Pastry Chef Jenny McCoy of Craft
个人简介
2011年纽约Rising Star糕点厨师Jenny McCoy高中毕业后做了一个冒险的选择。并未做好上合适大学准备的她，进入了肯代尔大学学习烘焙和糕点项目，那时的决定只是一时兴起。她的父母可能对此非常担心，但是对于McCoy而言，这是一个双赢的局面。如果她喜欢烘焙的话，她会将其视为自己以后所从事的职业；如果她不喜欢的话，她至少也能成为晚宴嘉宾。McCoy很幸运，她最终爱上了烘焙。她是一个天生的烘焙天才，以至于她最初的工作就是在芝加哥一些顶级餐厅进行，包括Charlie Trotter’s、 Blackbird、Gordon和Bittersweet Bakery。正是在这些餐厅的厨房里，McCoy才进一步提升了自己的审美能力、锻炼了季节性甜点的制作技能。
在获得如此正式的高端餐厅工作经验后，McCoy决定暂时停止专业烘焙休息一段时间，到欧洲各国和美国中南部旅游开阔自己的烹饪眼界。当她意识到自己对美食的兴趣已经延伸至厨房以外时，她重返学校，在德保尔大学（DePaul University）获得了美食撰写学士学位（B.A. in FoodWriting）。当McCoy首次重返新奥尔良糕点厨房时，这位仍然很年轻的厨师开始为Emeril Lagasse经营3家餐厅的糕点部门，并且每周都在Emerils.com网站上的“烹饪博客”里贡献自己的力量。不久之后纽约来的电话将她吸引到了北部。
Interview 采访
Emily Bell：什么激发你追求专业烹饪？
Jenny McCoy: 高中毕业后，我开始学习烹饪纯属一时兴起。我对上大学一点都不感兴趣。当时我就想：“为什么不去读一所烹饪学校呢？听起来挺有趣的！如果我不想以此为生的话，我也可以学学怎么烹饪。”我去了芝加哥肯代尔大学学习烘焙和糕点项目，随后完全爱上了烹饪。课程学习到一半的时候，我开始在餐厅工作，更加深陷其中。这就是我如何开始烹饪的，非常偶然。随后，我就继续学习获得了大学学位。所以有什么风险呢？
EB:你对那些刚起步的年轻厨师有什么建议吗？
JM:在我的厨房里工作的每一个厨师，当他们开始工作时，我都会给他们提供3条建议。阅读你所能接触到的所有书籍刊物：行业杂志、《美食与美酒》、食谱，读所有关于美食的书籍；花尽可能多的钱到外面吃饭，品尝不同类型的美食，尝试不同的美食，品尝和体验其它的美食；空闲时间和假期到其它厨房里工作，如果你一周在某个地方工作5天，花1天时间到其它地方的厨房工作。就像学习一门外语一样。如果你自己专心沉浸其中，你会学的越来越好，慢慢会越来越喜欢它。
JM:在我的厨房里工作的每一个厨师，当他们开始工作时，我都会给他们提供3条建议。阅读你所能接触到的所有书籍刊物：行业杂志、《美食与美酒》、食谱，读所有关于美食的书籍；花尽可能多的钱到外面吃饭，品尝不同类型的美食，尝试不同的美食，品尝和体验其它的美食；空闲时间和假期到其它厨房里工作，如果你一周在某个地方工作5天，花1天时间到其它地方的厨房工作。就像学习一门外语一样。如果你自己专心沉浸其中，你会学的越来越好，慢慢会越来越喜欢它。
EB:你会推荐烹饪学校给有志向的厨师吗？
JM:我会推荐。虽然我并不认为这绝对必要，但是我想很多进入高等厨房的厨师都在烹饪学校学习过。如果你想要在三四星级的餐厅工作，烹饪学校的学历会给你带来极大帮助。但是读一所烹饪学校并不是必须的。我也相信这会为初学厨师打下良好的基础，帮助他们熟悉基本的设备、专业术语、技能。
EB:你的糕点哲学是什么？
JM:我感觉很多人都这样认为：少即是多。对我而言，甜点是一顿餐的结束。它需要给这顿餐画上一个圆满的句号；餐后需要有一个持续性。最好的甜点是对之前所吃菜肴的补充。甜点简单点，不要过度修饰。当人们吃甜点时，他们都会完全放松下来，摒除杂念、非常享受。通过让事情变得不那么复杂、变得更加直接，你会为客人提供这种体验的机会。
EB:创造甜点的灵感从何而来？
JM:我的灵感受到许多不同事情的激发，例如逛市场和在最佳时期找原料。出去吃饭、看到其他人其它事确实会让我产生不同的观点。灵感无处不在。有时我想到一个好创意会在午夜醒来。关于新甜点的创意可能来自任何地方。它可能是我想到的一种混合味道。有时我会把甜点放在一起，因为我想要尝试它们混合在一起的味道。我也不知道这些味道到底从何而来，它们就是找到了我。我所浸入的灵感之井可以更深。这就像是一种测试，决定如何创造出一种改良甜点，使其真正能让人镇定下来，制作这种甜点需要满足制作所有盘装甜点所需的一定条件——味道平衡、质地平衡、视觉吸引、冷热均衡和酸度合适。所有这些要素都满足才能制成一份盘装甜点。它需要包含人们想要这一道小菜里含有的所有成分。通过这种方式我缩小了我所认为的一道改良甜点特征的范围，味道和质地同等重视，加更多的盐，过多柠檬，还有其它的吗？有时，制作出来后它会变成和原来的甜点完全不同的东西。有时它制作的刚刚好，就是我所想的那样。这种甜点也会被加入菜单，让顾客品尝进行测试，然后食谱会随之调整五、六、七、八次。有时只需一次就够了。
EB:你最喜欢的味道组合是什么？
JM:好难抉择。我很喜欢大黄和玫瑰混合味。
EB:你在工作中遇到的最艰难的事情是什么？
