Essential Bakery Equipment List For Your Shop

A bakery is a dreamy place where the delightful smells of warm and puffy loaves of bread, pies, cookies, and cupcakes are blended. When you enter to buy bread, you will get lost in the muchness of flavors and colors of various delicious and fresh bread, pastries, and desserts.

To create a bakery that is able to produce fresh baking every day and operate successfully, you need to have high-quality bakery equipment on the top of the list. Here is the necessary bakery equipment list we prepared for you.

1. Bakery Ovens

You need to be careful while choosing any bakery equipment, but even more when choosing an oven for your bakery since ovens are the heart of your business. Several ovens are convenient for baking, and you can decide considering what you will bake and the size of your business. You can also take a look at our blog post, a guide for commercial ovens, about all types of ovens.)

a. Deck Oven

Deck ovens are one of the essential bakery equipment. Commercial deck ovens are designed for baking bread, and they are the best for artisan bread. The dough is placed on the stone or ceramic deck of the oven, and it uses both conductive and radiant heat to bake. The conductive heat transfers from deck to dough directly, and radiant heat is the hot air that circulates throughout the cooking chamber and makes the bread cook further and faster. With the multiple decks, it allows you to bake many food items at once. The deck ovens, which have a steam injection mechanism, create crisp and brown bread crust while making inside soft and puffy.

b. Convection Oven

Convection ovens cook by using fans that circulate heated air throughout the chamber. The consistent heat it creates provides evenly cooked food and speeds up the process. This fast cooking time may not be suitable for the foods that need to rise and cook slowly.

c. Rack Oven

A rack oven is for baking bread and pastries, especially for high-volume operations. It uses a heating source at the bottom of the chamber to bake food by rotating it around a central shaft above the heat. You place your items on the metal or stone shelves linked to the central shaft, and it bakes evenly by spinning the shaft. Rack ovens take up a lot of room in the kitchen but provide high production.

d. Standard Oven

Standard ovens are ideal for small businesses since they are the cheapest commercial ovens but most efficient. The radiant heat created by a fixed heating source is dispersed, and it is what bakes and cooks all the pastries and bread.

e. Conveyor Oven

You can bake a vast amount of food in a shorter time by using a conveyor oven. With the simple usage of this bakery equipment, staff can efficiently operate it without any knowledge. You just put the item on the belt, and it moves the food through the oven, cooking it with the hot air blows. And you get the evenly baked food from the other side of the oven. Being programmable is their most significant advantage. You choose the program, and it sets the proper temperature and time for the food. But because of the opening size, everything may not fit inside, and food may dry out because of the jets of hot air.

2. Bakery Refrigeration

Since the dairy products and ingredients of delicious pastries, cakes, and other bakery food, such as milk, egg, butter, etc., should be kept at safe temperatures, refrigerators and freezers are also bakery equipment you need. You can choose one commercial refrigeration below for your bakery, depending on your kitchen’s space and capacity.

a. Reach-in Refrigerator

A reach-in refrigerator is a perfect piece of bakery equipment for any volume operations because of its diverse sizes and capacity. While the smallest reach-in refrigerator has only one door, the biggest can have three doors opening up to three compartments. They all have similar depths, which lets you effortlessly reach inside. The compressor can be mounted to the top or bottom of the refrigerator, and reach-ins come with one-piece or half solid, glass, or combined door models. (you can also check out our buying guide for reach-in refrigeration for further information.)

b. Blast Chiller

A blast chiller is for cooling down the baked food before keeping them in the refrigerator or freezer. This valuable piece of bakery equipment can reduce the temperature of food items in a bit of time. They typically have three chilling cycles; the first one chills softly, proper for delicate food items.

A fast blowing of cool air is used for large volume foods, which composes the second cycle. In the third cycle, cold air as low as -40° F is used to shock-freeze the items in less than 4 hours and is generally used to maintain the smooth texture of ice creams. (If you don’t know where to start, you can read our article about blast chillers, functional and healthy commercial bakery refrigeration.)

c. Commercial Freezer

In need of lower temperatures than a refrigerator can provide, commercial freezers will be required. Freezing is a perfect way to keep the food safe for a long time. They come in various sizes and layouts such as undercounter, the best for businesses that do not have much space, walk-in, and reach-in, ideal for large volume operations, and upright, which is the most popular one with multiple shelves for easy access.

d. Worktop Refrigerator

Worktop refrigerators are the best way of using limited space efficiently for small bakeries. This versatile piece of bakery equipment provides a working area on top while keeping the food at safe temperatures inside. You can store your products on the shelves it has, and it may have doors, drawers, or a combination of two.

3. Bakery Food Preparation Equipment

Preparation is one of the significant steps in the way of making bakery food. From dough prepping and proofing machines to food processors, several bakery equipments will be required for preparation.

a.  Bakery Mixers

A commercial mixer is one of the primary bakery equipment to mix and prepare amazing bakery goods in perfect consistency.  Density, consistency, and smoothness are the crucial parts of baking. A commercial mixer can be a countertop, standing, or floor model, and it will mix the doughs, batters, and creams to perfection no matter the size.

