Behind the Scenes at the Dining Services Bakery

Starting at 7:15 each weekday morning, nearly 1,900 women pour into MHC dining rooms, expecting breakfast. In that caffeine-deprived state, few probably wonder where their breakfast came from.

The breakfast Danish pastries, muffins, and quickbreads, as well as the baguettes, rolls, and desserts served at lunch and dinner are all baked in the Dining Services Building. Four employees, managed by Al DiMaio, start around 3:30 am each day. Three hours later, the aroma of golden brown baked goods permeates the air as food is loaded onto a truck for campus delivery. In forty-five minutes, all kitchen workers have baked goods to serve with the cooked-to-order breakfasts they prepare for students.

It's like running a relay race three times a day, seven days a week; everything must go like clockwork. "It's a challenge every single day," says dining services director Dale Hennessey. "Any number of things can go wrong, from a late delivery or food being dropped to a malfunctioning piece of equipment."

On a recent morning, however, things were going smoothly in the bake shop. By 8 am, breakfast breads were at residence halls, 125 dozen grinder rolls were out of the ovens, and bakers were making hundreds of roll-up fruit pastries, chocolate chip cookies, and other desserts.

For those used to family-size kitchens, the scale of things in the bake shop is surprising. DiMaio shows a visitor two gas-fired ovens whose revolving shelves can hold forty sheet-cake pans at once, a 120-quart bowl used to mix 160 pounds of bread dough per batch, and machines that cut and shape hundreds of rolls or cookies. Lining the walls are fifty-pound bags of flour and five-gallon tubs of fruit pastry fillings. Racks holding hundreds of rolls are "proofing," while dozens of chocolate-swirl layer cakes cool nearby.

While some of us have trouble baking a single pie or tin of muffins without disaster, the College's bakers give the campus its daily bread--and a lot more--without apparent stress.