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Acme Bakeshop first fired up its oven in Garden City 10 years ago and has been distributing its loaves to retail stores and restaurants around the area ever since.
But to ensure the bread is at its peak freshness before heading to market, founder and chief baker Michael Runsvold starts his day in the early morning hours.
He welcomes me in through a front door with cracked glass spidering out from some kind of impact. An Acme Bakeshop sticker acts like a patch over the crystallized wound.
Michael has already been at the shop since about 10:30 p.m., which isn’t when he usually clocks in.
“I typically start my work day around 2 a.m., but Fridays there’s just more stuff that needs to be baked so it takes a few more hours,” he said.
Much of those extra breads and pastries go to the Boise Farmers Market, though restaurants and stores also order more for their uptick in weekend shoppers.
Pistachio croissants are about to come out of the oven, and in their place go their ham and gouda stuffed cousins.
“I’m making sure we get as much cheese as possible in these croissants,” he said as he sprinkles them with generous pinches.
Proofing cabinets filled with different doughs and pastries line up next to a massive oven that holds four separate chambers with their own temperature and steam controls.
Soon, Michael’s pulling out perfectly golden-brown loaves of potato bread from the oven with a paddle that’s at least twice as long as he is.
They crackle their own symphony as they sit on a nearby rack – the outermost crusts breaking and snapping as they adjust to the cooler air.
Tunes pumped in courtesy of Radio Boise echo off the concrete walls which, like pretty much everything in the bakery, have a layer of flour coating them.
Michael begins slapping out dough on a stainless steel table to prep them for a final proof before they go in the oven.
He then loads a tub of delicious smelling orange dough destined to become turmeric baguettes into a nearby machine.
The mixed sounds of hydraulics lifting the blob of flour, salt, yeast and water until it pleasantly squishes into smaller, equal pieces is strangely satisfying.
All of this happens well before the clock even hits midnight.
That’s when Michael stops taking restaurant orders for the day and figures out his game plan for how to stack the oven over a few smoke breaks he takes while sitting on a milk crate.
“One of those filthy habits that kind of comes with the job,” he said.
He has to figure out the most efficient way to bake roughly 2,900 items over the next few hours, including hundreds of baguettes that can’t all fit at once.
Clacking out his division problems on an analog Casio calculator, Michael soon solves that Tetris puzzle and move on to the next batch – this time, focaccia.
“Alright, I think I’m being summoned,” he said, as an alarm beeps at him from inside the bakery.
For the rest of the night, Michael’s schedule will be dictated by his timers, freeing up his brain to calculate the next move in a precisely orchestrated dance that becomes even more complicated as staff show up around 2 a.m.
Ingredients for the morning’s regular baguettes are mixed together and left to rise while dough for future bakes are created.
Another batch of bakers arrives around 3 a.m. and gets to work slicing the now-cooled loaves of bread, but only after Michael has to spend a quick five minutes re-aligning the machine’s blades.
Eventually, nearly the entire staff starts pounding out focaccia and shaping baguettes.
This is when Michael is nearly glued to the oven, always just a few trays ahead of what his co-workers are cranking out to fill up the nearby proofing cabinets.
After loading dozens of loaves at a time on a long, cloth sliding machine, he’s got to clean out the excess flour from each bake with a lengthy broom.
Michael repeats this process for the next several hours, passing off the finished loaves to drivers who arrive around 5 a.m.
One of them doesn’t show up or answer his phone, leaving Michael to cap off his shift with a delivery route he hadn’t planned for.
No call, no shows happen every week or two, which he chalks up to the early hours.
In the meantime, the other drivers load trays into vans backed up to the dock, ready to be delivered.
Finally, sometime in the 7 o’clock hour, Michael gets to breathe a little, even though the air is obscured by a light haze of flour.
He rates the shift as a good one, with no big hiccups. But he doesn’t spend any time romanticizing what he’s just done for the last nine hours.
“The sense of accomplishment is as ephemeral as the bread. This is all going to be gone in a couple of hours and then we’ll do it again.”
Well … he’ll do it again. I’m going to sleep.
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