Bread baking tour of New York City

We enjoyed some great bread during our visit to Manhattan. Our first stop was at the Sullivan Street Bakery. After sampling some really great bread we were thrilled to have none other than Jim Lahey, the founder and bread book author, arrive and talk with us for a while. What a treat!It was a definite "hole in the wall" place with just a few seats along the front windows, and bread displayed behind a glass counter. It would have been interesting to see the "behind the scenes" but the bakery wasn't organized for that.
Even though the rest of the group was dragged along for the ride, they all seemed to enjoy the bread!On Saturday evening we went to the Chelsea Market and visited Amy's Bread.
The entire bakery is visible from the main hallway of the market. The oven section is quite impressive, with multi-level ovens for loaves of bread.This is a circular oven. The bread or rolls are loaded into the oven on metal racks, which revolve during the baking time. The baked loaves are cooling on racks to the right.
Dough that is rising is on racks right next to loaves and rolls that are cooling.

The baker is transferring loaves from the rising boards to the mechanism that slides the loaves into the oven. About a dozen loaves at a time were loaded onto the mechanism and loaded into the oven by extending the arm of the mechanism.

The baker, with his insulated gloves ready, checks on the progress of baking before removing the rack of rolls from the circular oven.
We enjoyed watching a team of four bakers splitting the batches of dough into equal sizes and then shaping the loaves.
The leader would cut a loaf of dough and then weigh it. If it was too little he'd cut some more and add it, if too much he'd cut some off with his dough knife and return it to the big batch. The containers in the background hold dough ready to be formed into loaves.
I didn't completely understand this, but with batches of whole wheat dough, they'd dump a batch into what appeared to be a vacuum machine.
They'd add some flour, close the lid, pressure was applied, flour would fly out of all the gaps, then the lid would be cracked open and the dough would have doubled in size! Plus it would be cut into loaf sections.The leader would scoop up the sectioned dough and fling it onto the forming table. Some of the loaves were small,created from just one section, while others were created by combining two sections of the dough.