/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>13299814

Bakery owner here. Baking professionally is a blast. My feelings towards actually owning the business are a lot more complicated. Lots of good things but also lots of stress.

>bread thread

Proud of y'all.

>>12528779

No problem!

>>12528716
>>12528732

But to his point, bake by mass. Baking by volume puts a very low ceiling on the level of consistency and advancement you can achieve.

>>12528732

That's a little much. 2.0 percent baker's percentage is the loose universal standard for salt, which would be 10g for 500g of flour. 14-17g may retard fermentation by too much.

Make sure it's as even as possible when shaping and work on your scoring a bit. The angle of the razor to the bread should be super shallow, and you don't have to go in very deep. Also, bake in a dutch oven if you have one, and get one if you don't.

Naniwa Chosera 800
Suehiro Rika 5k

That'll take care of 99% of your knife sharpening needs for about 100 bucks.

>>12502136

Shuns aren't bad but are generally overpriced for what is offered. They're a solid buy of you just want a decent knife but you can get a lot more for a little less if you're willing to do the research.

>>12486113

We do exclusively wholesale to restaurants and markets, which is great business wise because it means all of our bread is already bought as soon as we make it, but it also means 80 percent of our business is just one type of bread and the other 20 percent is two more, and I don't get the chance to play around or experiment. I could potentially open a second location for retail and hire someone to be the head baker of the wholesale operation, but that's a headache I can't deal with for at least two more years, plus my town is already lousy with really high quality bakeries, so I'm not sure the market is here.

If I sell in two years I think I could get about double what I payed for it, and that would be seed money to travel the world and expand my baking knowledge and then open up a place from scratch that isn't half a country away from my family.

>>12481726

Thanks, anon.

>>12480194

I value having something I can call my own. Also, I'm a year into ownership and just turned 25 so I'll forever be able to say I owned my own bakery basically as a kid still, and (knock on wood), things are going really well so far. Business is up about 40% since I took over.

It isn't my dream bakery, though, and I'll probably sell in the next 5 years, travel around for a while learning from other bakers, then start my own place from scratch closer to family.

>>12481250
>>12481255

We never pasteurized our milk at my dairy since it was all for me and the hundred people I lived with, so I'm not knocking it. I just want to be clear with people that raw milk comes with a not insignificant risk and that the overall quality of the milk will play a more central role in taste than pasteurization. Drink raw milk if you want, but source it responsibly from a dairy with good standards and we'll treated cows.

>>12480723
>>12480844
>>12480903

I'm not saying there's actual chunks of shit in milk, but the fact of the matter is that no matter how clean and meticulous you are in you dairy, there is going to be *some* amount of contamination in the milk. Hell, the FDA won't count a bathroom sink as a handwashing sink because it's in the vicinity of a toilet. You think that even with a sterilized udder and equipment, there isn't any particulate matter of cow shit floating around in the air that is necessarily going to get into the milk? It's like the equivalent of having your toothbrush in your bathroom. There are poop particles on it, and that's a fact.

Again, I wouldn't classify drinking raw milk as a particularly risky thing to do, but I don't think that raw vs pasteurized is nearly as important as quality overall when it comes to a flavor profile for drinking milk.

Former dairy Farmer here.

Raw vs pasteurized is less important to taste than quality overall. Find a local dairy farm that treats their cows well and you'll get some great milk, pasteurized and all.

I wouldn't classify drinking raw milk as super risky, but there is cow shit in all milk, and if your body isn't used to handling the resulting microbes, you might be in for an unpleasant bathroom experience every few months.

>>12479863

A little over 6 years, we think. He's a shelter dog so we're not 100% sure.

>>12479853

My breakfast.

My boy.

Picked up the CCK recently even though it's overpriced at this point. Sharpening the straight edge is actually sort of difficult coming from standard knives.

>>12476207

Those look dope as hell. Hard to tell without reference but are they little guys? If so, I like that.

>>12475488

>70 hour work weeks minimum
>on call 24/7 in case anything ever goes wrong
>existential stress of being responsible for several hundreds of thousands of dollars in value and the well being of other people

The baking has close to no downsides apart from your wrists and back constantly being fucked and breathing in flour all day, but business ownership adds a whole extra layer of fun on top.

>>12471321
>>12471652

German 100% ryes get fucking wild. Vollkornbrot has to rest for two days out of the oven to all come together properly.

I should be doing my invoicing right now but lately I've been putting it off until I get home from the bakery in the morning, then doing them real quick and running them back in before the delivery drivers leave.

One of the hardest parts of running a business is probably forcing yourself to sit down and do the administrative things that need done. I can spend 16 hours straight in the bakery on a Friday night to get all the bread made and it doesn't phase me, but sitting down to do invoicing, or responding to emails, etc., can feel like an impossible task sometimes.

Not as often as I should, honestly. With the bakery, I can write off 50% of any meal at a place I sell bread to as a business expense. I haven't taken advantage of that recently.

>>12462022

Double check to see if it has steam injection. If not, with only a few loaves, it's going to be even harder than a home oven to get steamed up properly.

Baguettes - be gentle and work faster than you think you should. Don't be afraid to roll out individual sections more or less for an even with.

Ciabatta - you don't really shape ciabatta, just cut it to shape after its bulk ferment, but be incredibly gentle. Handle it like it'll die at the slightest nudge.