JM:对于我而言，其中一件最艰难的事情是与我亲自指导出的一位特别棒的糕点厨师告别。很多时候我都在尝试与我下面的工作人员培养牢固的关系。我花了很多时间为他们设立目标，帮助他们在我的部门达成目标，有时也帮助它们完成个人目标。他们是如此的优秀，不得不向更高的目标进发，你没有发展空间容纳他们。你不得不看着某个人，然后说道：“你太优秀了，但是你必须离开。”帮助他们展翅高飞。这些都发生在最优秀的员工身上。就像送孩子上大学一样。
EB:如果你可以从头开始做一件事，你会做什么？
JM:我想如果我能从头来过，早些时候，做厨师的时候或我不那么担心自己的个人生活时或我没有相似的财政负担时，我会花更多的时间在更为专业的糕点领域，花一年时间学习面包制作、巧克力制作或糖类工作的艺术。这些东西都需要深度挖掘来理解。作为糕点厨师我体验过这些，但是却没有更多的时间真正成长为不仅仅是一个餐厅糕点厨师。我永远也不可能成为一个面包烘焙师或巧克力大师。
EB:你最喜欢的食品行业慈善机构是什么？为什么？
JM:绝对是Wellness in the Schools。我是它的一个积极成员。一年前我加入他们，最初是在布鲁克林PS 89工作，它是布鲁克林仅有的几所绿色学校之一。屋顶上有一个温室。它是一所非常棒的学校。我们正花时间改变整个学校的午餐配置，从加工过的食物、冷冻食物到从头做起的食物的菜单全都更换掉。今年他们正在为27个学校做这些事情。
EB:你在那里做甜点吗？
JM:我们会做一点。我们做了一个胡萝卜的实验，做了一个胡萝卜蛋糕。它并不是特别健康。我们教他们如何用干果和蜂蜜制作即食麦片和燕麦片。我们所制作的并不全是甜点还有以更健康的方式呈现的糕点和甜食。大部分情况下，我鼓励他们吃新鲜的水果。
EB:至今为止你所取得的最令你骄傲的成绩是什么？
JM:当我第一次在菜单上加上我做的一些甜点的时候。那时我还不是糕点厨师，是Blackbird餐厅的糕点副厨师。我和其中一位糕点厨师一起工作地非常开心舒服。看到我的第一个创意得到认可并放在菜单上，这或许是我最自豪的时刻。另外一件事，情感始终贯穿了我的整个职业生涯。每一次我在菜单上加上一个甜点，我都感到无比自豪。我已经谈到了比较有趣的部分，我也已经准备好分享我的经验。那一次非常棒，我非常兴奋。
EB:成功对你而言意味着什么？
JM:过去几年里，我逐渐积累了所有这些大量的信息，学习如何成为领域的权威，如何分享这种知识和这种信息。想要成为权威人物而非仅仅餐厅糕点厨师，你需要成为烹饪书籍的作者、加入像詹姆斯比尔德基金会（James Beard）和Wellness inSchools一样的组织、在烹饪学校授课，并触及该行业的每一个领域。从那里，你会将对该行业抱有热情的真理传播到厨房之外。教厨师如何真正喜欢他们所做的事情，除了热爱制作美食以外，还要真正热爱这个行业整体。
EB:五年后你会成为什么样？
JM:或许在电视上，你会看到我已经出了好几本烹饪书籍了。我的目标就是像Emily Luchetti一样成功。我想成为Craft的糕点厨师，但是却不必每天都呆在那里。我想在厨房里有一个自己的徒弟，在我的监管之下，但是我还想授课、写书和上电视节目。Craft允许我身兼数职。我想要做的不仅仅是烹饪。五年内，我希望我仍然在做现在在做的事情。
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Pastry Chef Jenny McCoy of Craft
Biography
2011 New York RisingStar Pastry Chef Jenny McCoy took a gamble after high school. Not ready toenter college proper, she enrolled in the Baking and Pastry program at Chicago’s Kendall College, mostly on awhim. Her parents might have trembled, but for McCoy, it was a win-winsituation. If she liked baking, she’d have a viable career path. If she didn’t,she’d at least be a sought after dinner party guest. Lucky for McCoy, and herpocket book, she fell into baking with gusto. She was such a natural talentthat her first jobs were in some of Chicago’stop restaurants, including Charlie Trotter’s, Blackbird,Gordon, and Bittersweet Bakery. It was in thesekitchens that McCoy refined her palate and honed her talent for seasonaldesserts.
