Eating Well. Anyone Else Bake Bread?

[EscapedMentalPatientParticipant 1489]

Thanks for bringing the bread thread back @felix! & Keymaster  🙂  I’m glad you will give the bread a shot, Felix.

@fitzbones

Not late to the thread at all brother, and I didn’t consider it waffling on.  Thank you for posting your knowledge.  It always fascinates me to read such a thing.  It’s cool to read of such things from a professional, and I really enjoyed reading your post.  Glad you generally approve of the recipe, it’s been working pretty good to date, although it’s certainly not a complex, or fancy bread or such.

I was always curious Fitz….at a bakery.  It’s a fairly general question, and I know bakeries are of course different sizes and operations.  Generally speaking, how much/many loaves of bread would you make in one batch?  You had mentioned throwing 2kg of salt into 50kg of dough.  wow.  So out of a batch that size, how many standard loaves would a guy get, approximately?  On a typical shift, how many loaves of bread do you think you’d have churned out?  A bakery has to be a pretty tiring place to work, I’d think.

Cool stuff man.

[FitzBonesParticipant 304]

I was always curious Fitz….at a bakery.  It’s a fairly general question, and I know bakeries are of course different sizes and operations.  Generally speaking, how much/many loaves of bread would you make in one batch?  You had mentioned throwing 2kg of salt into 50kg of dough.  wow.  So out of a batch that size, how many standard loaves would a guy get, approximately?  On a typical shift, how many loaves of bread do you think you’d have churned out?  A bakery has to be a pretty tiring place to work, I’d think.

Bakeries can be truly exhausting, especially in summer working in front of 8 ovens at 200*C for 8-ish hours. Hydrate brother, f~~~ing hydrate. Especially since in most if not all bakeries, the day is done when the bread is and bakers dont take breaks for lunch or smoko.

Hmm. 50kg dough is 50kg of white flour, 30L of water plus another 3-ish kg of other ingredients. Out of that you’d get about 100 loaves if that was ALL you were making. Our production for a day might help and I’m only referring to the bakery where I was head baker with an apprentice on so a 2-man night.
50kg white: 48 blocks(loaves); 120 round rolls, 90 knot rolls, 60 long rolls, 60 dinner rolls, 6 half-loaves plus some ‘sweet’ breads like apple glens etc.
18(or 16, its been a couple years)kg wholemeal: 27 blocks, 60 round rolls, 3 half-loaves
8kg m-grain: 12 blocks, 30 round rolls
That was our ‘primary’ production or our big doughs. We also did 3kg sourdough, 1.5kg turkish loaves, 3kg rye, 5kg ciabbatta, 7kg pane de casa, 5kg apricot, 10kg fruit though our fruit was interesting as we would mix the ‘crystal’ dough, get what we needed from that very sweet dough before adding our fruit to make it a proper fruit dough. There were other doughs in there as well but I honestly cannot recall them at the moment.

Every bakery is going to be different, in recipe, practice and order. Some do their white doughs last, some first. Also production depends on what that bakery ‘specializes’ in depending on location. The bakery I mentioned was in Ivanhoe in Melbourne but out in the rural area where I am, the bread production is much lower as bread doesnt sell as well and so primary income is pies, pasties and sausage rolls. Cakes are also a massive income earner but not where I specialized in as I found bread to be far more interesting, delving into the science underneath it all.

I spent a NYE/Christmas working in Sorrento, a coastal yuppie town in the Mornington Peninsula, where it gets crazy busy over that period. There were 5 of us on shift every night, working 12 hour nights pumping out thousands of rolls and hundreds of loaves each night and for that year I believe we broke sales records for Brumby’s Bakeries(franchise) for Victoria, if not Australia. 55 thousand dollars of bread in a week.

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run,"

[ThermonuclearAutomaticWeaponParticipant 80]

I myself eat a s~~~load of bread. I am also a fast food eater, and fast food has tons of bread in it.

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