Photos & Stories from Macy's DeGustibus Event

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a cooking demo at the Macy's De Gustibus school with Chef Marc. Because he's pretty much a "celebrity" chef, Marc gets invited to do a lot of various events, appearances, and classes. The event was an American Cut preview event because....we're opening an American Cut in NYC!!! This is GIANT news that I could not be more excited to share, especially since I will be moving back to be the pastry chef! More about that later!

Paramount Hotel

I got up to NYC the day before the event and checked in at The Paramount Hotel, a hotel owned by American Cut's parent company, LDV. Beautiful hotel, wish I could have spent more time there, but we were super busy with prepping for the next day. I headed downtown to Chef's restaurant, Marc Forgione, to begin preparing for the De Gustibus event. We did 5 courses in total, with dessert being the last. For dessert, we made my mascarpone cheesecake with a tangerine gelee. This cheesecake has been on the menu at Cut in various forms since the winter; currently it's paired weth a rhubarb Campari gelee and rhubarb fennel sorbet.

Here's the deal about the Forge kitchen... It is really tiny. And not so well-equipped. With low ceilings, a lot of humidity, and a walk-in refrigerator that feels like a cave. It's really incredible how they manage to turn out consistently incredible food with the resources they have. Kudos to the staff who works there on a daily basis. They managed to clear off a good amount of space for me, so my prep was no problem...Until I had to bake the cheesecakes in what appeared to be a large toaster oven. Unaccustomed to the way that oven worked, my cheesecakes swelled, and I had to perform some "surgery" on them the next day to give me enough room to put the gelee on top. A small problem that cost me at least an hour of sleep because I like to over stress about everything.

Showing how to mix the cheesecake

Mascarpone Cheesecake

Chef Marc in action

Wednesday was the day of the event and we met at Forge to do some last minute preparations and pack up to drive over to Macy's Herald Square. When we finally beat the traffic and got there, Chef Marc attempted to give me the keys to his brand new SUV to park it. Here's all you need to know about my driving skills: They are not good. I quickly handed them off to our chef de cuisine, Quincy, and assumed navigation responsibilities.

When we got in the DeGustibus kitchen, our hosts Sal (the owner/director of De Gustibus) and Emeril (the kitchen's lead chef) could not have been nicer or more accommodating. I'd seriously like to go back every week just to hang out with them. We unloaded all of our mise en place and got ready for guests to arrive. The first four courses were a blur with Chef showing the attendees how to prepare some of Cut's signature dishes: everything bagel gourgeres, shrimp cocktail, the OG caesar salad, and Tomahawk/chili lobster surf & turf. Before I knew it, it was time for me to hit the stage to assist Chef Marc with the dessert course. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. I'm used to being behind the scenes making the desserts, not on stage in front of an audience.

Fire power, unmolding cheesecakes

As soon as the lady in the front row yelled out "You're so pretty!" (did I mention there were wine pairings with each of the courses...?), I felt calmer, and Sal, Chef, and myself began to converse about the desserts at American Cut, our process, and the cheesecake we were preparing (which the audience got to eat while we were demoing). We told the story of how it took over 20 attempts to perfect the recipe.


Overall, the event was a big success. I personally had so much fun, and I hope that I get to do another event at De Gustibus in the future. So onto my bigger news... I will be moving back to NYC in a couple of months to open our second location of American Cut! The restaurant will be located on Greenwich St. in Tribeca (only a block away from where I got my restaurant start at Locanda Verde!) and will be opening sometime in late summer. As much as I've enjoyed my time in Atlantic City, I am anxious to get back to NYC which feels like "home." I have a couple more months though to soak up all the UV rays I can.

Group Shot

Read more...

Blue Chicken Eggs & The Best Vanilla Ice Cream

A little while ago, I bought the cookbook Frozen Desserts by Francisco Migoya. I had received Migoya's other book, The Elements of Dessert for my birthday this year and loved the way the books are written pretty exclusively for pastry professionals. I have an extensive cookbook collection, and I am frequently frustrated how a lot of recipes are beyond basic and often don't even work. Migoya's cookbooks are the real deal: ingredients in metric weights, precise instructions, complex techniques, and beautiful pictures. I can't believe it took me so long to discover these books.

