In a recent conversation with an old friend and former boss, I mentioned I was working in food again, playing with large batches of everything, laminating doughs and re-learning how to make large-scale bread. He offered that he was jealous of our dough sheeter, a twelve hundred dollar machine that is, essentially, two rolling pins and a couple of circular conveyor belts. We use it to make lumps of dough – up to twenty pounds – into long rectangles down to two millimeters thick. It’s very handy in speedily and uniformly processing the massive amounts of pie dough and puff pastry we use every day, and it’s essential in the creation of our from-scratch croissants and danishes. A croissant, I am sure you know, is a laminated item, meaning that the “dough” is actually layers of alternating dough and butter, eighty-one of them – and all, ideally, perfectly even. It begins with one slab of dough and one chunk of butter and ends up…well, laminated. (I tried to find an existent picture of raw croissant dough on the internet but, apparently, no one is interested except me. And hopefully now you.) It’s doable by hand in small batches, but that way isn’t any fun. Care has to be taken to keep both dough and butter at the same temperature, and as cool as possible. Rolling something out by manual rolling pin makes for a much warmer affair, both because it takes longer to do and because you have to make many more passes with the rolling pin, thus creating that much more friction and therefore heat. The couple of times that my friends have asked how they might make homemade croissants, I’ve told them that it’s not really worth it and, for the home cook, I think that’s true.

So my dear friend – a pastry chef in the Midwest – wishes that he had a sheeter. Sometimes he makes from-scratch danishes for brunch, he said, and does the whole show by hand. Danish dough is even more a pain in the tuckus than croissant dough as it is stickier – owing in part to a substitution of milk and eggs for water in the basic formula – and has more layers of butter and dough than its more straight-laced cousin. When he makes danishes, he laminates the dough by hand, forms them, and then proofs the pastry in a rather slap-dash “proofbox” that is actually a plastic tent with a pan of hot water at the bottom.

Proofing in the process by which yeasted doughs, once formed, are set to rise just before they are put in the oven to bake. Proofboxes are used in bakeries to regulate this process, maintaining a constant temperature and humidity so that, no matter the conditions outside, the baguettes, for example, will always need forty five minutes in the proofbox before baking.

My reaction to his jealousy surprised me. I would have expected to feel smug, I think, that I get to use a neat piece of machinery that he lacked and wanted, that I was making a product that he couldn’t, or couldn’t make as well. But I didn’t feel that way at all. Instead, I felt jealous of him. While we talked, I imagined him at home in the evening, standing in his own kitchen with a notebook on the counter, composing the brunch menu for the coming week and brainstorming how he could come up with a danish, that oh-so classic breakfast pastry. That swirl of sweet, buttery dough filled with glop – fruit or cheese… How to make an evenly laminated, presentable product without throwing labor costs out the window? How many days would it take to make the dough and laminate it? Could it stay cool enough? What size recipe would fit in the mixer? How many would go in the oven? How to rig up a proof box? How warm or cool would it have to be given the average temperature of the restaurant’s kitchen during the day? Then I pictured him at work, assembling the plastic sheeting over a rack of baking pans, perhaps, boiling a saucepan of water to steam up the plastic and warm the dough to rise.

He works – most people work – with disadvantages right out of the gate. Small operations rarely have money or space for sheeters or proofboxes. Sometimes the equipment in pastry kitchens is little better than the appliances I have in my cupboards at home. Or maybe I’ve just been working in threadbare kitchens this whole time. Maybe my perspective is skewed.

There is an ease in working for the well-outfitted kitchen. You rarely have to make up a special procedure or custom tool to compensate for an item or appliance that ought to be there but isn’t. It’s easy to do your job when you are given the right tools and so that is just exactly what you do. And while this way of working is generally less frustrating and certainly more efficient and predictable, it is much less fun.

Lordy, is it so much less fun. In teeny tiny kitchens, you have to dance around your coworkers. You squabble over who gets to use the one and only scale. You negotiate for oven and rack space. In small operations, you often run out of ingredients. Sometimes, you can’t put a produce order together that is large enough to make it worthwhile for the produce distributing company to give you an account. It is the case either that you don’t use enough in a week, or you don’t have the refrigerator space to store it all at once. When you can’t get the produce company to deliver to you, you send your grunts out to the nearest grocery store with petty cash in their pockets or you make trips to Costco on your afternoon off. Maybe you don’t have a mixer large enough to hold a full batch of cookies, so you mix it by hand in a large white plastic tub. Or, you don’t have a proofbox, so you make one.

And when your shift is over, and you are mopping up the space at the end of your shift, you feel a much greater sense of accomplishment and connection to your product and your customers than you ever could have if things had gone more smoothly.

