Timing and Temperature are Critical for Sourdough Bread | Proof Bread

all right so we're just get in the morning started today with auto lease like we always do I want to spend a little bit more time talking about how important water temperature is to mixing your dough's when I first started all this three years ago it's summertime the bakery that I took over was still extremely rudimentary in its development and it's because really proof has from its start grown very organically no one had a crazy amount of capital to invest in this operation when it was first started so this really is an example of a business that was started with very very little and has earned its its own key so with that said when we were mixing those three years ago by hand there wasn't a whole lot of tools in the bakery to use the processes were still younger and less developed I really like to talk often about how we stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us recently his father's day and I was reflecting on all the things that my dad did in a similar way the original Baker Jared had to start somewhere and he started really from the very beginning when he passed his processes on to me they weren't finished I don't think that he would have ever considered them finished a lot of people have a hard time understanding in our story that that evolution really has never stopped so from that day forward that I stepped into the bakery the first time three years ago there's always been a development process happening water temperature was added afterwards so I'm taking a thermometer here and I'm going for low 80s so right now it's 81 degrees and I'm going to take it now that's a summertime temperature for us and it's based on where I want my final dough temperature to be now what's the other factor is water temp our flour temperature so the most influence to temperature in the dough is going to be the ingredient that has the most mass in the dough it's flour for sure and so taking the temperature of my flour it's actually also at 81 degrees so by having water at 81 degrees in a spiral mixer in particular because the mixer itself is a really really important factor in deciding water temperature this is appropriate 81 degree water the reason being is that this mixer is not going to increase the temperature of the dough much at all if it does it will be by one or two degrees maximally so we sort of we want the water to be about where the final dough temperature is gonna be with the spiral now I'm also gonna be mixing sandwich dough next door in the planetary mixer and there's no way that I could get away with 81 degree water in that particular mixer the temperature increases a ton during the mixing process so more appropriately I'm going to be shooting for water temperature that's in the mid-60s so that there's plenty of room for the dough to increase in temperature before I remove it we're going for final dough temperatures in the mid-80s 84 82 84 degrees is a range that I really like to shoot for in the winter time I don't mind if my final dough temperature in the mixing bowl is pushing 90 because by the time I get it out of the mixer and into the bins it's in the mid 80s because the temperature in here is so low in the summertime I spent the entire evening cooling the bakery and I went through great lengths by doing things like putting these these tent walls there camping tent walls in between the rooms we don't have air conditioning in the newer areas of the bakery like that new addition yet it's a future project and so this is one of the best ways that we can trap the cold air in this room right now actually today we have a shipment of the of a massive role of these polar plastic sheets that typically go in between refrigerator doors and I bought I believe like 300 feet of this stuffs that I can actually line the walk-in doors as well as the doorways in between the rooms so we are going to upgrade from the more well less refined ten wall to something that looks a little bit more professional and and that I that's an interesting point to something that's very regular around here I do actually get a little bit personally offended at comments that talk about this space sort of negatively and the reason being is that if anybody was around here in the beginning and sort of was around here through the entire journey I think they would be much less likely to comment on this space what's sort of ironic is that cottage bakeries are very easy to explain and rationalize that there are smaller levels meaning when you're in your home's kitchen and when you're doing things that an extremely small level that's what most people can associate with cottage baking oddly though what I found when we were at that level most definitely we did not have the infrastructure in place to adequately manage baking at any scale efficiently yet I mean from every angle from keeping things clean keeping things organized takes tools and resources to do all these things and so over time we've accumulated them but again this is a very organically produced enterprise so the idea of having strips between the rooms to control temperature is awesome but has taken time to get to that stage we still had a garage door between these two spaces just a few months back so I'm tearing this this bucket right now so that my scale shows zero I've got my 80 degree water and now I'm gonna do my water measurement for this sourdough mix that I'm doing we're mixing our standard full-sized mix which is pretty common for us on a daily basis so this first measurement is 17 liters of water I'm going to take my total measurement which is a little over 35 liters of water and subtract what I have so far now I have a difference I'm gonna pour that water into my nice clean bowl and now I'm ready with the next one which is about four liters short no worries I'll add a little water into this bucket this water is coming out of the tap at the exact temperature that I want a lot of people ask about our water we have