Pizza Crust Nightmare
Feb. 19th, 2015 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppet[Content Note: Anxiety/anxiety disorder]
So today was not quite as bad as the coconut macaroon incident, but it was a near thing. In fact, it probably would have been as bad if I hadn't had a lot of help from a coworker and at least one student intern towards the end, so many wonderful thoughts to them.
Today I was assigned to make pizza crusts. That in itself is not terrible! Pizza crusts are not the worst thing in the world to make in the bakery, even if we do have to rely on one of the three people in the bakery staff with a key to the liquor cage, two of which were not available today and one of which spent most of the day in her office. (The recipe calls for a certain amount of white wine, and boozeahol is one of the most commonly stolen items in restaurants, hence the liquor cage.) Mostly the worst part is the fact that it makes one's hands smell like garlic for a good while, and even that's a subjective worst.
No, what made pizza crusts bad today was different. See, we had an order for some sixty pizza crusts, even though it wasn't on our schedule sheets so we didn't know exactly which day it was due (tomorrow, for the record). Technically, we had forty-three already made and waiting in the walk-in freezer downstairs, but my boss wasn't entirely satisfied with that. No, instead, at eight-thirty, she nabbed me from the bakery to go downstairs with her so I could sort the available pizza crusts into "acceptable" and "unacceptable", and then count the respective crusts and report back the numbers. She then proceeded to demonstrate how to sort the pizza crusts without adequately explaining what made one acceptable vs. unacceptable, leaving me with some forty-plus pizza crusts to sort by arbitrary standards I have limited to no understanding of. (I finally figured out, AT THE END OF THE DAY, that the standards were whether they were the correct size (which I figured out) and whether they had any (large-ish) holes in the middle (which I didn't figure out).) It was a fight not to have a hugely weepy anxiety attack on the spot. Before she left me to sort the pizza crusts, and because I knew I would have to make more, I asked my boss to get the white wine out of the liquor cage for me so I would be able to use it.
While I was sorting pizza crusts, I got a call from my coworker in the bakery. She wanted to know what on earth I was doing downstairs and how soon I could be back up, because two more student interns had arrived and we still had one of the previous shift of interns for another hour. I explained what was going on (including the lack of directions on how to sort pizza crusts), my coworker sympathized, and I promised to be back up as soon as I could.
Fast-forward a bit to measuring out ingredients for the dough. Guess what my boss forgot to do? If you guessed "get out the white wine for Socchan", you are absolutely correct! I had to call her and ask her to come out to the bakery to get the white wine out for me so I could make the pizza crusts to her specifications. (I would be willing to overlook this in almost any other circumstances, because goodness knows my memory and attention span have enough gaps in them, but I have lost the ability to be rational about these pizza crusts. I lost it when I had to sort and count the frikkin' things at eight-thirty in the frikkin' morning.)
So I get the dough mixed, and I let it rest while I go to lunch, which turned out to maybe a be a little too long, as it's only supposed to double in size and instead it maybe tripled in size? But it was "my" job and we didn't have anyone else to cover it, so. I had a student help me pre-shape the dough while I measured it out into lumps of the appropriate size, and then together she and I started rolling the dough and getting it onto sheet trays and docking it. (Docking = punching little holes in it. If you've ever used a fork to punch holes in the bottom of a pie crust for reasons that escape me at the moment but I'm sure are very important and you should definitely try the next time you bake a pie, this is the same idea. We've got a special tool for the job as well called a docker, and it's kinda like a painter's roll crossed with a puffer fish.) Then my coworker finished the task she was on and offered to help, which I was completely down for. Only we only had the one docker between three people, and we were all in a row, and while I could arrange everything else so no one had to reach over anyone else, the docker did a lot of leapfrogging. So I set out to find a second docker for us to work with.
Except there wasn't one. I'm pretty sure that there's only one single docker in the entire building. Which isn't too bad most of the time, because most of the time three people together aren't trying to roll out thirty-eight pizza crusts, but today was very frustrating. After that was done, I set about trying to free up an extra baking rack so we could par-bake the crusts in shifts, because there was no possible way we could have gotten all thirty-eight crusts in the rotary oven at one time, and even if we could have, they wouldn't have baked evenly. Eventually I managed it, and then went looking for a spare speed rack (a tall-ish rack you can put sheet trays on that has speedy wheels at the bottom; different from baking racks in that it is speedy, relatively lightweight, and does not couple with the rotary oven's mechanics) to put the pizza crusts on when they were done. I finally managed to track one down in the banquets area and went to ask the head of banquets if I could use it. She wanted to know what I was using it for, and I told her about the pizza crusts....
