you could bake probably about 2 semi-large loaves or 2-3 trays of cookies at once.

I don't own this, but Anova is known for high quality home cooking equipment. And I think 600-700$ is a fair price for a high quality oven.

(this is not an ad btw, I just heard about this and think it would fit your purpose really well)

Colin2's picture
Colin2

Anova

Interior (W,D,H):
16.9 x 12.4 x 10in /
429 x 315 x 254mm

Capacity: 1.2 cubic ft

Standard 30-inch U.S. ovens are generally between four and six cubic feet capacity. 

That said, not all the space in a standard oven is usable, and if the Anova heats more evenly it will make better use of its smaller capacity.  But it won't fit a half-sheet pan, which for me is a kind of minimal requirement for a home oven.

 

MichaelLily's picture
MichaelLily

Go with a standard commercial convection oven. They work really well for all kinds of product except for crusty bread. A lot of people just use dutch ovens to circumvent this problem. In fact, Chad Robertson faced this scenario of no deck oven and came up with the dutch oven idea (perhaps he was not the first, but who cares?). I have 2 southbend ovens (they are stackable) and a Rotoflex pizza oven for bread. The convection ovens have good capacity for pastries and a little more limited for bread, but they are fairly cheap and easy to come by.