Emily Luchetti Blog

When I first met Michelle Polzine, pastry chef at Range, I was immediately drawn in by her sense of humor, energy and smile. But within five minutes I realized behind this friendly demeanor there’s also a woman serious and extremely passionate about her desserts.

Born in Bellflower in Southern California she grew up in 6 different cities before moving to Portland when she was 19. On a whim she moved to North Carolina. To pay the rent she started washing dishes at a local restaurant. As she explained “it was not as glamorous as one thinks it is” so she quickly proved herself and became a cook.

To get to the employee bathroom you had to walk through the pastry department. She would see the cooks working quietly peeling apples and melting chocolate and envied that environment to the crazy savory side of the kitchen. She finally got her entrance into this as she describes it “secret society” when a pastry cook was too drunk to work.  They called her to fill in. She said she would come in on her day off and help but they had to give her an additional shift in the pastry department. She never went back to the hot line. Her first pastry chef job was at Elaine’s in Chapel Hill.

In 2002 she and her husband (who she met in the first week she moved to North Carolina) moved to San Francisco. Here she has worked at Bacar, Lulu and Delfina. She also was an associate professor at The California Culinary Academy for a short time.

Michelle doesn’t have formal pastry training. She learned from books. Betty Crocker, Chez Panisse Desserts, Baking with Julia, and Stars Desserts were among her favorites.

Earlier this week we sat down at Blue Bottle Coffee in the Ferry Building and talked pastry.

EL: What flavors/ingredients do you like best?

MP: Fruits of all kinds. They’re one of the reasons I moved to San Francisco. The variety and availability is amazing. I love all berries, dates, pomegranates and stone fruit. Grapes and persimmons are wonderful to eat but there aren’t that many different ways to incorporate them into desserts.

What flavors/ingredients do you like least?

Nothing really, sometimes combinations can be wrong but individually they are all good.

What dessert or flavor first comes to mind when I mention the following ingredients?

Rhubarb- Tart

Passion fruit- Ginger cake with passion fruit caramel and coconut cream- It’s on my dessert men now.

Chocolate-Mast Brothers from Brooklyn

Berries- Seascape Strawberries from Lucero or Dirty Girl

Coffee- cold brewed coffee granita

Almonds-croquante

What dessert has someone else created that you loved?

Nicole Krasinski’s financier with plums or tangerines (whichever is in season) and olive oil gelato. Nicole makes smart desserts.

Who has influenced your dessert style?

Delfina, Claudia Fleming, Chez Panisse and Emily Luchetti (sorry but she really said me)

What ingredient would you like to see used more in the pastry kitchen or appreciated by diners?

Figs, dates and prunes.

What kitchen tool would you be lost without?

My hands

What’s your least favorite pastry trend?

Pastry trends

What do people not know about you that you wish they did?

I am pretty transparent. People see all of me.

Where do you like to eat out in the city?

I like the tacos at La Taqueria. Even without my employee discount I would like eating at Range.

What was the last thing you made outside of work?

Strudel for a friend’s birthday

I was at a wedding last weekend and the cake was delicious. Thanks goodness, as it was my brother’s wedding and he was staring at me when I took a bite hoping I approved. It was a white cake with a raspberry filling. The vanilla butter cream had a good balance of flavors. Buttercream that tastes like you’re eating a stick of butter is not fun. That’s when you eat around the frosting and quietly put your plate aside with a napkin on top to cover up what you didn’t eat. To help counteract that problem and give buttercream more depth of flavor I use a trick I picked up years ago from Rose Beranbaum- stir in some melted and cooled white chocolate at the end. There isn’t so much white chocolate that you taste it but it gives better flavor overall.

Rolled Fondant is also frequently used on wedding cakes. Most pastry chefs buy it and dye it the desired color but some make it from scratch out of sugar, corn syrup, glycerine and gelatin. I did it a couple of times but it wasn’t worth the time. I wish someone would figure out how to make it taste good.  Some brands are definitely better than others but for me it always tastes like wet cardboard. A talented pastry chef can make impressively beautiful and creative cakes with fondant. A pastry chef’s technical skills is important as there should be a thin layer covering the cake and it should lie flat over the cake without any wrinkles. As much as I am in awe of these cakes, give me frosting over fondant any day.

Lincoln Carson
As corporate pastry chef for all 19 of Michael Mina’s restaurants, Lincoln Carson moved his home base from Las Vegas to San Francisco when Michael took over the Aqua location on California Street. Lincoln wanted to have one spot where he could be involved on a daily basis with the menu and the pastry staff.
He studied pastry at Johnson and Wales in Providence, RI and worked extensively in New York under many chefs. Working with Francois Payard at Le Bernardin influenced his dessert style the most. There he learned a pastry chef’s should evolve and not be stuck in one place.
The dessert service at Michael Mina is not your typical a la carte menu. The waiter asks you if you would like dessert or not. If you say yes, you get served several different desserts. More of a tasting size portion or a bite or two they are presented one right after another. You can nibble on them in any order you want. Lincolns’ desire is to offer customers multiple flavors and get them to try something they might not normally order. He also believes it brings added energy to the table near the end of the meal. Lincoln is serious about his craft but has fun with it too. Lincoln and I first met years ago at Culinary Institute of America Pastry retreat. Now that he has moved to San Francisco we had the opportunity to reconnect.