....AT WHICH POINT she told me that she had ordered in the required number of pizza crusts for the banquet, making all of the work I had done for the past two-and-a-half hours, AND the sorting and counting, absolutely meaningless.
It was a wonder I didn't explode on the spot.
We decided to finish up the pizza crusts anyway, since we were already practically at the baking stage and why the hell not. Banquets head said she'd use the pizza crusts we made anyway since we made them for this specific purpose and would save the ordered in ones for another time. I started baking off the crusts while the student intern and my coworker finished rolling them out, and eventually the other student intern finished her task at the time (rolling six days' worth of cinnamon rolls) and helped out with the few remaining pizza crusts. All three of them had to leave at one o'clock, so I was left to finish baking the crusts on my own, which I was pretty okay with. I was going to be done soon, yay!
Then my boss came in, looked at the rack of pizza crusts that had just come out of the oven, the last one, and told me they needed to be baked a little bit longer. So I spent the next hour baking the rest of the crust "a little longer" and making sure they were all arranged so they could cool properly and etc., at which point I was scheduled to leave.
I was ALMOST OUT THE DOOR when one of the lead people from the restaurant proper (and coincidentally Geeky Coworker's boyfriend) came over to say that he thought that the whipped cream was a little bland. I tasted it, kinda agreed, and, after nearly deciding to do otherwise, ended up re-whipping it with some more sugar and vanilla to make it an acceptable sweetness level. (Which is not about pizza crust, but I was so done with EVERYTHING at that point that I thought it may as fricking well have been.)
Anyway, tomorrow I get to teach all the student interns how to make some basic animals out of fondant! Except I'm still not entirely sure which animals I get to teach them to make on account of Boss Related Shenanigans. I want to teach them to make a small basic bird (because it's fast and simple and you can make slight alterations to customize it to be practically any bird, especially songbirds) and stegosaurus (because it's a fairly basic shape and I came up with a great shortcut where you can use almond slices and slivers for the fins and tail spikes respectively), but it's seeming like I'll have to teach them to make at least a more complicated bird and maybe an ankylosaurus/crocogator??? Or possibly a lion. My boss mentioned me using something called scissor clips and told me she'd show them to me/explain them today, but we never got around to it, so.
I have one hour, maybe one-and-a-half, to teach the students in. Basic bird takes me about five minutes if I rush and don't bother to paint; stegosaurus takes me about fifteen. If I assume the students will take two to three times as long as I do when making these, an hour should have been enough time. Meanwhile, the more complicated bird takes me four colors of fondant (though technically two are just little smidgens for the eyes and beak) and fifteen minutes and cannot be customized; it's just a robin. I have no idea what she wants me to do for the crocogator/ankylosaurus, though the last (and so far only) crocogator I made took me about half an hour; ditto to the lion (though the first lion I made took me a whole hour, so at least this one's an improvement on that). Assuming the students take only twice as long as I do, and allowing for minimal individual attention for fourteen of them, that's still half an hour more time than I'm budgeted. Meanwhile, they're learning two complex things with limited applicability: the simple birds, as I mentioned, are super customizable, and can be anything from doves on a wedding cake to the state bird; meanwhile, stegosaurus is way more instantly recognizable than ankylosaurus*, and more popular than crocogators (outside of Florida at least, one assumes, though maybe even there).
None of that matters, though. Or, at least, that's the last I knew of it. Maybe my boss will have changed her mind, or will be willing to change her mind, before four-thirty tomorrow afternoon. Here's hoping!
* Though it turns out that ankylosaurus is actually one of our interns' favorites! Sadly, at least two of my coworkers had no idea what it even was without explanation ("The armored dinosaur with the clubbed tail?" "Doesn't ring a bell." "Maybe if I saw a picture..."), and my boss didn't know the proper name for it/its family. Maybe the intern can stick around a few extra minutes after the main workshop if we don't end up making ankylosaurus for it.
