Michael Laiskonis on Pastry Chefs
Michael Laiskonis is the executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin,
one of only four three-star Michelin restaurants in New York City. A
self-proclaimed “accidental pastry chef,” he traveled around the United States
extensively before working in a bakery, where he had his first big “aha” moment
working with bread and discovered a passion for cooking.
What turned out to matter more than you expected? Just in
the process of actually learning to cook.
I guess that when I started cooking it was just something to do and once I developed
a passion for it, I realized that—and I don’t want to overromanticize it or attach some
sort of Anthony Bourdain sort of thing to it, but you kind of enter a culture and it’s a
completely different culture. I’m sure other professions have it. I’m sure software guys
have it. It’s just a weird subculture and once you kind of enter that it becomes a
lifestyle, not really a job.
That’s truly how I feel. With other professional cooks there are obviously
colloquialisms and certain physical characteristics that they could have. And then
there’s also the reality of long hours, bad hours. You’re working when everyone is
playing; I’ve come to embrace it and now it’s just ingrained in the fabric of my being
that it’s just—I’m a cook before anything else. It kind of informs everything I do and
everything I see. I see through that lens of food. For an outsider that might sound a
little creepy, but it’s the truth. So when I started cooking, I had no idea that it
would take over my life or present so many opportunities to experience other things. I
can’t imagine giving anything up.
Being from a software background—from one weird subculture
to another weird subculture—I hear you. I would be curious how you would describe your
weird subculture.
And actually I’ve spent time thinking about this: what is it about the actual craft
of cooking or the act of cooking that does it, and a lot of it is the stress. Granted,
it’s a self-imposed stress, meaning we’re not brain surgeons. We’re making people
dinner, but dinner is important to a lot of people and especially at the highest ends
there is a constant quest for perfection. You’re never going to attain perfect, but you
can always push further. So I think it’s more of the environment of restaurant worlds
that kind of informs a lot of that.
I think there is a lot to be said for the power of almost the meditative state that
you get, even if you’re cooking alone, because you’re connecting with nature. You’re
connecting with things.
You’re making something with your hands. You’re hopefully making something greater
than the sum of its parts. It’s something that you can’t fully describe in words.
It’s just what I do. My wife works in a different restaurant. She runs the front of
the house, so my work and home life—there’s really no separation. We have the same
schedule, we come home, and we talk about the business. We wake up and we talk about the
business. So it’s a lifestyle.
As a pastry chef, are you more of a “by the recipe, exact
measurements” type of cook or one who adds an ingredient and tastes, and makes course
corrections as you go?
Both. I started in bread and kind of worked in pastry, but I bounced back and forth
between each side of the kitchen, between sweet and savory, for a little over five years
before I decided to stick with the pastry thing. There is a cliché that pastry chefs are
the calm, measured, exacting, precise kind of person and the line cook or the savory
chef is the spontaneous one. There is some truth to that. I think the lines are blurring
a little bit, but it’s really cross-training that gave me a solid foot in both, being
spontaneous and being precise. Too much spontaneity, and it’s just cook-and-see and
you’re ultimately lucky if you get the results that you want, but there is that joy in
being spontaneous or even taking it further and taking an attitude of well, if it’s not
broken, let’s break it and see what happens. That curiosity and spontaneity are not
quite the same thing, but to me, they’re of the same spirit.
So if
someone is learning how to cook, it’s not really a question of them thinking about
their own temperament and trying to match it up with baking or cooking; they should
really do a bit of both to balance things out?
Yes. It almost sounds like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. Because I rely
on a recipe, especially in a restaurant situation, consistency is king. Everything has
to be the same from batch to batch, day to day. Recipes are useful.
Recipes are important, but they’re also just guidelines or can serve as inspiration.
I think it’s a natural evolution for a cook—whether it’s a professional cook obviously
or a home cook—that with confidence, the recipe means less and less, that it can be used
as simple inspiration.
What would you tell somebody who is just learning to bake to
keep in mind?
First and foremost: cleanliness and organization are key, and they’re always going
to save you. Pay attention, especially with baking, which is firmly dictated by the
chemical and physical realms that you can’t always undo. Also, have that sense of fun
and that sense of play and learn from mistakes rather than stressing out about them. It
sounds kind of mystical, but I do have this belief that happy people make better-tasting
food. I also tell young people: just absorb as much information as you can. It doesn’t
feel like it’s sinking in or you’re comprehending it all. Cleanliness, organization, a
sense of fun, a sense of play, and always reminding yourself that there is more to
learn.
There are certain ways of doing things that ultimately find their way into the dish,
whether they’re perceivable or not. Sometimes it’s about things like cleanliness and
organization. When you’re eating a dish in a dining room, you’re not going to know
whether the cook who made it has a dirty apron, but I like to think that that does work
its way into it.
Can you give me an example of how you go about thinking
about a recipe and putting a dish together?
I have two. They both go toward understanding your ingredients and
composition.
We used to make brown butter ice cream, but to give it enough brown butter flavor,
we would have to add a ton of fat to the ice cream, which makes the ice cream really
texturally challenging. Then I learned about the reaction and the composition of
different kinds of dairy products. It’s actually just the milk solids in the butter that
give us the flavor, but the butter by weight is only 2% solids. We stepped back and
looked at heavy cream, which we produce butter from. That heavy cream has three times
the milk solids that give us the flavor of butter. So if we take heavy cream and reduce
it down to the point where we’re left with milk solids and clarified butter, we actually
produce more extractable and arguably better-tasting brown butter solids than we could
from butter. Then we separate it from the fat and add that to the ice cream.
We also do a lot with caramelized white chocolate. Sometimes I describe it as
“roasted chocolate.” It sounds kind of counterintuitive, that you’d never want to scorch
your chocolate. But if you do it in a controlled way you get an almost dolce
de leche–like flavor. Dolce de leche is usually made
by cooking condensed milk; usually, people just boil the can for three or four hours.
This gives you more complex flavors, because the proteins and the sugars in the milk and
the added sugar are cooking together. If you look at the composition of white chocolate,
it’s about 40% sugar and 23% milk solids. I researched the composition of condensed
milk; the proportion of milk solids and the proportion of sugar are nearly identical.
This was a huge connection for me to make personally in terms of substituting
ingredients. From there, we’ve gone on to do all kinds of stuff with caramelized
chocolate.
