Friday, February 8, 2008

Baked Cheesecakes

When we moved the restaurant, we had to go through a lot of steps to get the propane up and running again. During that process, there were provincial inspectors involved to make sure that all of the pipes and regulators and pressures were according to regular standards. However, despite all of our propane infrastructure being properly set up, we had major problems with our propane range for the first couple weeks of opening. We were getting a lot of yellow flame at the top of our burner tips, for the first time, and our ovens seemed to be extremely hot, and were burning all of our cheesecakes. We tried turning the temperatures down, but that didn't really seem to help.

We finally put a high temperature thermometer into the ovens after several days of experimenting, to see exactly how hot they were running. With the oven set at 250 Celcius, the thermometer read somewhere well over 400 degrees. With this scientific confirmation of our estimate that the oven was too hot, we eventually discovered that the regulator on the back of the stove was broken. We ordered a new one.

The new regulator arrived earlier this week, and now the stove is only running about fifty degrees hotter than before. That's still not perfect, but it's good enough for us to make it work. Amanda Purdy started in on the cheesecakes with a couple of successful test runs earlier in the week, and yesterday she was able to go into normal production. We make cheesecakes on an almost daily basis, so some days, she has to make as many as half a dozen cheesecakes, to get us through the busiest nights. Our customers are pretty happy that we have cheesecakes available again, finally.