soc_puppet | Today at work...

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Today at work...

I was making hamburger buns. I was about three-quarters of the way through the first shaping, when I felt something sharp and relatively long and sturdy in one of the dough balls. Suspecting it was a rosemary needle that had been caught in the mechanical bread cutter from some herb bread or other, I worked it out of the roll.

It was not rosemary. It was a sharp piece of clear plastic.

I managed to track down the source of the plastic to the lid on one of the flour bins (one of the two types I was using for the buns), but could not guarantee that there wasn't more plastic in either the buns or the flour. So I had to throw out all of the buns and hand-sift over sixty pounds of flour.

My arm is very tired from sifting, but at least I can be sure that no one will be eating plastic!

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I'm very glad you found the plastic before it wound up in food someone was trying to eat!

(Once I found a chunk of rubber from one of our big spatulas in an already baked loaf of bread at the bakery I worked at. Fortunately, there's a good chance that it was the only chunk, and we were lucky enough that it was our sample loaf, so it didn't go home with anyone, and I was able to throw it away. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee there wasn't more in any of the other loaves that day. And that's not as bad as sharp plastic!)

Same! That could have gone very badly.

I've got only one other story like this, and it involves the first pastry chef I worked for, who was Terrible:

There was one person in the bakery that Pastry Chef W trusted to make brioche correctly. Our brioche loaves were used in brunch, and thus very popular, and we had to make them fairly often. After one or two too many "mistakes", W tried to emphasize to us that we should feel comfortable asking her questions or for help, even if she was in the office (as she very frequently was).

One day, brioche was on the to-do list and I was the only one in the bakery; I decided to take W on her word, and asked if she could supervise me while I made brioche to make sure I did it correctly. She came out of her office, and started directing me. "Don't let the student interns do this," she told me as she added the flour, "but if you're an expert chef, you don't have to scrape the bottom of the bowl to make sure that you've mixed all the flour in. I'm an expert chef, so I can tell if I need to, but the student shouldn't get the wrong idea." It was still only in my first few months on the job, so I mostly nodded along. "The bowl should be scraped, though. You do that, you're wearing gloves!"

Okay, fair enough. I reached for a bowl scraper, to more effectively scrape the bowl. "No, don't use that! Use your hands." ...Okay. It wasn't worth it to me to argue with her, so I started digging through the 40qt mixing bowl with my gloved hands. "That looks pretty good," she said to me after a bit of scraping.

"I just want to do one more good scrape," I replied, and reached in to do so.

Snap! The outermost two fingers of my glove came off in the dough.

"And you see," W told me, right before we had to throw away the entire batch of butter-heavy dough, "this is why you don't wear gloves when you're scraping a bowl!"

Thankfully, I had more sense to point out that she'd made me scrape the bowl because I was wearing gloves, and also that she'd forbidden me from using the tool designed for bowl-scraping, but boy was I not sorry when she was eventually fired!

UGH. The "ugh, this is why you don't do the thing I specifically just told you to do, particularly when it wasn't the way you wanted to in the first place" thing never ceases to be one of the most infuriating things a person can say!

I definitely wouldn't be sorry to see her go!