You started off baking cookies, muffins, bread and other bakery products in your residential oven back in the day. Now, you are more successful than ever and have upgraded your business as well as your bakery equipment – hopefully! More than likely, you are baking all your baked goods in a rack oven, possibly even in a gas rack oven. You and your bakery team are also baking more than ever; more cookies, more muffins, more bread. You have added bagels, cakes, pies, rolls and buns to your menu. This also means… more flour! With more flour comes lots of flour dust and problems associated with it.

When flour gets in your rack oven burner, your rack oven will not burn properly, or even create burner failure. It also can create soot build-up in the heat exchanger. This can cause several issues, from decreasing the efficiency of your rack oven to premature failure of your heat exchanger. Your heat exchanger expands and contracts with different levels of heat, so keeping it clean should be a priority. With all you have invested, make the time and invest proper maintenance procedures for your bakery equipment.

How often do I need to have my rack oven cleaned and maintained?

A scratch bakery, or an “artisan” bakery, will need to maintain their rack oven more often as they make their own dough, producing a lot more flour. A bake off bakery makes their baked goods from prepared dough, decreasing the amount of flour in-house affecting their rack oven. A good idea on how often you should have your rack oven burner cleaned depends on how often and how much you bake. Your professional service team can assess your situation in more detail, but a good estimate would be approximately every 3-6 months for scratch bakeries, and up to once a year for bake off bakeries.

Signs your gas rack oven needs professional cleaning and maintenance:

• Your rack oven is not burning properly
• When you shut the door, soot falls out of the hood
• A flame is shooting out of the side holes
• The flame is more yellow than blue (should be more blue)
• A visual of the air intake burner will be full of flour

You counted on your business to “rise to the top”, but what you might have not accounted for was the equipment maintenance schedule to be such a priority – as it should! Keeping your bakery equipment in check will be an all-around winning outcome for all parties, every time – we promise.

A gas rack oven, although it’s capable to handle everything from baked products to deli and restaurant items is incredible, what is not so wonderful, but just as important, is keeping the parts to the gas rack oven clean.

The good news is Horizon Equipment’s Service and Parts Team knows just the remedy and we welcome an email or phone call anytime to talk rack ovens, burners, heat exchangers and more. We make it easy by providing maintenance tips to optimize the performance of your equipment to keep your bakery business running.

For more information on the maintenance of your oven rack or other bakery equipment, contact us at (800) 394-4674 or visit us on the web at www.horizonequipment.com.