The smell fills your nose the second you walk through the back door of Dozen’s Wedgewood-Houston kitchen. A walk-in oven — large enough to hold 30 trays of pastries on two kitchen racks — is baking more than 100 croissants filled with ham and cheese or chocolate, and you can almost taste the melting butter particles with every breath.
“I don’t even notice it anymore,” says Dozen owner Claire Meneely while studiously spacing out lumps of frozen cookie dough on sheet pans. It’s the saddest thing ever said by anyone — to grow numb to the scent of a freshly baked croissant is to grow numb to living life itself.
With an increasing number of wholesale orders to fill, as well as a cafe to stock, operations at Dozen have to start early. At 2:30 a.m., with the croissants in the oven, Meneely’s now getting to work on baking more than 100 cookies — chocolate chip, snickerdoodle and oatmeal cranberry — and next she’ll prepare and bake about 200 blueberry muffins. Then she’ll throw into the oven the seasonal muffins (expertly moist and not-too-sweet cranberry-pumpkin) and scones, in both sweet and savory flavors. Then there are pies and madeleines and the seasonal galettes to work on.
Because everything is prepped and ready to go (save for the blueberry muffins, which are mixed just before baking, as the batter gets grossly dense if left for too long), the bulk of Meneely’s early-morning duties involve “shoving the oven as full as possible as long as possible.” And tonight, though Meneely moves through the utterly organized kitchen with a quick but calm grace, she admits that the bakery’s busiest, most stressful season is just about to start.
Dozen is known for its pies — pumpkin, buttermilk-pear, chocolate-silk and butterscotch-pecan — so the day before Thanksgiving is understandably their busiest, with hundreds and hundreds of pie orders to fill. It’s so much pie, in fact, that Meneely has had to bring in a temporary outdoor freezer so they can start stockpiling crusts. The freezer is larger than a New York studio apartment.
“It’s a fun time of year, it’s a ridiculous time of year,” she says.
But tonight, it’s the quiet before the storm. Hip-hop streams out of the stereo, her favorite music to listen to during her early morning bakes, and Dozen’s kitchen light is the only interior light seen for blocks. Before I head back out into the darkness, Meneely hands me one of the freshly baked croissants. It’s perfect. It’s literally the best croissant I have ever eaten.
On my quiet drive home, through the all-but-abandoned streets, I eat my croissant while thinking about how lovely it is to be one of the few humans out here. No traffic, no fighting for parking, no one to see flaky crumbs rain down on my shirt with every bite. If Dozen were to open a 3 a.m. croissant window, selling hot-out-of-the-oven pastries for $5 a pop, they could turn this sleepy street upside down. But then again, that’d ruin some of the magic of being awake and alone, wouldn’t it?