a basic water filtration system for the whole site water runs through a softener because we have a lot of hard water here and then we do have you know access to filtered water but we don't we don't use the heavily filtered RO water for the mixing we just use the lightly filtered and softened water one of the reasons is well speed amongst others I have storage tanks for the reverse osmosis water there's I think four or five gallons stored in the bakery right now of RO water we use it in our humidifiers for the for the proofing chamber we use it to drink out of the rest of the water has been treated but but not all the way down to reverse osmosis so in case you're curious about about that now I'm getting close to the rest of what I need which is a little over 18 litres there it is I've checked the weight on my flower bags and they're spot on right at a hundred pounds so I'm gonna take this flower out now this is our custom blend of flower from our local mill it's a variety of local heritage grains milled to what's considered a type eighty-five milling rate type eighty-five means that the the fifteen percent that's most coarse which is primarily brand has been sifted out leaving all parts of the wheat berry in place blant bran germ and endosperm but but the coarsest parts sifted out we then use those courses parts again in our baking process when you dust the boards that that the bread is on before it goes in the oven that bran dust if you will allows the bread to slide off the boards into the oven and not get stuck or it's to them that bran actually adheres the bottom of the loafs crust so actually we are using a whole wheat deconstructed in that way now our our flour is not 100% whole grain this particular blend is 50/50 between whole grain and white i i've talked about this in the past and it's really worth continuing the conversation on flour there's a ton of misunderstanding generally about flour of sort of propaganda like information out there making white flour out to be public enemy number one and while white flour by itself is really nothing to praise on its own nutritionally it's not now that it's nutritionally bad for us but it's sort of nutritionally lacks it lacks flavor it lacks nutrient density but it's really good for a base structure for bread so it's not that we're using white flour exclusively but we're using white flour and our blends so that we get that kind of light texture that people want from bread and also a nice predictable protein structure since the mills have a really like refined way of creating white flour that's very consistent to the baker time in and time out so by going 50-50 on our flour blends what we're doing is we're still giving our customers all parts of the wheat berry all the benefits of the nutrient density from the stone mill flour but we're creating this nice hybrid with some of the benefits of modern bread we're not removing a hundred years of progress in bread making but rather were leveraging the best of the progress in bread making our last hundred years and combining it with the historical way that breads been made which was whole-grain I can't wait to show you some actually milled grains here because I think that we're going to get to a better understanding of milling after today and in general and a contrast of whole grain and white flour so I'm going to set these aside for the recycling bin now once again we're doing the auto lease right now so this is the combination of flour and water I'm not trying to develop the gluten at all all I'm trying to do is incorporate the flour and water together and allow time to strengthen that that initial dough before I add my LaVon or prepared starter as well as my salt to it so this mix is only going to go to the time that the flour is incorporated now we didn't start this way so going back to this idea of progress I remember the first time that I learned what an auto lease was and it was actually in the first fall that we were that we were owners of a bakery so go figure I was a baker making hundreds of loaves of bread all the time every week and I had no idea what an auto lease was I had this guest come in it was a home Baker who was very well studied in the jargon of sourdough now I didn't really learn that way I'm very into I'm very into learning by the trial of of observation and and at the beginning there's something about all of this that I wanted to make my own I didn't want anybody to ever be able to later on say oh well you just bought a bakery and took it over so you're not really a baker you just were taught all the things so I'm pretty proud to say that none of our formula is none of our processes none of our recipes hardly anything remains the same I haven't touched English muffins there's still their original formula but everything else that we make is has been modified has been refined over time and that's because originally I didn't really believe in just going out and watching others make bread and mimicking and it's part of when I'm sharing our processes I'm not really keen on just throwing out formulas will I ever share our exact formulas probably however please note that it's not about the formula that I have it's more about baking daily watching observations that you can make and making changes to where you're already at you're going to have a much more rewarding experience if you bake this way so I've still got some flour present if you look at this bowl you can see that some of the flour has not finished really incorporating to me that's that means that the always isn't quite done I just wanted to scrape the sides of the bowl before continuing so I'm gonna keep it running meanwhile I'll get my hands Molina so back to progress there is no auto lease in the beginning I had this guest come in that really had studied sourdough gasoline do you auto lease like what is this I'm sort of like new cool trend and you know I was a little worried about that question because I didn't want to sound like I didn't know what I was