big days

Thursdays and Fridays are busy days when we have to make 1,100 to 1,200 loaves of bread. The additional is from the extra routes, supplying farmer's markets and more people buy bread for the weekend.

Arms get very tired from the rounding and shaping. It's worse for the bakers because they have to load that many into the oven and lift them that same many out when they are done. The worst are the ones that sit in tins because the tins are really heavy.

Bread tins.
Each strap holds 16 loaves which when full holds at least 8kg of dough on top of the weight of it.

Bread on cooling rack as soon as they come out of the oven. 

Half of the farmhouses that have just come out of one of the 4 oven decks.

It's busy not just from making the additional loaves but also making sure the bread gets cleared away from the cooling racks fast enough for the next batch that comes out of the oven. Trying to find room to cool that many loaves in a small bakery is not easy. There is a lot of stacking and re-stacking of bread, gradually moving them onto plastic crates when they have cooled enough. Otherwise, all that hard work to making sure they proof, rise and bake well will be ruined.

All the cooling space we have.

Recipes and filling them in.

Numbers on the left indicate how many loaves we need to make.

This is the most number of baguettes we made in a single day,
which meant that I got to cut 52 baguettes just before they were loaded into the oven.

 
It's a double whammy on a hot day (a 20C day is too hot) because that is when we're just beaten down by the work and the heat. Standing in front of a lump of steel fired up at 220C all day long takes a lot out of the bakers .

Man vs 1,000 loaves. Man wins.

Man vs Heat. Man takes a beating.

I'm busy but I have it easy.