A Guide to Buying a Water Heater

Industrial Level Baking: Special Considerations To Take Before You Invest In A Deck Oven

12 January 2015 by Jeanne Cunningham

Name brand bread sold on grocery store shelves is produced en masse in deck ovens. If you have never seen a deck oven before, these things are the size of a large storage shed and have several racks, or "decks," on which you place your bakery goods to bake. For the industrial-sized bakeries, these ovens are an absolute necessity for meeting supply and demand. For you, the family bakery owner, they are not a necessity, but a luxury. If you have decided to invest in a deck oven for your bakery, there are a few things you need to consider first.

Do You Have Enough Room?

Sure, a deck oven could seriously maximize how much cake, bread, pies, bars, and sweet treats you can make, but do you have enough room for even the smallest of commercial deck ovens? In a bakery, you will want something larger than a pizza deck oven, which represents the smallest deck oven you can get at five feet, six inches, width and length. Others can be as large as ten-plus feet in width and height. If your bakery is big enough for the biggest industrial oven, that is great. If not, you might have to opt for more compact models/pizza deck ovens.

Can You Give Your Deck Oven Enough Ventilation?

Another thing to consider is the amount of heat these machines create. A pizza deck oven or compact model does not create any more heat than a regular oven, but the industrial models can reach temps up to fourteen hundred degrees! Granted, you may never use a setting that high unless you have a dozen wedding cakes all due on the same day, but the metal exterior casing absorbs some of that heat and then radiates it into the area around it. Really good ventilation helps disperse this excess heat such that it does not melt everything in your kitchen, including you.

Can You Place the Oven Far Away from Your Refrigeration Section?

It is a fact that a stove placed next to a refrigerator will cause your energy bills to soar as the refrigerator works harder to keep its contents cool/frozen while sitting next to a hot oven. In a bakery, where you have an extremely hot oven baking all kinds of goods all day, your refrigeration section needs to be far away from your deck oven. If you cannot make this accommodation, be prepared to pay the very high cost of your energy bills each month.

Price Is the Least of Your Concerns

One very good thing about industrial deck ovens is that they are not very expensive. If you place them in your kitchen where they have good ventilation and away from refrigeration, the machines pay for themselves in a relatively short time, depending on how much product you bake and what you sell your goods for. When you have to bake almost as much as a commercial bakery does, you can bake more and in less time than you would have if you were still operating on traditional bakery ovens. With the price being the least of your concerns, you can focus on size, space, temperature control in your kitchen, and how much bakery goods you plan to sell in the coming months. Talk to your local bakery experts, such as American Baking System, for more information.

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