Most weeks, I work just one day: Tuesday, shift 1, a.k.a. The Bake Shift.
(Shift 2 is pastry, shift 3 is afternoon breads, and shift 4 is evening prep.) 
The times noted are a mix of documented fact and educated guesstimates.

***

4:00 My alarm goes off. Despite going to bed early, I had a fitful night of sleep — I got cold, I went pee at least three times, and, for a brief period of time, I couldn’t sleep so I troubleshooted my book (and got some good ideas so it wasn’t all for naught). I make coffee, dress, get my cheese out of the press and into the brine, publish a blog post.

4:46 I leave for work, but the van makes funny noises, so almost immediately I turn around and go back to the house to swap the van out for the little car. (It doesn’t sound much better.)

5:08 I clock in.

5:10 I turn on the proofer, fill the sink with soapy water, pull pastries from the fridge, get a clean apron, clear the night’s previous baking off my work space, and start working on the pies: sour cherry. I’d made all the different components in advance, and Monday’s people pulled them from the freezer to thaw.

They’ll take forever to bake — close to 90 minutes — so I need to get them into the oven as quickly as possible. Once they’re done, I’ll crank up the oven and bake off the pastries.

the fridge, bursting at the seams with all the things I need to bake

the proofer; speed rack on the right with yesterday’s buns awaiting bagging

5:22 I realize the the top oven’s light isn’t on yet. Oh no, it hadn’t been preset! It’s supposed to be at 500 degrees when I arrive, the temp at which we bake the sourdough (and then drop the heat to bake the pastries). There’s nothing I can do — it will take a full hour to preheat — so I turn it on and then focus on baking off as many other things as possible so we’ll have something in the case at opening: orange cranberry scones (that I made last week and froze), chocolate chunk and salted oatmeal cookies, sausage rolls.

sausage rolls, egg-washed and sprinkled with thyme

5:41: I mix up the day’s sourdough and dry mise for the next day’s.

6:18 I’m getting hungry so I grab some granola from the kitchen to tide me over.

6:44 The top oven is finally to temp. I score the loaves — plain sourdough and olive — and load them into the oven. 

6:52 Time to give the sourdough its morning feeding.

7:08 It’s getting light outside and other employees are trickling in. 

7:13 The cherry pies are finally done. Even though the crusts didn’t have holes when I filled them (I checked!), the juice still seeped through the bottom crust. How to remedy this problem? I’m stymied. Two of the pies might not be sellable. 

7:16 The register person (today it’s the bakery manager) arrives. As she bags bread, stocks the case, and counts money, we chatter about all sorts of things.

7:21 The first round of sourdough is done baking, so I sweep out the oven and drop the temp. The kitchen brings over a pan of biscuits for me to bake off.

7:25 The bottom oven is ready for the pastries. I chose three trays of the most popular kind so we’ll have something ready when we open: chai morning buns, vanilla braids, and chocolate croissants. 

vanilla braids, a best seller

7:44 Both ovens are at correct pastry temps. For the next hour, I egg wash and bake dozens of pastries and then finish them off, as per their particular specifications: chai buns get a chai glaze, maple pecan pull-aparts get a maple glaze, vanilla braids get a vanilla glaze, the scones get an orange glaze, cardamom buns get rolled in cardamom sugar, cookies get salted, etc. 

chai morning bun

8:00 The diner opens. The shift 2 person arrives and takes up residency in the back corner where she’ll spend the majority of her day making, sheeting, and shaping the pastries.

8:37 Now that I’m almost done baking off the pastries, I no longer need the top oven, so I crank it back up to 500 degrees and bake off the remaining loaves of sourdough.

8:52 I taste the leftover banana bread I’d made the week before. It’s tangy, so: pig food. I wash dishes and scrub out the sink and refill it.

9:00 My help arrives! Because I’m in charge of pies and some other creative work, another baker is often assigned to my shift. Over the next few hours, my coworker will pound butter blocks, shape the sourdough, mix up maple glaze, make icing, bake off the rye shortbread, wash dishes, and generally keep me company and entertained with talk of books and hiking and family dynamics. (I have the best coworkers.)

9:10 I mix up a double batch of cake. We have an order for one cake, but I decide to make extra to sell out the door. I also want to experiment with baking little cakes in muffin tins, for junior minis.

prepping the cake pans

9:22 Now that the rush of baking is over, my energy lags. One of the other bakers is putting in an order at the bar, so I add mine — a latte. While the cakes bake, I make a red raspberry jam filling for the cakes, wash more dishes, and toss the bread cloths in the washing machine. Gradually, my energy picks up.

10:06 The pastry shift person has a lull, so I slip into the back corner and use the sheeter to roll out dough for five pie shells, the number of plates I can find (we just ordered another batch of plates, but no one can find them). The disks are larger than normal — I later find out that someone thawed ones that were intended for sausage rolls — so I have to cut them down to size.

10:30 I cut into one of the bum-looking cherry pies. There is no burnt flavor, and the crust doesn’t actually look that bad after all, so yay, we can sell them!