Baby Araucana Chick. I need one!!

I also can't believe it took me so long to discover there are chickens that lay pastel blue and green eggs. In Frozen Desserts, there is a sidebar dedicated to Araucana chickens. These chickens lay blue eggs (which is awesome in and of itself) as well as brown eggs, and apparently the eggs produced by these chickens have a superior taste. I became obsessed with finding these chickens, and found myself talking about them quite frequently. One day at work, I was talking with a server and he mentioned he and his wife own chickens. It turns out that the chickens he has are the same ones I've been searching for. I must have come off as very enthused because the next day he brought in a dozen eggs for me from his chickens, including several blue eggs which are more rare than the brown. It probably didn't hurt that I promised him homemade ice cream...

My assortment of eggs

I wanted to make an ice cream with them that would really let the egg yolk flavor shine and decided to go with vanilla. Let me take this opportunity to protest that there is nothing boring about vanilla. Vanilla is one of the world's most exotic spices, with a flavor that can be incredibly complex depending on the quality of beans you have. I've never been much of a chocolate fiend, preferring vanilla in almost every circumstance.

Finished product

I love all ice cream, but the quality of this one was amazing. It was so silky and rich. I gave a quart of it to my parents, and my dad declared it the best ice cream he ever tasted. In exchange for the eggs, I gave Jeremy, the server with the Araucanas, a pint, which he dug into halfway through his drive home.

I'd really love to get some of these chickens for myself, but alas, I live in an apartment and I don't think my landlord would appreciate it.

Read more...

New Winter Desserts

I know this is very cliche to say, but I feel like the past year has been passing by so fast. I got caught up in the holidays, and before long, I realized pumpkin cheesecake had a spot on our menu way past it's "seasonal expiration date." Coming up with a new dessert idea and testing recipes during the Christmas-New Year's push proved to be challenging. I knew I wanted to do a mascarpone cheesecake and had to test so many variations of it in order to get the recipe perfect. Because mascarpone has less structure than the typical cream cheese found in cheesecake, it was tricky to figure out a balance so that it would not  collapse, but also still taste like the mascarpone. Once that was done, I played around with a few uses of tangerine before settling on a tangerine gelee made with marmalade and a tangerine sorbet. I was originally thinking of a mulled wine sorbet, which tasted great on its own but really, really did not work with the dish (my sous chef Kristen declared it tasted "like someone spilled their glass of wine on their dessert plate"). I reduced that sorbet into a sauce, and the full dessert finally came together.

Chef Marc was also interested in using meyer lemons in a dessert. Meyer lemons are a cross between lemons and mandarins and are sweeter and more fragrant that common lemons. I love using citrus like blood oranges and meyer lemons in winter because they really brighten up a dessert menu. I didn't want to do something as straight-forward as a classic lemon meringue because the idea wasn't interesting to me. I opted instead to make a sesame sucree (sucree is a sweet tart dough) and line the tarts with those and paired it with honey tahini ice cream. Everyone's first reaction to the sesame/tahini was that it sounded weird, but I think I won most people over when they tasted it. The tart filling is lemon curd, one of my absolute favorite things to eat. The word "curd" is weird and scares a lot of people off from how delicious it really is. Curd is basically just a fruit pudding made with a lot of butter. Ok, that description probably doesn't sound much better, but it really is amazing. The tart is topped with a little dehydrated lemon zest and served with a huckleberry sauce. For a bit of "wow" factor, I made a sesame "glass" which is just sugar that's cooked to a high temperature, poured out onto black and white sesame seeds, and pulled super thin while it's still hot. Both desserts start on the menu tomorrow, just in time for the weekend.

Read more...

Holiday Recap

Me & My Siblings, Christmas Eve Eve

I'm a little late on this one, but it was an extraordinarily busy holiday season. For a restaurant, the holidays are always on the hectic side, but this one felt even more so. This was my first holiday season in charge of a pastry department, and I wanted everything to run smoothly. Like I said in my Thanksgiving post, working on the holidays isn't the best part of this job, but it's one I've gotten kind of used to over the years. This year I was fortunate to have off on Christmas Eve, my favorite holiday. As bonus excitement this year, my brother Eric got engaged to his longtime girlfriend Meghann, and we were able to celebrate with her family the day before Christmas Eve at Chef Marc's Tribeca restaurant, Marc Forgione. The meal was amazing, and we were all so overjoyed with Eric & Meghann's big news.

