4 ms·

In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation means you can't shrink the vertical space as much

In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation means you can't shrink the vertical space as much as you might like to. Anyway, it seems to me the important metric in this regard would be how many items per unit time a baker can effectively manage. Pizza requires some amount of attention more or less constantly. I doubt one baker can manage more than 5 at time, even if the oven could fit many more. Meanwhile that same baker can set a timer on an oven containing many dozens of bread loaves and forget about them until they're done.

CrazyStat 5y ago
You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or similar short flat-top breads. Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at least double the required oven volume), gives you similar revenue, and is much harder to sell.
- phonypc 5y ago
  A sandwich loaf baked in a pan should be made in a different style of oven, but the types of bread you're talking about are ideally made in the same style of deck oven as pizzas. To achieve that speed of pizza turnout would be quite the feat I think. Is this factoring in assembling pizzas? Checking/rotating pizzas partway through baking? The oven would have to be running much hotter than for the bread (admittedly no idea of the costs here). You'd probably have to use 5 separate decks to avoid slowing the bake when loading/unloading, 5 decks that could be packed with loaves rather than a single pizza. Meanwhile, I don't see why it should take more than 10 minutes to load an oven with 3 dozen loaves. During the bake time, the baker can be mixing or shaping another batch or any other task. The pizza maker realistically can't be doing anything but assembling/baking pizzas. Separate from baking, pizza necessitates the added labour of grating cheese and making sauce, or paying a premium for prepared versions. No argument that 36 loaves is a harder sell than 5 pizzas. That's sales volume though, not margin.
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    Margin is zero if you can't sell it.

CrazyStat 5y ago

You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or similar short flat-top breads. Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at least double the required oven volume), gives you similar revenue, and is much harder to sell.

phonypc 5y ago
A sandwich loaf baked in a pan should be made in a different style of oven, but the types of bread you're talking about are ideally made in the same style of deck oven as pizzas. To achieve that speed of pizza turnout would be quite the feat I think. Is this factoring in assembling pizzas? Checking/rotating pizzas partway through baking? The oven would have to be running much hotter than for the bread (admittedly no idea of the costs here). You'd probably have to use 5 separate decks to avoid slowing the bake when loading/unloading, 5 decks that could be packed with loaves rather than a single pizza. Meanwhile, I don't see why it should take more than 10 minutes to load an oven with 3 dozen loaves. During the bake time, the baker can be mixing or shaping another batch or any other task. The pizza maker realistically can't be doing anything but assembling/baking pizzas. Separate from baking, pizza necessitates the added labour of grating cheese and making sauce, or paying a premium for prepared versions. No argument that 36 loaves is a harder sell than 5 pizzas. That's sales volume though, not margin.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  Margin is zero if you can't sell it.