10:42 I crimp the pie pastry, line the shells with parchment paper and fill them with beans, and pop them into the top oven to bake off. We find the box of new plates (under the oven), and I briefly consider rolling out a few more crusts but then decide against it. I’m getting tired and running out of time.

dwindling stock

11:07 I put in an order for lunch: sourdough toast with Sunday sauce, which is a meaty bolognese and cheese, topped with an egg. I ask for a half order (with a side of greens), but then the cook comes over to ask what, exactly, a “half order” means since it’s only one piece of bread and a single egg, ha! I get the whole order and then convince my co-worker to help me eat it.

11:21 The jam isn’t completely cool, but I have to get cracking on those cakes. It takes a good while to split, fill, and ice the cakes, but it’s fun so I don’t mind. (I snitch the berries and mint from the kitchen, shh, don’t tell.)

bakery instagrammer

12:00 The new hire, a high school student, comes in to run the register and help knock things off the task list. (When the manager prompts her, she tells me that she and her boyfriend were voted homecoming queen over the weekend, whoo-hoo!) There are now five people in the bakery, plus the in-and-out customers and servers. The small space is busy and full, but somehow I don’t feel cramped.

12:45 My coworker needs to shape sourdough on the same table, so I scooch to one end and attempt to consolidate my mess.

seconds before I snapped the photo, the dough was hanging off the edge of the table

1:43 My daughter pops in begging for snacks. I direct her to the leftover grits pie in the fridge and ask her to get me another coffee — this time, an iced brown sugar latte. 

1:56 My coworker finishes shaping the sourdough and begins pounding out the butter blocks. The bakery and diner close for the day.

2:15 I give the starter its afternoon feeding.

2:28 I wrap and date the cooled pie crusts and leftover pie dough and run them over to the freezer in the storage room. While there, I take inventory of the fruits, crusts, fillings, and crumb toppings (what will we make next week?). A friend is passing through the co-working space and we chat for a bit. 

2:42: The manager and I discuss plans for next week’s bakes and my Saturday responsibilities (I’m swapping shifts with another baker and need a refresher on baguette procedure). I never got around to typing up a cup-to-gram cheat sheet (I’m sick of looking up stuff on my phone) and recording some recipes, but I decide I’ll do that work from home.

2:53 I organize the cakes in the fridge, scribbling notes so tomorrow’s team will know what’s what. 

3:04 My coworker has switched to her afternoon bread-baking duties (today, she’s also Shift 3). I’m not sure what she’s making, but there’s an enormous bowl of dough rising on the counter. 

3:20 I fish stale bread out of the bin and snag that tangy banana bread (for the pigs), hand off my not-terribly-dirty apron to the manager (who doesn’t want to run back to storage to get herself a clean one), grab a bag of leftover wheat rolls from the help-yourself stack, and clock out.

3:36 After nearly eleven hours, I’m back home.

The End.

This same time, years previous: soft sourdough bread, the soiree of 2019, curbing the technology addiction, another farm, another job, impressing us, three feet, a dell-ish ordeal, field work, the reading week, autumn walk.

A couple weekends ago I was at a gathering where I happened to mention — I can’t remember why — that I don’t make my bed, and people were like, What? You don’t make your bed? We’re shocked! And I was like, Of course I don’t make my bed! Do YOU? And they all — every single one of them — just stared at me soberly and . . . then they nodded their heads WHAT THE HECK.

Bed making, I thought, was a thing of the past like pantyhose and jello salads. Only people who lived in one-room cabins and needed their bed to double as a sofa during the day, or hoity-toity magazine stagers, or hospital and hotel staff, bothered with making a bed. I mean, who has energy for cleaning first thing in the morning? But apparently I’m the odd one out, oops.

Does this mean I’m a slob? Maybe. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. No one sees my bed (except for when I photograph it and then flaunt it on the world wide web), and if I’m gonna mess it up again in a few short hours, why bother?

And, in my defense, I’ve heard that creative people are less likely to make their bed (which is a nice thought, but I don’t buy it since I think everyone’s creative) and that people who make their beds are more likely to be successful, but that depends on what success means to you, and I think success is defined as figuring out the shortest amount of time between waking and that first cup of coffee, so there you go.

(If my husband’s the last one out of bed, he often tugs the covers straight, but he also loves to climb into a rumpled bed. In fact, he actively dislikes climbing into a made bed — it’s too much work, he says. And while I may not make my bed in the morning, I am pretty religious about straightening the sheets at the foot of the bed prior to climbing in at night: I like my top sheet tucked firmly under the mattress and my husband likes his part untucked, so every night there’s a bit of huffing and puffing as we work things out.)

Do you make your bed?

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (10.18.21), three things, kitchen notes, practical and beautiful, hair loss, the adjustment, grab and go: help wanted, that thing we do, pepperoni rolls.

I’ve had a good bagel recipe for years, but I rarely made them because the recipe called for some less-common ingredients, like wheat gluten, barley malt syrup, and milk powder, which made the bagels feel like a hurdle. However, a few weeks ago I experimented making the bagels without the weird stuff and — guess what — I didn’t miss ‘em! 

