Steve, one of my bakers (check out his blog "Latest Dish" in my blog list that I follow), was asking me the other day if when I started this bakery, almost 5 years ago if I thought that I'd be in the position that I'm now or the bakery in it's position that it's in now. I thought for a few minutes and answered. To be honest, I thought that I'd have better in-store sales. I guess that I'm not in the same culture where getting fresh bread everyday is as important as in Montreal or France. I'm not kidding; in the bakery in France that I worked at would sell 1500 baguettes on a Tuesday and 2500 plus on a Saturday. It was a small bakery too, smaller than the space we are in now. It was insane! We do have fairly good wholesale accounts so that somewhat makes it up.
Then he asked about our process. This is where the real progress has been. Starting from day one I used the traditional French methods because that's all I knew. Being the engineer that was trained to be, I tested my process and my doughs to see how efficient I could be and still end up with the same and in most cases even better end product. We are now in the process of our next phase of product development. From the beginning, our sourdoughs were always formed ahead of time and baked that day, up to 3 days out. But, our yeasted doughs (baguettes, cheese breads, ciabatta, etc.) were always made that morning. That means that we have to get to work at either Midnight or 1 a.m. That's early. Too early. So over the past few months we have made considerable effort to find a way to use the same idea with the sourdoughs for our yeasted doughs. The problem with our yeasted dough is that if they spent too much time, 3+ hours, in our walk-in cooler they would collapse and after baking they'd be junk. What we've developed is a system where we use our stress-free Rondo dough machine (check our my Rondo posts) to process dough which then goes directly into our freezer. Our dough has been formulated to handle this process with as little stress as possible. Then the day before we take our frozen formed dough and put it into our our retarder/proofer (a machine that allows you to program temperatures and humidity at specific times) and bam, the dough is ready to bake by the time that we need it to be baked. An added benefit to this process is that the dough goes through a slow fermentation process that adds an extra dimension to our breads. We noticed that our baguettes that go through this process have an extra buttery tastes that lingers much longer in the mouth than our regular baguettes do. There are other differences, the crust and interiour crumb for example. I wouldn't say that it's better or worse, just differnt. The final word is that we are very happy with the baguette and we are very excited to get an extra two hours of sleep.
Below are some photos from our tests on the freezer baguette.
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| Left to Right: Straight from walk-in, 30 mins out of walk-in, 2.5 hrs out of walk-in |
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| 4 hrs out of walk-in, a little over-proofed |
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| Tray full of test freezer baguettes |
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| Beautiful crumb structure of our freezer baguette |
I can't wait for six months from now when this is second nature. also, can't believe the oven spring on these babies.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this post!
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I visited your Countryside Plaza location for the first time on Sunday with my mom (after a Yelp search for cool local bakeries). I was preparing an Italian meal later that day, so picked up a fresh baguette from Le Quartier. Fortunately my husband has turned me onto baguettes - fresh baguettes! I would always rather purchase from a local bakery than a grocery store's bakery, even though I may pay an extra $1 or so, just to support local business. I did like your baguette - the center is very soft and chewy and it was almost like a ciabatta baguette. My parents are pretty old school and buy regular sliced bread to have with dinner, but I'm hoping to somehow influence their bread preferences... I'm visiting from Los Angeles through the holidays so we'll see if this happens!!