Eggnog Parfait

Peppermint Ice Cream Cake

Holiday Cookie Tins

For Christmas Eve & Christmas Day at American Cut, we featured a dessert menu with some special holiday desserts including a peppermint ice cream cake and an eggnog mousse parfait. For Christmas Eve at my house, I threw together a couple of desserts for my family, including a mascarpone cheesecake with a mixed berry compote and a candy bar cake. Not as impressive as the year I made 8 different desserts for the two days, but at least I came up with something.

NYE Desserts

As soon as Christmas was over, we switched into a heavy prep mode for New Year's Eve. NYE at a restaurant is one of the busiest days, and this year was no exception. A lot of people spend their NYE in Atlantic City, and the restaurant was packed for the night. That night, we ran three desserts to accommodate the pre fixe menu and other diners. Chef Marc wanted a "large chocolate cake," so I took that idea and made giant black and white ice cream cakes with chocolate cake and white espresso ice cream. We finished those off with edible silver balls and glitter. We also ran our Crackerjack Sundae, but added a significant amount of gold leaf to it for a "bling" factor. Gold leaf is a very thin sheet of real gold that you can eat. Our new vanilla bean mascarpone cheesecake also debuted that night, with a honey tangerine sorbet and mulled wine reduction. Dessert service wrapped up shortly after midnight, but we made it up to the front of the bar to watch the ball drop and toast with a glass of champagne.

Kristen & I, pre-ball drop

Now that the holidays are over, I've been able to concentrate more on developing new desserts and working on some interesting projects. Winter is a challenging time for any pastry chef, as the fruit supply dwindles to basically just citrus. Despite this, I have some new desserts coming up that I'm very excited about.

Read more...

Tis the Season: Gingerbread

All the cardboard templates

For the past few weeks, my sous chef Kristen and I have eaten, slept and breathed gingerbread. I had the big idea way back in the summer to do a gingerbread display for the restaurant, and as it got closer, my plans for it got bigger. When I told Kristen we would be replicating 9 casinos of the Atlantic City boardwalk, I think she wanted to hit me and/or quit.

Home Depot

A gingerbread house of any sort is a major undertaking. One consisting of 9 detailed houses is setting yourself up for an impossible mission. But my motto has always been "go big or go home," so that's what we did. Some time around Thanksgiving, I started by carefully measuring and cutting out cardboard templates to use to model and cut the actual gingerbread pieces. While I was doing that, Kristen was making 30 pounds of gingerbread that we'd all roll out (a major work out) and cut into the house pieces for later assembly.

Even with everything labeled carefully, we had 2 mystery pieces

Each piece was painstakingly iced after consulting many pictures of how each casino looked and even driving by some of them. I really need to tip my hat to Kristen; she is a phenomenally talented decorator, and a lot of the more intricate work was done by her. I was definitely the architect of this project and she was the artist.

Airbrushing Revel

Trump Plaza

Assembly turned out to be much easier than we were expecting. Because the templates had been carefully constructed, the pieces fit together almost perfectly. I had gone to Home Depot to have boards custom cut to fit on our display table so we could assemble the houses on the boards in the back and fit them onto the table in pieces. Finishing up all the small details seemed like it would never end, but sometime last night around midnight, we were ready to move the house to the front of the restaurant.

I'm pretty proud of the end result. I think our hard work definitely shows in it, and it feels good to finally be done with it (with some slight maintenance that will likely be required). If you're in the NJ area, stop by and check it out!

Read more...