Now the recipe is pared down to the most basic, straightforward list imaginable. It takes 10 minutes to mix up the dough, which means it’s faster and less involved than regular sourdough bread. Even though it’s still a two-day process (I want to test a one-day method soon), and there’s a little bit of awkward juggling what with the overnight proof and the added step of boiling, once you go to the trouble of figuring out a system, they feel so, sooooo easy. 

Seriously! Here, I’ll walk you through the steps. This is how last week’s bagel-making played out in my kitchen….

First thing in the morning, I pulled my starter from the fridge and fed it.

When I fed it again around lunch time, it was still sluggish, but I’d been using it weekly so I knew it was just bluffing — it’d wake up all the way during the shaping and proofing. 

Late that afternoon, about a half hour before I was set to walk out the door for Ultimate, I measured all the ingredients into my mixer bowl and let it knead for a few minutes.

Once the machine got tired, I turned the dough out on the counter and briefly kneaded it by hand.

I left the dough on the counter to rest while I pulled my hair into a ponytail and put my sneakers on, and then, once I was ready to go play, I popped back in to the kitchen to shape the bagels.

Once they were shaped — one recipe makes about 15 bagels — I slipped the trays into garbage bags and put them into the fridge for an overnight proof. 

Late in the afternoon the following day, I pulled the bagels out of the fridge and let them rest at room temp while the oven preheated. I put some water and a couple tablespoons of brown sugar into a big kettle and set it to boil. (The brown sugar is for flavor; other options include barley malt syrup, lye, and baking soda, which I might try next time.)

When the oven was hot and the water boiling, I boiled 3 or 4 bagels at a time, and then transferred them to the hot stone. When the stone was full, I popped them into the oven for about 18 minutes, and then I repeated the steps with the second half of the bagels.

And that’s it! Thirty minutes of dough prep one day, and an hour of oven work the second day. (And during that hour of boiling and baking, I also washed down the cheese cave, prepped for supper, brought in the laundry, etc.)

And as for the bagels? They are unlike anything you can get in the store, including at our beloved local bagel shop. I’ve found that bought bagels are often cakey and sweet — just bread with a hole in the middle — but these are altogether something else: chewy and dense, flavorful, utterly addictive. Fresh from the oven, we eat them plain (that’s how my husband likes them) or with butter; days two and three, we toast them. One of my favorite breakfasts is a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and ham. It takes us about three days to burn through a batch.

The other day my younger son scolded me for letting him eat as many as he wanted because then they wouldn’t last as long, he said, and that right there is the ultimate mark of a good food: you don’t want to eat it because then you won’t have it anymore.

However! Running out of bagels bothers me not one bit since that just means I have an excuse to bake up another batch of freshies.

Simplest Sourdough Bagels
Adapted from my own recipe.

If making plain bagels, use 4 teaspoons salt. If making everything bagels, cut it back to 3 ½ teaspoons since there’s salt in the seasoning mix.

Day One: The Dough
13½ ounces sourdough starter
12 ounces cool water
2 tablespoons molasses
2 teaspoons yeast
3½ – 4 teaspoons salt
¼ cup sugar
2 pounds bread flour

Measure all the ingredients into the mixing bowl in the order they’re listed: liquids followed by dries. Mix on low speed for 4-8 minutes. If your machine starts to whine after a few minutes, turn the dough out onto an unfloured surface and knead for several minutes. Cover with a towel and let rest for about 10 minutes. 

Divide the dough into 4-ounce blobs. To shape, roll a ball of dough into a small rope, shape into a circle with the ends overlapping, and then squeeze and roll the ends until they adhere to each other.

Place the bagels on parchment-lined baking sheets. Pop each sheet into a garbage bag (or cover with plastic) and move to the refrigerator to proof for 12-24 hours.

Day Two: Boiling and Baking
Remove the bagels from the fridge and let sit at room temperature for 20-60 minutes. Preheat the oven (and your baking stone) to 450 degrees. Fill a wide cooking pot with a couple inches of water and a couple tablespoons of brown sugar and bring to a boil. Cut the parchment paper that the bagels are on so that there are two-three bagels on each sheet of paper.

Once the oven is hot and the water is boiling, pull the baking stone from the oven and sprinkle it with cornmeal. Gently lower a section of parchment paper with bagels into the pot of water, flipping it so the bagels go into the water face-first. Tug off the paper and discard it. Boil the bagels for 20 seconds, flip, and boil for another 20 seconds. Keeping the bagels face up and using a slotted spoon, transfer the bagels one at a time to the baking stone. When the stone is full, bake the bagels for 16-18 minutes. 

Repeat the process with the remaining bagels. Bag and freeze any leftover bagels.

For Everything Bagels: sprinkle the stone with the everything seasoning in addition to the cornmeal and, as soon as the boiled bagels have been transferred to the stone, sprinkle their tops with the seasoning.

For Cinnamon Raisin Bagels: add 2-4 teaspoons cinnamon to the dough and knead in a few big handfuls of raisins.

This same time, years previous: show and tell, the quotidian (10.12.20), English muffins, a weekend away, soiree!, the quotidian (10.13.14), roasted red pepper soup, the dogwood wild runner, why it ain’t happening.