Running a Baking Business Out of Your Home? What Appliance Upgrades Might You Need?
Posted on: 16 May 2016
Whether you're selling your homemade baked goods to a mostly local clientele or to a nationwide audience willing to pay for expedited shipping, baking large quantities of different items on a daily basis may be placing more of a burden on your kitchen appliances than they were meant to handle. By upgrading certain appliances and adding in additional conveniences, you may be able to significantly increase both your output and revenue—but which appliances can provide the most bang for the buck for your small business? Read on to learn more about the upgrades you may need to make when converting your home's kitchen into a miniature professional bakery.
Convection ovens
Trying to bake finicky or fragile items like quiches, meringues, and angel food cakes in a standard nonconvection oven can be challenging. Unlike standard ovens that provide radiant heat from the top and bottom burners, convection ovens include fans in the rear of the oven that constantly circulate heated air over the surface of the food being baked or roasted. This allows for more even heating and will prevent your meringues and quiches from falling flat or developing the dreaded "donut hole" as the center fails to fully rise.
If you're currently working with a standard oven, you may want to consider swapping it out for a convection variety. If you have a bit of extra kitchen space, you may want to spring for a stackable set of convection ovens that can give you twice the amount of oven space while allowing you to bake at two different temperatures at the same time. By upgrading from a standard to a convection oven, you'll be able to expand your repertoire of baked goods and increase the amount of product you're capable of producing in a single day.
Gas cooktops
The vast majority of professional chefs and bakers prefer gas cooktops over electric. This is largely because of the greater ease of control with gas—achieving a certain temperature on an electric burner can be a trial-and-error process, while reducing or raising the temperature of a gas cooktop occurs instantaneously by simply changing the height of the flame. Gas cooktops are also generally much quicker to heat up than electric ranges. When you're spending a good portion of your day in the kitchen, these extra seconds spent waiting for water to boil or chocolate to melt can add up to a significant amount of time.
Upgrading from an electric stove to a gas one doesn't need to be an expensive prospect, even if you don't currently have a gas hookup in your kitchen. You'll likely only pay between $15 to $25 per linear foot for the professional installation of a gas line from your public utility line or a natural gas tank at your home to your stove.
Multizone refrigerators and freezers
One issue you may find yourself running into time and time again is that of not enough refrigerator and freezer space. If you're baking creations that need to cool quickly or batches of dough that must be frozen for a certain amount of time before they can be baked you may constantly be doing the refrigerator shuffle as you move items around to create a large enough space to accommodate your new products. Investing in a larger refrigerator and freezer with multiple, separately programmable "zones" can give you the extra space you need while allowing you to customize your storage space to each individual food item.
Multi-zone refrigerators and freezers include separate compartments that can be programmed to different temperatures, which is ideal for those products that need to be kept a bit warmer than frozen but that may not last as long at normal refrigerator temperatures or those that need to be chilled quickly immediately after baking.
To learn about these and other options for your small baking business, contact a representative from a company like Gringer & Sons Inc.
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