Artisanal

Artisanal:  (of a product, especially food or drink) made in a traditional or non-mechanized way.

As time passes and eventually I produce larger quantities and fulfill more orders, I will always have one thing in mind.  And that is this:  everything will always be done in a way that hearkens to the spirit of "artisanship".  

It means producing foods in small batches.  It means producing foods with more human hands and less mechanization.  It means subtle differences in the same foods from one day to the next.  

Someone once told me they thought that the reason homemade foods are better than those that are mass-produced are the tiny imperfections and inconsistencies within a food that result from the the way the food is prepared, mixed, baked, or cooked, by hand in a home kitchen.  I think there is a lot of validity to that idea.

Whatever it is that makes homemade foods better, though, can only result from actually making it the way homemade foods are made.  At least that's what I think.  

I like the idea of a shop with lots of normal mixers instead of big commercial/industrial-sized mixers.  I can seem them all humming away mixing numerous small batches of many foods and people buzzing about checking on them one by one.

I don't even like the idea of doubling a recipe.  Doubling a recipe does not always yield the same result as two separate single batches.  I can discuss more on that later as I've done many tests of that premise.

For me, though, the idea of making food traditionally in small batches with lots of human intervention is what I will always prefer.  Certainly that means that if I were to open up a shop, my overhead costs from the extra staffing required would not be in the best business-tradition, but it would be certainly in the best homemade tradition.  And that's the kind of food I want to make.