Following suchformative experiences in fine dining, McCoy took a decisive hiatus fromprofessional baking, traveling to various countries in Europe and South and Central America to broaden her culinary vocabulary. Whenshe realized that her interest in food extended beyond the kitchen, shereturned to school and got her B.A. in Food Writing at DePaul University.When McCoy first returned to a pastry kitchen, it was in New Orleans, where the still young chef ranthree restaurant pastry departments for Emeril Lagasse and contributed weeklyto the “Cooking Blog” at Emerils.com. It wasn’t long before New York City’s siren call drew her north.
McCoy’s Big Applearrival was a splash. She worked as opening pastry chef at Marc Forgioneand oversaw pastryoperations for both locations of A Voce. Now inthe kitchen of Craft,McCoyfuses a career in finesse, seasonality, and discipline with her own brightpersonality—and a healthy appetite for creative risk-taking. When she’s notbusy in the Craft kitchen, McCoy teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education, volunteers withWellness in the Schools, and flexes her writer’s muscles with regularcontributions to SeriousEats.com, HuffingtonPost.com, and a forthcoming dessertcookbook (keep your eyes on the shelves in 2013).
Emily Bell:What inspired you to pursue cooking professionally? Jenny McCoy:I started cooking on a completewhim after I graduated from high school. I was not interested in collegeproper. “Why don’t I go to culinary school?” I thought. “Sounds like fun! If Idon’t do it for a living I’ll just know how to cook.”
I went to the bakingand pastry program at Kendall College in Chicagoand completely fell in love with it. Halfway through my program, I startedworking in restaurants and fell even harder for it. That’s how Istarted—randomly. I then went on to get my college degree and stuff like that.What’s the risk?
EB:What advice would you give to young chefs just getting started?JM:Every cook that works in mykitchen, when they first start, I give them three pieces of advice. Readeverything you can: industry magazines, Food & Wine,cookbooks, read, read, read all you can about food. Spend as much of your moneyas you can eating out, exposing yourself to different types of food, tryingdifferent foods, tasting and experiencing others’ food. Spend all of your freetime, days off, staging in other kitchens. If you work somewhere five days aweek, spend a day in someone else’s kitchen. It’s like a foreign language. Ifyou immerse yourself in it, you’ll become so much better and grow to love it somuch more.
EB:Do you recommend culinary school to aspiring cooks? JM:I would recommend it. I don’tthink it’s absolutely necessary, but I think a lot of people who are enteringkitchens in the upper echelon, many of those cooks have gone to culinaryschool. If you want to work at three- and four-starred level restaurants,culinary school gives you a leg up. But it’s not necessary. I do think itprovides a great foundation for entry-level cooks, helping to familiarizethemselves with basic equipment, lingo, and techniques. Entering a kitchen withno exposure to what a professional kitchen could be like is pretty intense. Ifyou have basic understanding I see cooks tend to do a little bit better. Iwould recommend it, yes.
EB:What is your philosophy on pastry?JM:I feel like this is lots ofpeoples’: less is more. To me, dessert is the end of the meal. It needs to wrapthings up well; there needs to be a continuity from what you’ve been eatingearlier in your meal. The best dessert complements what you’ve had previously.Keep it simple and not overly adorned. By the time people get dessert, they’reready to kind of kick back and not think so much and really enjoy themselves.By keeping things a little less fussy and a little more straightforward, youcan offer guests the opportunity to have that experience.
