Trust Me, I'm a Baker

 *Warning: Grisly pictures ahead. Not for the faint of heart.*

So I became part of a Tim Burton movie recently.

Many of you probably know already from Facebook and such that I sliced my hand open recently and had to get 16 stitches. It was the unfortunate outcome due to a mixture of frozen fudge, an awkward cutting angle, and my own impatience. I now adhere more closely to knife safety.
And I strongly recommend CutCo knives. They really work!


Here's the timeline of my healing process in pictures:

 

This is what it looks like now.
Still have some healing to do.

I've mostly kept my hand wrapped up in bandage tape and gauze and then wear a latex glove while I'm at work. Those gloves don't breathe at all. It's pretty miserable. Now I'll have to be extra careful to make sure the cut doesn't split again. I don't know how to take it easy :p


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As for all this work I've been busy with, well, I started working at a bakery at the beginning of the month. My major (Food Industry Management) requires that I spend one semester working on the production side of a company. The company that I am at is called New Grains Gluten-Free Bakery.

Here it is in the Macey's grocery store. It's cool to look back on this picture and recognize all the work that goes into it all. We bake, cut, package, seal, and label everything by hand. Those black bags are pre-made mixes that we weigh out and bag and seal on a daily basis. The sugar cookies are frosted by hand.

So what is a day in the life at the bakery like?

Well, first I wake up at 5am. Yup. It's rough. When I get to the bakery I have to put on a hairnet and an apron. Then thoroughly wash my hands.

After that we start the bread making process.

One of the supervisors is usually running the mixing process and keeping track of how many batches of bread we have to make. One batch is equal to... you guessed it, 13 loaves of bread. As the supervisor weighs out the dough into the loaf pans, some of us are in charge of smoothing the dough into the pan, because guess what, gluten-free bread doesn't rise the same as regular bread. We literally have to shape the loaf to make it look normal.

Once the batch is all smoothed, we put it on a cart and place it in the proofer (20 minutes for white, multi-grain, sourdough or egg-free loaves). After it's done in the proofer it goes into the oven. 60 minutes for sourdough, 40 minutes for the rest of the breads. We have 6 ovens. There's usually 3 carts in the proofer at a time and the whole process continues until we've finished the amount of bread we need for the day. Once the loaves are out of the oven, we place them on shelves (see below) to cool.

 

We usually make dinner rolls and hamburger buns the same time as the bread (one person is in charge of that while the others are smoothing). The same goes for tortillas and pizza crusts at another table. We have to wait until we've almost finished with the bread to start the English muffins though because those have to bake at a lower temperature.
Once we've finished baking the bread, we start packaging the dinner rolls because they don't have to be cut and they cool down the fastest. Then one of the supervisors starts cutting the bread. We put it through a slicer that cuts it all up like sliced bread should be. Then we bag and date and twist tie the bread (with the correctly colored twist tie of course).
Meanwhile, someone is getting together the orders as everything is getting bagged. Some orders are double bagged for shipping and others are placed in boxes. Personal orders are usually double bagged, the grocery store ones usually are not.
Also during this time, someone can be grinding flax seed or coconut for later or they can be measuring out pre-mixes for use the next day at the bakery (that's usually what I like to do). Some pre-mixes are also weighed out into individual bags to sell in stores.
Cookies are usually made on Saturdays when I don't work so I don't know much about them except that we flatten them ourselves and push the chocolate chips into the cookies that have them. This prevents them from streaking the bags when we put them in. For the cookies and macaroons and pecan caramel bars, we seal them all individually. The Pecan bars are cut in precise squares (like we literally measure it and cut along a yard stick - I did that once) and the edges are left over for us to snack on :)
We usually wrap up the day around 3pm. Although lately it's been around 1pm.

All in all it's a pretty good job. I'm learning a lot and I know it's information I can use despite everything being gluten free. My only complaints are that I don't have a lunch break (only a 15 minute break) and I've yet to be paid (I've tried convincing myself that this is okay because many internships aren't even paid anyways, but let's face it, I'm poor and I need the money!). Despite all this, I think the week before the family reunion is going to be my last because I've got a lot of days I want to ask off in July and I could really use more sleep. Plus they're increasing the hours the Info Desk is open at the Wilk so I'd rather not be working 6am-2pm at the bakery then 3pm to who-knows-how-long at the Info Desk. We'll see what happens though.



As for other exciting happenings in my life:

1. Friday, May 16th: Brigitte got married! I'm so excited for her and everything was so nice. The Manti Temple is beautiful and I was so glad I got to go. She looked gorgeous!
It was also cool to see a sealing from the other side. Brigitte and Seth are pretty fun to talk to too. They have this whole story about why their wedding rings are significant. It was adorable to see Seth at Brigitte's side the whole evening, holding her hand. Super cute :)

2. Friday, May 23rd: We found a random carnival in the parking lot of the mall. Of course we went on all the spin-y rides and made ourselves sick. It was so much fun! after this we were going to watch the meteor shower, but could cover prevented us from seeing anything. Bummer!

3. Saturday, May 24th: We went to the Hispanic/Latino Market so Christopher and Kolby could get all trunky and so I could try some of the things that made the especially nostalgic. We decided to get really culturally diverse and went to the Asian Market as well.

These were our spoils of war:

They were pretty good. We apparently made some popular choices.

I, like a nerd, had a blast reading all the ingredient labels.

Life is Good.