This empty building will soon be a new bakery... | Proof Bread

three months ago city says we need to move we have four months to move out of our garage a lot of people at that point were saying just get a random building and move in and just stay alive every move is expensive moving a production bakery meaning moving ovens getting everything to be working in a new space making sure that you have all the the plumbing all the electrical that you need on site it's all expensive so we were never going to successfully be able to move multiple times we needed to find a place really really fast that was going to work for us for a long term i originally was sort of in despair about this whole thing the whole idea of moving with four months and it was because i didn't think that we would find something quite so suitable this building that we're in is right on main street it has a giant parking lot in the back so there's a lot of parking back there you can see that there is a door all the way in the back where customers can come in and in the future people will come down this really long hall to get to the front on main street and otherwise people will be able to come in right from main street so this is a downtown historic district for the city of mesa these buildings are over a hundred years old so this building is quite literally four solid brick walls all around and the way that it was constructed was two layers of brick it's really really neat you can see that there's certain parts of this brick wall that that might appear damaged but it's held up by two consecutive layers so it's a really sturdy building it's already outlived a typical human lifetime and is likely to outlive another i want to go through it starting from the front if you come visit us you'll have sort of two ways of spending time here you can come visit downtown mesa and walk around main street and spend your time outside on main street we will be turning this window pane here into a walk-up window and so you'll be able to just simply walk right up i have a person a woodworker making us a custom wood bread display that will go from a low point here all the way up and so as you walk up to this window in the future you'll see bread in the window and then you'll see this window opening you'll be able to buy your bread and never actually set foot inside if that's how you'd prefer downtown mesa is becoming cooler and cooler by the day i've always felt that this district had a lot of charm but a lot of great businesses are moving in within the last 12 months we've had a large amount of food and beverage concepts move in tacos chihuahuas will be our neighbor next door this is their second or third successful location in the city they they're pretty well known for their tacos and they make their own tortillas in-house it's a it's pretty cool place we have a brewery that just moved in from down the street that amanda and i have been working with at another location that we did a market at for years called 12th west there's a great sandwich shop down the street called worth takeaway uh actually we got married in this cidery that's uh not too far away from it's actually across the back parking lot called cider core and one of our first employees mike olson owns a pizzeria in there called mike's pizza so we're kind of moving into an area that feels like an extended family and in addition to people that we already know and have relationships with there's a bunch sort of moving in as we speak we're trying to set things up yesterday we tried a lunch at this venezuelan place across the street and next door apparently there's a barbecue place coming in so i'm looking forward to giving that a try it'll be a very different world from being in a residential district and in a garage where everything we do we have to look over our shoulder and wonder are we upsetting somebody right now in fact it's it's just it's liberating to consider that we can have people working in the middle of the night and it's completely okay in fact probably encouraged so when you walk in if you choose not to use the walk-up counter you'll walk in the front door and this will be a wrap around counter in this area so if you walk straight in the front door you'll be looking at a big pastry display that wraps around in an l and right behind the pastry display will be a bread rock made by the same person that makes the other one the counter will wrap around in an l and then turn and head all the way back and so on this side which will be the customer side there will be a bar made out of butcher block and it's counter height because i hope to be able to do classes in here at some point so it's actually a baker station type bar that you'll be able to sit at be 12 seats down this this really long row now on the other side of that bar is just a short glass partition i think health code is only five or six feet we're going as minimal height that we can get away with and the other side will be another butcher block bar running down the stretch of what this will be which will be our production bakery and so you'll quite literally be sitting across from the bench as we work and make the next day's worth of pastries and breads and everything so you'll have your fresh pastry and potentially coffee you know over there and you'll be watching us work with croissant dough or shaped bread i hope that it's a place that'll just be fun to hang out in for whether it be a short period of time if you're just passing through or if you want to hang out and just watch bakers do their thing for a little while i hope that is a place that's conducive for all of that we over the past few years have been mostly inspired by working the way that we do getting the results that we get and then sharing them with someone so as we've gotten busier our bakers have gotten a little further away from our customers if you consider three years ago and two years ago and a year and a half ago basically anyone who baked at proof