So today was not quite as bad as the coconut macaroon incident, but it was a near thing. In fact, it probably would have been as bad if I hadn't had a lot of help from a coworker and at least one student intern towards the end, so many wonderful thoughts to them.
Today I was assigned to make pizza crusts. That in itself is not terrible! Pizza crusts are not the worst thing in the world to make in the bakery, even if we do have to rely on one of the three people in the bakery staff with a key to the liquor cage, two of which were not available today and one of which spent most of the day in her office. (The recipe calls for a certain amount of white wine, and boozeahol is one of the most commonly stolen items in restaurants, hence the liquor cage.) Mostly the worst part is the fact that it makes one's hands smell like garlic for a good while, and even that's a subjective worst.
No, what made pizza crusts bad today was different. See, we had an order for some sixty pizza crusts, even though it wasn't on our schedule sheets so we didn't know exactly which day it was due (tomorrow, for the record). Technically, we had forty-three already made and waiting in the walk-in freezer downstairs, but my boss wasn't entirely satisfied with that. No, instead, at eight-thirty, she nabbed me from the bakery to go downstairs with her so I could sort the available pizza crusts into "acceptable" and "unacceptable", and then count the respective crusts and report back the numbers. She then proceeded to demonstrate how to sort the pizza crusts without adequately explaining what made one acceptable vs. unacceptable, leaving me with some forty-plus pizza crusts to sort by arbitrary standards I have limited to no understanding of. (I finally figured out, AT THE END OF THE DAY, that the standards were whether they were the correct size (which I figured out) and whether they had any (large-ish) holes in the middle (which I didn't figure out).) It was a fight not to have a hugely weepy anxiety attack on the spot. Before she left me to sort the pizza crusts, and because I knew I would have to make more, I asked my boss to get the white wine out of the liquor cage for me so I would be able to use it.
While I was sorting pizza crusts, I got a call from my coworker in the bakery. She wanted to know what on earth I was doing downstairs and how soon I could be back up, because two more student interns had arrived and we still had one of the previous shift of interns for another hour. I explained what was going on (including the lack of directions on how to sort pizza crusts), my coworker sympathized, and I promised to be back up as soon as I could.
Fast-forward a bit to measuring out ingredients for the dough. Guess what my boss forgot to do? If you guessed "get out the white wine for Socchan", you are absolutely correct! I had to call her and ask her to come out to the bakery to get the white wine out for me so I could make the pizza crusts to her specifications. (I would be willing to overlook this in almost any other circumstances, because goodness knows my memory and attention span have enough gaps in them, but I have lost the ability to be rational about these pizza crusts. I lost it when I had to sort and count the frikkin' things at eight-thirty in the frikkin' morning.)
So I get the dough mixed, and I let it rest while I go to lunch, which turned out to maybe a be a little too long, as it's only supposed to double in size and instead it maybe tripled in size? But it was "my" job and we didn't have anyone else to cover it, so. I had a student help me pre-shape the dough while I measured it out into lumps of the appropriate size, and then together she and I started rolling the dough and getting it onto sheet trays and docking it. (Docking = punching little holes in it. If you've ever used a fork to punch holes in the bottom of a pie crust for reasons that escape me at the moment but I'm sure are very important and you should definitely try the next time you bake a pie, this is the same idea. We've got a special tool for the job as well called a docker, and it's kinda like a painter's roll crossed with a puffer fish.) Then my coworker finished the task she was on and offered to help, which I was completely down for. Only we only had the one docker between three people, and we were all in a row, and while I could arrange everything else so no one had to reach over anyone else, the docker did a lot of leapfrogging. So I set out to find a second docker for us to work with.
Except there wasn't one. I'm pretty sure that there's only one single docker in the entire building. Which isn't too bad most of the time, because most of the time three people together aren't trying to roll out thirty-eight pizza crusts, but today was very frustrating. After that was done, I set about trying to free up an extra baking rack so we could par-bake the crusts in shifts, because there was no possible way we could have gotten all thirty-eight crusts in the rotary oven at one time, and even if we could have, they wouldn't have baked evenly. Eventually I managed it, and then went looking for a spare speed rack (a tall-ish rack you can put sheet trays on that has speedy wheels at the bottom; different from baking racks in that it is speedy, relatively lightweight, and does not couple with the rotary oven's mechanics) to put the pizza crusts on when they were done. I finally managed to track one down in the banquets area and went to ask the head of banquets if I could use it. She wanted to know what I was using it for, and I told her about the pizza crusts....
