The baking shift

7/17/2019

I’ve worked a lot of shifts. I’ve spent warm Midwestern summer mornings opening a subdivision’s pool and dusky suburban evenings dropping off a small health spa’s nightly bank deposit. I traded away D.C.’s gray nighttime hours to chase video clicks and watched the sunrise from bus windows more times than I could count. And now I’m once again sacrificing my early mornings, but to sate the appetites of hungry Alaskans and tourists.

A typical workday here starts with my 4 a.m. alarm blaring a series of escalating beeps into the shimmering summer silence. With near-constant sunshine and shoddy curtains, I perpetually question my sense of time. I usually hurtle out of bed in a panic, certain I’ve overslept and questioning what day it is. After verifying that I’m not Rip Van Winkle and eating some sort of bread-centric breakfast, I make my 2-mile commute to the Flying Squirrel Bakery.

At 5 a.m., the sweets baker opens the door and the heat hits — sometimes, like a warm embrace beckoning me in on a chilly morning, but more recently, like a stifling wave. It’s a huge departure from the thermostat-regulated office world. On some mornings, the wood-fired oven has smoldered its evening load of birch wood down to dust and cooled to 540, 520, even 475 degrees Fahrenheit, and I have to coax a small pyre to life at the front of its tile-lined expanse before spreading the coals and waiting for the embers to peter out in order to sweep the hearth and load my first batch. Those days, the kitchen stays comfortable if we open the windows and turn on fans. Others, like one Sunday during Alaska’s early July heat wave, the oven roars a toasty 740 degrees when I get in and I do everything I can to cool it down to a bakeable 650 or 600: sweeping out the live coals, jamming embers down the soot deposit, wiping down the stones with a wet rag once, twice, three times, leaving the oven door open to disperse the heat throughout the bakery. Those days, the sweat condenses on my back by 7 and runs down the nape of my neck by noon. My co-workers stand outstretched in front of fans in any free moment. I just try to chug water in my sweltering, stagnant corner. My bench is tucked behind the oven, with a small window overlooking the fireweed (flowering early this year from the heat) and an even smaller fan that doesn’t do much of anything. But it’s a nice nook, despite the temperature. It allows me to escape some of the hustle and bustle of the kitchen and focus on weighing, kneading and shaping, even when an RV rush comes in or the computer fails or the line snakes out the door, and for that I am very grateful and a little guilty.

The bakery has a set bread schedule, which determines the type of doughs I bake and mix each day. But other than that, my daily tasks and their order are all dependent on demand and timing, creating a waterfall of effects that I rarely game out perfectly. The overnight fermented doughs get pulled out of the walk-in fridge first thing, any Alaska whole wheat sourdough croissants that were rolled, shaped, and rested the day before always get egg-washed and proofed next, any fast-rising sandwich loaves get mixed, and then it’s all up in the air. A rush last night left us with no bread? Baguettes get divided and shaped, so that we have something on the shelves by 8. A bagel order placed late Saturday? I weigh, round, poke, stretch, boil and bake 30, 50, 70, 100. Oven too hot for challah? Divide and braid the rich, eggy dough last, and then stick three sheet pans under them and tent them with tinfoil in the oven. Five doughs to mix later? Make extra sourdough starter early to last through the afternoon. CSA bread shares that I forgot about? Quick soak some oats for eight speedy sandwich loaves.

But sometimes one bread will proof faster than expected, or I’ll brush against a hot sheet pan and drop a bagel as a burn sets on my forearm, or the timer won’t go off and I’ll pull the morning buns out too dark, or I don’t use enough flour and a loaf gets stuck on the peel on its way into the oven, or we get a rush and run out of bread at noon. There’s no shortage of things to miscalculate and mess up if I’m not paying attention to the details or thinking far enough ahead. I finally get coffee into my system when the bakery opens at 8 a.m., and usually make less mistakes after that.

One of the most satisfying parts of baking is taking tightly shaped, fully proofed loaves out of the proof box and slashing their outer skins with a lame (a sharp razor blade that is also very easy to accidentally cut one’s own skin with) just before sliding them from the wooden peel onto the hearth. It gives me a final attempt to control their unstoppable spring as the yeast propels the bread’s hardening crust up and out. And then when I fish the crisp golden loaves from the oven’s interior, I get to see how successful my efforts were. Sometimes the loaves split on the sides, yearning for deeper slashes or to merge with a too-close neighbor loaf. But there are more and more days when I successfully harness the bread’s power and the loaves come out with smooth exteriors and exposed, springy, patterned slashes.