talking about it's like nah and then I started to rationalize on something that I had no idea of course then right around that time I discovered Trevor Wilson's book on open crumb mastery and so he is talking a lot about various types of dough development amongst which auto lease was covered now mind you we were hand mixing three years ago so we would come in and we would throw all the ingredients into this giant trough that the original Baker had constructed from basically half of a barrel and a table that had sort of been built around it now we would basically pour first dry ingredients the flour and then we'd pour the wet ingredients the flour and the starter on top and mix all of that to really as far as we could so you know basically pour all these ingredients into a bowl that was essentially the size of my entire sink and we would just dig our arms in and get to mixing yet 15-20 minutes would pass by it be a full you know upper-body back workout no doubt and we had very little to no gluten development really occurring so right away as I was reading and researching because while I didn't really believe in the short video content that you found on YouTube it's why we love the type of content that we're putting out because for me when somebody puts out a three or four-minute video it can be anyone it can be an incredible Baker that has incredible wisdom but it can also be somebody that is baking their fourth or fifth loaf of bread they've had moderate success maybe they got lucky and when you filter down the content to three or four minutes you know anybody can give you three or four minutes of tips I didn't want to build a bakery based on that type of knowledge I wanted to do the hard work of learning daily and so really the the observations that you make daily they're not always so pointed a lot of it just has to do with you know small little adjustments that you observe in your dough's but what was on my mind in the early days was how can I get gluten development to happen at a decent rate to match fermentation and to match the rise of the dough so I found this to be sort of a problem intersection because what I discovered early on was that time does something really cool it develops gluten sort of passively in your dough's the problem being that when you're mixing by hand once you incorporate a Livan or starter into your dough the time that it takes for gluten to develop often is longer than the time that it takes for the bread to rise to the point that you can shape it so the intersection of those two events was a big challenge when we were mixing by hand auto lease made all the difference we did a modified all release in the beginning so we discovered about a year in through study and trial and error and reading that if you added all the ingredients - the salt that you could have sorry all the ingredients - a starter so flour water and salt you could have something that Trevor Wilson refers to as a premix a lot of the same gluten strengthening properties of an auto lease but the timing of which was diminished and slowed down so now I could take that premix and it could be done all night so what we started doing was incorporating ingredients by hand for one or two minutes just like I did in this bowl at a smaller scale so we'd line bins on a table the entire tables Worth and I would just get the water into all the bowls get the flour into all the bowls and mix for one or two minutes each each bin until it was kind of at this shaggy state and we would add salt we would let these things sit for a couple hours and would refrigerate the bins overnight and come back to them the next morning by the next morning the glutton was so well developed and we added the starter within four hours we ended up having results that are similar to our results with the mixer today so we settled on that process but the cool thing is we took our entire bakery operation which at the time was already mixing for three farmers markets on a Saturday and we were doing that all hand mixed so if this guy ever breaks granted I won't be thrilled to go backwards but in theory we can scale back down we can sort of deal with the adversity of our somewhat old technology in this in this second hand mixer breaking and not break our business along the way cuz we have done the hard work of scaling up before that so I've got this going now we have one other Otto Lee's to start and that's going to be the sandwich mix for this I'm just going to get a quick reference on on my water content I'm looking for 15 15 and a half liters roughly of water here now I have a little bit of a trick up my sleeve because we're going towards the planetary mixer now so I need colder water I stuck this bucket of water last night into my walk-in cooler which has a low temperature and so this water which I removed from there about an hour ago is at 54 degrees I'm looking for water in the mid-60s ideally so what I'm gonna do is take some of this water which is still 80 degrees and it's going on to my tared scale so that is four thousand three hundred grams or 4.3 litres I'm going to start adding this cold water to it and we're gonna get up to the ten liter mark this way mix it up I'm gonna get a temperature reading now so we're actually at 65 degrees right now which is perfect although I need to add five more liters I need two different temperatures really to do that cuz I have 55 here so it's critical that I get a little bit more eighty degree water let's see if this water is still coming out where I want it yeah it looks great right now I'm getting 78 as a reading and keep in mind that I'm going for 65 and I don't have any fancy water dosing tools you know the next level up for us is to turn to take our water lines here and connect the the end of our water lines both hot and and chilled so if I put in a chiller for from my cold water supply and I can bring the cold water temperature down then at the very end of the water lines I can put something called a water doser in which you