Night Mode
“Fry is bullshit,” my coworker said helpfully on my first night shift at the bakery. I was put on the fry station, which is where most of us start out. Frying the 400-800 doughnuts is actually the easiest and quickest part of the job; it’s the filling, sugaring, glazing, and garnish that takes up most of the night. The work is tedious and frustrating, so my coworker meant it sympathetically.
In my new schedule, I eat dinner each night at home with Anthony then have a few cups of black tea. I leave the house a little after 11pm and join the motley crowd of New Yorkers wearing either party clothes or scrubs on the subway. I arrive to the bakery, the only building with all its lights on on Spring street. Once inside, the night falls away. The small crew of 3-4 people moves quickly to turn on ovens and fill speed racks with empty sheet pans. I assemble the deep-fryer and fill it with oil, mark up parchment paper with the night’s tally of goods for pre-order, shipping, and the store, and put together a special filling machine for injecting jam and ganache into the doughnuts. By the time the oil heats up, I’m ready to start.
The next few hours are a struggle. There are a lot of things that can go wrong: the doughnuts can be too small or overproofed or underproofed or so flaky that when you attempt to fill them they split at the seams. Even though most of these factors are out of our control, we’re responsible for the final product. The time pressure is merciless. To be done before morning, I must always be moving. Put a batch in to fry, try to fill as many as possible, flip the frying ones over, organize the already-fried doughnuts and get the next batch ready, and repeat. I’m not efficient enough yet. There are specific patterns of movement that have been optimized over countless nights, that my coworkers execute with lightning speed while I fumble. My heart-rate has quickened just writing this paragraph, and my nose has filled with the smell of oil.
The goal is to be done with the filling and sugaring step by 4:30, which is when we take our required (unpaid) half-hour break. I make myself a matcha and sip it with my snack of a tortilla filled with almond butter and golden raisins. I sit in the half-darkened customer seating area, across two chairs to get my feet up. I've started bringing a pressure point massage ball to press between the wall and my shoulder blades. I scroll Instagram and Twitter and send people messages they won’t see till morning. It feels like night during the break, like maybe I have a paper due for a 9am class.
Back at my station, I’m dealing with fondant, which is the stickiest substance known to the modern world. Its only redeeming quality is that when cooled it firms up so you can peel it off whatever it has stuck to. Trying to fill a piping bag with the stuff is a dexterous art, that my clothing, the floor, and the outside of my piping bag attest that I have not mastered. I’m learning to get it to just the right consistency, which is smooth and glossy but not overly runny. It dries out and cools down while I work, so I can add hot water to it or heat up the outside of a mixer with a butane torch. I sometimes dip my piping bag briefly into a pot of water that I keep simmering on the induction burner. I’m turning out to be decent at piping the bright pink rings on top of the doughnuts, at least. As I labor over the sheet trays, my shoulders hunch up and my neck twists to the side, and some muscle on my left side (serratus anterior?) is way too tense. I’m focusing on relaxing all of this, or I’ll never be able to keep up the work. By the time I’m finished, the front-of-house crew has arrived, and the activity and turmoil of the day has begun. I’ve never witnessed the sunrise; it’s always suddenly there.
For my first few days, 7:30 marked the moment at which I began to hate everyone and every object around me, no matter how much I reasoned with myself that it was just fatigue. Eventually I began to make it through that last hour tired but with some control over my mind. Still, the subway ride home is less triumphant than a dull vacancy of thoughts or comprehension. I arrive home and feed the cat, wash my face, take out my contacts. Usually Anthony is still in bed when I crawl in. I sleep hard and dreamless, waking up around 5 or 6 hours later the way you do from an unexpected nap, mussed-hair and sticky-eyed, disoriented and off-balance. Gradually I come back into the world, and then soon it is night again.