It could be that I can never be happy working in a kitchen that is not my very own. If I were employed in the other sort of place, I might use these pages to complain about how hard it is to constantly run out of currants or lemons. I might write about my frustration at using half of my time compensating for the equipment that I lack with half-effective and haphazard improvisations. From this vantage point, however, it seems to me that these things are part of the soul of cooking for which I have begun to ache.

      There is something very freeing in all of this. There is something rather cold as well. There is no art in my bakery, not that I have been able to see anyway. There is craft – and pride therein – but no art. Things have been reduced to technical details: the temperature of the butter, the best way to measure molasses, the calibration of the scales so that every cookie weighs the same as every other. Attention to these aspects of the craft is critical. But the heart is missing. Maybe there is no room in our crowded schedule for love. We rarely see our customers, are not often present for their first bite. We never see them smile when they taste something they like. We are deprived, by the way the system is arranged, of the feeling that we are feeding anyone at all. We are loading racks. We are meeting quotas and filling orders. We are minimizing waste.

      When I began the post-baccalaureate job search, I did not intend on landing in a bakery again. As my mother pointedly commented when I told her where I had been hired, going back to food “creates a certain symmetry” in my curriculum vitae. I won’t itemize my reasons here, but there were, are, many for wanting to stay out of the professional kitchen. At the top of the list, however, is this: I really, really love food. Moreover, I respect it. I respect eaters, too. I enjoy feeding people, watching them taste what I’ve thought up, what I’ve crafted for them. I revel in eating with my dinner companion, picking apart a meal we’ve just made, congratulating ourselves for small triumphs and drawing out a plan for how to do it better next time. I want to make things the way I think they ought to be made. And I will. I want to experiment. I dream food. I soar when I get it right; I stew when I miss my mark. Pun intended.

      But in my bakery, there are none of these aforementioned pleasures. There are others – a perfectly risen loaf, for example – but we are, I feel, utterly disconnected with the nature of our product. We are missing the human link. We aren’t feeding anyone.

      In noticing this, I am both distressed and relieved. This separation puts my experience on the clock in an entirely different category from the cooking that I do at home, the cooking that is rather special and that I hold dear. At work, I am liberated from my warm and fuzzy feelings for food. Unencumbered by emotion, I can think of weights and measures, of speed, of yield and trim loss, of dough temperature and health codes. It is one part survival and self-protection, and many parts necessity. Indeed, I think this outlook makes me a better employee.

      So I am learning how seal-off that part of me that gets all mushy about food. If anything, I think it will make time in my own kitchen all the better. Lately, when I get off work all I want to do is come back home and cook, to explore some idea I had while weighing and mixing those hundreds of pounds of flour. It is different, what I do on the clock. I am not even sure if it can properly be called cooking. It can’t in the way I mean it, anyway. Cooking is something more than coagulating proteins and emulsifying sauce. It is this emotional, human component that makes it so marvelous, the very bit I cannot do without.

If there were any doubt regarding the necessity of happy feet in everyday life, and there oughtn’t be, this uncertainty is absolutely eliminated once one (say, me) spends all day on one’s feet (say, in the kitchen). My new job requires that I stand for about seven hours straight. On a concrete floor. Lifting fifty-pound sacks of flour and sugar, hoisting trays of cookies, and schlepping large quantities of dough hither and thither. I wore my vaguely-fashionable – and perfectly comfortable in an everyday kind of way – brown sneakers during my first two shifts. Then I learned the handy phrase, my dogs are barking, and uttered it so often that I rubbed a threadbare place in the middle.

I asked for a pair of Crocs for Christmas last year, thinking that they would make fine around-the-house-and-garden footwear, which they have. I told my mother that I didn’t care what color she chose, as they would likely never leave my property. She settled on bright turquoise, which I did not object to. I don’t wear very colorful clothing, let alone shades of turquoise, so these strange, plasticine shoes match exactly nothing that I own. Tooling around in the backyard in them, I do, however, feel quite cheery. I never had any intention of wearing them in public. Or around other people.

But the allure of these lightweight (only six ounces!), vented (for cool and un-stinky feet), and utterly magical shoes was irresistible. So, on Day Three of the New Job, I got smart and trotted out in the The Most Comfortable Shoes I Have Ever Worn.

Some of my favorite things about them:

• That bone-shattering ache usually experienced after standing on concrete all day is gone.
• They are made from anti-microbial material.
• My toes are vented and so do not sweat.
• The footbed molds to the shape of my very foot. They’re practically custom made!
• It’s pretty difficult to take myself too seriously when I wear them. When I get frustrated or tired, I just look down and smile.
• They are relatively inexpensive. And comfort is beyond price, anyway.