....AT WHICH POINT she told me that she had ordered in the required number of pizza crusts for the banquet, making all of the work I had done for the past two-and-a-half hours, AND the sorting and counting, absolutely meaningless.
It was a wonder I didn't explode on the spot.
We decided to finish up the pizza crusts anyway, since we were already practically at the baking stage and why the hell not. Banquets head said she'd use the pizza crusts we made anyway since we made them for this specific purpose and would save the ordered in ones for another time. I started baking off the crusts while the student intern and my coworker finished rolling them out, and eventually the other student intern finished her task at the time (rolling six days' worth of cinnamon rolls) and helped out with the few remaining pizza crusts. All three of them had to leave at one o'clock, so I was left to finish baking the crusts on my own, which I was pretty okay with. I was going to be done soon, yay!
Then my boss came in, looked at the rack of pizza crusts that had just come out of the oven, the last one, and told me they needed to be baked a little bit longer. So I spent the next hour baking the rest of the crust "a little longer" and making sure they were all arranged so they could cool properly and etc., at which point I was scheduled to leave.
I was ALMOST OUT THE DOOR when one of the lead people from the restaurant proper (and coincidentally Geeky Coworker's boyfriend) came over to say that he thought that the whipped cream was a little bland. I tasted it, kinda agreed, and, after nearly deciding to do otherwise, ended up re-whipping it with some more sugar and vanilla to make it an acceptable sweetness level. (Which is not about pizza crust, but I was so done with EVERYTHING at that point that I thought it may as fricking well have been.)
Anyway, tomorrow I get to teach all the student interns how to make some basic animals out of fondant! Except I'm still not entirely sure which animals I get to teach them to make on account of Boss Related Shenanigans. I want to teach them to make a small basic bird (because it's fast and simple and you can make slight alterations to customize it to be practically any bird, especially songbirds) and stegosaurus (because it's a fairly basic shape and I came up with a great shortcut where you can use almond slices and slivers for the fins and tail spikes respectively), but it's seeming like I'll have to teach them to make at least a more complicated bird and maybe an ankylosaurus/crocogator??? Or possibly a lion. My boss mentioned me using something called scissor clips and told me she'd show them to me/explain them today, but we never got around to it, so.
I have one hour, maybe one-and-a-half, to teach the students in. Basic bird takes me about five minutes if I rush and don't bother to paint; stegosaurus takes me about fifteen. If I assume the students will take two to three times as long as I do when making these, an hour should have been enough time. Meanwhile, the more complicated bird takes me four colors of fondant (though technically two are just little smidgens for the eyes and beak) and fifteen minutes and cannot be customized; it's just a robin. I have no idea what she wants me to do for the crocogator/ankylosaurus, though the last (and so far only) crocogator I made took me about half an hour; ditto to the lion (though the first lion I made took me a whole hour, so at least this one's an improvement on that). Assuming the students take only twice as long as I do, and allowing for minimal individual attention for fourteen of them, that's still half an hour more time than I'm budgeted. Meanwhile, they're learning two complex things with limited applicability: the simple birds, as I mentioned, are super customizable, and can be anything from doves on a wedding cake to the state bird; meanwhile, stegosaurus is way more instantly recognizable than ankylosaurus*, and more popular than crocogators (outside of Florida at least, one assumes, though maybe even there).
None of that matters, though. Or, at least, that's the last I knew of it. Maybe my boss will have changed her mind, or will be willing to change her mind, before four-thirty tomorrow afternoon. Here's hoping!
* Though it turns out that ankylosaurus is actually one of our interns' favorites! Sadly, at least two of my coworkers had no idea what it even was without explanation ("The armored dinosaur with the clubbed tail?" "Doesn't ring a bell." "Maybe if I saw a picture..."), and my boss didn't know the proper name for it/its family. Maybe the intern can stick around a few extra minutes after the main workshop if we don't end up making ankylosaurus for it.
