San Diego Reader

I once walked into a dermatologist’s office with a nasty, unnatural-colored inflammation around my fingertips. Right off, I thought it was leprosy.

The doctor looked at it in a cursory way, not too interested, and said, “You’re either a baker or a bartender, right?”

I thought, am I at the right address? Did I walk into some psychic scam artist’s den?

“Yeah, I’m a bartender, but I always wanted to be a baker. How did you know?”

“You generally only see these kinds of funguses in professions like these, where the hands are kept moist for hours at a time, either in ice or a sink, or, say, bread dough.”

I was treated successfully. It cleared up. But it made me wonder why I blurted out, “I always wanted to be a baker.” As I thought about it, I realized it was true. As a kid in a loud and brawling Italian household, it seemed that my Aunt Louise was consistently mellow. She baked, from morning until night, kneading and rolling and folding ravioli, filling cannolis and making fragrant loaves of golden bread the size of baseball bats that appeared from her ovens in an assembly-line parade of life affirmation.

Of course, had I confessed my secret ambition to this occupation to my brothers or cousins, I would have been pounded.

Everyone has had the experience of walking into a bakery, say, in the morning — but it doesn’t matter what time of day — and filling one’s nostrils with a smell comparable to few other things, like the sea, or a woman, an infant, rich earth after a rain, or certain fleshy blossoms.

This happened to me recently while seeking out the best bakeries in San Diego. It wasn’t until I entered Devany’s on Felspar in Pacific Beach that I was flooded with that Proustian, childhood sense of warmth, well-being, and, of course, hunger.

I bought some rolls, which were exquisite — not croissants or raspberry-macadamia, low-fat, high-fiber, gluten-free, non-lactose, Amaretto yuppie puffs. These were just rolls. Bread. Good for sandwiches or dinner. The same dough as their hamburger rolls. If my mother ever baked or cooked anything, I’d say they were just like Mom used to make.

I wanted to do it. Just try out. See if after a single shift — no pay, of course — if they would let me bake something. Maybe consider me as a possible employee; bakery material, as it were. Few things I could think of would be more noble: an ancient heritage, a tradition, an art.

I called Michelle, who does most of the cake decorations (complex and beautiful) and asked her if I might try my hand at the work of baking (not decorating) just to see if I had any aptitude. Michelle’s a cheerful woman and she did not hesitate. “Sure,” she said. “You probably want to work with the men in the back at night. Come on by Thursday morning about 1:30, and they’ll get you started. Ask for my dad, Mike.”

This was great, but 1:30 in the morning? That’s the middle of the goddamn night. Well, I had to ask myself, when do you suppose this stuff gets done?

Mike is a graceful, quiet man, 62 years old, who works at a steady rhythm pouring huge, 100-pound bags of flour into a Hobart mixer, which looks like some Victorian torture device. That is, it is a vat from which a descending screw or churning, evil-looking metal spiral moves slowly in a sure, steady spin that mixes the flour and water in large quantities. It seems fraught with a kind of menace I can’t quite put my finger on. Mike speaks in a low voice while he works.

“My dad started this bakery in 1938. He went off to the war and started it up again in 1946.”

“Here, in Pacific Beach?”

“Yes. We were on Ingraham, then Garnet Street. We moved to Pacific Plaza and then we moved here. I’ve been a baker my whole life. I started when I was ten.”

“What did you do in here at ten years old?”

“They had me washing pans and trays to start off, and then gradually I learned everything else.”

Mike performs every aspect of production and administration at Devany’s — everything except cake decoration, although he knows how to rotate and frost a wedding cake very well. He demonstrates, miming the actions on the rotating dish, and it reminds me of a careful and fastidious potter at a wheel creating art as well as craft.

To refer to the cake decoration of Mike’s daughter’s as art is not just promotional hyperbole. Her work was recently on display at the David Zapf Gallery on Kettner Boulevard. It’s the first time that gallery has included baked goods as visual art.