basically tell it how much water you want it to dispense and the temperature you want it to dispense at and it does this part for you which maybe one day it's their expensive they'd just a small little box that you install on the end of your water lines I believe the pricing I found is several thousand dollars so it's not an expense that we have decided is practical yet when there's other really expensive things still to buy but one day maybe you want to have nothing else to buy or when it just becomes a point that there's too many airs happening on water temperature so for a larger bakery that has more crew members mixing it's a way to ensure consistency amongst crew members in something as important as temperature control but for us typically it's just me and one other person that's doing all the mixing and so this is just something that would be a personal luxury to me and personal luxuries are not that important when building a community business they actually really needs to be sacrificed for a little while there will be time later on in my life hopefully to slow down and have a little bit more personal luxury so now I have a perfect 65 degree water and I just need 200 more grams to get to the end and this means that by combining 65 degree water with 80 degree flower I'm actually still going to be starting this mix in the low 70s I want it to end in the low 80s and so this mixer is then being given basically a 10 degree heat up range depending on how long you mix how deeply you develop your dough in the mixer you're going to have to change your water temperature accordingly so we tend not to over develop our dough's when mixing we tend to do a lot of the work with passive time so for us 10 degrees is enough of a buffer but it's probably on the low side for planetary mixers so if I was to give any just general advice be you almost probably want to aim for your starting ingredients that average temperature to be closer that 65 range for a planetary mixer like this so this applies all the way to home bakers using a KitchenAid in their homes because those are also planetary mixers one sort of relating further to all scales of this type of mixer we can we can sort of transition this discussion into one about mixing speed so I think that when you're not baking bread regularly even if you bake other types of things regularly maybe you make whipped cream or our meringues you're used to using the higher speeds on your on your mixer set up probably more frequently and it's very tempting to shortcut the process by throwing on the high gears but I'll tell you I have not mixed bread dough more than once or so just to see what happens on a speed above 2 on these bigger machines and on the the home kitchen aids it's I think more like a 2 or 3 as well it starts to move really fast as you slide that thing over and the faster that you're rotating that dough hook the more that you're tearing at the gluten development that's happening and so you're countering your work I sort of wonder I don't know if there's any truth to this but I wonder if one of the reasons that the general public fears over mixing bread so much is because there's been a lot of people out there at their homes especially that have been tempted and have gone into higher gears the thing about developing dough is what was really taking a place is that when flour and water combine they are they're combining into this protein structure that that is gluten and that protein structure is a bond that at first strengthens into like this weds it's kind of neat to think about really think about like think about a web that just gets more and more layers with with new layers of strands say going in the opposite direction with each layer so you have this really strong and more and more resistant theme in in gluten development well so that same exact process is happening in the mixer and passively and it's definitely a bell curve so gluten will develop strength and then over time it will start to weaken and break apart well by artificially breaking the gluten strands apart with your dough hook when you go into the highest here's your incensed over mixing your dough right away this as you tear the gluten strands you're doing the same thing that's going to happen naturally twenty or thirty minutes later so there is there's a test that Mills actually use its called a Farina Graf I think I'm saying that wrong but I'm gonna go with it somebody can correct me down below in the comments but I think it's a Farina Graf test we're gonna have to talk we're gonna have to get that exact verbage from from the mill when we go but basically it's a test that measures how long you can mix a given flour at a given protein level before it begins to break apart so they're basically the way the test is run is in a mixer where the dough is just mixed together just flour and water and the dough is combined it gets strong and then it keeps going it keeps going it keeps building strength until that breaking point when finally you reach a peak in the bell curve and then everything you do thereafter is is the downward part of the bell curve where now you're starting to break that gluten apart now you don't need a mixer to experience this you can experience this passively with time where if your dough ferments too long it starts to lose its strength and so really timing is is critical as a result of all of this so now I've got my flour and water in this small mixer it's on speed one I'm gonna let it continue notice I didn't add all the flour all at once I got the mixer going for a brief moment before adding the rest and that's primarily because we really do push the capacities on our mixes I'm pretty sure that this mix is slightly over the recommended capacity for this mixer but it's so convenient because it's exactly one bag of flour and we can do it so long as we add our flour in two parts because the the overcapacity aspect is very very minimal so now that that's going I'm going to take it to the same level as the other