How to Sequence Your Bake Day: A Guide to Oven Workflow and Planning

By: Alisha Fuller

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Have you ever stood in front of a hot oven with different products ready to go, trying to figure out which one goes first? One product is starting to overproof. Another needs the oven hotter than what you just set it to. And it feels like you’re playing catch-up before the first load even goes in.

This guide will help you plan your bake day so that it flows smoothly without any major delays or unforeseen setbacks. While it references the Simply Bread Oven, these sequencing principles apply to any oven where multiple products are being baked throughout the day.

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Sequencing by temperature and bake time

Each bake requires a certain temperature and bake time, and these are typically fairly rigid (although not completely, some recipes can be tweaked without sacrificing results). Additionally, because the thick stones retain heat, it’s much easier to raise the temperature of the oven than it is to lower it (see our article on heat transfer for more details). With this in mind, this is how we’d encourage you to sequence your bakes:

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• Identify compatible temperatures: Organize your bakes by temperature requirements, and plan to bake items with similar temperatures in sequence OR at the same time. If you plan to bake two or more items at the same time, it’s also important to think about bake duration and steam usage. Removing one item from the oven while another still bakes can disrupt the temperature and steam density within the oven.
  
• Move from lower to higher temperatures: Once you’ve grouped your bakes by compatible temperature, you can order them from lower temperature bakes to higher. Again, this is most efficient since it takes much longer for the stones to cool down.
  

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Accounting for recovery and on-going prep work

Now that you have a base order for your bake day, it’s time to think through some other key variables. These variables shouldn’t change the order of your bakes, but instead tell you how much time and effort you should account for at each step of the process. 

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• Account for recovery time: Dough saps energy from the stones of your oven as it bakes, and it takes time to replenish that stored thermal energy to the stones. The larger the dough mass, the more energy is sapped, and the longer it takes to replenish. It’s important to test and log recovery durations ahead of time, this way you know how much time to allot yourself for recovery on the official bake day.
  
• Account for prep work: A bake day consists of multiple bakes, and likely, multiple types of bakes. Each bake may have different final proofing and shaping requirements, and some are more involved than others. Make sure to think through the amount of prep work for each item being baked, and how that may overlap with other bakes going on in the background. Try to avoid doing high-intensity prep work while a finicky or fragile bake is in the oven requiring your attention. Instead, try to align intense prep work with set-it-and-forget-it bakes.

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Conclusion

The difference between a chaotic bake day and a smooth one often comes down to what happens before the oven is even hot. Bake sequencing is about thinking ahead so you're not guessing in the moment.

Spend a few minutes before each bake day to organize your bakes by temperature requirement, and order them from lower to higher temperature bakes. Once you've done that, make sure to pad your schedule with buffers for oven recovery and miscellaneous prep work that needs to be done.

It can seem like a lot, but these steps can help to make it feel a lot more manageable and a lot less stressful. After a few bake days using this approach, the sequence will become second nature. You'll glance at your product list and instantly see how the day should flow.