After demonstrating the simple cardboard, plastic, and aluminum-foil-covered decorating wheel, Mike is back at his energetic, deliberate pace, preparing dough for bread loaves, dinner rolls, hamburger buns. As he works, he introduces me to his “crew,” David Miller, Glenn (just Glenn), and Caleb Diaz. The three other nocturnal battersmiths work at a distance from each other, at their own stations: muffin preparation, for example; the rotating “reel oven”; and the Danish roller and cutting table. None of them is engaged in any conversation across the bakery, such as, “Hey! How about those Chargers?” or “How’s the wife and kids?” Each seems to be in a separate world rotating around the single star, Mike, for the combined purpose of production against the clock.

At 8:00 a.m., hungry, hurried business men and women, shop clerks, students, young mothers, surfers, elderly, longtime customers in the habit of making Devany’s a morning stop will all come through the front door with definite carbohydrate and/or fructose needs that must be met. At first, I think the chatterless work atmosphere is due to Mike’s — “the boss’s” — presence, but this is not the case. The quiet, the relative solitude and repetitive cycle of production are important to these men. The nature of their tasks and the lack of necessity for social interaction are two moving parts that drive them more than the wage involved.

One thing is conspicuous by its absence. Recipes. No one in the mini-pastry factory is consulting measurement lists or wall posters indicating quantities of sugar or butter to be used. Not a single cookbook is in evidence, and yet an impressive variety of products is being prepared here. From breadloaves to “diplomat pudding” (a classic bread pudding made with leftover Danish dough) to carrot cake and blueberry muffins, walnut loaves, bran muffins, and numerous types of cookies.

I ask Mike about this and he says, “Oh, we have recipes around here somewhere.” He guides me to a chest of drawers near the mixer and pulls one out. He rifles through some yellowed pages, some typewritten with inked notes, but most in cramped handwriting. These pages were written long ago and resemble some unearthed ancient manuscripts with a fine silting of dough like exotic desert sand or temple dust. “We never really look at these,” he says. “We’ve got the recipes up here.” He taps his head.

Another absent item occurs to me. No donuts. “Everybody’s on this health kick, I guess,” Mike says. “Besides, we can’t compete with Vons or Ralphs as far as donuts.”

“This health thing is going to blow over,” I assure him.

“Maybe,” he says. But he might also be thinking that Vons and Ralphs aren’t going anywhere.

Mike suggests I talk with Glenn, a tall man with a mustache unfolding what looks like a beige blanket — Danish dough that had been “put up” the night before. He’s worked at Devany’s “on and off for 20 years. Mike’s hired me several times.” Glenn is fortyish; he came to San Diego to “be in the sun,” and worked in a 7-Eleven before being hired by Mike Devany for the first time.

“Well,” I suggest to the laconic baker, “this must be a lot easier than dealing with wackos at 7-Eleven in the middle of the night. I mean, you probably don’t get many wackos in here at 2:00 in the morning, other than me.”

“That’s a fact,” he says. I give him my spiel about the ancient art he is a part of, the tradition, the history nearly as old as mankind and fire, the nobility of baking grain into sustenance. “It’s a job” is all he says, adding, “but, yeah, it may be the second-oldest profession.” As the night wears on, it is evident that it’s more than clock-punching and assembly-line monotony. Glenn enjoys his work at a level you don’t see at the DMV — or 7-Eleven. It is in his hands and the relaxed but focused posture and easy movements that you see it.

Glenn has flattened the sheet of Danish dough and folded it several times. These will become “snail,” “pretzel,” and “pocket” Danish. He sets the sweetened dough on a conveyor belt and then dusts the surface of the belt with dry flour. He unfolds the layers until it is the size of a small-area carpet. He turns on the conveyor belt, and the swatch of “set up” firm batter advances toward the automatic roller that flattens and thins it further. “You see something you’ve started that goes to completion,” he says. “You can see how much you’ve progressed over the course of a shift. It may not be like American television — 30-second satisfaction, you know — but you get a sense of accomplishment that you can see.”

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