The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Scaling up Forkish Overnight Country Brown

jabraben's picture
jabraben

Scaling up Forkish Overnight Country Brown

I've been baking a slightly modified version of Ken Forkish's Overnight Country Brown for 6 years now. I've baked probably a couple thousand of these loaves, two at a time in dutch ovens in my home oven. A local town has a community kitchen with a three deck Doyon oven with steam injection so I'd like to move my baking there and scale up. I think I can fit about 30 total in the three ovens and I'm thinking through what that would take in terms of process changes. The easiest thing to get my brain around is simply continuing with his methods - pinching, stretching and folding - but either doing 5 tubs of 6 loaves worth of dough at a time or slightly scaling the recipe to maybe 10 loaves worth of dough each in three tubs. They have mixers, of course, and, at a minimum, I think I could mix the dough in those before pinching, stretching and folding starts to reduce manual labor without compromising the quality of the bread. I'll do some test batches to see how it goes but I imagine someone here has the experience to advise me. Am I going to end up with carpal tunnel mixing roughly 26 kg of dough each baking session by hand, even split up into 3-5 batches? Would mixing the dough to begin in the mixers be as far as I should go with the mixers if I want to maintain the character of those loaves? My understanding is that trying to knead more in the mixer instead of stretching and folding would lead to a dough too uniform in structure to get the varied crumb structure one wants in such a loaf. I'm sharing a picture below, not because you need to see it to answer my questions but because one likes to share their handiwork with others who might appreciate it. Please be gentle. I'm only an amateur. 

 Sourdough loave leaning against bannetons.

tpassin's picture
tpassin

The Perfect Loaf bakery owner has some videos about how he makes various artisan breads in his bakery.  I found them very interesting.  He mixes with a mixer, then stretches and forms by hand.  Here's one I found.  It might be worth a look -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8PUlZrngZQ

TomP

jabraben's picture
jabraben

Thanks for that. I'll check them out.