Bakery Time

upending time & time as ingredient

The door to the uppermost oven deck clangs shut and I set the timer for the cinnamon rolls’ baking time of 25 minutes. It’s 2:03 a.m. and the Saturday morning pre-farmers’ market baking has officially begun. Atmospheric post-punk music, a sound that fits the mystique of the pre-dawn hours, plays to fill the space that feels empty in my solitude. Two speed racks stand off to the side, waiting to be filled with trays of sweet and savory pastries: croissants, danishes, scones, buns filled with cinnamon and cardamom butters. I load the other three of the oven’s four decks with three trays each, of croissants filled with frangipane; croissants filled with Gruyère, roasted eggplant, carmen peppers, and red onion; and croissants filled with cheese and coated in an everything bagel mix, setting the timers for 12 minutes, 18 minutes, and 38 minutes respectively. Baking underway, I start in on applying an egg wash to croissants, to give them a golden sheen when they bake. Puffy and slightly jiggly from their overnight proofing, their dimensions have expanded into a delicate, plush softness reminiscent of the Michelin Man’s. I drag a brush dipped in beaten egg up one side of a croissant’s sloping shoulders, then down the other side, and then repeat this 35 times. Somewhere along the way, the oven timer for the frangipane croissants interrupts my egg washing. Out come those three trays, to be placed on a speed rack to cool before I refill the oven with three trays of croissants; this cycle continues until 4:00 a.m., when I need to begin placing cooled pastries into plastic tubs for their transport to the farmers’ market.

My tasks and time dictated by what yet needs to be baked and by the oven’s timers, I easily lose track of where the hands sit on the clock; I’m usually surprised that it’s already that time when my coworker walks through the door to mix a batch of bread dough, or when my boss arrives to start loading the van with all of the fares to sell at the farmers’ market. These moments mark the progress of the morning, and the passing of time; I recognize them better by what I’m typically doing when they happen, rather than by the time on the clock. Every moment matters in Saturday morning’s choreography of moving trays in and out of the ovens, filling pastries that need to be filled with pastry cream and fruit, adding finishing garnishes to pastries once they’re out of the oven, applying frosting to 72 cinnamon and cardamom rolls, packaging and inventorying everything that’s been baked. These early hours of the day pass about just as quickly as if I were asleep, with the rest of the world, reminding me that I am operating in a different time-context. It makes me feel at once outside of time — of the understanding of time that’s been normalized — and deeply entrenched in the time-context specific to baking. 

Our modern way of defining the passing of time is rooted in 19th century industrialism: creating a universal metric of notating time and defining the hours and minutes of the day came about as a way of managing train schedules, which then soon became a way of managing laborers. This relationship with time positions us not necessarily as working with it, but pushing through it. If the speeding up of travel and production is an annihilation of space by time, the push for ever faster, ever more efficient labor places the worker in a position combative with time, working against the clock. 

Sourdough baking is anti-industrial by nature, as a method of baking that has been practiced for far longer than the world has been industrialized, and as a method of baking that demands a slow process. As sourdough bakers, we are cultivators of a living thing, facilitators of the dough’s process from mixing flour with water to become bread. How we interact with the dough is influenced by how “fast” or “slow” we can feel it changing, or how active the starter is. Today, sourdough baking can be a resistance to industrialization and the streamlining of products and experiences. Rather than annihilating time, it relies on it, it celebrates it: the soft crumb, delicate spring, and tangy flavor that makes eating sourdough bread so pleasurable would not be possible without it. 

Zeitgeber, a German word that translates directly to “time giver” or “time cue,” refers to environmental or social factors that influence our understanding of time. Some examples would be menstrual cycles, the daylight that influences our circadian rhythms, or the demands that structure a workday. Before the introduction of train timetables, each place in the world kept its own time. To an extent, this is still the case in the microcosm of the sourdough bakery. Every day at work, alarms remind us, every three hours, to feed the sourdough starter that makes all of our bread and pastries come to life. Our days’ structures — our zeitgebers — are defined by our doughs’ needs; time is measured not always by the traditional way of reading a clock, thinking about what time of day it is, but rather how much time there is until we need to add salt to bread dough, give croissant books a series of folds, shape our doughs, feed the starter that makes it all possible. 

The early mornings (or middle-of-the-nights), upending the sense of daytime, ensure that we are able to feed people, serve them bread, when breakfast time rolls around. This can be seen as an act of servitude, but also as a way of sharing our craft and our practices with others. Our zeitgeber encourages a sociality around our practices.

When I was first learning to bake bread, teaching myself mostly using Ken Forkish’s book Flour Water Salt Yeast as my guide, I read that two important and often unsung ingredients in a loaf are time itself, and temperature: the dough needs proper time to rest before adding salt (a process called “autolyse”), and proper time to ferment, to develop flavor and structure, and the time that it needs depends on the climate where you’re baking. Time is an unassuming ingredient throughout each phase of food preparation, starting with the plants that grow into the ingredients that we cook and bake with. Temperature works hand in hand with time, guiding it, and guiding us. Baking with sourdough makes the variables — the ingredients — of time and temperature all the more significant. Time and temperature impact first the activity of the starter, and ultimately the activity of the final dough. The same croissants that need up to 18 hours or even more to proof on the iciest January or February days only need half that amount of time in the height of summer’s heat. 

The zeitgeber of the doughs’ schedules extends beyond the confines of the bakery, into my home, into my bed. These “bakers’ hours” have an invisible hand over my sleep habits for three days. It means that on Friday, I go to bed at 7:30 p.m., and wake up six hours later, with just enough time to brush my teeth and bike the half mile to the bakery. It means that I take a midday nap when I get home from work on Saturday, that I’m likely to fall asleep by 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. that night, and that I will be awake and out of bed by 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, my body adjusting from my schedule the day before. Often when I get home from work on Saturday, my husband asks me how my day was. I’ve chuckled at the question, partly out of exhausted delirium, at realizing that by midday, I have had a full day. Of course my body would want to rest. Though the sun is brightly shining, high in the sky, I’m on bakery time.