Australian bakery oven specialist, AutoBake has recently upgraded and evolved its long-established Serpentine oven with a view to offering bakers around the world unrivalled flexibility.   

 

 The company’s marketing director, Amanda Hicks, pointed to a definite industry trend towards ‘fine tuning of the baking process’ and has taken this into consideration with the new evolved Serpentine equipment.   

 

 According to Hicks, “Whether it’s reducing the total bake time, or tailoring the baking profile to achieve a particular quality of finish, ovens need to have an enormous degree of inherent flexibility”. Bearing this in mind, she said that hybrid ovens combining both convection and radiant heating mediums have begun to emerge on the market.   

 

 A hybrid Serpentine oven was one of the major attractions on the AutoBake stand at IBA 2006 in Munich, Germany. It offers both convection and radiant heat plus top and bottom entry for the oven’s vertical S-shaped transport mechanism, not forgetting a ‘steam zone’ and the capacity for stone hearth baking surfaces.   

 

 Hicks said that the Serpentine can be customised for any baking requirement and that, compared to an equivalent tunnel oven it has a footprint which is one tenth of the size.   

 

 User friendly, touch-screen management and control systems complete the picture of AutoBake’s new Serpentine configuration.