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Is a Bread Oven Worth It for Your Microbakery? My Forno Review | Episode 122

  • Mar 26
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


There is a point in a growing microbakery where you stop wondering whether people will buy your bread and start wondering whether your oven can keep up with them. That is a very different question, and it is a business question.


I baked out of residential ovens for about two and a half years and built a real, profitable business doing it. Eventually my equipment, not my demand and not my skill, became the thing holding the whole operation back.


I have been baking in a My Forno bread oven for four months now, and I get asked about it constantly. So here is the honest version: what actually changed, what it cost me to get there, and how to tell whether an upgrade belongs in your business yet. You do not need a bread oven to build a microbakery that works. I want you to be able to tell when you do.


The setup I grew this business on

I started in my regular kitchen oven, shuffling Dutch ovens, for about five months. Then I got one baking steel and taught myself to open bake, which put me at four loaves at a time.


When it was clear my capacity would not keep up with the growth, I found a used double oven on Facebook Marketplace for $250 and paid a contractor to add an outlet in our dining room. That got me to eight loaves a bake, four per oven. It was pulled out of somebody's remodel and had plenty of quirks.


In June I replaced it with a new 30 inch double oven from Lowe's, about $2,500, with a multi-rack feature that browned the top and bottom racks evenly. With four baking steels I could bake 16 loaves at a time, and I left the steels in permanently and baked everything right on them.


That progression is what made scaling possible without a huge upfront investment, and I would recommend that same path to most bakers before I would recommend a bread oven.


What a residential oven really costs you

The loaf count was never the problem. The problem was that I could not leave.

  • I steamed by hand with a garden sprayer, then reopened the oven at about five minutes to spray again, because a residential oven is not built to hold steam.

  • Both of my ovens had hot corners, front right and back left, so I rotated front to back at least twice per bake or those loaves came out too dark to sell.

  • I had a timer going off every five to seven minutes for the entire bake.

  • I lost at least one loaf almost every bake day to over-browned corners. Some days two or more.

Add that up and it is real money in wasted ingredients, plus hours you cannot spend on anything else. On days when I had prep left over from dough day, none of it got done during the bake, so bake day just kept stretching.


I was willing to live with that to grow. I also knew it was not something I could keep doing for years.


The 220-volt outlet nobody budgets for

Before you shop for any oven, know this. Anything bigger than a small countertop oven needs a 220 volt outlet, and that is true for a residential double oven just as much as a bread oven. There is no workaround, so an electrician is part of the plan.


The cost swings a lot. If you have an electrician in the family it can be very manageable. Our breaker box was across the house, so mine was not. Either way it is a real line item in your growth budget.


What actually changed with a bread oven

I got the My Forno in November. It holds 12 loaves at a time at my size, which is about 850 to 900 grams, and my bake runs roughly 20 minutes with the steam closed and 14 to 15 minutes open to brown.


The learning curve was three or four bakes to dial in temperature and steam. I had a few less-than-pretty loaves in that stretch and then it settled.


Look at the numbers on paper and this reads like a step backward. I went from 16 loaves a batch to 12. The batch size was never where the gain was.


Loaves per hour is the number that matters

From the very beginning of my business I have tracked loaves per hour. In the early days I knew I could do four loaves an hour, which meant 28 loaves was a seven hour day. That one number told me what I could promise and what I could not.


I am at about 18 loaves per hour now. My residential setup could technically push a similar total, and I was tied to the oven the entire time it did.


Now I load the oven, close the steam valve, set a timer and walk away. Twenty minutes later I open the valve, set a timer and walk away again. I touch the process for a few seconds between loading and unloading.


That gives me a solid 20 minute block and then a 15 minute block inside every single bake. In those windows I mix the next day's dough, scoop cookies, wash dishes, prep for market, or talk to a customer standing at the counter. That is the change that made this worth the money.


The loaves you stop losing

Even browning across every loaf. No hot corners, no burnt bottoms, reliable oven spring. I have essentially no product waste now, where before I was pulling at least one loaf a bake for the family because it was too dark to sell.


Run your own math on that. One lost loaf per bake day, at your retail price, across a year, is a number worth seeing written down.


The steam is built in and even, which also means I am no longer spraying water into an appliance that was never designed for it. My old oven held up fine, and I always felt like I was on borrowed time with it.


I have not run into anything that does not bake well in it either. Cookies, scones, crackers, granola, cinnamon rolls, inclusion breads, all of it transferred over. I can run the decks at different temperatures and turn decks off, so I will have pizza crusts coming up to heat on one deck while I finish focaccia and sandwich bread on another.


Why I chose this particular oven

It is analog, which means fewer parts to fail. My fancy residential oven had so many digital components that I always felt failure was a matter of time, especially with steam involved.


It is built in Italy by a company that has been manufacturing large commercial deck ovens for more than 60 years, in house, down to cutting the steel and shaping the heating elements. That told me what standard it was built to. And the US representative, James Bridges, is someone I know and trust. He spoke at the Summit, and he is responsive.


Please do not buy one yet if this is you

A bread oven will not fix a demand problem, an inconsistent week, or a menu you are still figuring out. If you are still learning your process, still building your customer base, or not selling through what you bake, the pressure of that investment will feel heavy and it will not solve the thing that is actually stuck.


Go get a baking steel and learn to open bake. Watch Facebook Marketplace for a used double oven. Those upgrades cost a fraction as much and they buy you real capacity while you sort out the rest.


When it is genuinely time

If you are consistently baking somewhere in the range of 60 to 100 loaves a week, your oven is your bottleneck, and you want to keep growing, that is when this conversation becomes a business decision instead of a wish.


Here is how I would work through it. Pull your last eight weeks of production and find your true loaves per hour. Count the loaves you throw away in a month and price them. Then get an electrician out for a quote on the outlet before you fall in love with any oven, because that number surprises people.


And know where the next bottleneck moves to. I still run a half-size convection oven for cookies and scones alongside the bread, and it still needs rotating, so my next upgrade is a second oven. Efficiency and sustainability are linked. If your process is inefficient, your business is not sustainable, no matter how good the bread is.


Final thoughts

You can build a successful sourdough microbakery without a bread oven. I did it for years, and plenty of bakers I know are doing it right now.


But when the business is already working and the only thing standing between you and more is how long you have to stand in front of an oven, better equipment gives you your time back. Four months in, my bake days are calmer, every loaf is sellable, and I get to run the rest of my business while the bread bakes.


If you are at the point of investing in a bread oven, I am so proud of you and so excited for what it does for your days!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If capacity and workflow are where you are stuck right now, these three go deeper.


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