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How to Scale Your Bake Day from Two Loaves to Thirty | Episode 55

  • Jan 19, 2025
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


There is a moment in every microbakery where two loaves turns into twenty and everything you thought you knew stops working. The dough moves faster, the fridge cannot keep up, and the loaves that come out do not look like the ones you have been selling.


Every one of us goes through it, and you can shorten that learning curve by borrowing from the people who already have.


I am not going to teach you how to bake, because there are people who do that far better than I do. What I can tell you is what changes in your production when the volume goes up, what to buy and in what order, and when you are ready to promise that bread to paying customers.


Get consistent before you get big

This is the business rule underneath all of this, and it is the one I see broken most often.


If your loaves still come out wildly different from one bake to the next, stay right where you are a little longer. Bake one or two at a time until the results are boring and predictable. Only then start practicing in bulk, and only after bulk is working should you take money for it.


I watch bakers get excited at exactly the wrong moment. They are still a little inconsistent, they start offering loaves for sale, and then they learn that a large batch of dough behaves nothing like a small one. Now bread is promised to a list of people, the loaves are flat, and there is no time to fix it.


Selling is a promise. Get your process repeatable first, then make the promise.


Send your craft questions to the craft teachers

I am an intuitive baker. I do not take the temperature of my dough, I read it, and that came from repetition rather than a formula.


Here is how I got there. I baked the beginner recipe out of The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo six or eight times, following his process to the word, until I knew how the dough was supposed to feel in my hands. After that I could change the hydration, use different flours and scale it up, because I knew what I was aiming for.


If fermentation is still a mystery, go spend time with the people who teach it well. The Sourdough Journey is where I learned a great deal. Get the craft from them, and let me help you with the business you are building around it.


The math is just multiplication

Bread recipes scale straight up. If your recipe uses a thousand grams of flour for two loaves and you want thirty loaves, you use fifteen times everything. There is no secret adjustment.


Build a simple spreadsheet with each recipe and its ingredients in grams, plus one cell where you type the number of batches. Mine tells me how much flour, water and starter a bake day needs before I walk into the kitchen, which turns the day into a plan instead of a scramble. An hour of setup, and you will use it every week for years!


Bulk your starter backward from dough day

You do not need seven mason jars of starter. You need two containers and a schedule.


I keep 30 to 50 grams of active starter in a one quart container on the counter, and a four quart container in the fridge for cold discard that goes into cookies, crackers and muffins. Then I work backward from dough day.

  • Three days out: scrape most of the active starter into the discard container and feed what is left clinging to the sides at about one to five.

  • Two days out: work out how much starter the bake needs. Ten loaves might need a thousand grams.

  • The night before: feed your hundred grams of active starter up in a bigger container. For a thousand grams that is roughly 450 flour and 450 water, doubled for two thousand.

  • Dough day: bake with it, leave 50 to 100 grams behind, and start again.

A high ratio feed does not take much longer to peak, and fed in the evening mine is ready in about twelve hours.


Buy bins before you buy anything else

The cheapest change with the biggest return is mixing in bins instead of bowls.


Six loaves in one bin instead of across three bowls means fewer times your hands are in it, less mess, and a faster day. Bins are cheap, they were one of the very first things I bought, and the difference was immediate. Keep a quart of water beside you while you mix by hand and dip your fingers when they gum up.


Choosing a mixer

This is a real capital decision, so match it to the size of business you actually want.

  • A KitchenAid is not built for bread dough at volume and will burn out its motor.

  • A Bosch or an Ankarsrum handles about six loaves at a time and they are tanks. If you do not see yourself going past thirty loaves a day, one of these will serve you for years.

  • Past thirty loaves a day and heading toward fifty, sixty or a hundred, a 30 quart spiral mixer like the Estella is what most microbakers move to. Mine handles 24 loaves worth of dough at once.

Mixing by hand in a bin is a perfectly good place to start. Do not buy the big machine because it looks legitimate. Buy it when the volume you are already selling justifies it.


Your fridge is probably your real bottleneck

More bakers get stuck here than anywhere else, and it is fixable without spending much.


Hang a cheap analog thermometer inside, because the digital readout on the door is not always telling you the truth.


When you load a lot of room temperature dough into a fridge, the fridge temperature rises, and while it catches up your dough keeps proofing. Three things help.

  • Stagger your batches. Mix in groups of six or eight spaced about thirty minutes apart, so you load in waves and the fridge can recover between them.

  • Put ice packs on the top shelf, not the bottom, since cold air falls.

  • Leave your bannetons uncovered. Plastic traps heat and stops your dough cooling. Uncovered dough does not dry out badly, and that surface ends up as the bottom of the loaf anyway.

A dedicated dough fridge is one of the earliest investments worth making, and it does not have to be new. I found a used upright freezer on Facebook Marketplace for $250 and ran it as a fridge with a $50 Inkbird temperature controller, and that carried my business for over a year. If you buy new, look for a model that converts between fridge and freezer. I flip mine to freezer for thirty or forty five minutes while I load, then set a phone reminder to flip it back.


One more thing about those proofing charts from the craft teachers. They are built for one or two loaves, and a big mass of dough holds its own fermentation heat and rises faster, so the timings will run ahead of you. Watch the dough, not the clock.


Choosing how you bake

Your oven caps your volume faster than anything else, so pick your method with your target volume in mind.

  • Dutch ovens. Most home ovens fit three or four, and hauling that much cast iron wore me out fast.

  • Enamel roasting pans. Lightweight, they hold steam under the lid, and a good option if you have a gas oven and cannot open bake.

  • The two loaf pan method. Bake in a loaf pan with a second pan inverted on top to hold the steam, then pull the top pan to brown. This is how a lot of bakers reach real volume in a home oven, if you will trade the rustic shape for it.

  • Open baking on a steel. The route I chose, because I love the oval loaf. I worked out steam in my electric oven, baked four at a time, and later moved to a residential double oven.


If you are already selling every week

Take fifteen minutes and find your actual bottleneck by walking your bake day and asking where the line forms.


If you cannot mix enough dough in the time you have, it is the mixer. If your dough is over proofed by morning, it is the fridge. If you are still baking at four in the afternoon, it is the oven. Fix the one that is limiting you and leave the other two alone, because buying the wrong machine is an expensive way to not solve your problem.


Final thoughts

There are as many ways to bake as there are bakers, and nothing here is the only way to do it. Take what serves you and leave the rest.


If you end up with over proofed bread this week, please do not let it wreck you. I tell my workshop students that ugly bread tastes good too. It becomes croutons, breadcrumbs and bread pudding, and it becomes the reps that teach you what your dough is telling you.


Get consistent, then get bigger, and buy your equipment in the order your business actually needs it.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you are working on capacity and equipment right now, these three go well with this one.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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