To learn how to make bread, I began volunteering at Better Health Bakery at the beginning of 2014. The bakery was part of the Centre for Better Health, a fifty-something year old Hackney charity that offers training placements for adults in recovery from mental ill health. It closed in 2022. Whilst volunteering, I fell in love with making bread and began working as a baker there until summer 2018. This is a post about life as a baker looked like at Better Health Bakery in 2017…
My eyes open. I fall out of bed, turn on Radio 4, boil the kettle, jump in the shower, have a cup of tea, notice how late it is, run out the door, just make the bus.
I pound up the pavement and see the white flag that says BAKERY jutting out of the warehouse and I steam through the double doors. Classical music blares from the sound system, coaxing us all to be industrious. MORNING, MORNING, MORNING we all say to each other. I change out of my real life clothes that are progressively becoming more like pyjamas and change into my uniform, which is basically a set of pyjamas. Another cup of tea is made and mistakes from the day before are eaten for breakfast. Perhaps it is a broken cookie or a burnt Danish pastry. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could eat all of our mistakes?
Once everybody (bakers, admin staff, mechanics from next door's bike shop, volunteers and trainees) have arrived at work, we congregate round the bakery's long, steel tables to divvy up jobs. Sometimes we might even do a pre-baking group stretch, watched by perplexed customers who have popped in to the bakery to get their morning bun and filter coffee.
The task for the day is to make the dough — there are two 'dough shifts,' one is early, the other, not so early. The earlier shift starts at 8 am and is for making the enormous quantities of dough in the large, industrial mixers. I weigh the flour and the bubbly leven, which changes in smell all the time. Sometimes it is fruity, sometimes it smells of champagne, other times, cheese. Depending on the weather, the next task is to work out what the water temperature should be and to weigh out the water. If it is cold, water should be warm to kickstart the sleepy yeast. If it is hot, the water needs to be cold to keep the yeast going at an even pace. I pour water, then leven, then flour into the spiral mixers. Salt comes later, after I have let this preliminary mix rest. Once it is mixed, I fold the kilos of dough with the help of my colleagues, checking the temperature every half hour to make sure everything is proving at the right speed. The second dough shift starts later, at 9 am and is reserved for table work. Tins are oiled and floured, pastry is made, sourdough starters and levens are fed, hand made doughs and seed soakers are prepared.
Mornings buzz, volunteers, trainees and bakers work together to measure, mix and make. Sometimes this process is smooth. Sometimes it is not. But if things do go wrong, making mistakes turns into lessons about dough. Bread is forgiving. If we go wrong, nobody dies, nothing bad will happen. It is simply bread. It is always the mornings that fly by, that never relent and never let me have a moment to think or to worry. We end our morning by flouring spiral patterned bannetons and toasting cheese and chutney sandwiches for staff lunch. On Fridays we have pizza. Surprise pizza - pear, celery and rosemary potatoes all having made guest appearances as toppings. Some lunches are calm and we munch on carbohydrates and chat. Some lunches are rushed as bakers work through the break to make sure the dough is ready for the post-lunch shaping.
After lunch, we reconvene around the steel table tops, but now they are covered in beige wooden boards, scales and white dust. Music is important now. It makes or breaks an afternoon. Sometimes we have ‘Power Hour,’ playing something obnoxious to kick us out of our cheese-toastie slump, other days it might be a 'Ladies of Disco' playlist, at other times it might be reggae or something angsty. Shaping loaves is the glue of the day. We all do the same task, around the same table and during this time, we talk about things. All sorts of things. Shaping feels the most like therapy. If I have noticed people open up, calm down, brighten or gain confidence, this is the bit that I see it in. And not just from those in recovery, either. I see the same thing happen for volunteers who given up one of their work days for a number of reasons. Maybe they need new ideas about what to do next, a different direction or a change of scene. I even see it sometimes in customers, smiling at us as they wait for their sandwiches watching us pull the dough into little balls and stick them, seam-side-up into paper pulp baskets, telling their children ‘will you watch the bakers make bread?’ It is the bit I like best. After shaping, cleaning, then the day is done. I scan myself to check for new bruises and oven burns, my back is achey, my arms hurt and my feet are sore. When I first started, baking was a workout, my twiggy arms weren't strong enough to lift heavy flour bags. Now I look like Popeye. At the end of the day, I am never flour-free. I seem to permanently have bits of dough up my arms and a light coating of flour in my hair, on the tip of my nose, white eyelashes. The baker shutters go down and the bus takes me home, paper bag under my arm containing the day’s left over bread.
The time that I scurry home through the front door from the dough shift is about the time that my eyes flicker open for the bake shift. The night's task is to bake all the dough. For me, it is where the magic happens. If I am on this shift, I wake up at around 7 pm. In the summer, the sky is pastel. In the winter, it is dark, illuminated by orange streetlights as people march down streets, desperate to make it home. I make myself a feast worthy of a Sumo wrestler, then catch the nightbus to work — depending on how much baking there is to do, I arrive at the bakery sometimes between midnight and 2 am. The streets are quiet. I turn the key, there is always a beep, a creek and a buzz that greets me as the empty bakery says HELLO. I climb the step-ladder because I am too short to reach anything without it, switch on all the lights and put very loud music on, something upbeat and usually distasteful. With the lights on and the music terrible, I forget about the ghosts that I know live in the bakery. HAVE A GOOD BAKE is usually scrawled on the bottom of the evening's production sheet. I find this sentence almost monastic, like we are part of some baking religion. I imagine bakers, dressed like friars bowing their heads and saying things like MAY YOUR BAKE BE MERRY. I start by shaping bread sticks, rolling them in course semolina and tucking them into their couche-beds to prove. I begin baking at about 3.30 am, taking the dough out of the cold store, tapping it onto boards, scoring it with a razor and loading it into the hot, hot oven, over and over again until it is 6 am and until I have baked it all. Then, cleaning, slicing, packing, setting up shop. 8 hours alone, with the bakery ghosts and the bread that sings to you as it comes out of the oven. CRACKLE, CRACKLE, CRACKLE. By the time I throw open the shutters at 8 am, my eyes are red, my skin is parched. And I am very, very, VERY dusty. MORNING, MORNING, MORNING everyone says to me, as they gather around the tables. I drag myself home, flourier than ever. I eye up the ‘Baby on Board’ badges that pregnant ladies are wearing, I wish that Transport for London would offer a badge that said ‘I’ve just been baking all night and would really like to sit down please’ as the trains and busses are still full of commuters.
I am tired. It is a tiredness I have never known before — a totally different sort of tired than if I had been working on a computer or in an office. It is the type of tired that gets through to your bones, but also gets right to your heart. It is a content kind of tired, because I know I have achieved something, running around a bakery for hours, in the dead of night, turning flour and water into something of substance. It is midday now and I fall into bed. I am peaceful. I smell like bread. The smell is everywhere and it sends me into a doughy, dreamless sleep.