Bakeries

Bread and pizza want different ovens. A pizza oven runs hot and recovers fast between 90-second bakes. A bread oven holds a steady, slowly falling temperature for hours so a loaf can set its crust, expand, and finish through without the floor spiking or crashing.

Mass, and why it changes everything

Our bakery build carries a 100 mm hearth rather than the 65 mm we use for pizza, and doubles the ceramic fibre and rockwool. It takes around three hours to charge from cold and then holds usable heat for the best part of a day.

That extra mass is the whole point. When forty loaves go onto the floor at once, a thin hearth loses temperature and the bake suffers. A heavy one carries the load without dropping.

Working the heat curve

A single firing gives you more than one product. Bread at 280 to 300 °C, then roasts as it falls through 220 °C, then slow cooking and drying below that. Bakeries that plan the day around the curve get three distinct uses from one load of wood.

That is where the fuel economics turn decisively in favour of a brick oven over a deck oven, and it is worth designing the production schedule around rather than treating as a bonus. The running-cost arithmetic is here.

Steam

For crusty hearth breads and sourdough, steam injection makes a real difference to oven spring and crust. For tinned and enriched breads it matters far less.

It has to be built in at construction — it cannot be retrofitted sensibly — so it is a decision to make before we start rather than after.

Loading and shape

A round dome floor suits pizza and fights bread tins. Where tray and tin loading is the priority, a barrel vault gives a rectangular floor with consistent roof height that takes standard gastronorm pans without improvised supports.

If you bake bread and also serve pizza, that shape is usually the better compromise — you give up a few seconds on the Neapolitan bake and gain a floor you can actually load.

Curing a heavy oven

The larger the mass, the more water is bound into it and the longer it takes to leave. A 2.6-tonne bakery oven needs a full three days at the low end of the curing schedule before it goes anywhere near working temperature.

We run those fires ourselves before handover. Rushing them cracks hearths, and a cracked hearth in a bakery oven is not a small repair.