I love them so much, in fact, that I have ordered a second pair to serve as dedicated work shoes. A turquoise pair – beaches – for home, and a chocolate pair – professionals – for work. Even if you don’t need work shoes – or you have an Adult Job and cannot get away with plastic shoes (poor you) – these are worth looking into. The last time I went a-huntin’ (before giving up and ordering the Pros online because REI had sold out of them) I saw Crocs in all kinds of crazy configurations and colors, least of which was a very attractive sandal. Truly, your dogs deserve them.

Today was day two. Even after a long, hot shower, I still smell like dough. I have flour in the creases of my skin that will take days to soak out. Today my manager put me at the helm of a Kemper mixer – just the kind that I worked on six years ago when I made bread at the Pearl. This one is smaller, but pleasantly familiar. I mixed dough for cinnamon rolls, croissants, and puff pastry. I prepared thirty-plus white plastic tubs and weighed a few hundred pounds of dough and set them all to rise. I mixed flour and yeast and water into familiar things.

I had forgotten how to do all of this. A week ago, if asked how one mixes dough in this manner, I would have shaken my head slowly from side to side and admitted that it’s been too long. I would have said that I don’t do it anymore. It would have made me sad to think so. Or wistful. Or nostalgic.

But today, bent over the Kemper -

OK, “bent over” isn’t quite accurate enough. Try instead, “bent-into.” Think of a girl, just over five feet, with her head, arms, and one shoulder inside the bowl of a giant mixer set on the floor.

Anyway – today, while I was pulling some two hundred pounds of dough that tomorrow will be laminated with yellow European butter and become croissants, I had a serrated knife in one hand. I used the other hand to reach under a mound of dough and tug at it just enough to make room for the knife to cut a chunk out. You must avoid ripping the dough; the gluten won’t tolerate it. So it goes tug, cut, tug and when a piece is freed it gets flung onto the digital scale that rests on the nearby table. At nine pounds, the dough is made into a roughly rectangular shape and deposited to rise. Tug, cut, fling, form. Tug, cut, fling, tug, cut, tug, cut, fling, tug, cut, fling. And as I tugged and flung, I was no longer the new girl, trying to impress a bakery full of unfamiliar bosses and colleagues. I was not unsure or nervous. As I tugged and flung, I remembered, through my hands, what it is that I do. And a thought snuck up on me, quite unexpectedly and a little bit against my will: maybe this is really what I will do with my life. Maybe this is actually what will make me happy.

On my first shift – yesterday – the final task of the day was forming croissants, a job I had not performed since my internship after LCB. The final graduation requirement was a six-week internship and I chose the best patisserie in my hometown. It’s a long story, and I will only tell you the pertinent part now: we formed croissant and danish second thing in the morning, just as soon as the wholesale and retail bakes were done, between four and four-thirty a.m. I think. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember anything that ever happened before sunrise. This patisserie was run by a husband and his wife. He was French, unsubtle and straightforward. She was American, equally assertive, critical, and pregnant (which made her, I think, a little extra crazy). Their reputation was well-deserved and they took it very seriously. Our products, including those items produced by the twenty-year-old neophyte intern, were to be flawless. And the croissants that this inexperienced, overwhelmed, and intimidated (not to mention very underslept) girl formed were no exception. Every day, I was shown how to make them, and then how to make them better. Each croissant I formed was critiqued. I became obsessed with perfecting my technique, in terms of both efficiency and quality and, I am happy to write, my improvement was notable and satisfying. Once my internship was over and I returned to Portland, I didn’t give the ol’ croissants a second thought. Until yesterday.

Standing at the bench, flanked by my new coworkers, in what is definitely the largest and probably the most cheerful bakery I have ever been in, I tried to focus on the croissant-forming lesson I was receiving. Every place has their own procedure, and I didn’t want to assume that I knew better, or that knew at all. But my hands would not be stopped. Upon picking up that soft, smooth triangle of inchoate pastry, I was powerless over the will of my fingers. Everything I learned at four a.m. from the Frenchman and his wife came out of me. It felt like I had never stopped making them, like the dough and my hands had some secret language that my brain could never fully understand. The same thing happened today at the Kemper.

I suppose it’s just like riding a bicycle.

Since I had said for so long that I would not return to foodservice after finishing my Bachelor’s degree, this job as been a little bit difficult to feel wholly good about. From one perspective, I have clearly let myself down. But from another angle, this is a homecoming. Today, before the ache and the fatigue set in (bakery work is physically hard and I am quite unused to early mornings), when my body settled into a rhythm and my brain was freed to think of other things (like this post, and my garden), I experienced a zen moment of sorts. As I cut dough out of the mixer, glancing occasionally at the scale but mostly knowing when I had reached my target weight, I noticed that I was having a moment free of doubt. My hands knew what to do, my brain was unconcerned, and my heart was maybe even a little glad. Just like we don’t get to choose our parents or where we are born, maybe we don’t always get to choose the things that ring our chimes. In the kitchen, like it or not, I am home.