A Pastry Chef's Thanksgiving

Turkey Dinner #1, mostly pie

One of the worst parts of working in a restaurant is having to work the holidays. Since I've started professionally baking, I've always been at restaurants that were open 365 days a year. The first year I had to work on Christmas, I bawled my eyes out in the walk-in refrigerator. Thinking about how my family was opening presents and listening to Christmas carols while I worked brunch service (something that would make anyone want to cry regardless of it being a holiday...) was just too much for me, and I had a tiny meltdown. Fortunately, one of my coworkers found me, gave me a hug, and told me to get my ass back upstairs to work. Since then, I've toughened up considerably and working the holidays has become a slight annoyance, but nothing that will cause tears. I've come to view my coworkers as a family, albeit a very, very dysfunctional family and spending the holidays with these people now feels almost normal to me.

It was also one of our chef's mom's birthdays

This Thanksgiving was the first holiday our restaurant was opened for, and it sort of caught me by surprise. With the whole month of trying to transition to an entirely new dessert menu, the hurricane, and my birthday, I kind of forgot about Thanksgiving. I was trying to cram too much into that week, and while everything got done, there were stressful moments. Like when I showed up on Thursday to realize that not only did we have just one working oven (which has been the case for a few weeks now), pastry would need to share it with all the turkey-roasting. And we were opening for dinner service four hours earlier. So all the bread, turkeys, assorted side dishes, and desserts needed to come out of one oven in about half the time we normally have. No sweat, right? Um, cue the tears in the walk-in....Almost.

Pastry's contribution for family meal

The chef/cook team cobbled together a "family meal" for our staff- the term used for the pre-shift meals a lot of restaurants have for employees. I made a couple apple crisps (one of my favorite things to bake, using the same recipe I learned in preschool, no joke) and pecan pies. Kristen, my sous chef, and I sat down to quickly eat some turkey, but weren't really into the side dishes. What amazes me about Thanksgiving is how every family has a roster of side dishes that is particular and unique to them, and every family thinks others makes the exact same sides. For instance, I wrongly believed every family had Stovetop stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, and canned cranberry sauce. Whoever prepared our family meal thought the standards are brussel sprouts, collard greens, and mashed sweet potatoes. And maybe they're onto something...Those mashed sweet potatoes were delicious.

Wawaaaaaa

Feeling relatively unsatisfied though, we begged a friend to stop at Wawa on his way to work and bring us a turkey bowl. For those of you unfamiliar with Wawa, you're missing out. It's pretty much the best convenience store you can imagine, but better. Turkey bowls were delivered and consumed, ovens were cleared, and things were looking up.

About an hour later, a server misfired a dinner, so Kristen and I ended up with a turkey dinner for 4, making that our third turkey meal in under three hours. Which made this day maybe the best Thanksgiving ever by some people's standards. We sold a lot of desserts, had some fun, and at the end, went out for some beers.

Pecan Pie Bread Pudding with Maple Bourbon Ice Cream

Thursday also marked the end of my 1 month trial period, and I'm happy to say it went well and my promotion to executive pastry chef is now official. That is definitely something big to be thankful for. I'm excited about the month to come. Holiday season is one of the best baking seasons, and this year will be no different. Stay tuned for a giant gingerbread display that Kristen and I are putting together. It's going to be epic. Or a major fail. We shall see...

Read more...

Birthday Cake!

Walllll-eeeeee

For the past four years, I've really wanted a Wall-E cake. Unfortunately, I'm usually the one who makes the birthday cakes, and I frequently make my own birthday cake. I swear this is not as sad as it sounds.

Sometimes it's sad to cut a cake this nice

This year, my birthday (November 17 kind of took me by surprise. I've been so busy with working and the new menu that I almost forgot it was coming up. I think it crossed my mind to make cupcakes for my coworkers, but things got hectic and I totally forgot.

Kristen with the Wall-E eye post cutting

I was totally surprised when my pastry cook and friend Kristen showed up with a Wall-E cake on Saturday for me. Kristen is a really talented cake artist, and she's made some cool things for us at the restaurant. This one really "took the cake" though. The level of detail was incredible, and it looked so much like Wall-E. It was probably the coolest birthday cake I've ever had (sorry Mom!).

We cut it up before service and it was easily enough Funfetti cake to feed the entire restaurant staff. That amount of sugar probably is what got most of us through an insanely busy Saturday night service.

Read more...