Basic Bakery Operation
Everybody loves bread. It is simple and easy to eat even while you are walking on the street or on the way to your office. Loves eating it does not mean that you know how to make it. We usually get our bread and pastry at bakery or supermarket and it is already baked and ready to eat. But do you know how the bakers made it and what is the basic bakery operation took place?
Bakery operation can be divided into four main section. This section including mixing, shaping, dressing and baking. There are certain tools and machinery needed although there are sometimes it just need experience and skill obtained by long years in this fields. Different with other type of food and beverage business, bakery business need more than one staff that work in production kitchen to be more efficient.
Mixing is the most important section in bakery operation. This section will determine how long your production will run each day including washing and cleaning process. The one who is responsible in mixing dough for bread, topping and cake mixed need to be accurate, consistent, discipline with high level of concentration to avoid mistake and waste. Not to mention using a lot of energy. Just imagine if someone who work with 20kg to 25kg of sweet dough each session, need to transfer the dough from the mixer to the kneed table to cut and weighed before dividing it to smaller pieces. These tiring process will easily make people forget and made a mistake on following the right recipe.
Transforming a dough into an interesting bread design will require skill and experience. The knowledge in culinary art will help greatly in this artistic process. Imagine a baker with a skillful hand can make more than 30 bread design each day and he need to make it all in a hurry to avoid the earlier made dough get proofed. However, for much easier bread design that does not require additional tools except for roller, a staff with good training can make sure it done. For beginner or rookie baker, task like shaping tart dough or preparing the mold for baking is most likely the best choice.
Dressing a proofed bread does not need much skill or effort. What they need is good memories and faster hand. The one who up for this task need to memorize each shape and names of the bread that are ready to dress with specific ingredients, topping and quantity. For samples, if production order require Tuna bread, so he need to make sure what shape or bread design that use with tuna flakes. This goes for every type of bread that need to be baked. If daily production require more than 30 different bread design and shape, there is nothing more than good memory needed.
The last and finishing section is nothing more than baking. The one who is responsible for this task usually known as oven man. Good knowledge and high concentration needed while handling an oven to ovoid over baked or much worst disaster. Every type of bread has a different setting of temperature and time needed to get the best result. Oven man need to concentrate on his job because handling this dangerous machinery can be much trickier when it involves electric or gas. Some small mistakes can lead to profit loss and not to mention life at stakes.