also was at the markets on saturdays now there's too much baking for that to be a reality anymore so coming back in here we'll we will activate that same source of inspiration for our team that we've historically had that's making something sharing it and being able to actually take in the feedback from people as they enjoy it it's part of what makes i think what we do most rewarding you know you work a really long day you have a really arduous task of of making a huge amount of something and trying to make it really well and with sourdough so it's pretty precise and unforgiving and when you see the joy that that brings to someone else it really makes it worth it so you'll be able to sit at that bar or if you're one of two lucky people there will be a window table right here for two overlooking main street going behind the counter to the wall this space called for obviously ovens it's a bakery and when we first looked at it we were considering moving the ovens that we have from the garage over that made the most logical sense initially until we started looking at what type of a space we're working with and what that would mean so our ovens require a hood to go over them and actually there's a little bit of a design flaw in our current system that's sort of dictated by our lack of space and that's that the hood that's required to go over the gas oven is the same as the hood that's required to go over the deck oven and the deck oven our deck oven in particular has a lot of brand that we're using we we unload the bread on boards which are dusted with wheat bran and then that goes into the oven well some of that brand gets kicked up in the air and the hood sucks it up and the hood then sometimes drops some of the bran on top of our gas rack oven which quite literally wreaks havoc on that rack oven which is fully exposed on the top and so we have to almost daily use a compression blower to blow out the the brand it's a lot of extra maintenance a lot of extra service on the rack oven because of that that sort of in hindsight we would have done it differently type thing uh well moving those in here is also expensive because a contractor would have to create a whole new hood system for those ovens and we're dealing with commercial contracting now so the costs are very different than what we can do when we're basically our own general contractor in a residential district here in commercial zoning as a as basically a proprietor in the space i can't even pull the permit without a general contractor on it and so when we were doing the bids originally just like hypothetical bids everybody was saying this hood system could cost up to thirty thousand dollars to put in and so i thought at that point we ought to consider an oven upgrade we decided to invest a lot more than that into new ovens we financed those uh recently uh and we we went with ovens that one of our friends in tucson don guerra barrio bread has they're the pauline ovens so we'll have a similar oven to what he has the the main reason for it was both the rack oven from there and the deca then have self-contained hoods and this space used to be a pizzeria so right before us it was a wedding venue and right before that it was a pizzeria so i'll show you some interesting things if we look up you'll notice two exhausts already in the ceiling and then you'll notice some really thick electrical conduit coming over here which we can map to the box in the back and know that those are high voltage 220 50 amp breakers which perfectly fit the oven that are actually coming in here i got really lucky in that regard although i'm trying to point that out now because what i've learned in this process is when you're doing commercial construction uh the the first instinct for an architect and a contractor is basically to treat this as an empty shell so they'll look at the back electrical panel and pretend it's just the panel in there and they'll go into the project thinking we're going to switch every breaker and we're going to run all new conduit all new cable it's easier to conceptualize that way because you can say i need lights there there there there there there i need outlets there there there there and so i'm just grabbing from the hole and wiring it anew well if you want to do it that way be prepared to spend well just a ridiculous sum of money on electrical uh in in our case the electrical bid doing it that way came out to like half of our overall project budget uh for the for the build out just insanity so what i'm doing now is i'm going through with with an electrician and we're going to be mapping every outlet back to the box and providing that information to an engineer and to our architect so they can then rework the plans using the power that's already in the ceiling using the power that was already dedicated to the ovens that used to be here and that way we're not redoing what's already here and thus we're able to take the electrical down from what was half of our build-out budget to like a third of that so we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars of potential savings to do that research and legwork i'm thankful that we uh built additions in our current garage because i wouldn't have had the opportunity to really work with all of these utilities and construction components enough to understand how to react when i first got this this bid the other day i almost went into a mini depression because you know here we've had so far 1 600 people from dozens of countries pitch in to help us build this out and we've raised a staggering amount um you know in help we've also gotten some additional lending and we thought that we were looking okay to move forward and then i started getting a bid in that far exceeded what i had and then you know hearing from some of the contractors who sort of classify this as a baby project which is is a rough thing to deal with when i feel like i'm throwing everything i have at it um it's interesting living in this