I sometimes read in cookbooks or see references on international cooking shows about places where private homes don’t normally have ovens, so cooks will bring casseroles, etc. to the local baker to bake for them in the bakery oven.
Never having lived anywhere where ovens in private homes were not the norm, I am curious: does one have to pay the baker for the use of the oven? Is it just a quid pro quo that the baker will perform this service with the understanding that home cooks will be buying other things from the bakery? If you have personal experience with this practice, please state where, how large a town, etc.
(I was considering this to be more a cultural anthropology question than a cooking question, but mods, if you think this is more appropriate for Café Society, please go ahead and move it.)
I believe there are still places where this happens today. I recall a popular TV chef (I think it might have been Jamie Oliver) doing this in a show where the format was visiting different countries to showcase good local stuff. I don’t recall many of the details - it might have been somewhere in North Africa - locals would (reportedly) take a tallish clay pot to the market and fill it with an assortment of items, then seal it with a flour and water dough and take it to a communal cooking stove - the pot would be plunged into a big heap of embers, alongside other pots, and would be retrieved later.
I’m afraid I don’t recall the details of payment for the cooking service either. Sorry.
In the stories I have heard about people doing this in ‘olden times’ in England, there was often a context that the people asking were very, very poor, and the person allowing them to use the cooking fire (sometimes a blacksmith, not a baker) would be doing so as an act of charity.
Ten seconds to set the pot on the coals, ten more to remove it - big money, indeed. I’d guess a very small per-pot payment, or a neighborly, goodwill gesture. Besides, this might be a culture with very little hard cash circulating, so: barter! Baker gets a scoop off the top 'o the pot…
Good memory. It was, in fact, Jamie Oliver in Marrakesh. He mentioned off-hand paying the guy 50p or a quid, but I don’t know whether he meant that literally. The embers were at the local public baths and their primary purpose is to keep the water hot.
The episode is here and all the communal cooking bits are in the first few minutes.
I assume the price for cooking in the baker’s oven would be a sort of rent. Effectively, you were renting a small patch of the oven for an hour or two. Like renting a hotel room or anything else that costs something to maintain and prepare, and has limited capacity, but your use doesn’t directly incur much cost.
In Spain people usually have ovens, but you may still be able to rent a baker’s for something very large (I used to join my BFF’s grandmother when we were kids, to bake enough bread and goodies for a family of about 90 for a month) or to rent their services to bake something to order. In either case, it’s just like any other service: cash or credit card.
I asked this question at a local Denny’s tonight (I go there to read the paper, drink coffee and bother the waitresses [everybody has to have a hobby]) and the manager told me they wouldn’t do that as it would violate health code regulations and for liability reasons: My pot roast was overdone! My sushi was underdone! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!
Don’t know about commercial wholesale bakeries.
You couldn’t afford to do this for free, because fuel costs money. We’re kind of spoiled nowadays in the age of fossil fuels, but it wasn’t that long ago that gathering fuel for cooking was one of humanity’s major tasks.
My in-laws in Korea did not have in-home ovens until about 2015. Before then, they never baked. Breads and cakes were always purchased from the local bakery (there are many). Now that they have ovens–they still never bake. But it gives me a chance to bake something for them when I visit. Little cakes, since you can only fit one 25-cm pan in it at a time.
You also have the loss of cooking space may be lost revenue, or longer harder work hours. You might need a separate or larger oven so some capital investment here too, along with additional fuel for it. More then just labor.
One may incure loss of revenue as well as people bring their own instead of buying from you.
Also these places might be owner operated and hourly wages may not be the correct measure.
Lost of factors other then hourly salary, which seems the smallest part of the mix.
I don’t quite get it- are you saying that if you’re the baker and you’re employing a guy at say… $8/hr, you’re going to use that as part of your cost calculation to determine how much to charge your customers?
Big surprise there… labor is usually a significant part of the cost of running a business.
You’d have to calculate more than that- fuel cost, the cost of the building (including taxes, lease, A/C, some portion of the water, etc…), and if you wanted to get serious, you’d need to calculate and include how much you could have made during that time if you’d have used that oven to bake something you could sell for profit(opportunity cost- what **kanicbird **is talking about in his second line above). That would set your cost, which is basically your floor value for price- if you don’t make your cost back, you’re literally paying to operate.
Assuming you think you can make your cost back, the next question is how much can you actually charge for use of the oven? Most of that would be dependent on what the customers’ other options are for cooking (substitutes), and if there’s competition, what are they charging? Are there ways to distinguish your oven from theirs? (better heat control, larger, etc…) How many customers do you think you can reliably get in?
Ideally what you want is the combination of price and volume that makes the most money- high price isn’t always where it’s at.
The places I know you can hire, you can do so outside of their normal working hours: it’s not “lost revenue”, it’s “supplemental revenue” during what would otherwise be null-revenue times. With BFF’s grandma, we’d only see the baker when we went in and later when we went by her house to return the keys. I’ve seen other places which will offer both that kind of service (in which case you pretty much only see the owner when she makes sure you know how to operate her over safely, and toddles off) and “assisted service” where a baker will stay with you and guide you when needed (different from lessons; it’s you who decides what to do and how, and if you want to make liver-flavored muffins the baker will just silently count to one million).
For the pure-rent case, salaries are not even involved. And none of the businesses which offer this kind of service have a special oven for this: the oven you’re renting is the one they normally use.
A lot of the answers in this thread are speculation from people who have never been within 500 miles of a rentable oven.
You’re selling the service of baking, e.g, a cake which, if you think about it, is not fundamentally different from selling the service of icing a cake. You take material provided by your customer, you subject it to a process, and you return it in an enhanced condition. There’s a cost to providing the service - the premises, the equipment, the fuel, the labour - and you need to calculate that and then add a profit margin and, presto! you have a price.
It’s going to make a difference whether you think your core business is baking and selling on your own account, and baking for others is simply an add-on service which you provide for goodwill or marketing benefit and which you charge at marginal cost, or whether you see yourself as providing a range of services, of which baking for others is just one, and you spread your cost base proportionately across all your services. That’s up to you.
The word for the fee to use an oven is furnage (Latin: fornagium)
Some things to note - sometimes, some places, in the Middle Ages, it would be the lord who paid the baker for some oven time, and his serfs got to use it. More likely, it was the lord’s oven, and he charged peasants and bakers to use it. Or just charged bakers for the right to build one. Ovens could be quite tightly regulated and profitable. Here’s a Google book search on Spanish ovens, for instance.
Also, peasants didn’t necessarily have cash money, so may have paid in kind - a portion of their baked goods, or just grain.
My dad’s biological mother was co-owner of the local bakery in her small Kansas town in the late 1930’s and WWII. I’m told that it wasn’t uncommon for her to allow townsfolk to come in and use her ovens for special events or for emergencies. No rent was charged and the arrangements were all rather informal. I suspect it mostly offered as a courtesy for some of her friends and regular customers.
But it gives me a chance to bake something for them when I visit. Little cakes, since you can only fit one 25-cm pan in it at a time.