one in speed one it's not really going to build temperature very much temperature seems to increase in dough's as they develop in structure as well so as the gluten comes together into that interlocking web and gets strength there is more friction that's produced as it's spinning in the mixing bowl and that's when it's really gaining temperature especially in this one because of the style in which this bowl operates where the entire bowl moves counter to the the dough hook the the action in this mixer is generally gentler and as a result it just has less friction on the dough as it develops which is why this one doesn't seem to build strength my other are not build strength doesn't seem to build temperature like the planetary wonders I want to clarify though that we might not be using our spiral as intended to some extent when we first got our spiral mixer it was completely broken we went out to California drove our old box truck which by the way it was like its final voyage because it was falling apart it was an auction truck and had a lot of issues but we made it all the way to California and back and we got this mixer and a couple other second hands thisis somewhat early on is about a year and a half ago now but the mixer was broken it was in a basically I guess we're restaurant equipment goes to die type place this entire control panel every every electrical fitting was fried so the way that it was intended to run is that you set a time for timer one which was also speed one you hit start and it ran in speed one and then you set another time for speed 2 which was timer 2 and so when timer 1 was exhausted timer 2 engaged well neither of these timers worked and we went to our electrical supply store and we tried to find these original components this mixer has long been discontinued by Hobart so we couldn't find original components instead we basically put in our own custom switches that we could find and so we were only able to in sort of haste I'm sure we could restore this fully but in haste we're only able to restore a single speed on this mixer I think it's the low speed which is probably one of the reasons why when we mix in here there's no temperature increase so don't take my words completely - to the nth degree because maybe if your spiral mixes faster than mine maybe you can't put water in it that's at the final dough temp but for us that's how we've modified our equipment to work and so again that probably gives you a little bit of a lesson in of itself and that's use your equipment to your own specifications to your own parameters this is really a science experiment every time you go to bake and you need to fit the scientific parameters that you need meaning the temperatures that you need not just fit what everybody else is telling you to do because their equipment might be slightly different than yours at least I don't know maybe maybe those are you watching all have been able to purchase brand-new equipment from day one and maybe you all are blessed with those type of resources for me it's been a journey of going from the same way of baking that our ancestors did where I'm pretty sure we could have literally inserted an old-time baker of the medieval age into our original bakery and they would have felt right at home all I would have to do is justify electricity just the one modern thing of electricity everything else was pretty much rudimentary well we had we we went from that level here so along the way we have not just immediately graduated to the best of the best of the best and equipment so it's time now to add the rest of our ingredients to these two mixes that we have I've only got one last thing to prep I spent some time last night actually prepping some of the extras that are going into today's mixes but I forgot one mix of flour prep so I'm going to quickly measure out this flour at right on the money at 2% Baker's percentage this is a cease I say flour this is not flour this is definitely salt everything about it is salt so 2% salt to flour and it's the one thing I didn't really have prepped for these mixes so I'm just gonna get this set this one comes out to a little over a kilo which is a lot of salt but that goes to show just how big this mix is it's now very easy to forget what a luxury it is to have a spiral mixer I I'm not gonna forget the day very easily that we put this into production because on that day I gained back a lot of my time we can mix a hundred and twenty loaves in this guy in one go and prior to that we had the spiral or the planetary which can only mix 40 so you have to do 3 times the mixing in the planetary to get to the spiral the 40 was the first size mixer in my opinion that makes any sense to use in production beyond hand mixing for a bakery if you are making less than 40 loaves at a time you can use a small mixer no question but I think that there is a huge huge benefit to mixing by hand below that level not only do I think that you will more likely scale up the amount of bread you're making if you can get yourself into a mode of mixing by hands because you won't have that barrier see a small mixer will tell you oh well I can only mix ten loaves in here so I can't really go beyond ten loaves and because we seem to have a thing about not wanting to take on more physical work than we already used to doing like it is difficult for me to conceptualize going backward to a hand mixing world so by not allowing yourself to mix on a mixer until you have mixed sizes that make sense you're going to learn a lot more about your dough you're gonna have a much better relationship with it and you'll also have a better historical context how baking was for everyone else who's ever had to bake bread other than our modern generation so also it's just faster at a certain point if I'm gonna mix bread in a 20-4 mixer which can only get maybe 12 kilos of dough 12 kilos of dough is like 15 15 or so low the amount of work I have to do to get the mixer ready and then clean up the mixer after after