VILLAGE BAKING CO.

AM4:20

It’s hours before the sun comes up, but already the parking lot of Village Baking Co. on University near Greenville abounds with the chalky sweet-sour smell of yeast rising. In a couple hours, neighbors will form a line in the parking lot to wait for the door of the cozy bread and pastry shop to be unlocked and thrown open at 7 a.m. Although most neighbors never go beyond the retail shop at the front of the building, it’s only a part of Kim and Clint Cooper’s Village Baking Co., which provides bread products and pastries to restaurants all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “This is a 24-hour process that’s continuously done,” explains Brittany Marquez, the distribution manager at the bakery. “What we made last night is being delivered this morning, and what they’re making right now will be delivered later on today and into tomorrow.”

AM4:23

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Marquez wanders through the warehouselike room. “We always start from the back,” she says. “This is where it all begins.” Half a dozen people bustle around, chopping dough and flopping chunks of it onto bulky metal machines. Latin music blares from loud speakers and shotguns through the room with a tinny, hollow ring. “Our day starts at 3 a.m. most days,” Marquez explains.

Pastry chef Ashlie Taylor hits the point home saying, “I got one hour of sleep last night. I’ve got a lot of pies to have out by the morning.”

AM4:30

Hector Perez, who oversees the breadmixing process, checks on the “mixing station,” which looks just like your mother’s mixer at home, only giant, as it rhythmically rolls the dough with a paddle. “And then they knead it, cut it and weigh it. It’s all done by hand,” Taylor says. “It goes through a proofer, and then it’ll go to the next step where it’s processed.”

AM4:31

Across the room a young woman chops dough into bricks, weighs each chunk and lines them up side by side along a table. All morning the bread makers — each of whom arrive at 3 a.m. and are usually referred to as “the mixers” — mix, measure and bake things like hamburger buns, hoagie buns, hoagie rolls, pretzel rolls, pull-apart sliders, sourdough bowls, jalapeño bowls, baguettes and more.

AM4:37

“These are the croissants we made yesterday,” Taylor notes, indicating several columns of stackable plastic trays filled with croissants that were left to dry overnight. “When [the pastry staff] gets in at 5 a.m., we egg wash [the croissant dough] and then pop them in the oven, so the majority of croissants are done by 7 a.m.,” she says. Taylor is attending Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Dallas after teaching preschool for eight years. “All of our pastry people have graduated from Cordon Bleu or are attending Cordon Bleu,” she says. Aside from several different types of croissants (classic, chocolate, ham and cheese, etc.), Taylor oversees the creation of things like laminated brioche, macaroons, pies, cakes and more. “And we’re always trying new stuff.”

AM4:39

Taylor points to several stacks of flour in the corner of the room. The bakery goes through about ten pallets worth of flour every week, almost 25,000 pounds total. “You should see how much butter we go through,” she says. “Just on the pastry side alone, we go through half of a fifty-pound block [a day]. So 25 pounds of butter per day go into those croissants.”

AM4:48

A cargo truck beeps as it backs up to the delivery entrance at the front of the warehouse where packaged goods are sent out daily. Village Baking Co. ships more than 150 orders a day and each order has about 80 pieces, according to Marquez, whose job is to oversee the delivery process. Marquez began as a driver and "worked very hard to get out of the truck and into the office,” she says. Drivers first begin coming in at 3 a.m. to collect truckloads of pastries to deliver all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and they continue to make deliveries until about 1 p.m.

AM5:10

The retail store is stark and empty at this hour, but in just a couple hours, the shelves, the windows and the baskets along the countertop will be brimming over with freshly baked goods. “Right now it’s calm,” Taylor says. “It will be much louder come 10 or 11 o’clock. It will be busy, there will be no parking spots outside, you will hear the racks moving, and it will be hot. It will be completely different.” —Brittany Nunn

“As long as stupid people keep doing stupid things, we’ve always got work.”