Skip to main content

How To Set Up A Bakery in the Philippines

First of a series. 
Knowing how to bake.

I need more than a page to explain the nitty gritty on setting up your own bakery, in fact, in the next few months I will be re-opening mine.

So instead of lecturing you guys on what to do i will try my best to tell you my preparations for my bakery. Just to make it simple.

Siempre, dapat marunong kang mag bake. In all my years of teaching baking, I started 2001), every month I get students who own bakeries but never bothered to take up baking. Just like that, they would set up a bakery by hiring a baker.

Fine, as long as you can trust the baker right? Uh....wrong. That baker will not stay with you forever. Another downside is that 100% of the time, he owns the recipes your bakery is selling. You have no idea how much sugar the pandesal has, or how much egg yolks he uses in the Ensaimada so you can do proper inventory and food costing. Nada. 

If he tells you he has a headache and doesn't feel like coming to work today, he doesn't work today. That's it. No bread. You don't know how to bake, so the bakery is close for today.

If you know how to bake, then at least you can get a helper and train him or her, pay less than a master baker asks for and OWN YOUR BREAD. You decide how much sugar the pandesal has, how much egg yolks the Ensaimada has and best of all, you know how much each piece costs. 

Which is what I will do come March when my baking school/bakery re-opens. 

We live in a small subdivision so I don't expect a large volume of sales. My target is to offer it online, take orders and the display case is just that. If residents want to order, I will accept orders but won't be opening the bakery store like the rest of the bakeries which is usually from 4 am till 8 pm for safety reasons. Maybe when Covid disappears, I will but not yet as of now. I plan to open maybe at 5 am till about 5 pm or as long as supplies lasts.

So the bulk of my target client is online, I get to schedule the production as orders come in since there are not too many people around us anyway. This is also because i will do some online teaching as well, and open my hands on class to a limited number of students only. My class used to be for 5 to 6 people, but now it will be only good for 2 to 3 max per session.

I plan to hire a lady baker, someone who wants to learn and be a future Panadera. I will only hire an experienced baker if we can't handle the orders, but for a start, kami na lang muna. Hopefully, interested siya sa baking and willing matuto because if not, it will never work. Baking breads is something you cannot force on anyone. That someone has to love it, the mixing and the waiting. Not just the eating. Ang damiko ng  na meet na people who always say "ang hirap pala nito, bibili na lang ako". Patay!

If he or she has this same attitude, like we New Yorkers say it, forget about it. 

So that's at the top of my list and since I already know how to bake then that gets crossed out. Write it on your to do list. 

Till next....mahaba po ito so please keep me on your calendar. I am excited too.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3rd Class Flour, What's It All About

For starters i cannot make this Hard Monay if i did not bring any 3rd class flour or soft weak flour to New York. Once i ran out of 3rd class and tried Cake Flour, it turned bad, do not even think of using All Purpose, it will be soft but not chewy as this one made with yes, 3rd class indeed. So third class is hard to find here in the US if you will use that term. You have to say or look for soft wheat flour, that's it, not hard wheat flour, not cake or All purpose but something in between these two. It is easy to find in the Phil., just ask your local bakery suppliers and they know it is Tercera. Tercera is not for bread, bakers use it basically for cookies, cakes and other pastries, but we bakers know how to create bread recipes using part of this flour with the bread flour or hard wheat flour. It makes a softer version of any of your fave breads, with a cheaper price tag. Plus if i own a bakery, i get to use the third class for my cakes and cookies, lowering my food cos
19 comments
Read more

Cutting Pandesal, Baston Style

So how do we really do the Baston style "singkit" cut? First start with a slightly stiff dough, if your dough does not have eggs or eggyolks, a hydration of around 55% is ideal. I have seen bakers use less water, but that will make your Pandesal too dry and dense after 1 day or so so try to keep it slightly on the soft side, but not too sticky. Why? If you use a sticky dough for the Baston style cut, the dough will spread and will have a flat look rather than a rounded shape we are all familiar with. In Tagalog, "lalapad" ang dough so medyo flat ung Pandesal. So after you mix the dough, divide it into 2 to 4 portions if you are mixing  kilogram. Experienced bakers divide their dough into 500 gram portions, i do mine the same way. Flatten the dough, focusing more on the length and not on the height. The height of the dough should be around 2 to 3 inches only. Next, fold the dough while pinching the edges making sure the dough surface
3 comments
Read more

Kape at Pandesal

When someone emailed me about Kape at Pandesal, i suddenly felt home sick. Just these two words. Dipping Pandesal in coffee. Who got this phenomenon or practice started? We all know the colonial Spanish era and Gregorio Zaide mentioned our fondness for idling around in the history books (Juan Tamad and siesta), but for breakfast? Who wants to jump up and down when you wake up? This is the answer. Dunking the warm, crispy Pandesal into hot, steaming coffee. How did this thing start? Who invented it? What made the Pinoys dunk their Pandesal? Maybe the Pandesal in those days are rock hard, or maybe it is one way to sweeten the bread. Baka may alamat dito. Is it because the Pandesal is salty in those days? After all, sal means salt right? The Italians love to dunk their Biscotti in coffee, but the Biscotti deserves it. Seriously, Biscottis if not dunked in coffee can give you a free tooth extraction. But the Pandesal? Okay to some, it cools down the coffee. Don't tell me they
Post a Comment
Read more