myself I would have already had more bread mixed by hand so I do think that there is a breakpoint that's natural and so I would not recommend going out and buying buying a $5,000 20 quart mixer for bread we have a 20 quart mixer we did not buy it new and we bought it first because it was the first thing that ever came up available on auction as far as a mixer it was more expensive on auction than our bigger mixers ironically so I spent on auction twelve hundred dollars for this twenty quart mixer whereas on auction this is before I put any money into fixing them back up but let's just use my winning bid numbers twelve hundred eight hundred eleven hundred so the most expensive mixer was the one that actually we couldn't really use for bread we we were still hand mixing after we purchased that for eight months the only thing we did in it was mix like fillings beat eggs that kind of thing it's useful for that but not really for mixing dough seriously it's just too small I'm gonna do my morning meditation I'm feeling quite good today so let's give it a smiley and get this guy going now meanwhile I've already done some of the legwork for my other mix my sandwich mix requires milk powder which is just dehydrated milk requires salt and it requires brown sugar in addition to the flour water at the end I'm also going to add water or a butter and whenever I use butter it's the last thing that goes in the mixing bowl and it goes in the mixing bowl when other things have already developed and I've got a nice strength going so I'm dropping the mixing bowl now and I've got my preps brown sugar I've got my prepped milk powder and salt I'm going to combine the three really quick and by doing this I'm breaking up some of the clumps in the brown sugar and as I break down those clumps they're going to incorporate a little bit better for me I'm always trying to prevent things from clumping it's not really all that scientific or all that advanced but it's one of those things that it's an attention to detail thing that will make a big difference in your dough's fix the things that you can fix in your mixing so we're always worried about the things that we don't know yet I do the same thing I want to know all about the intricacies of rye fermentation for instance it's an area of interest for me I have a fairly I have an okay understanding I've spent maybe maybe four or five months regularly working on rye breads and rye sourdough breads but it's a very different learning curve with new information and it's tempting to sort of feel like oh I wish I knew what I don't know I wish I could do what so-and-so does along the way there's a lot of little things that anyone could do that we often overlook but because this is such a science the little things end up mattering a whole lot so something as simple as making sure that when you incorporate all of your ingredients into your bowl they incorporate evenly and fully it's a big deal so anything you can do surrounding your mixing technique to do so is important so going through that a little there's a baker in in the bay area of San Francisco I believe it's Los Gatos there's a Michelin star restaurant called Man race' and they own a bakery next door of a mad race of bread the head Baker there at least before her name is avery and I saw her give a lecture on sourdough Donuts and because the the dough was heavily enriched with sugar and butter she sort of meticulously went through her mixing technique which stuck with me ever since a lot of it had to do with basically taking your core ingredients flour and water and making sure you have development before adding every bit of inclusion so anything above flour and water she considered inclusion and she had a very particular way of only incorporating the rest in parts before introducing the before introducing more and and in doing so making sure that the dough strength was was not affected because keep in mind that when you add things outside of flour and water you are changing the structure of that dough you're changing its makeup so different ingredients strengthen dough whereas different ingredients weak in dough some ingredients grab moisture into dough some ingredients some ingredients have completely different effects so one of the best tips I can provide is a really really simple one it's when you're adding new ingredients into your dough add them in smaller amounts and be sure that they don't get stuck on the sides and clumb before finishing your mixes and this is really as simple as approaching this with a little bit more patience and observation so I'm watching as I'm putting the stuff in and I'm checking to see whether it's going to clump up on the sides I see that it did brown sugars kind of notorious for it which is why I'm being careful to begin with most of that first bit did incorporate so I'm adding little more now meanwhile I've got this guy going and you can see that the dough hook is starting to grab that dough and stretch it I'm looking in the center there as I try to judge when to cut the mix here in reality I could probably already cut it but what I'm trying to do is develop just enough strength now [Music] there's probably going to be a huge amount of debate between Baker's as to what exact decree you want to mix your dough to it's yet another variable if you have all the variables surrounding it controlled meaning you have your temperatures under control you've got your timings under control you've got your fermentation of your sourdough starter under control then you can start to play around with this variable and see okay well if I mix a little bit more what's the effect on the rest of the process so we have a particular range that we have liked that produces good results for us and I'm still a couple minutes away meanwhile I can add more now this is brown sugar that got clumped and it's probably because the sugars just a little bit older than I want so I'm just gonna use my fingers to break that those pieces and I've been able to do