Suggestions for making time to learn

The best way to make a career out of baking is to make baking your career. 

But I know that's not very helpful. Unless you have the luxury of just switching jobs (and baking is not typically a high paying job) it's going to be difficult to put in those hours. Now, if you have the ability to start your own business then that's a different matter. It's a big risk, but many successful bakers opened their own bakery with very little experience. Nothing teaches you as well as learning on the job when money is at stake.

Additionally, I've seen below average bakers succeed wildly with their sub par bread because they were excellent at running a business. And I've seen very skilled bakers forced to close up shop after a year or two because their business skills didn't quite match their baking skills.

If you're as busy at it sounds, it's gonna be difficult finding the time to bake. But in my experience, it seems if something's important to us then we'll always find a way. 

So with all that said, the power of refrigeration should allow you to find a schedule that allows you to bake more than once or twice a week. The actual labor of bread baking doesn't take much time -- a half-hour to mix your dough, 15 minutes for pre-rounding and shaping, a couple minutes to score and load into the oven, 10-15 minutes for clean up.

Everything else is just waiting. Waiting for the bread to bulk ferment, waiting for the final loaf to proof, waiting for it to bake in the oven.

Many of the bakers here lead very busy lives, but they've found a way to fit bread baking into their schedules. I'm sure you'll get some good advice on baking schedules using retardation in the fridge (I don't typically retard my loaves so I can't offer much advice here). 

But I do know exactly what you're going through. When I discovered bread baking I was already set on a different career path, but I just couldn't get baking out of my mind. It wasn't long before I quit my job and took a position at a bakery so I could learn by baking 8+ hours a day. However, I was young with little responsibility and I understand that's not gonna work for everyone. 

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. Good luck!

Trevor

So... My advice ... don't do it ... ;-)

Timing is everything. I'm fortunate in that I'm self employed, so I make up the sourdough levian at about 3pm for the next days bake, then later in the evening I mix/knead the dough, let it snooze overnight then scale/shape/prove/bake.

And on to consistency and practice...

So make up enough dough for 3-4 smallish loaves. Here a 400g loaf is a sort of standard. For that, I scale to 515g of dough which bakes to a very generous 450g loaf. So if you make up 2Kg of dough, you can easily divide that into 4 in the morning, pre-shape into a boule, then shape into batard, boule, etc. This gives you 4 practices at shaping for one lot of dough. When I'm doing the pre-shape thing, I usually have a full bench of dough lined up which takes a good 10 minutes or so to prepare, so by the time I've done that, the first one I did has had it's 10 minutes bench-rest so I can go straight into the shaping and into the banneton/couche/etc. for proofing.

What you can also do... Just make up a batch of (say) 65% hydration dough - flour, salt, water, yeast. Let it ferment for half an hour, then divide and shape. If not happy, knead it all together, throw it in the fridge for half an hour, then repeat. Keep doing this until you feel you have the knack.

Another thing I did a few years ago was to go on a basic bread making course. Even though I was happy with my skills, seeing someone else do it at close quarters, then leaning their ways was very helpful. It gave me more confidence in handling dough if nothing else.

Cheers,

-Gordon

I'm only a home baker but I do have experience advising small business start-ups in a wide variety of industries including a few food-related although none involving baking. Due to this background, your post brought to mind a few things that a would-be entrepreneur should figure out very early on. 

How high a priority is this? There's a broad spectrum from "gee, that seems like a neat idea" to being completely driven. If you're at or near the former end, follow Gordon's advice and don't do it. At least not now. You can re-assess later if your attitude changes. 

What exactly do you want to do? 

What do you need to learn and/or do in order to do this? Note that this question involves more than just baking knowledge. For example, what kinds of bread are likely to sell well in your area? What laws and regulations apply to the way you want to operate? How much ballpark financial investment will be necessary, and where will this money come from?

Note that this is far from a complete list of questions, and also that I'm not putting them forward to try to discourage you. It's just that I've seen far too many people who don't appreciate that starting a small business and giving it a solid chance to succeed is nearly as hard or as wide-ranging as it actually is. I've also seen a lot who didn't understand what Trevor pointed out, that just producing a good product doesn't guarantee success. 

bscruggs,   I would work on your baking skills first and foremost, and in your "free" time,  look for community college courses on accounting, business, etc.  I think your goal of being ready to go in a few years is reasonable.  If you don't have one,  my first investment would be a cooler  ( a wine cooler may do ) and a notebook.  The cooler will let you pause the development of the dough -  many of us home bakers split up mixing and S & F of  sourdough into an hour or two one night, then into a cooler for bulk ferment, the next night forming, then back into the cooler for final proof, then into the oven the third night for baking.   I suggest you focus on one or two recipes and make them over and over till you have them down pat, then add a few more, and so on.  A few months from now you should be able to turn out loaves on a fairly consistent basis, and then its off to the farmer's market, or the local coop, or other market where you can try to sell your loaves.  A local restaurant is not a terrible idea, but my guess is that your margins will be much lower.   Once you have been able to make a few sales, you should pretty quickly get an idea of what sells and what doesn't.  Understand that it is much easier to satisfy the demand of the consumer than to change their expectations.  There are many here that find that a loaf is perfect when covered in nearly burnt areas, in your neck of the woods, that might not sell.  I just returned from a trip out of the country, and heard rave reviews of a bakery, when we got there, there were a few people in line, and the lady in front of us said she had been going there everyday and their loaves were out of this world, and we read tons of reviews about how great the place was.  If I took photos of what they called ciabatta,  I don't think anyone on FL would guess that was what was being attempted.  I bought a boule that was well shaped, but ended up completely devoid of flavor, the same was true for their "whole wheat"  loaf.   So in that community, a baker can do quite well selling very bland bread, and it is quite possible that if you tried to sell true artisan bread, they wouldn't like the taste.  Again, the primary issue in being a commercial baker is being able to consistently produce a similar tasting product day in and day out - once you can do that, you can start to build up a name for yourself.