Restaurant Breads

While it is not mandatory to make your own bread, it isn’t impossible to make it either. It all depends on what you are capable of doing with the environment you have at your disposal. Some bread, such as brioche, can (and should) be baked in a convection oven, but most other breads should not. Sourdough, for example, should only be baked in a hearth oven for the best results. You can rig a static oven to act as a hearth, but there is only so much bread you can bake in a static oven. (For an example on how to completely bypass a hearth oven to bake sourdough, see the recipe.) Therefore, the ovens that you have to bake with are truly what will determine your bread-baking capacity. Other equipment, such as electric mixers (many restaurants are equipped with 12- or 20-qt electric mixers) and workbenches, are easier to come by. Remember that bread has been made for the past 5000 years without much more than a pair of hands and a heat source.