Bite-me Bake House

The QuiltyView...Life / Work insights. An occasional series looking at other people’s work lives.

Walked into the Bite Me Bakehouse the other day. My third visit in just a few weeks. Strange to say because in my 27 years in the area I had never been there previously, always driving on by. True, for many years it had been known as Rubber Duckies and never really appealed for my custom. In its defence the shop had suffered when the F3 was opened, being effectively bi-passed from the old custom on the busy Pacific Highway. 

The recent ownership change and the building of multi-units on the Highway at Mt Colah has seen a re-emergence of the site for tradies, travellers and families alike. It is good to see a local business do well and its offerings of crusty bread, lovely pastries and pies is impressive. The cherry pie they do ticks too many boxes for me!

In conversation with the manager I congratulated her on the shops impact and she told been she was at the end of a 12 hour shift. They bake everything on site. This revelation took me back to my teens, I had worked for a month in Percy Ingles bakery in the Broadway Market in London as a 15 year old. My old mate Johnny Burnham got me the job and I can honestly say it was one of the toughest jobs I ever did. We’d start at 1.00am and leave at 8.00am. The work itself was wearying in a hot environment but more than that the relentless routine involved got to me. Bread to be mixed, baked  cut and wrapped, doughnuts jammed and the clean up afterwards was tough. We couldn’t leave before the next dough was in the holder and everything spotless. The one painful lesson I did learn was don’t touch newly baked bread! We had dropped a few loaves off the stretcher coming out of the oven. They had been on the floor a while so muggins stopped to picked them off the floor. I still have the fingertip burn scars😳

So as the manager served me in theBite Me Bakery I told her than my Bakery experience was one of the hardest I’d had. She just nodded, smiled and said ‘That would be right!’