EB:What goes into creating a dessert?JM:I’m inspired by so manydifferent things—walking through the market and finding an ingredient at itsprime. Going out to eat and seeing something someone else did stimulates adifferent idea in my head. It could come out of nowhere. Sometimes I wake up inthe middle of the night. Ideas for new desserts come from all over the place.It could be a flavor combination I thought of. Sometimes I’ve put togetherdesserts cause I wanted to try flavors together that rhymed. I don’t know wherethey come from. They just come to me. The well that I dip into for inspirationcan be deep.
From there it’s kindof testing, and deciding how to create a composed dessert so it is trulycomposed and it has a certain handful of elements that all plated dessertsneed—flavor balance, texture balance, a visual appeal, a combination of hot andcold, and having the right kind of acidity levels and crunch. That all kind ofgoes into a plated dessert. It needs to encompass everything one would want ina small course. From there, I narrow in on what I think a composed dessertshould be, taste and texture elements together, more salt, too much lemon, whatabout something else? Sometimes it morphs into something completely differentfrom the original dessert. Sometimes it’s spot-on what I thought it would be.It can take testing on the menu, tweaking a recipe five, six, seven, eighttimes. Sometimes it’s just once.
EB:What’s your favorite flavor combination?JM:So tough. I'm really intorhubarb and rose.
EB:What’s the toughest thing you’ve had to do in your job?JM:One of hardest for me is sayinggoodbye to a cook that I really felt like I shaped and kind of mentored intobeing an amazing pastry cook. A lot of times I really try to cultivate strongrelationships with people under me. I spend a lot of time setting goals forthem, helping them achieve goals in my department and sometimes as individuals.They get so good they need to move up and you don’t have a place for them. Havingto look at someone and say, “you’re so amazing, but you have to leave.” Helpingthem spread their wings. And that happens with your best people. It’s almostlike sending your kids to college.
EB:If you had one thing you could do over again, what would it be?JM:I think if I could do anythingover—earlier on as a cook or when I wasn’t so concerned with time for my ownpersonal life or didn’t have quite same financial obligations—I would’ve spentmore time in a more specialized area of pastry, spent a good solid yearlearning the art of bread making, chocolate making, or sugar work. Those typeof things you have to delve deep to comprehend. As a pastry chef I haveexperience in all those, but I have not had too much time to really be morethan a restaurant pastry chef. I’ve never gotten to be a bread baker or achocolatier.
EB:What are some of your favorite food-industry charities? Why? JM:Wellness in the Schools,definitely. I’m a sort of active member. I started with them a year ago andoriginally was working with PS 89 inBrooklyn, one of very few green schools in Brooklyn.There’s a greenhouse on the roof. It’s a fantastic school. We’re spending timechanging over the entire school lunch program from processed, frozen food to acompletely-from-scratch menu. They’re doing that in 27 schools this comingyear.
EB:Do you do dessert there?JM:We do a little bit. Did a labon carrots and we made carrot cake. It’s not especially healthy. We taught themhow to make granola, oatmeal with dried fruits and honey. Not full-on dessertsbut elements of pastry and sweets in a somewhat healthier format or formula.Mostly, I encourage them to eat fresh fruit.
EB:What’s your proudest accomplishment in your career to date?JM:When I first got to putsomething on the menu. I wasn’t a pastry chef at the time, I was pastry souschef at Blackbird. Ihad a pastry chef who was really great to work with. To see my first ideabecome executed and menu-ready, that was probably one of the proudest moments.Another thing—sentiment carries on throughout my career. Every time I put adessert on the menu I feel really proud. I’ve gotten it to the point where it’sfantastic. I’m ready to share it. It’s good. I get all excited about it.
EB:What does success mean for you? JM: Slowly, over the years, [accumulating]all this vast wealth of information, learning how to become an authority inyour field, learning how to share that knowledge and that information. To be anauthority, not just a restaurant pastry chef—to be a cookbook author, to beinvolved in organizations like James Beard, Wellness in Schools, to be teachingin culinary schools, to dip my fingers into every area of this industry. Andfrom there, kind of spreading the gospel about having enthusiasm for thisindustry beyond the walls of the kitchen. Teaching cooks how to really lovewhat they’re doing, beyond just making food, to really love this industry as awhole.
EB:Where do you see yourself in five years?
JM:Probably on television, withmore than one cookbook under my belt. My goal is to be almost like EmilyLuchetti. I want to be the pastry chef of Craft, but nothere every day. I want my protégés in the kitchen and to be in charge, but Iwant to teach, to write books, do television.Craft allowsme to wear many hats. I love doing more than just cooking. In five years I hopeI'm doing what I'm doing now, all over the place.
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