Mar showed up at Ssäm Bar one night at 8 p.m. for the first night of her “externship” and helped me prep until about 2 a.m. We wore winter hats and turtlenecks because the basement was freezing. Giggled and figured shit out. This continued once or twice a week for the next few months. Little did either of us know Marian would become the anchor, lifesaver, soulmate, sister, and sous-chef who made and saved our little pastry department.
Mar stood next to me watching me pull out my hair trying to make a deep-fried apple pie. She looked at me like I was a little insane when, days before Ko was set to open, I told her about this cereal milk idea I had instead. I mean, I had to start looking at other options if I couldn’t get the fried apple pie I promised figured out.
We tasted my next few attempts at an apple pie with Serp, as well as the cereal milk panna cotta I was working on. The panna cotta had a pretty boring banana cream with it, and he wanted something slightly different. He said, “I may be crazy, but what about avocado?” Both me and Mar perked up. Being a California girl, Mar loves avocados, and we’d really wanted to use them in a dessert. In fact, we had an avocado puree all ready, waiting for inspiration to strike. And there it was.
This is the essence of how we come up with things. We make things that we are interested in. We make them taste good. Then we stand in front of our fridge, with the door open, just like you do at home when you’re trying to figure out what to make for dinner or eat for a midnight snack. We pick and pull out things we’ve been working on and see where we can merge ideas and flavors. We try to be intelligent about it. But most of the time, it’s a eureka moment that we didn’t even know we were working toward.
I finally came up with a deep-fried apple pie—a kind of take on the Hostess or McDonald’s apple pies we all grew up on—through some messed-up, backwards, forget-everything-you’ve-ever-learned-about-pie-dough stroke of stupidity and kept moving. We opened our two-man pastry department at Ko by packing up five large pails of staple ingredients and a toolbox of equipment and moving them from Ssäm to Ko in the back of a lovely little ’93 Subaru station wagon, the “company car.”
Once we had a little prep table to call our own and more regularish hours, we began menu developing, putting better systems into place in the restaurants for our dessert programs, and, of course, making family-meal dessert daily. I developed a firm belief while working in restaurants in this city that family meal, the one prepared daily for your peers, is one of the most important meals you’ll cook. The respect and integrity you put into it speaks very highly of you as a cook—and of how much you care about your fellow cooks. Often pastry is exempt from being required to contribute to family meal. But once I started full time at wd~50, I made it a personal requirement.
I would joke with anyone I worked next to that making family meal was my zen moment. I went back to my self-proclaimed roots; I baked without measuring (sacrilege to most accomplished bakers) and used whatever mise-en-place was over- or underbaked or left over. Family meal is meant to be delicious and nurturing. I made what I knew from years of baking for myself—something I affectionately called crack pie because you can’t stop eating it, cookies galore, brownies, etc. If there was a birthday within our three growing restaurants, I would make a layer cake with the same notion, using fillings we had on hand for our desserts.
Little did we know that making family-meal desserts with our in-house mise-en-place for the other restaurants would be recipe testing for our next project.
One day, tumbling down the stairs from the sidewalk into Ko’s basement, Dave said, “Hey, if we could get you a bakery space, would you do it? The Laundromat next to Ssäm is closing, and we need to scoop up that space before someone else does.”
“OK,” I said. I’d come to realize that having a bakery was what I wanted as an end goal. I just didn’t think it would come so soon.
“No, but seriously—if we could get that space for you to have as a bakery or something, would you really do it?” he asked.
“I said yes. I’ll do it,” I shot back, puffing up my shoulders.
It’s funny to think that’s how most of our big conversations go. They’re quick and to the point. Dave and I get each other, I think, on a level that most people don’t, or maybe it’s just that no one has understood either of us before. It’s usually just a few sentences of dialogue; we figure out the hard stuff later. We are both people of our words, fearless of a challenge, and self-confident to a fault. We will do anything to make something work. It’s one-half rock-hard work ethic, one-quarter pride, and one-quarter spite, I think.