Once I’ve baked all the day’s breads, which can range anywhere from the five breads I fire on Saturdays — baguettes, cheese bread, spent grain loaves, walnut raisin swirl loaves and Spinach Bread (our largest order: 27 golden spent grain loaves for a food truck in town) — to the three baked goods I’m responsible for on Tuesdays — croissants, molasses multigrain sandwich loaves and ciabatta— I start weighing, combining and kneading for the next day. My mixer is a behemoth: an aged Hobart, equipped with a dented bowl that rusts if it’s not dried by hand and weighs more than 30 lbs. empty, that comes with a built-in timer that keeps spinning for 30 seconds after it hits zero and a crank that requires exactly 17.5 rotations to lift the bowl to the correct kneading height under the pitted dough hook. It counts as heavy machinery, meaning none of our dishwashers or front counter staff under 18 are allowed to operate it, and can handle our largest 65 lb. bread dough if I scrape the sides religiously while mixing and entice a coworker to help lift the bowl onto my bench afterwards. 

I prep anywhere from three to five baked goods for the next day, which can mean weighing seeds for a quick mix in the morning, timing butter rolls and folds for croissants, estimating pizza doughs needed for the night, mixing soakers for the heartier wheat- or rye-filled doughs, or prepping fillings like roasted potatoes for morning buns or sautéed zucchini for cheese bread. Some doughs rest at room temperature before going into the walk-in, while others stay as cold as possible. Some need to stay soft and pliable, but others have to be springy and taut. And inevitably, I make mistakes. Sometimes I mix up the molasses and the barley malt. Once I forgot to add commercial yeast — luckily, to a baguette dough that melded sourdough and yeast. And still another time I accidentally carried the zero and added a tenth of the salt I needed. There’s a big difference between .037 kg and .370 kg. But luckily, my mistakes have all been salvageable, and usually not repeated. 

Many people have asked what my favorite bread is, and I still don’t have a full, succinct answer. When it comes to my favorite bread to make, on some days the rote, assembly-line nature of whipping out 27 near-identical Spinach Bread loaves settles me into a good rhythm and allows my mind to wander (slightly). Turning spent grains from the local brewery into bread has also been a satisfying, full-circle way to bake. Other times, the all-encompassing focus of rolling uniform baguettes or stretching ciabattas is a soothing escape. And, surprisingly, the finicky, unpredictable nature of croissants has captured my interest. Just like the naturally risen sourdough breads I first fell in love with, I am captivated by the knowledge gap between process and outcome. Whenever I slide the layered viennoiserie into the oven, I can only guess how they’ll turn out. To eat, I still love hearty wheats. My two days off are the days when the other bread baker makes the Alaska whole wheat sourdough, the eight grain dough and the Alaska barley dough, but I love nomming on those breads and still keep up a steady toast diet, even while surrounded by gluten for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week.

My fellow bakers, cooks, dishwashers, baristas and front counter workers are infinitely helpful, supportive, and fun. They’ve each saved me from baking disasters, whether it be by spotting a forgotten measuring cup of milk or sticking my abandoned doughs into the walk-in cooler for an overnight ferment. We have a mix of food service experiences, ranging from my big fat zero to another’s six years in the bakery’s kitchen, and, for the time being, are overwhelmingly female, which is a welcome anomaly in the cooking world. Some are seasonal like me, others are jacks-of-all-trade that pitch in everywhere at the bakery in the slow wintertime, and still others don’t stick around very long in the high-demand seasonal work environment of Talkeetna. But I’ve loved to glean tips and tricks from each person, ranging from how to make more uniform baguettes to food safety 101 to the correct rugelach dough consistency.

Amid all the ingredient weigh-ins, the recipes to follow, the doughs to count, and the timers a-buzzing, there isn’t time to worry about a 1-year plan, or even a 1-month plan. When my thoughts aren’t consumed with my bread to-do list, I’m usually thinking about what I’m going to eat on break or what I have to snack on after my shift or what bread I’m going to take home tonight. The smell of butter and sugar wafting throughout the bakery makes food a persistent and all-encompassing desire, but in an intuitive way. I don’t eat sweets nonstop. I feel healthy, even though I probably eat more sugar now than I did when I sat at a desk for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, but I’m on my feet all day now too, lifting huge bowls and buckets and bags, getting barley from across the kitchen, running used bowls to the dishroom, loading and shuffling and temping loaves in the oven. Dividing, pre-shaping, and rolling dozens of 2 lb. loaves certainly would be easier with bigger hands and stronger wrists, though; unfortunately mine can’t grow along with my slowly strengthening bread biceps and triceps.

When I check off the last item from my to-do list, wipe out my bowl, and clean my bench, that’s it. My mind is clear. Work is over, and it doesn’t leak out. There is no taking recipes home, no Slack notifications about my fermenting doughs, no breaking bread news alerts or pleas to come in early for my croissants. Sure, some days are longer than others, but I still leave the physical labor and the whole mental load of tomorrow’s planning at the kitchen’s radiating thermal threshold, and cross back through the mosquito-netted doorway into beautiful summertime Alaska, full of lakes to plunge into, stories to learn, trails to run, trips to plan, and people to meet.

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