world now where you know the other people hiring general contractors of big corporations that have no problem spending a half a million or a million or 1.5 million on a retail build out whereas for us that that equates to us going away you know the bakery not existing so let me tell you a little bit more i mentioned that the counters will wrap around and the same guy who's doing the the wood displays is uh is uh putting a whole butcher block counter system in here the counter becomes the separation between customers and our production staff as we kind of go backwards into the space it goes from ovens to we have that big long table we have a narrow kind of center alley for the whole production bakery so one of the things i was considering when designing this was how do we deal with the fact that we have a lot of floating objects that we use while we're baking namely speed racks the the carts we have so many of them and as we get into this space we'll probably have so many more so actually in our design i took what would normally have been a work bench up against the wall and i moved it out by five feet and we actually put in a partition wall at five feet here to create a back channel alley for the speed racks so that our staff could be working here or here and the space in between that we're all sort of flowing down would be free of clutter and objects so one of the challenges with this space was really long and narrow so i had to try to work through all of our baking workflows within that constraint so that people weren't completely on top of one another all the time what we've been trying to accomplish with the design in this space is continuous production so uh this is sort of inconceivable when you're when you're working on your own when you're you know at that first stage of being a cottage baker or you know the idea of of basically letting things continually cycle so what i'm looking for is enough space for speed racks ambiently so that we can stack them up for a shift and they can move on to proofing or move on to the oven wherever they're going next and there's enough space for a whole shift's worth of items so the next shift can come in and start fresh so a lot of what we're working on in here is creating first in first out type models so that speed rack alley actually will be loaded from one end and unloaded from the other as we go backwards in the space we'll have our mixers and right behind our mixers will be a l-shaped proofing room that we're going to be putting in this space that proofing room is being designed out of cement board so that it can take the high humidity that we'll we'll put in it we'll be putting a mini split heater on top of the proofing room along with a with a we think we're going gonna go with a swamp cooler to feed into the the mini split that way we'll get the humidity and we'll get the temperature that we need uh with just a simple wall thermostat so again in the future bakery you'll be able to take a speed rack and go first into this l-shaped proofer and then first out that way and off to the oven the proofer in here will be able to accommodate 12 20 speed racks which is up from our maximum capacity being about eight right now the walk-in is one of the hardest things in our design when i was first mapping this out the walk-in was i either figure out the walk-in or we can't get this building again it's a really long narrow building i only have uh like eight meters to work with in in width 22 feet and and so it's not a whole lot of width to to deal with there was this back room here that used to be some sort of an office and we're basically squaring it up and extending it five feet and that is our walk-in cooler so we're going to insulate it with a walk-in box it will also have its own little roof here where all the equipment for the walk-in will go the the condenser and whatnot the proofing room will border the walk-in so i'm not building any more walls than i have to i'm already building out the wall here and that one wall is shared with the walk-in with a proofer i should say so we love the exposed brick this whole side will be left completely untouched that side we just have to basically bring like put a wall up against it for the first eight feet so that we can have our kitchen so the top will be fully exposed and the bottom will be kind of our backing for our whole kitchen but it's an open concept kitchen the sheeter will run along at the end of the the counter we'll store some pallets at the end of the customer counter down this way of flour and now we're sort of going to the back we have a couple customer restrooms here they're going to be slightly remodeled re-tiled because the tile in there is a little bit gross and if we basically box them in here and make both the entries on this hallway we can make both the bathrooms ada compliant that's the americans with disability act uh it ensures that basically the specifications for the bathroom make it very comfortable for somebody on a wheelchair to go into the bathroom um do a full rotation in the bathroom you know in the chair and still be able to use the facilities actually the front front counter also that has those two seats will be specific to ada heights so this will definitely be a building that's friendly to to people that have to use a wheelchair so distribution was very important to us we ultimately are a market bakery we want to stay a market bakery this area of town downtown mesa is up and coming and we hope to do well here with retail sales but we know that will be a lot safer if we simply remain a market bakery like we are today so it was not an option to have a building that wasn't able to be distributed from this wall at some point in the past used to be a roll-up garage door and so we're going to be removing the drywall and uncovering what used to be just an opening for a garage door the owner of the building actually speculates that the garage door is still rolled up in the little ceiling in there