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My blog really sucks this month, I can't put cohesive sentences together anymore. Sorry about that, fair readers.

In exciting news, we got our new scale at work, and now the process of labelling baked goods is more precise and streamlined. If only we could get the baking to that point. We have two old 4 door deck ovens (basically pizza ovens). I'm pushing 40 (holy crap, that's the first time I've had that thought!) and those ovens are older than I am. Earlier this year we got a 2 door convection oven. I had been asking for a rack oven with steam for many years, but we got the convection oven to implement the crappy ones we already had. I had never used a convection oven before this, and I told them that. We got it anyway. I was told that it would be good for pies and cookies, but not for yeast-raised stuff, which is my department. A convection oven, for those who don't know, has a fan in it to blow the hot air around, baking everything evenly as well as faster than a regular oven. It baked evenly for awhile, but now, not so much. One of the problems with the deck ovens is that we have to turn almost everything around halfway through baking, which gets to be a large pain in the ass (and my back too, the bottom doors are about 10 inches off the floor). The convection oven was supposed to correct this, but lately we have started turning pans around in there too. Lovely.

When we first got it, we had to figure out how to use it, because the manual was not really forthcoming in this department. We figured out the pies first, they come really nice now. We had trouble with the cookies and bar cookies (brownies et. al.), and people would complain about the cookies that were baked in the convection oven. So now, we don't do any cookies at all in there. I experimented with some of the yeast raised stuff, and the bread in the loaf pans comes out great, as does the cinnamon rolls. I bake the pastries and danish in there too. All in all, I think the convection oven was a bad idea. If I had known more about it or worked with one before, I could have told them, but I was assured that it would be great. I learned after the oven came in that many convection ovens have a switch where you could turn off the fan. This would be great if ours had that, because we bake a lot of cookies, but we can only bake 4 pans at a time in the regular ovens. There are only 2 doors where the cookies come out right, even when messing with the temperature. It's very strange.

Thanksgiving is almost here, so the convection ovens will be very busy with pies, so we'll get our money's worth out of them then. But come January, when it gets slow, we won't be using it very much. Some days it probably won't be worth it to turn it on.