Hotel bread, help set this up!
I wasn't sure where to post this, so mods, feel free to shuffle this wherever it might seem best. This is a strange request for information exchange so let me start with some background. I am operating a small hotel/B&B in Beijing... not commonly thought of as the land of bread breaking, but our clientele is 99% foreign and 100% into our western breakfasts. A decent chunk of this a la carte breakfast gets made up of country-style toast with home-made jams and locally made french cheeses (!!? - yes, awesome). However, the bread we are buying is less and less interesting to someone like me who gets to see it daily, or anyone reasonably into breads. I'm a western-trained chef -- but far from a baker, so I can tell there's a problem with it and it is fixable with hopefully not too much effort.
We've recently invested in a proper-sized (60x50cm) oven that just just fits in our tiny kitchen and haven't looked back since, with cookies, cakes and quiches as often as possible. The next jump for us to take it replace the breads we are buying with something made right here! There are some limitations though, as I can't simply turn the place into a bakery with the staff I have and the hours which I'm trying to generally REDUCE. So the goal is to somehow supply ourselves with 2-3 loaves of bread per day, 7 days a week that are completely awesome in taste and texture, can be prepped once a week (maybe I freeze the dough-balls and take out to proof overnight?), and perhaps use something fun as a base, like a sourdough starter? Anyway, you all get the idea. If you think freezer storage for something like this works and I can therefore bake every single morning, great! If it's a better idea to spend a few hours in one block each week prepping and fully baking the weeks' breads, that's fine, though not as fun, and likely even more annoying to the kitchen.
As you can see this is a question of logistics, but also one about recipes, as I'm not a big baker and I need some form of recipe that gives the best bang for the buck in terms of ease of recipe and taste -- something I can train others to do. The more I read through this forum the more I want to spend a month playing around and baking just for myself but I can also see how much of it goes way over my head. I'm an impatient cook that hates precision. China and Chinese food is perfect for me - until this question came up.
What do you all think? JS