–  Dough Mixer

A dough mixer is one of the bakery equipment designed to make dense mixtures, ideal for preparing bread and pizza dough. Dough mixers usually come with a single agitator, a spiral or s-shaped hook, and they are perfect for mixing a massive amount of dough at a time. They have a stationary shaft, and the bowl rotates around the agitator, which provides a more consistent dough.

–  Commercial Mixer

A heavy-duty commercial mixer is a keystone bakery equipment, and various ingredients should be blended accurately to create the perfect mix, resulting in delightful baked goods. Depending on the type of product you are preparing, they are equipped with a shaft to attach different agitators. Most of the mixers have three agitators; dough hooks for thick doughs such as bread doughs, a beater for medium consistency doughs such as cake batters, and a whisk for light blends such as frostings or whipped creams.

b.  Dough Sheeter

Dough rolling is not easy: Catching the right thickness and evenness is not always possible. Dough sheeter is bakery equipment that eliminates the need to roll dough manually, requiring too much physical force and labor. It produces evenly rolled dough with a perfect smoothness with the rollers it has. There are one and two rolled and reversible units for flattening the dough to the proper thickness. You can change the space between the rollers to adjust the thickness of the dough.

c.  Dough Divider

A dough divider is a piece of bakery equipment for cutting the dough much faster than manual cutting, saving your time and labor. With the help of a hydraulic or mechanical press, the blades are cutting the dough, which you lay on the plate under the blades. And with the built-in rounders, roll the cut pieces of dough into small dough balls. You may customize the size of the rounded dough by varying the time spent rounding and the volume of the pressure.

d.  Proofing Cabinet

A proofing cabinet is a piece of necessary bakery equipment, as the dough of most bakery food which includes yeast, like bread and donuts, must be left to rise before baking. A proofing cabinet provides the required environment for dough, so the yeast can ideally rise by keeping the temperatures between 75° F and 85° F, which are the proper temperatures for the dough to rise. And they maintain the humidity level with the steam injection or water pan system they feature, which lets the dough rise more.

e. Bread Slicer

Here is the final part of the marvelous process of making bread. It is time to have them sliced after getting hot and crispy crusted loaves of bread out of the oven! You may quickly and practically cut the bread loaves into several regular slices just in a single move with the sharp blades a bread slicer has. The crumb trays make this piece of bakery equipment way easier to clean; all you need is to slice the warm bread and bag to serve freshly to customers. One point to keep in mind, the bread must cool down a bit before slicing; otherwise, it won’t be cut properly.

f. Food Processor

We can count food processors as necessary bakery equipment, which will provide pureed or chopped food items that can be used as fillings or stuffings for pies and bread. There are two types of it; the first is the batch bowl model processor, consisting of an integrated bowl and a shaft that the blades attached. Choose the correct attachment, and cut anything in any shape and size you want. When the ingredients are cut, you need to stop the processor and get the processed food.

In the other model, the continuous feed processor, you don’t need to stop the processor from taking the processed items. It continually cuts the things that you put on one end and pours them into a container in the other end. This makes this piece of bakery equipment ideal for high-volume operations.

4. Bakery Storage Equipment

After baking various cakes, cookies, bread, desserts, and everything is done, what about storing them? The storage for ingredients and dry goods is required as well to get everything organized. We listed a group of bakery storage equipment below to give you an idea.

a.  Bakery Display Cases

A bakery display case is a perfect way to display the bakery food items to attract customers while simultaneously keeping them at safe temperatures. There are refrigerated, non-refrigerated, and heated ones, based on your need. You may keep your frosted cakes, and cupcakes cool without drying them out with a refrigerated one. The non-refrigerated display cases are ideal for bread, and the heated ones are for keeping the food warm until serving.

b. Dry storage Cases

Dry storage such as ingredient bins and food boxes are needed for dry food items like flour, salt, sugar, grains or beans, to properly and safely store and keep them. And to orderly store the heavy boxes and bags to optimize your space, you can use dunnage racks as functional bakery equipment.

c.  Delivery Carts

When it comes to moving heavy things like ingredient bags or boxes, utility and delivery carts are the required bakery equipment items. With the casters they have, you can easily transfer anything anywhere. Some may have adjustable height legs, making the transferring process much more manageable.

d.  Bakery Racks and Tables

Moving sheet pans is demanding work; especially in busy times, it can cause accidents in limited spaces. You may move lots of pans from one piece of equipment to the other at once using proper bakery equipment designed for this purpose, such as oven racks.

A durable and solid table is needed in many processes of making bakery food, such as kneading, rolling, cutting, or decorating. The bakery tables are usually made of stainless steel, which is corrosion-resistant and easy to clean.

To Sum Up

A bakery has palatable baking for everyone, from birthday cakes to warm bread, cookies, and muffins. So a bakery with fresh baked goods will never fail. The proper bakery supplies will assist you in running every process flawlessly, from preparing to holding, baking, and serving. Whether you start to run a bakery shop from scratch or expand your business to meet the increasing demands, it is not hard when you have the right bakery equipment.