that so that way it will smooth back out in the dough so I'm somebody that really is motivated by change by development by progress but there's something that we've been discussing more and more well really we've been discussing this from the from the very beginning prior to proof when I was doing I guess more of a traditional type of business is technology-based so a software base it seems to be more trendy than than a baking business and Amanda was working in a corporate office we often discussed in the beginning days well what yeah we often have this idea well business is just something that you scale and you make the most that you can in revenue and the most profit and that's what a good business is I don't really have that view anymore especially after going through three seasons of growth so proof is roughly twice the size it was a year ago right now and a year ago is roughly twice the size than it was a year before which was roughly twice the size that it was the year before so three times that we've gone through that and that's that's an insane exponential curve to live through it sounds all peachy from the outside cuz it just sounds like Oh more money the expression of more money more problems is true especially when you've lived through it there's no such thing as growth without expenditure and if you're growing too fast actually Jeff Bezos recently talked about this in some media article I was reading about how he feels like Amazon is stuck in this perpetual loop of having to invest its profits into growth and whether that's true or not is debatable I don't want to get into a debate on the profitability of something like Amazon but I can firsthand from a tiny tiny micro bakery say that growth is expensive and it can be crippling in and of itself so you can outgrow your own resources if you grow too fast then the resources that you're accumulating are wasteful so you're buying resources that then you're outgrowing before they reach their end-of-life and that's where your profitability really starts to be called into question so you know an example of this is suppose that this was a brand new piece of machinery which we do have some like that dough sheeter over there across the room was a brand new piece of a machinery when we bought it and so the price tag was above 10 thousand dollars so it can only do what it can do and we're nowhere near its capacity right now but if we keep growing at twice at a doubling every year well it's not going to take very long to outgrow that and the thing is the the usable lifetime for that dough sheeter is probably over a decade so if I grow it in two or three years now my ten twelve thousand dollar investment can't be spread over the 12-year period now it's spread over a three-year period and if I divide it by the amount of product that I've run through that sheeter well now my profit margins have really lowered because of what growth so it's really important to gauge growth smartly and for us we're also looking at it from another layer entirely and saying well will growth eventually lead to a change in the overall quality of what we do and the overall message that we bring out to the world well growth prevent people from learning to bake more because of more automation what's the appropriate amount of automation that protects quality and consistency but also empowers human beings to learn this craft of baking I think that all of those things have different limits and different answers and for us we've reached a really interesting level here in in this particular setup and now we're sort of transitioning to doing things like our entire business used to be surrounded by Saturdays so everything we did was Saturday 95% of our revenue was Saturday we did produce all week but just much lesser amounts the pandemic sort of changed that for us where we started to roll out a delivery service and now we are slowly catching up to Saturday on other days we're nowhere near that yet but this year growth is not going to be doubling again it's actually just going to be balancing and sort of hedging Saturday with other days so that if it rains on Saturday we don't lose all the money for the week that we need to make the idea of rain which is rare here in the desert Southwest is such a stressful one because if it rains on Saturday morning during farmers market hours we could see 40% of our weekly revenue wash up just because of that now that might not mean anything other than a number but keep in mind that we have several family member families that we support from this bakery so the idea of losing 40% of our revenue on a week along with all the waste because we can't really just suddenly stop producing because of rain we can't always accurately forecast the rain either it's stressful so by being all spread out to multiple days which is what we're doing now that's kind of our next phase we're trying to prevent outgrowing this space for a little while at least for us right now that little while is is years in length we want to be able to pay off our investments we want to be able to profit a little bit from our investments and then sort of reevaluate and to us this is what growing a business and a sustainable and historically normal way is all about I think that I think that as we see the the crash and expansion of our macro economy we ought to start considering what is it like to build a business that stands the test of time I'm pretty passionate about this I'm probably more passion about this than about bread production itself the idea of not falling into the trap of the boom and bust cycle not just building things based on momentum and then seeing them crash and burn I I look at kind of the food industry in particular right now and say so much the industry is built upon this notion of borrowing capital from rich organizations or property management organizations or landlords spending that borrowed capital and building your entire business based on a lease structure where all your margins are kind of