With a skeleton crew of me, Mar, and Emily, an amazing Culinary Institute of America extern we picked up along the way, we began menu developing for a bakery that had no rules and no bounds. We would finish our daily prep for the restaurants as quickly as possible and make ourselves sick from testing and tasting thousands of versions of cookie dough, cake batter, and soft-serve ice cream bases.
A separate skeleton crew of Joshua Corey, our handsome “handyman” if you asked him his title, Dave, Drew Salmon, Momofuku’s COO, and I began designing, contracting, and building out the space. We bought pendant lamps at walmart.com and contemplated what furniture, if any, should exist. None of us had ever opened a bakery, and the bakery I ran on Star Island was nothing like this, except I sure did know how to use an old eighty-quart mixer and wasn’t afraid of scooping cookie dough out of it.
Long days turned into long nights, into yelling at contractors and slamming down phones. Our lives became mudding ceilings, sourcing the right nondescript display case, and painting the walls and ceilings in “hint of mint” when we should have been sleeping.
Only a small handful of people knew that Momofuku even had a pastry department, but we were determined to build a bakery that belonged to us, and we were going to do it as best we could. And by small handful, I mean really small. Milk Bar started with very few employees, working seven days a week, seventeen hours a day or more. Helen Jo joined our team for no good reason that I could see except that Marian, Emily, and my zombie-like state somehow enchanted her. James Mark, formerly the low man on the totem pole at Ko, who had baked a different loaf of bread for practically every family meal, became our overnight bread baker.
It wasn’t long before the doors officially opened and the place was packed. Lines out into the cold all times of day. Customers were often confused by the crazy ice cream flavors we served morning till midnight, by the series of flavors that were always expanding and contracting, and we didn’t begrudge them the confusion. We were making it up as we went along, but—and I can’t express this more sincerely—we were truly surprised at how much people were into it. At a certain point, Anderson Cooper was plugging our crack pie on television. Things had turned surreal. Dave swears he knew it was going to work all along.
A year and a half passed. We opened our second Milk Bar location in midtown. Business was booming, but we were on top of each other, mixing and baking from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. in 700 square feet of space. We’d hoist sheet pans of cookie dough over the heads of our patrons several times a day to get them to a refrigerator to chill for an hour or two before we hoisted the pans back to our oven to bake off for the evening and late-night crowds.
We needed a bigger boat. There are only so many chest freezers from Craigslist you can squeeze into an already cramped basement, so many cookie fridges you can surreptitiously put out on the floor of Milk Bar, and so many tables you can take over for shipping and special orders while telling guests they have to stand somewhere else to eat their slice of pistachio layer pie.
We found and signed a lease on a huge warehouse space that would be our castle, our kingdom, our home. Cue noise: car screeching to a halt. Only thing is, it wouldn’t be rezoned and kitchen-ready for another four months.
So we chose the next best (and only other) option: schlepping our kitchen up to Spanish Harlem to bake in a stranger’s fourth-story rental kitchen, using a stranger’s dingy refrigerators, a stranger’s
elevator that always seemed to break down when the deliveries were obscenely large, and, even worse, a stranger’s wonky ovens.
And there we perched, in a barely-air-conditioned 90- to 100-degree kitchen for a long summer. We baked, and we developed a delivery system, a packaging system, an “oh, shit” list to keep us on top of every single disaster we could and surely did encounter at 113th Street and Third Avenue. We were in boot camp all over again. We climbed those stairs with fifty-pound bags of flour on our shoulders or wobbled down them with twenty-four-quart tubs of soft-serve ice cream to take to Noodle Bar. We screamed, we sweated. We tried to hide it when we were down at the restaurants. We scrubbed sheet pans at 3 a.m. until we hired and trained a dishwashing staff. We carpooled up and down the FDR Drive at all hours of the morning and night.
Then, just when the summer of 2010 cooled off, our new kitchen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was ready. And by ready, I mean empty, clean, and ready for us to do it all over again, one more time.
