Pakpao Nano Bakery Part 2 — The Work Studio and the Oven
As described in Part 1 of this series, I was motivated to make the most of my time in the Neutral Zone, reflecting on what’s important in my life but also bringing joy to others through bread. Coming out of baking class, I knew I wanted to bake in larger quantities, but I didn’t immediately imagine that I would be turning my condo into a nano bakery. I was convinced there could not be enough space to make things work, and I really didn’t want to ruin the aesthetic of my home with bakery gear. So I first tried to scale up using my existing set up with the Challenger Pans.
The actual act of baking bread is interesting because you’re looking to maximize the heat transfer into the loaf while preventing the crust from hardening before the “oven spring” completes. Most home bakers resort to cast iron or steel or thick stones for the heat transfer aspect, and then kludge together solutions for steam generation. One of the simpler solutions is throwing ice into a rip roaring hot cast iron vessel and then trapping that steam with a lid. Others include pouring boiling water onto lava rocks and other similarly non-ideal solutions that can result in burned forearms and gorgeous crusts.
With these solutions, you’re generally limited to 1–2 loaves being baked at a time. And if you need to bake more than 2, you have to wait for your heat transfer device to re-heat. For the Challenger Pans, it would take 45 minutes between bakes to re-heat, and then the 35–40 minutes to bake, so an additional 80 minutes per 2 loaves. This was not ideal, and I am an impatient person, so it didn’t take long before I started to investigate bread ovens and other spaces to build out my bakery.
Modernist Bread devotes a whole book of their tome to techniques and equipment. When I originally received the book set from a friend who was moving away (the wonderful Eric Rivera, chef extraordinaire), I glossed through the pages never imagining I would need anything other than my trusty Wolf (and later, my Anova Precision steam oven). This time, with a better understanding of bread and the heat transfer necessary to create lofty loaves, I revisited the book and learned about what makes different types of ovens so fantastic for different use cases. However, there was the matter of where it would go given my condo’s limited square footage.
As luck would have it, our condo building has Work Studios, and a large one became available for sale. I was thrilled, and I got to work designing the space and imagining a separate office for when I found the right “next job” for myself. It didn’t have running water, but I was so excited that I took the time to layout my ideal floorplan, down to the colorful rug and a space for DanDan. I even sourced a “portable sink” that would allow me to have 6 gallons of water for washing hands and equipment. I chatted with friends nonstop about it online (much to their annoyance), but I was finally having fun again.
Once I set my mind to something, I tend to overlook / workaround the pitfalls (which my friend Leigh lovingly chided me about over lunch later). This was not a good solution for a variety of reasons, the least of which was the LACK OF RUNNING WATER! So fortunately, the work studio didn’t work out, but my creative juices were flowing. I felt more alive and excited than I had in months at this point, and I really wanted to get serious about building the nano bakery. I also had the support of my neighbors who would be the recipients of the increased output of bread. :)
Andrew, seeing how excited I was imagining the work studio and subsequently disappointed when it fell through, encouraged me to consider how we could make something work in our condo itself. Could we move a table into the living space and shove an oven into the utility room? It was a ridiculous concept, but the more I thought about it, the more it grew on me. It gave the added benefit of being with my family while I’m baking (which is a long process, even if most of it is hands-off).
So back to the oven. It was the item that would immediately unlock scale and efficiency and reduce ergonomic challenges and risk of burns. A true commercial deck oven was out of the question (too big and crazy electrical requirements) and frankly overkill for wanting to do 8–10 loaves at a time.
But while imagining the work studio bakery, I discovered the Rackmaster RM2020 and knew I had to have it. Campbell Macfarlane is a UK-based industrial appliance engineer and a hobbyist sourdough baker, and during the pandemic, he designed a specialty oven for home bakers / microbakeries. It solved a lot of the issues from the prior oven of choice for hobbyist bakers (Rofco ovens), and didn’t have questionable electronics (SimplyOven has some interesting answers to how they operationalize their IoT updates…). I had to learn about how to get power to the oven given its 230V/13A NEMA 6–20 requirements. I thought I could tap into my dryer’s power, so I scheduled an electrican to come out and visit.
This is another instance of where I am grateful for the community! The electrician Jayson (also an avid cook and baker) agreed that using my dryer’s power was a good solution, and instead of charging me an arm and a leg and doing some invasive work, we found some off-the-shelf components that worked like a charm. David Justus, another former colleague — this time from Sunrun — tapped into his Electrician Apprentice skills and found an in-line 20 amp breaker to protect my new oven. And, with that, the prerequisites were cleared!
Next was getting the oven delivered and installed, which I was confident we could do on our own (overly confident, perhaps?)
The delivery process was super smooth. Pleasant Hill Grain was awesome to work with, and they sent me several emails with instructions around prerequisites (2" of room on each side of the oven, NEMA6–20 outlet that has 15A/230V, etc) and also instructions on how to determine if the shipper mishandled/tipped the package and how to look for damage.
PHG used FedEx Freight. I got a tracking number on a Monday, and FedEx called me on Thursday to set up a time for delivery (4 hour window). I was the last delivery of the day on Monday, but the delivery driver was super nice and helpful. We have a loading dock area in our condo building, so I had it dropped in the middle of the dock that I had reserved for assembly.
Now the hard part… I had never received anything in a wooden crate before, so it took some googling / YouTubing of how to use a crowbar embarrassingly enough. With a little bit of elbow grease, an electric screwdriver, and a crowbar, we got it open. Ta-da, the oven was there in all its glory.
From there, we unwrapped the plastic that held the door shut and removed the 50 lb stone shelves (without damaging them or our fingers!). Even with the shelves removed, we still had to hoist 220 lbs of oven up 26" to get it onto its crate.
We used these furniture movers to get the oven up high enough to get the cart underneath it, but I was too short to even make that work. My husband is 5'10", and I am 5'2" and I was getting pulled under the oven each time we stood up. After three hours, we realized that it wasn’t going to work (yes, we should have realized it sooner, lol). We managed to get the oven and cart into our home so it wasn’t in the loading dock, but we needed help!
Again, I am fortunate enough to have an amazing community of people to rely on. Our building’s engineer Ryan came over, strapped in, and we got the oven safely onto its cart within 10 minutes.
From there, we rolled it into the utility room, and turned it on to break it in. Over the course of 6 hours, I turned the temperature up 50C to allow any moisture in the stones to slowly evaporate (there is a risk of cracking the stones if you crank the temp up to 300C on the first bake and there’s moisture trapped in them).
Since receiving the oven, I’ve baked a few different items (country loaves, baguettes, shokupan, pizza!), and there’s a learning curve for sure vs. using a convection oven + dutch oven. But I love it! The results are spectacular, and there’s a WhatsApp community (some overlap with the Perfect Loaf discord community), and everyone is lovely and helpful. I also enjoy making time lapse videos of the bakes, which I couldn’t do before :)
I could have never imagined that I would have semi-industrial equipment in my little condo, but here we are! The cart with wheels make it easy to move for when I need to access items on the shelves on either side of it, and honestly, the look of it has grown on me. It’s so well-insulated that the room it’s in doesn’t get much hotter than the rest of the house.
With the oven out of the way, I needed a bigger table with better ergonomics. And in Part 3, we’ll meet some more friends in my community and learn about woodworking!