EL-What flavors/ingredients do you like best?
LC- Acidic fruits. They have a lot of punch and hold up well to being manipulated in a dessert. Balance is crucial too. I prefer yellow peaches over white as the latter are too sweet. Passion fruit and pineapple in season.

What flavors/ingredients do you like least?
Not many things but- licorice and anise. Too much sugar in a dessert.
What dessert first comes to mind when I mention the following ingredients:
Rhubarb- vanilla, rhubarb soda
Passion fruit- panna cotta
Chocolate-brownies
Berries-whipped cream
Coconut- sponge cake
Almonds- Almond Joy
What dessert has someone else created that you loved?
Stephen Durfee’s (Pastry chef instructor at the CIA at Greystone) Deconstructed Cocoa Cola. Coke has many ingredients and Stephen was able to pull them out and create a dessert. It was amazing.
What ingredient would you like to see used more in the pastry kitchen or appreciated by diners?
Bitter flavors like coffee and chicory. They need to be used with restraint but they balance sugar. Rose and orange blossom waters.; floral notes
What kitchen tool would you be lost without?
A Vita Prep
What’s your least favorite pastry trend?
The misuse of modern techniques and ingredients. You need to understand the basics of fundamental pastry techniques before trying new things. You can’t experiment on guests.
Where do you like to eat out in the city?
After spending so much time in a kitchen I like straightforward food. Boot and Shoe Service and Namu.
What was the last thing you cooked at home?
A bone in rib eye with pardon peppers.
What did you have for breakfast this morning?
Grapefruit Juice
What do people not know about you that you wish they did?
I know that I can come off as imposing in the kitchen, and I suppose I am at times, but mostly I’m a pretty nice guy…and I love to ride fast motorcycles.

This past summer a trend seemed to pop up overnight: Serving pie and other desserts in jelly jars. Recipes and photos were all over the Internet. Restaurants put versions on their dessert menus—key lime and chocolate cream pies with Graham cracker crusts and fruit pies with and without bottom crusts. I found it silly and shrugged it off as another passing fad.

As someone who strives to make great tasting desserts on a daily basis, what bothers me is part logistics and part pleasure. Ground cookie-style pie crusts work fine but all the ones I’ve tasted that featured a traditional pie crust were under-baked and soggy. Glass jars serve one person and in a small container the fruit cooks faster than the crust can brown. If you get the crust brown the filling will be overcooked.

Also when you dig in all you get is filling, and you have to go to the edge to get the crust. I know some may think I’m no fun and being picky. Yes, they might be a cute hostess present, but when I am making desserts cute is not what I strive for.

I was willing to let pies in a jar go unmentioned, but I recently saw cupcakes in a jar. This is just plain dumb. The one I sampled had the cake part with a paper liner in the bottom of a one pint jar and frosting piped on top. To fill the jar required about 2 1/2 inches of frosting. The frosting stuck to the sides of the jar making it practically impossible to eat the cupcake; you had to dig through all the frosting to get to the cake. Then you have to avoid mistakenly eating the paper liner. I have seen them without paper liners, a definite improvement, but the proportions of frosting to cake are still off and they still require a spoon. This negates one of the best things about eating a cupcake— using your fingers.

So please no ice cream sandwiches, napoleons, muffins, or Rice Krispies Treats in jars

Monday morning I started my work day with a chocolate tasting. Good thing I squeezed in an early morning trip to the gym before hand as it was a marathon.

Guittard Chocolate located in Burlingame invited a bunch of pastry chefs for a blind tasting of some of their chocolates to get feedback of the styles and characteristics we like or don’t like in chocolate.

Founded in 1868 Guittard Chocolate has always been a family run company.  Etienne, Gary’s great grandfather, was first at the helm followed by his grandfather Horace, and then his father, Horace A. Under Gary’s stewardship and vision the company developed its E. Guittard line that is used by pastry chefs and home cooks worldwide.

We sampled chocolate made with 60, 70 and 100 percent cacao. For each percentage we tasted three different types. For the 60 and 70 percentages we tried the chocolate as is and also made into a chocolate mousse with a chocolate center. For the 100 percent we tried it plain and in a brownie like cake with a ganache. When tasting chocolate it is important to taste it in something as well as on its own. The characteristics change once you add other ingredients.

The 100 % which is unsweetened was tricky to taste solo as it is so strong. Most of us, myself included, were a little overwhelmed by the straight-up 100%.  You have to be a veteran taster like Gary Guittard, current president and CEO of Guittard Chocolate, or Michael Recchiuti of Recchiuti Chocolates, to pick up nuances through the bitterness.

While we all picked up on similar flavors in the different chocolates- red fruit, coconut, coffee, cocoa, even peanut butter and agreed on whether they were acidic or creamy, the preferences for these were all over the map. Some preferred the chocolates with a deep cocoa taste while others liked softer more subtle ones. There were no wrong or right answers and that’s what makes tasting other pastry chef’s desserts interesting and important. You get to look at things in a whole new light.

Some chocolates have a consistent flavor profile throughout. Others have a first hit of one flavor and then morph into something else entirely. When I get a new chocolate I make it in one of my tried and true recipes. That way I can discern differences. Interestingly, Michele Polzine, pastry chef at Range, tries the chocolate and lets it tell her what to do with it. I am going to try that approach next time.