Dave Smith wrote:
> Curly Sue wrote
>
> > Of course people can bake for fun and/or challenge. I just don't
> > agree with the statement that almost anything baked is better at home
> > and it's just a matter of following a recipe. I would hope that a
> > baker with years of experience who makes their living at it, would do
> > better than someone who gets a recipe and tries something once.
>
> I think that the challenge for professional bakers is to mass produce their
> goods on a scale that is profitable and maintain high standards of
> quality. Once the process becomes mechanized the quality goes downhill.
> Good baking is a time consuming process that works well at home, but
> quality almost always slips when you start mass producing the stuff.

The last thing to slip with mass produced baked goods is quality... if
the quality of mass produced baked goods slipped one iota it would
become compost.
You're making the leap to comparing the neighborhood bakery with the
national bakery, something you obviously know nothing about.

Neighborhood bakeries are not into mass production, most everything is
done by hand the same as one would at home, just on larger scale.
Yeah, they have stand mixers too but much larger... they produce a
thousand muffins exactly the same way a dozen is produced at home...
well not really, at home most folks scoop the batter with some kind of
spoon, it's slow, messy, laborious, and not very consistant...
professinal bakers scoop batter with their hands, it's very fast, no
mess, extremely consistant, and labor is practically effortless, a
professional baker can fill twelve dozen muffins and be onto the next
gross while you're still futzing with your first dozen... you won't
find rubber spatulas in a bakery, they use the scrapers located at the
ends of their arms... really very few hand tools/gadgets in a bakery,
most every operation is done with hands. The most important and
highest paid position in a neighborhood bakery is the finisher, and
that is all hand work, decorating is done one at a time, no mass
production (to date no one has figured out how to decorate nearly as
well by machine). And they can definitly bake infinitely better
quality products at any neighborhood bakery but as I said in a previous
post they bake at a level appropriate to the economics of the
neighborhood, no sense preparing costly gastronomical delights for
display purposes only, just so poor slobs like you can peer in the
window and drool over what they can't afford.

Of course you know all about the virtues of mass produced, you typical
Twinkie maven.

Mass production baked goods are at a national level, where volume runs
into the millions, where the most critical goal is *consistancy*, not
quality, a very different baking operation... those who do the actual
baking have no baking skills whatsoever, they're minimum wage
production workers... everything is automated, even the finishing work
is done robotically, essentially the only labor needed is 24/7 fork
lift operators and janitorial service. The relatively few tool room
employees who maintain the machinery probably command the highest wages
of anyone in the plant, they're highly skilled mechanics but I doubt
many have ever even baked a box cake. There will be a few QC people
too, they measure, they taste, they don't bake. Those who develop the
recipes are located in a relatively small test kitchen, could even be
on the other coast, because the nationals will maintain several
stratigically located production centers, to keep distribution costs
down, and each regional production center will most usually prepare a
somewhat different version, to satisify the different tastes in the
areas it serves. The test kitchen employees are not professional
bakers, they wouldn't know where to begin in a neighborhood bakery...
they are food scientists, typically chemists, they develop the mass
produced packaged products you find on stupidmarket shelves, they are
NOT professional bakers. I don't consider Twinkies, Ring Dings, Oreos,
Chips Ahoy, and the rest quality baked goods, maybe you do but I call
that dreck.

Dave Smith, quit bluffing... you havent a clue about bakeries... Wonder
bread is mass produced, probably your benchmark.

Sheldon