Wednesday, October 7, 2009

not missing home yet

Robotics!! Freakin' robotics in the bakery. Incredible, here at the trade fair in Germany there is amazing stuff. Roll machines running hundreds of rolls a minute, automatically panning them, and robotic arms placing the tray in a rack. Very little manual involvement.

Seems pretzel type items are very popular here. I believe they will be the next big thing back home. We get several calls weekly, people looking for pretzel rolls and buns. Just before I left we made a load of "Lauger pretzels". We needed a picture for our website. We are doing Oktoberfest in our store the week of the 19th of October. Matt put together our opening page announcing that. We made the pretzels on a Wedenesday, and we sold them at our Aville market. Pretty incredible. We had one lady come back three times for pretzels. I think they will do well during our Oktoberfest week. Probably need to keep making them after that. During my time here at the trade fair, I found two vendors that sell pretzel equipment. The first one had just what I wanted. A little tabletop unit that will dip six pretzels at a time in the lye solution. Downside, they don't sell to the U.S. or Canada. The second vendor, will ship to us, but only sells big, expensive machines that are far to big for our bakery. I'm kinda back at square one. I'm sure I can get our local welder guy to build what I want. I'll keep ya posted.

Well it's dinner time. Headin' back to the Altstadt, old city, here in Dusseldorf. Wild busy place. Lots of nitelife. It's in a part of the city that's left from before the war. Narrow streets with no form of pattern. Probably occupies one square mile. Food here is really good. But the beer is better!

Aufwiedersehn.

3 Comments:

Blogger Laminatrix said...

If you're gonna do pretzels, you have to have mustard, and I don't mean that bright yellow crap, either. Or pretzel rolls, with ham, cheese, good mustard . . . mmmmmm.

Oktoberfest beer is really interesting; just went to a Beer School about it last week and got to try a bunch of different ones. The beer is made in March and then stored over the summer (used to be you couldn't brew in the summer because it was too hot and it would get moldy or go bad); more malted barley flavor, not as much hops.

October 7, 2009 at 3:36 PM  
Blogger Jory Downer said...

we'll try and get some mustard packets. gotta agree, gotta be the brown stuff. pretzels in germany were good, very good. the beer in belgium was awesome! it is different than the beer in germany. what is it that makes the belgium beer a little, almost sweet?

bakery goods in belgium, in a word, embarrassing. not sure how they sleep at night.

October 13, 2009 at 6:41 AM  
Blogger Laminatrix said...

What kind of beer did you have in Belgium? It might have been the yeast strain; it might have been the grain (wheat instead of barley); maybe a combination. If it was a lambic, the lambics typically don't add yeast to the beer; instead, they use the yeast in the air for their fermentation (how'd you like to control THAT product?!), and they age it a very long time.

October 13, 2009 at 11:02 AM  

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