A peachy sun creeps up on a Thursday morning in Lakewood. Early commuters slump at the bus stop at the corner of West Clifton and Detroit roads. Behind them, the lights go on in the storefront of Breadsmith. One of the morning crew turns the front door sign from CLOSED to OPEN. The day begins with some 700 loaves cut and shaped by human hands.

For most of the history of breadmaking, hands have been an essential ingredient. Industrialization changed some of that, and even small bakeries benefit from such advances as, well, electricity. They rely on commercial ovens. They take advantage of machines that accommodate enough flour and water to mix 50 loaves.

Still, the bread here is made from scratch ingredients: flour and yeast, real butter when it's called for. Nuts and raisins sweeten some doughs. Herbs make others savory.

But human minds and muscles are required to do the job.

The Lakewood Breadsmith franchise is owned by Ginius Macys, a former IT specialist who grew disillusioned with the corporate scene, and his wife Sabine Kretzschmar, executive director of the Shaker Historical Society. Bread lovers both, they threw their entrepreneurial energies into this carb-happy enterprise four years ago -- right in the middle of an Atkins diet surge. It was tough at first, admits Macys, but business has grown steadily since.

About a third of the daily yield goes to restaurants and small markets; the rest is sold at the shop. French and Italian are daily staples, but varieties such as Irish soda bread and Tuscan herb loaf are offered as specials on certain days.

For the most part, the life of each loaf begins the evening before it is presented for the buying public. This Thursday morning's yield begins around 8 Wednesday night, with Aaron Slocon, a Liberian man who has worked at Breadsmith for three years, measuring ingredients for each variety into a commercial mixer.

For the Baltic rye: wheat flour, rye flour, rye meal and sourdough starter. Rustic Italian is simpler: wheat flour, water, salt and yeast.

After each mix, Slocon turns the dough into a covered plastic bucket for proofing -- when the dough rises. Different doughs require different amounts of time in the proofing buckets. Although this is a "slow" night, with about 13 kinds of bread on the schedule, keeping track of time is a key task for the night shift.

Tiffany Tanner is, among other things, keeper of the watch -- a task she performs in her head, not on paper. Tanner runs the bench, where proofed dough is smacked to expel excess air, then shaped and formed.

Tanner works the bench with Mashbura Aliyeva and Nazli Mukhtadova, a mother-daughter team who brought their own breadmaking skills from Uzbekistan.

Keeping proof times in mind, Tanner and the others retrieve the enormous, yeasty doughs -- perhaps 50 pounds of it at a time -- from each tub, one by one, and turn them onto a flour-covered wood block.

"This is the best part of the night -- making bread," says Tanner. "This is the Zen part."

It is low-stress work, Tanner says, but breadmaking at this level demands physical effort and a sensitivity about how variables like the weather will affect certain doughs.

The women take turns swiftly separating chunks of dough from the whole and weighing them. Then three pairs of hands begin kneading and shaping each 2-pound chunk, either to be fit into a traditional bread pan or for its life as a free-form loaf. The hands dance with the dough until the bench is covered with perhaps 100 loaves that the women eventually place on racks for another period of proofing.

The air in the kitchen is filled with the scent of yeasty ferment. Tanner keeps watch on the clock, deciding which breads need more time and which are ready to go into the tiered, stone-lined bread oven. Those that are ready go onto the setter, a conveyor that can, with some muscle, be raised and lowered depending on which shelf of the oven the loaves are headed for.

Tanner hovers over the setter and uses a razorlike tool with a French name, lame, to slash a lip into each of a dozen loaves of Italian bread. The lame is "a 20-cent piece of equipment that changes the complexion of the bread," Tanner says. She can slice checkerboard patterns into sourdough rounds or give baguettes a series of sharp diagonal cuts.

By 3 Thursday morning, the kitchen is hot. There's an easy rhythm as the women turn out the dough, shape it and move loaves into the oven. Tanner pulls them out about six at a time on the end of 7-foot-long wooden paddle. She slides them onto cooling racks. By 5, a batch of hoagie rolls emerges from the oven and the night's baking is done.

The morning shift workers arrive around 6, greeted by three tall bakery racks lined with cooling loaves. They bag some for deliveries to stores and restaurants and put others on shelves in the front of the store as the RTA buses go by.

It will be more than an hour before the first customers come through the front door, looking for something that is both new and old: fresh bread, made by hand.