and so we're going to find out through demolition whether that's true or not the linoleum in this room at some point needs to be replaced hopefully that'll happen now we'll see if the cost to costing can work we'll put our dish pit back here this there's already a three compartment sink from before and so it's pretty well suited for our our dish washing and all that all that and there is a utility bathroom back there that's pretty well suited for our required mop sink so that all has to kind of be gutted and reconfigured as our utility room this this whole building has more more than meets the eye because we're also we also after kind of careful consideration of the future and all of our plans decided to take on the the neighboring unit uh which we'll have to do a tour of at some other point uh the two units will be pretty well connected both in the front and the back and part of kind of the customer experience for anybody who comes and visits us down here will be to either sit uh and hang out over there if if there's no space over here or interact with what we have planned in that in that space in fact we're probably going to be moving there first because we're not doing any construction in that space so we'll probably be opening up a little shop over the next few months over there and starting to get to know the actual community down here in downtown mesa which would be hopefully daily or you know regular customers of ours so there's a lot going on over the next couple months we're going to be tearing this whole well i shouldn't say tearing this whole place up originally there was a saw cut planned to run the plumbing and to run the electrical and over the course of this week i worked with the engineer to once again use something that the building already had somebody in the past put this this drain line in and since we're already putting a furred out wall onto this uh onto this break we can actually run the plumbing all inside the wall instead of cutting up what's actually pretty nice tile we had to work out the electrical as well i have a lot of personal leg work to do with an electrician to remap the electrical so once we get through those two things i'm confident that we can come up with come up with a set of bids from contractors that we can actually work with to get this project done we actually already have an approved permit with the city so at this point we are quite literally just waiting for the right contracting partners to select and get going on this project so we're excited to see what comes next a lot of coordination is happening on a daily basis like last week for instance we moved packaging and distribution over here for a few days for thanksgiving to see what would it be like to split those things up it went so well changing our production rhythm around basically taking warm items putting them directly on our delivery truck and bringing them here to slice package and distribute that it sort of guided our strategy to move into the neighboring unit early while this one's under construction will be taking packaging and distribution with us so the people that are staffed in packaging and distribution will basically become our first retail staff members down here we'll have a chance to sort of gauge what the traffic is what's the natural traffic we'll get much more opportunity to talk about what's going on down here with everybody who's already down here get everybody excited about the future bakery and sort of become a part of the community so it's definitely an exciting time we are trying to learn as we go in some ways and then trying to use every bit of knowledge that we've accumulated both baking and construction over the past three years to get this project done successfully and the consequences are extraordinarily high so making the wrong decision can literally lead to financial ruin right now i i hate to be so dramatic about it but the people you work with on the on the construction it seems like you have all the opportunity to work with just the whole gamut of ranges of service and and construction and cost from costs that are affordable but require more knowledge and legwork from us meaning what i found the way to drive construction costs down is to use what's here well to use what's here i have to be willing to spend the time to investigate what's here i'm not finding that like willingness from the contractors who would much rather just draw a simple new schematic rather than try to figure out oh well that outlet maps to that breaker and it's drawing x amount of amps and so i can use that existing line to power a b c and d on the plan so i'm starting to do that ladder work and that's the only way that this project is going to not bankrupt us if we can get through this actually i was talking to the owners of the cidery next door yesterday we were over here and you know they said we're in the hump we're in the like hump that you can't see over the other side the the hump seems daunting and all you see is just this construction hump that you're in it's it's true it's it's hard to picture the other side right now where we're just in here doing our thing and it's sort of normal again because right now it feels like you're just reaching for stuff that a year ago seemed like a still a pipe dream but but we're here and dealing with it so one step at a time one foot in front of the other and we'll we'll get through this too uh and i continue to look forward to posting updates as we go in the meantime see see what amanda's working on here in this dark corner you

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 44,133

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bakery, microbakery, proof bread, proof bakery, sourdough, bread, baking, cooking, food, gourmet, artisan, homemade, handmade, handcrafted, flour, recipe, how to, kitchen, ingredients, cottage bakery, rustic, small business, entrepreneur

Id: bKUDwO2IPbI

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020