that razor thin amount at the end there's really very little equity that's being built up in your infrastructure over time and so when we do have these global shakeups people are talking about their the restaurant industry disappearing now we're talking about 80% of restaurants potentially not recovering based on this global pandemic that we're seeing and I would argue that has much less to do with the talent and skill and good food that's in the restaurant industry and all to do with the way in which the industry is built if restaurants were built the way that I imagine family restaurants were built 5060 years ago you'd have families doing more of an organic build-up like we're doing but there's really no regulation right now that provides a pathway from small pop-up to brick and mortar restaurant in fact that middle ground is where it gets iffy if we focused on building pathways through that middle ground because there is definitely a pathway for a food industry to pop up like we do have farmers markets that's typically where food based businesses are are started it's through pop-up events but I think that we need to spend some time as we think about rebuilding now into providing more regulatory pathways for people to be able to safely and legally produce in the middle so that they can build their own equity in their infrastructure and equipment at least they can start buying their kitchen equipment before they go into a brick-and-mortar can you imagine the way this math works so again I've said this before and I'm going to say it again typically people that are independently wealthy do not go into the food industry and I think that the reason being is not that hard to understand people who work in the food industry work 12 16-hour days on their feet if you already have what you need financially to pay your bills the only reason you would do that is just pure passion and I'm sure there's a lot of that out there I'm not trying to say that that no rich person has become a great restaurateur but I'm trying to say that the industry probably is more marked by scrappy younger poorer people generally that are trying to work their way to something and as a result I find it to be very predatory that these people end up putting their own homes as collateral in order to borrow money to buy equipment which is also put up as collateral ultimately for the spaces that they lease and then these leases become these crippling bills where if they have a seasonally driven bit business part of the year they're not even paying their bills alright I spend some time around the state because I love to travel in normal times but Flagstaff or northern Arizona in general was like this where there's this really big season for tourism and for going out and then there's a slow season and I just imagine all these restaurants in the winter losing money in order to try to make up lost ground all summer and how much better it would be if on the whole the system more operators actually owned their real estate and owned their equipment but we can't get there if we're impatient we can't get there if we expect our strong owner-operators to scale up into beautiful modernized contemporary looking brick-and-mortar spaces from day one so next time you judge a book by its cover and you go into like this incredible let's say an incredible you still see a lot more mom-and-pop food operators that are immigrants so if if I go into say the Asian cuisine you'll find these kind of scrappy food businesses where you can tell that they actually own their stuff and the way you can tell is because it's not all that pretty sometimes you might have the restaurant that has cookie cutter tables and cookie cutter chairs it it's not hole in the wall but it has amazing food because the kitchen is passionate and you know what those are the kitchens that are probably going to survive because they own their stuff so if they don't make money this month or next month they don't have these massive debts to pay so I'm a real proponent for building slow that's what we're doing here building slow it seems like we've gone fast and in and we've gone fast because we haven't pushed the brakes enough proof has been something that the community has wanted we're very thankful for that we're thankful for just the momentum that we've gotten and the outpouring of support that we have my job from the beginning has been pushing the brakes an adequate amount at the right pace and I've never done a good job because I don't like pushing the brakes so then I find myself dealing with more than we can take on and so I've gone through many events in here where we've overstressed our crew we've overstressed ourselves I've been in regular fights with Amanda as we try to restore equilibrium and balance so for us this year is all about that it's all about sort of looking at last year's data trying to learn from it trying to figure out how we can get through this coming holiday season without getting so overwhelmed how we can do a better job keeping maintenance routines for our stuff so that our stuff doesn't break down so we're looking at things that are not really all that valued in the business world right now we're looking at how can we how can we reach sustainable maintenance and not just hyper growth because it's not true that you can just sustain and hyper growth forever and ever and ever I think that if we doubled again this coming season that there would be at least a very high chance that Amanda and/or I hit the point of burnout because we've teetered at that edge a number of times and have had to go through periods of sort of forced slowdown ourselves relying more on our crew just to recover sort of mentally

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 148,857

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bread, sourdough bakery, make bread, microbakery, local bakery, proof bread, proof bakery

Id: OZgzcTbAY78

Length: 66min 15sec (3975 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020