Park View kosher supermarket in Golders Green has a 17 tray, 'Crystal', reach-in retarder-prover for recovering yeast-raised bake-off products, which they buy direct from a plant bakery in Israel. On a busy day Park View will sell 400 of their speciality challa breads . All these and a variety of other specialist products, such as Jerusalem bagels and chocolate filled rogalach, go through their DRP, which is fitted with an easy to use 'Combination' control panel, equipped with a colour progress display that indicates graphically what part of the retard/prove process the programme is in. The Crystal gives the very compact bakery additional proving capacity to the below counter model they have at point of sale. Conveniently positioned next to the freezer in the supermarkets store, the Crystal DRP is just 737mm wide.
Roger Davis' DTS Bakery in Greenwich also runs a roll through DRP equipped with capacity for three racks and equipped with a 'Dough Master' panel that automatically controls the retarding to proofing cycles dependent on the product that is loaded. His speciality is an oven bottom loaf that is made from refined, laminated dough and called a 'mongoose'. This West Indian recipe, if stored properly, retains its doughy texture for up to nine days. It requires a very long proof time and special bake at 380 degrees F. The DRP is ideal for the mongoose's extended proof, which can be done overnight and is stepped at steady intervals, giving Roger and his assistant an optimum finished proof at just the right time in the morning, when his deck oven has achieved a steady high temperature.
The range of retarder-provers that MONO is able to supply is as wide as the applications they are used for. Take Bath Bakery, which supplies the famous Georgian city's many hotels and catering outlets with a wide range of breads including many speciality lines requested by foreign tourists.
Unusually for an independent business, Bath Bakery's bread production represents 35% of their total output. Their staff would not be able to cope with the production of 83 different bread lines, with early morning delivery deadlines, if it were not for the controlled, computerised dough conditioning available through their three, roll through dough retarder-provers (DRPs). When the first two bakers arrive at 10pm each night they take out six of the nine loaded racks and feed the product straight into the bakery's pre-heated rack and deck ovens. These first batches include eight different breads, wholemeal rolls, buns, croissants, French sticks and a special French stick called a 'Zille' which is so shaped that it will snap easily into four pieces after baking. "This", stated Martin Brooke, "gives us a tremendous leap forward in production at the start of a shift and also right through the day, as we are also able to hold products back in the retarder-prover if oven capacity is not available at any time." Martin reckons that if they did not have the retarder-provers he would need an extra three skilled staff to produce and manage the volume and variety of work that his ten staff are currently achieving.