We painted the creepy rooms with leftover paint from everyone’s past home painting experiments (mostly mine), hung pictures of dogs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the empty walls, and assembled enough prep tables and metro shelves to fill thousands of square feet. My mother, aunt, and sister stuffed my poor brother-in-law’s truck full of yard-sale furniture to cart across state lines for our makeshift offices. We made friends with big guys with big dollies and trucks with lifts. And we rented U-Haul trucks and moved our ever-expanding kitchen from Spanish Harlem to our home. Finally.
After just two years, we caught up on sleep (kind of). We wooed an amazingly talented staff to join us in our plight. Each one of us has a different background, a different attitude, and a different view on life and food.
Helen Jo stuck by my side, whether we were spray-painting a rusty dough sheeter gold and naming her Beyoncé, running outside to pet a puppy, or commanding an entire kitchen to work faster! Leslie Behrens entered full force with blonde like you have never seen before, and a love for key lime pie turned cake that let us know she was a lifer. Yewande Komolafe, our wanderlust Nigerian princess, reminded us daily to be fierce with attitude and never to miss an episode of This American Life. Helen Hollyman, with her patience and hilarity, taught us how to wrangle quirky customers with grace and poise while laughing inside all the way. Sarah Buck danced into our basement and schooled us in the art of bouncing to Reggaeton while corralling a sassy staff into banging out a prep list in record time. Courtney McBroom, cool as a cucumber, hilarious, and vulgar to a fault at times, is my mighty kitchen stand-in, silently reminding me it will all be OK, even if I take a day off (she’s also half of the hilariousness of this text). Maggie Cantwell, equally nosy and hungry at all times, now runs our operations and reminds us to be good women, girlfriends, and wives, all while balancing spreadsheets and telling cooks what it was like when she was in the kitchen. Louis Fabbrini, the tall, dark, and handsome Doogie Howser of Milk Bar, has somehow managed to know and love the cause among a jungle of crazy women and balance a delivery staff, an etc. staff, a technology infrastructure, and a Milk Bar world-domination scheme, all at the age of twenty-two and then twenty-three. Alison Roman, our West Coast transplant, is so ridiculous in spirit, chatter, and skill that we just give her some jars to fill with jokes or drama—or her next amazing batch of flavored butter, jelly, or jam. Alex Wilson, God bless her, flies strong and solo most of the time, ricocheting off each Milk Bar, and generally managing our laughter levels, homemade apron distribution, cookie pars, and locations all the while.
We are a family. We call each other out on bullshit, push each other to be better everythings, and catch each other when it all blows up in our faces. We have lost sanity and sleep over new desserts. We argue about and challenge the ways we make each recipe, the way we serve each item, the way we get each dessert to you with the shortest line and in the friendliest way possible.
The heart of our daily lives at Milk Bar is the core of this book—warm, hardworking, strong, humble, and straightforward. I’m excited and scared to share it with you. We are no geniuses. Putting it down on paper for someone else to read leaves us vulnerable to the ease that is the essence of our desserts’ success.
There are no tricky secrets to what we do—it’s about getting in there, working smart, and making something delicious out of everyday ingredients. The only things you need that are not already in your cupboards are a few funny ingredients that will make you shake your head in disbelief. Our recipes exist to appeal and to relate to everyone.
We all started off as home cooks, and we never stray far from our roots. This cookbook is a collection of the recipes from our lives and love affairs with food that we have adapted, adjusted, tasted once and tasted twice, and made in the Momofuku spirit. They are simple and tasty. They are salty and sweet. If you ever wanted to start a pastry department, then open a bakery, then grow an empire out of a few employees, young by birth or at heart—or just turn on your oven and make something super-tasty—you really only need the ten mother recipes you’ll find here. Honestly, that’s how we did it.
In our kitchen, real talk means we break it down for you. Good-bye niceties: just cold, hard truths is what real talk is all about. When one of us is not doing the right thing, copping a bad attitude, feeling sorry for him- or herself, being lazy, or underperforming (we’re all human), we all know what’s needed to get each other back on track. Real talk.
