There are a lot of cottage food bakers out there, making/selling artisan bread at farmers' markets and through side shelves in established retail/grocery spaces.
The big issue with home baking is scale -- there are often regulations that limit what you can use (often it MUST be in the kitchen within your primary residence, and it can ONLY use a standard residential oven). And if you can't make many loaves, the prices end up being about double compared to industrial produced bread. Hence the $10-25 per loaf at the farmers' market.
So I've been reverse engineering what's possible, given the cottage food law constraints (specifically in Ohio, but applies to a lot of states).
There are lots of non-standard things that I've found actually work quite well for me: Kneading the dough by slowly rotating it in a dough tub (no stretch-and-folds). 18hr+ room temperature bulk fermentation (using just a few grams of starter). Standard oven with 2 "decks" using baking stones. Using only a 10-15 minute bench rest (microproof) then quickly shaping loaves before going straight in the oven (no pans, parchment, banneton, or couche).
So I've put it together as open research for anyone to use. There's also a dynamic recipe page with my production quantities for various breads over here: https://palmbread.com/open_research/baker_recipes/
If you've ever considered baking bread at scale, please give it a look and let me know what you think. Thanks!
akumpf•4mo ago
The big issue with home baking is scale -- there are often regulations that limit what you can use (often it MUST be in the kitchen within your primary residence, and it can ONLY use a standard residential oven). And if you can't make many loaves, the prices end up being about double compared to industrial produced bread. Hence the $10-25 per loaf at the farmers' market.
So I've been reverse engineering what's possible, given the cottage food law constraints (specifically in Ohio, but applies to a lot of states).
There are lots of non-standard things that I've found actually work quite well for me: Kneading the dough by slowly rotating it in a dough tub (no stretch-and-folds). 18hr+ room temperature bulk fermentation (using just a few grams of starter). Standard oven with 2 "decks" using baking stones. Using only a 10-15 minute bench rest (microproof) then quickly shaping loaves before going straight in the oven (no pans, parchment, banneton, or couche).
So I've put it together as open research for anyone to use. There's also a dynamic recipe page with my production quantities for various breads over here: https://palmbread.com/open_research/baker_recipes/
If you've ever considered baking bread at scale, please give it a look and let me know what you think. Thanks!