Hey there, baking friends! I hope you're all doing well and feeling happy. I have some exciting news to share with you all. As a housewife who loves baking, I've been running a successful home bakery. But now, something great has happened, and I'm getting the chance to open a bakery in town!
So, I need your help and advice. I'm not an expert in the business stuff, but I know you guys have a lot of experience. I want to know what baking equipment I should get for my new bakery. You know, things that will help me bake more efficiently and make my goodies even better.
Also, I'm looking for some ideas on how to package my baked goods in a cool way. I want the packaging to catch people's eyes and be friendly to the environment at the same time.
My husband's feeling better now, so I can focus more on this bakery dream of mine. I want to make sure I'm fully prepared to handle more customers and make everyone happy with my treats.
You’re asking the wrong questions.
Equipment and packaging cannot be selected until you have a product line that is formulated AND production tested.
Home baking is done with recipes. A recipe is a list of pre-measured ingredients and mixing instructions. This approach cannot be used in commercial production.
Commercial baking is done with a formula. A formula is established percentages of specific ingredients, the percentages of which have been calculated against a fixed value. For example, in baked goods using wheat flour, the fixed value is the flour. In a pastry cream, the fixed value is whole milk.
If you don’t know baker’s percentages and Desired Dough Temperature (DDT) and how to use them, you cannot run a bakery. Both are required to bake successfully as these fundamental principles are the basis for scaling, quality control, and business management.
You cannot select equipment and tools if you do not have a developed AND tested product line. For instance, most bread requires a different type of oven (deck) from most pastries (convection).
A deck oven bakes by heating the oven floor, then transferring that heat from the floor directly to the product/pan that is placed on it.
A convection oven works by heating air and circulating it within the oven chamber by a fan. Hot air blowing around the baking pans/sheets will dry out products that require some moisture retention, like bread.
While a convection oven is good for cookies, cake, and tarts, its drying effect is not good for most breads
The fan on most convection ovens cannot be shut off since convection IS baking with hot air. The fan on a many convection ovens are strong enough to blow batter out of the tins/pans. So baking cupcakes and muffins are problematic. If these are in your product line, you need to research and test different convection ovens to ensure it can bake these products without damage.
Having adeveloped product line determines the equipment and tools required to run your business.
Learning baker’s percentages is just part of the process. The assumption in learning baker’s percentages is the baker also knows methods, techniques, and science of baking.
Home baking methods cannot be used for commercial baking. Cookbooks are revise for home use since the average cook doesn't have the baking knowledge and/or access to equipment, tools, and ingredients used in commercial production.
For example, home recipes call for creaming butter and sugar with “room temperature” butter. There’s no such thing as room temperature--every ingredient must be used at a specific temperature to ensure the correct finished dough/batter temperature. For example, a finished cookie dough and a cake batter must not exceed 68°F to ensure the plasticity of butter is maintained. If “room temperature” butter is used, the finished dough/batter will exceed DDT. Cookies will bake flat as pancakes and cake will not rise to it's potential.
Commercially produced dry butter sheets are used for laminated doughs in a commercial bakery. The average home cook doesn't know what dry is and doesn't have access to it.
So knowledge of fundamental baking science is a major part of production.
Enthusiasm is great, but not a replacement for fundamental commercial baking knowledge.
If you have never taken any professional baking classes, I strongly recommend you at least start educating yourself. You simply cannot use home baking methods for commercial production.
Examples of baking formula below. Baker’s percentages are required to scale production to demand. If ten 9” vanilla cakes are needed on Saturdays and only five on Wednesdays, or 36 chocolate chip cookies Tuesdays and 60 on Fridays and Saturdays, the only way to scale up and down AND the only way to maintain the same quality batch-to-batch is with baker’s percentages. Aside from production scaling and quality control, the only way to manage inventory, calculate sale price, track costs is by using baker’s percentages. You cannot know how much cake flour to purchase each month if you don’t know the amount of flour used per day of production. You cannot calculate the price per unit if you do not the actual grams of each ingredient per unit.
An example of dough using flour as the fixed value:
Flour 100%
Butter 70%
Sugars 105%
Brown sugar 60%
Granulated sugar 30%
Invert sugar 15%
Egg 30%
Vanilla extract 10%
Salt 1.5%
Leavening 1%
Chocolate 125%
Total baker’s percentages 442.5%
In a filling, like pastry cream, the fixed value may be the whole milk. The whole milk would be 100%, and the ratio of all other ingredients is calculated against the whole milk.
Whole milk 100%
Sugars 25%
Starch 7%
Yolks 20%
Butter 12%
Total baker’s percentages 164%
Baker’s percentages will keep the quality constant no matter the size of the batch. From these baker’s percentages, a baker can create any amount of product. If you do not know how to create five dozen 70 g cookies or one dozen 35 g cookies, or fifteen 750 g loaves of bread or five dozen 50 g rolls using baker’s percentages, then you need to learn. Ditto for understanding and applying DDT.
Books on commercial baking
Michel Suas
https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Bread-Pastry-Michel-Suas/dp/141801169X
Wayne Gisslen
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Professional+Baking,+8th+Edition-p-9781119744993
Paula Figoni
https://www.amazon.com/How-Baking-Works-Exploring-Fundamentals/dp/0470392673
