/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>11890197

What temperature are you letting it ferment at overnight? Are you folding it all during the fermentation process?

>>11886542

Looks bretty gud. Try to get your shaping down a little better and try to make the scoring marks at a really severe angle so they can form a little bit of an ear. Pic should demonstrate what plane I mean.

>>11195633

Did you put it in the oven straight out of the refrigerator?

>>11195658

As the other anon said, steam can help. If you're going to spritz, be careful, as you can potentially shatter the glass front of your oven. Pans of water tend to not produce the volume of speed in the time needed to make much of a difference. Your best bet to recreate steam injection at home is a dutch oven.

Also, try baking at a lower temperature for longer. What can happen, especially with wetter doughs, is a crust that initially comes out crisp will take on moisture from what's left in the crumb. Baking longer (and consequently, having to bake at a lower temperature) can give the moisture in the bread more time to evaporate out and not make the crust go soggy later on.

>>10952650

It would mostly be about not putting out too much info. Faces are a thing, and I've worked in enough food production facilities to know that no matter how well you're doing, you're breaking some FDA rule or regulation, so it's better to be careful.

>>10952620

I have, actually. Would have to work out the logistics of it but maybe I'll give it a shot eventually.

>>10945438

That looks good as hell. I might have to start doing some more at home baking in a few months when I have any time at all. I don't get to explore recipes outside of the two, soon to be three things we make at the bakery very often.

>>10952493

Didn't get the chance to take any yet but I probably will this week.

Just finished recipe development on a ciabattini roll for the bakery, y'all. Sent out samples and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. I might have to start the production day for our sourdough loaf an hour earlier to make enough time for all the ciabatinni before the bread gets delivered.

It's a 4.5 oz (baked) mini ciabatta loaf about 4.5 x 3 in. Based it off of the same starter we use for the sourdough and just played around with hydrations, dough temps, mixing times, and steam injection/baking times for the last few weeks and it's finally ready. Looks like I might not run this bakery into the ground, so that's tight.

>>10891133

I'm still young and haven't kicked the old habit of visiting here, yet.

>>10891145

Nope and nope.

>>10891182

Hmm. You could stucco over it.

>>10891231

We don't do pastries. Just bread. The two in the OP are what we're mostly doing now. Currently working on a ciabattini roll too, though.

>>10891110

Just some red paint, and nah. I was kind of surprised that the Dep of Ag wasn't annoyed by all the exposed brick, though. It seems like, because they classify bakeries as low risk, as long as you're not really, really fucking things up, they don't knock you for anything.

>>10889295

That's really the one thing I was concerned about with all of this, but my accountant hooked me up with a local full service payroll company. They're more expensive than just doing it thru QB, but all I ever have to do is tell them how many hours everyone worked and they take care of everything else.

>>10889425

I want a dough divider so bad.

>>10889497

Not that I've noticed. I quite smoking about a month ago, actually, so my respiratory system is better than it's been in years.

>>10891003

I don't really know how similar baking at Panera is to baking at...well...actual bakeries, but it's probably more useful to have on your resume than something that's completely unrelated to baking.

>>10887638

I'm only a week into it so I can't say for sure. But it's alright so far. This first month is going to continue to be crazy, but once all of my vendor/customer accounts are completely set up and the initial craze is over, the business end of things shouldn't take up too much time.

>>10887653

>What is the percentage of stuff that you don't sell at the end of the day?

Not very high. Doing exclusively wholesale, most of our customers have standing orders and will call in to adjust based on what they need. The only weird account is with one of the big grocery stores, and they have terms that if they don't sell it they send it back and don't pay for it. I think they end up sending back maybe 10% of their loaves on a slow week, and that retailer is maybe 15% of the business by order volume.

>How much does that eat into your profits?

Again, not much. It's worth it just to get so much bread out consistently.

>>10887669

Most whole loaves can be thrown in an oven/toaster oven at ~250 degrees for a few minutes and they'll come back to life. Keeping it wrapped in plastic wrap will also help it bounce back quickly.

>>10887674

Thanks anon.

>>10887598

I lived with a bunch of hippies out in the woods for three years and learned to bake there. When I moved to the city I just baked a bunch of bread at home and brought it around to local bakeries as my resume.

>>10887581

I understand that.

>>10887576

For sure. It's way too easy for even upscale restaurants to save on costs by buying baked goods through giant retailers. That's part of my sales pitch, though. "Y'all are buying meats and veggies from local producers for all your shit. Don't ruin the final product by slapping it all on 2 dollar white bread from Sysco."

>>10887544

Yup. I put in a small down payment and am financing the rest thru the previous owner over three years.

>>10887519

It might be doable even in a small market. If you're willing to do all or most of the work in a bakery you can keep overhead really low, as flour costs essentially nothing. We get 50lb bags for 15 bucks each.

>>10887513

>your picture seems pretty hipster

It's literally just a picture of bread.

>Also probably stupid expensive

Nah. We have really good local name recognition so we can upsell a bit, but we wholesale those giant white loaves for 5.50 each, and restaurants can get about 12 full sized sandwiches out of each loaf.

>Im betting you target the no gluten audience too?

Nah. For one, I haven't really done much GF baking, and I'm not particularly interested in it. Secondly, to actually call anything we make GF we would have to do it in a different facility. I have good insurance but I'm not trying to get sued by someone with Celiac's over cross contamination.

As a tip for anyone going into business, make sure you have plenty (PLENTY) of time to get all of the bureaucratic stuff in order before your opening date. Cities will take their damn sweet time to get you the licenses/paperwork that you need to actually operate, and State agencies for taxes are even worse. Things kind of came down to the wire for me because lawyers/accountants are slow as shit and I basically had to do the entire set up of the business in the last two weeks before signing the purchase agreement. I would recommend avoiding that if at all possible.

>>10887478

200k ish in the city proper, though we deliver to a neighboring town as well.

>>10887481

I've been on and off 4chan for the last decade so I have an innate and unreasonable bias against reddit. Not much conversation yet, as I just took over a week ago and it's not a customer facing business. I'll probably go to the local newspaper for a write up in the next few weeks.

>>10887395

We don't have any refrigeration at the bakery so we can't do pastries, really. I also have basically no experience with anything other than bread.

>>10887135

I started as a delivery driver/baker's assistant and graduated to head baker about a year ago. The previous owners had family stuff going on in another state that disallowed them from investing as much time as they wanted in the business, and they wanted to own a bakery to be in the bakery, not just to do the bookkeeping for a bakery. They offered it to me at a great price and I took it.

>>10887139

I unironically created a reddit account to keep tabs on folks around town talking about the bakery and I kind of hate myself for it.

>>10887146

We're wholesale so the end retailer deals with all that.

>>10887128

>Got a favorite recipe?

I'm currently developing a ciabattini roll based around the starter for our main sourdough loaf, and it's coming out really well, so that's been a fun recipe to tinker with. Our main sourdough loaf recipe is also pretty interesting. It uses a poolish, a hard starter, and instant yeast.

>Hardest thing you make?

Probably going to end up being the ciabattini. You can hardly even sneeze around the dough without it losing all its air. We used to do a vollkornbrut about a year ago which is also a pretty challenging dough.

>Easiest thing you make?
Is fresh bread a necessity f

Our main sourdough loaf. We make so much of it and I've been doing it so long that one other baker and I can pump out ~400 loaves in the course of a 7 hour shift.

>Is fresh bread a necessity for you or are you cool with older preservative stuff

Since we bake daily we don't bother getting flour with any preservatives. The bread tends to go hard before it goes moldy, anyway.