When I Was A Baker

I've done a few of these before, where I relay anecdotes from jobs I've had. There was "When I Was A Temp", which was kind of fun because temp jobs really lend themselves to crazy anecdotes. And I've also done the stories of when I worked in movie theatres, and then there was the security guard thing. But I was also a baker, sort of, for a few months.

I worked at a Perkins in Wyoming. If you've never been to a Perkins, it's basically Denny's, but with more green. Also, there's sort of an onsite bakery. I say "sort of" because a lot of the baking involves taking premade pies out of the freezer and putting them in the oven. There's some preparing involved, but not really all that much. My guess is that the people at Perkins Central don't want to put too much decision-making in the hands of the extremely cheap labor working at 3:00 am.

And that's a good idea, too. The few times I got to mix up my own muffin batter, I usually threw together random things like Banana-Mint-Chocolate-Cinnamon. And they tasted weird. I ended up channeling my creativity into sugar cookie decorations. We had these sugar cookies, see, and they got a smear of white frosting, and then we were supposed to drizzle designs on them. I tended to draw faces. And a disproportionate number of the faces would be pirates, because eyepatches are easy to do. One time I did the standard Psychic Card Designs. You know, the triangle and the wavy lines and stuff they use to see if you're telepathic? Yeah, nobody got it then either. The field of sugar-cookie japery is tougher than you'd think.

It was a job that had the best learning curve I'd ever seen. There were two shifts: the 1:00am-9:00am shift, and the 8:00am to 3:00pm. Or so. The early shift involved a lot of preparation; making rolls of three different kinds, and that sort of thing. When I first got the job, it involved a lot of effort and I was always behind when the other baker came in. But after a few weeks, I could do pretty much the whole eight hours of work in two hours. Not two consecutive hours, because stuff had to cook (or "bake" as we called it), but I'd basically be able to come in, work tremendously efficiently for a little over an hour, and then hang out in the break room for awhile. And it was easy to get away with slacking off for two reasons. First, the baking staff was fairly isolated from the rest of the staff, so nobody was sure what I was supposed to be doing. And second, it was like 3:00 am, so the one server and one cook on duty were also usually slacking off.

The best thing about the job was what it taught me about cooking. I think I've made it clear that there wasn't anything particularly complex about it, but you have to keep in mind that I was in Wyoming. Which means I was very far above sea level, so none of the official cooking times worked. Seriously, the air pressure is sufficiently low up there that regular recipes don't work. And as a result, I had to rely on actual cooking techniques: looking at food and being able to tell if it's done. Pumpkin pie is tricky; you have to pull it when the wetness on the top has shrunk to about a two-inch diameter. If you wait longer, the pie will crack, and if you pull it earlier, you get pumpkin pie soup, which a lot of people don't like.

After I'd been a baker for awhile, I reached the next level, where I didn't need to check on the stuff in the oven or look at a clock. I'd just go about my business (reading the newspaper in the breakroom) and suddenly look around, realizing I should check the oven just when the dinner rolls were ready. It was eerie.