So. Here’s how it’s going to go. I’m surrendering all of my favorite recipes to you. Letting you into our world. We are a tight-knit, loving bunch, unafraid of eating too much cookie dough or of slathering our bread with too much butter. We are our own breed of home bakers with formal educations, and we strive to make thoughtful, clever food that hits home every time. We work hard. We laugh hard. We love to share our takes on baked goods with anyone and everyone. We are incredibly casual but never cavalier. We are deadly serious and deadly accurate when it matters. Spend some time understanding how we laid out this cookbook, read our ridiculous mantras, understand the need for certain ingredients and kitchenware—and you will be one of us.
Cooking any of the recipes in this book is like working a day at Milk Bar side by side with us. But before you’re even given a time card to work in our kitchen, you have to pass the ultimate test. Are you a hardbody?
hardbody is a term we use at Milk Bar to describe a person who goes above and beyond. Softbodies need not apply in our kitchen. (We like softbodies as people, we just don’t like working next to them.) Every single person who works with us is either a hardbody or a hardbody-in-training.
A hardbody never complains—a hardbody isn’t afraid to work through the toughest of times. No heat in the winter? Snowsuits under your chef’s whites. No AC in the summer? Sweat to the oldies and keep working. No elevator, no room for the one hundred gallons of organic milk to be delivered, a flat tire on the van, a broken dolly? No problem. We are hardbodies. We got it.
Maybe you’re mixing a huge batch of cookie dough and your industrial-size mixer shits the bed. A softbody would surely give up. But not a hardbody. You’ve never lived until you’ve mixed one hundred pounds of compost cookie dough by hand and then raced to scoop it with your lunatic boss. Just ask Heather Pelletier. The people need their cookies!
A hardbody approaches each recipe and task with a sense of humor. A hardbody keeps cool and keeps creative. As you read through this book, you’ll find that a striking number of these recipes were the result of burning, or mismeasuring, or just throwing some leftovers into the mixing bowl. A hardbody knows there’s always a brilliant recipe waiting to be invented with leftover Ritz crunch or overproofed mother dough.
Everybody gets a hardbody litmus test before they become one of us. Once they’ve shown us their hardbody potential, they are allowed through our doors and let into the fold. They are officially a part of Milk Bar. They are family.
clocking in at Milk Bar means showing up. You put on your kitchen whites, pull your hair back,
and get your notebook and Sharpie out to make a prep list and plan your day of baking. Turn on some tunes and get in the zone.
To get started at home, you need to clock in too—make sure you and your kitchen are ready to dedicate some time to the food. You’ve got to make the kitchen you’re about to bake in your own. Put on your favorite album, or tune your radio in to NPR. Have your favorite oven mitts, apron, and head scarf ready. Hang pictures of puppies all over the place. It matters—I promise.
This cookbook is designed to help make your life in the kitchen easy. Get yourself organized before you start. Understand how the cookbook works. Understand how we work. Know what recipes you want to make.
You must know what you’re about to get into before you get into it. In our kitchen, prep lists and clipboards abound (thirty-three is the current count—more clipboards than employees), to get each other up to speed once we’ve clocked in, so that we’re not lost in a sea of sugar and sheet pans when we start our day.
In French cooking, there are four “mother sauces.” Most every French sauce is a derivative of one of these four sauces. It is a known fact that if you master the mother sauces, you can make nearly anything in French cooking. I like to think the same is true of the Milk Bar pastry kitchen.
I flew solo at the beginning, but as the restaurants slowly grew, so did the techniques and dessert menus. I had to be smart about prep work and mise-en-place. We built three pastry departments, three retail bakery locations, and one sweet stronghold out of ten mother recipes—nine sweet ones and one bread dough.
Start with a mother recipe and discover the range of desserts that stems from that recipe. Following the mother recipe in each chapter are recipe variations, where the main ingredients and flavor profiles change but the technique remains more or less the same.
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