Conventional baking in the kitchen – Renato Bosco

“In these complex times, having help from technology means having concrete support that is always active and ready”.

After famous chefs from our #RoadToSmartBaking community such as Franco Aliberti, Igor Macchia and Aurora Mazzucchelli, the new protagonist for the in-depth feature on baking is Renato Bosco. A leading personality in the world of leavened products, and a member of CotturaFutura®, Moretti Forni’s permanent research incubator, Renato Bosco contributed to the creation of serieX, the first and only oven in the world equipped with Inclusive™ Technology, as he tells us in this interview:

You have been using serieS for some time, and now serieX, what differences have you noticed?
I use both serieS and serieX for my production and I have found that they have the exact same baking performance. The only difference is in the management: with serieX the handling is simplified to the maximum. It is the oven that dictates the baking times and with adaptive timers and deck, the professional no longer has to worry about controlling the product, but always gets a perfect result.
Surely serieX is the evolution, for me it is something extraordinary, in a really complex moment characterised by the difficulty of finding collaborators in pizzerias, having a help from technology means having a concrete support always active and always ready.
In fact, serieX being equipped with Inclusive™ Technology allows any operator, even non-specialised ones, to bake every product perfectly and easily, simplifying the management and organisation of work.

How do you use serieX in your activity?
Having contributed to the development of the oven project with Moretti Forni’s R&D Department – even though I normally delegate the baking phase to my team – with serieX I have paid particular attention to these moments, to fully grasp all the nuances, including management, so that I can assess and analyse baking in every aspect: from bakery to pizzeria, to pastry and gastronomy, both for some of my products and for all the toppings on my pizzas. I am fully satisfied with everything I bake.
Exploring baking possibilities is also important for me to collect reliable data ‘on the field’ and then share it with the team in a detailed report.

Is there a dish you prefer to bake only with serieX?
All the vegetables that we do inside the pizzeria nowadays are done with serieX as the temperature rises, to take advantage of all the heat that is already in the deck we cook aubergines, courgettes, peppers, all the veggies that have a longer cooking time, that need a lot of energy. This is just one of many examples of course.
With the residual heat of the oven, I bake ‘in caduta’ – aka with the temperature lowering – those foods which need a constant but not too high temperature, such as confit tomatoes for my tomato powder.
The thing that really gives me satisfaction is the fact that with serieX I can really ‘switch off my brain’ because it takes care of everything on its own: it ensures the correct baking area as it always tells me precisely where and when to bake. When one of the zones of the deck is ready serieX ‘calls’ me with a ring and this function is really one of the most incredible things. The heat is always optimal and its adaptive deck uses only the energy it needs, which is not wasted even when opening the door, because if you really want to check the product being baked, you can look in the mirrors at the back and see the colour of the product right away.
The oven has the extraordinary ability to keep the heat inside for such a long time that you can bake many products, like the cherry tomatoes mentioned earlier, without even turning it on. In my opinion this is a great advantage, because when we talk about saving energy and we manage to cook perfectly just with the residual heat, it means we have hit the jackpot.

So even in the preparation of the line, we can say that serieX is a tool that supports you…
When we beta tested it, both at MorettiLAB and in my pizzeria, we did some reasoning: we started with lower temperatures to bake, for example, brioches at 160/170 °C and then made a progress, i.e., arriving at midday with Roman-style pizza or the Double Crunch®, exploiting all the heat 100% thanks to the baking system with the various cycles.

We have often reflected together on how the quality of a deck oven increases the shelf-life of leavened products: have you also found this aspect in gastronomy?
Yes, quality heat not only improves the shelf-life of the product, which is a tangible fact because we see that the product actually preserves better, and also the texture is totally different from convection or rotor baking. Deck baking heat makes the product soft for a very long time, probably this is because the caramelisation occurs in a more precise and punctual way, slowly, both on the surface and inside the product, where heat is directly involved, giving a more pleasant flavour that with convection and rotor systems we cannot have.

Do you think that having a compact deck oven can make a difference in a fine dining kitchen?
I am lucky enough to have a lot of friends who are cooks, chefs, etc. By definition they are always looking for equipment that is a real technological collaborator, compact, precise and has its own consistency. At Identità Golose, for example, I spoke with a chef who was enthusiastic about the S50 series because it is the right size that fits everywhere, it remains within the energy consumption sought by the category, being actually better… it really is a very important support!
It is also very interesting for its versatility, as it is possible to bake gastronomy and leavened products at the same time, thanks to the stackable decks, even in cramped places, ensuring a versatility that was hard to achieve.
serieS helps you starting in the morning. For example, this chef told me: “I bake bread twice a day, one in the morning for the customers who have lunch at the restaurant to give a product with the freshness and temperature I want, and then in the evening for dinner service”. He has already seen further, and he knows that the technological help of this oven is super interesting!