Last weekend Antoine Guerlain and I finally got a chance to stop by and visit Noah Elbers at Orchard Hill Breadworks in Alsted, NH. We had been working in Richmond, NH building a 4' x 6' hearth commercial oven for a new bakery operation there run by Dan Greenspan.
Noah is a very knowledgeable baker and has been a huge supporter of our ovens over the last few years. He bakes in a massive LLopis oven, which is a manufacturer from Barcelona, Spain. Their ovens are famous for the round, rotating hearths. It was great to meet Noah and see a Llopis in action both for the first time.
I'd begun to contemplate using heat exchangers in the exhaust channels of bake ovens some time last fall, and then recently designed a system to do so in an oven I designed for Second Street Bistro in Livingston, MT. When I met Noah, I could see he was already way ahead of me!
In this video you'll hear Noah talking about his system. There is a lot of energy going "up the stacks" in most bake ovens, and the heat exchangers make for an increase to overall efficiency without a doubt. His 700 gallon tank was sitting at 180 degrees F, ready for use in the domestic system.
It was nice to watch Noah at work. Here he's in the middle of an 800 loaf bake night, cruising along, a few loaves at a time off the deck of the rotating LLopis hearth.
