Christina Tosi takes making cookies very seriously.
The dessert queen and owner of New York’s acclaimed Momofuku Milk Bar is explaining what it takes to come up with something new. “You go through a process in your head where you think, does that make sense? Is it well-rounded enough? Is there enough of this or that? Do the flavours shape themselves properly?”
The questions continue through the testing process: “I can’t tell you how many times where it’s like one gram of salt, one and a half grams of salt, one and three quarter grams of salt, just to make sure it’s right.”She has to be utterly confident: “Nothing makes it to the menu unless we think it’s the most delicious version of what we can make.”
With gamine features and auburn hair, Tosi has that casual Williamsburg charm. Yet it belies a drive that has seen her take Momofuku Milk Bar to one of the hottest bakeries in the world in just six years. In the Milk Bar recipe book she uses “hardbodied” to describe her dedicated Milk Bar team, a term she defines as “a person who goes above and beyond”. It could be the perfect definition of Tosi herself.
In Sydney recently for the Crave Sydney Food Festival, she took up our challenge to create something Milk Bar-esque but inspired by an iconic Australian treat. After extensive testing – read sampling red frogs, Minties,Twisties, TimTams, Vegemite and more – she has fallen for the flavour and texture of Violet Crumble bars and the distinctive taste of Anzac biscuits.
“Nothing makes it to the menu
unless we think
it’s the most delicious version
of what we can make.”
Tosi is renowned for her incorrigible sweet tooth, and her unconventional eating habits have become almost legendary: as a teenager she would eat Doritos with brown sugar and mayonnaise; her favourite breakfast is a cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookie with a cup of coffee and she admits to “a crippling cookie dough problem ever since I can remember”.
She loves a bit of salt too, often starting the day with potato chips to counterbalance the sugary goodness at work. “So much of the job is tasting and sampling.”
Indeed, as she gets to work in our studio kitchen, she pops broken Violet Crumbles and Anzac biscuits into her mouth. Yes, we’d like to hate her for that turbo-charged metabolism – but instead we just envy her.
After tasting the Violet Crumble bar, she decided to do an esoteric take on an oatmeal butterscotch cookie. It’s a cookie she has been working on since she was an aspiring teenage chef. “It was my speciality,” she says with a laugh. “I thought I could not be more hip or more creative. Looking back at it, it was just an oatmeal butterscotch cookie [but] I really thought I was onto something.”
The Milk Bar recently acquired a smoker and the team has been smoking everything. “Mayonnaise is my favourite,” says Tosi straight-faced. “Potato chips and pistachios came out great [and] we smoked some cereal milk.” It’s all in the name of stimulating creativity. “When we’re playing around with food, sometimes it’s not about playing with a recipe, it’s about a study of what can we smoke.” Smoked oats worked well too, she remembered, when she bit into the Violet Crumble. She thought: “Let’s play off the Violet Crumble as a toffee and let’s smoke the oats to give it a cool flavour.”
The Anzac biscuits were given the honour of becoming an alternative biscuit base for her trademark Crack Pie.This delicious concoction of butter, brown sugar and freeze-dried sweetcorn powder was a serendipitous creation, as impossible to resist as its name suggests. It was also one of the reasons Milk Bar was catapulted into the spotlight, with US television host Anderson Cooper talking it up on his show not long after they opened.
“Dessert makes people happy.”
While Tosi presses crushed Anzac biscuits into the pie dish, we have a very sincere discussion about the differences between cookies (fudgy) and biscuits (crunchy). Her passion for desserts is apparent and she loves to cook them.“On one level, it’s totally selfish, because that’s what I want to eat and that’s how my mind works in terms of creating.” Yet the idea of nurturing others with food also resonates with her, something she credits to her mother and grandmother. “I was very much raised with the relationship with baked goods and your relationship with people, where you bake for every occasion and no occasion and you give and you nurture.” And, she adds: “Dessert makes people happy.”
Although she grew up baking, she studied maths and foreign languages at university. During the summer vacations she ran a bakery and, realising how much she enjoyed it, decided to move to New York and study at the French Culinary Institute as a pastry chef. She worked at acclaimed French restaurant Bouley and molecular gastronomy hot spot wd~50 for a spell, but became disenchanted. “My definition of a pastry chef was plated desserts with multiple components, and that only satisfied a small part of who I am.I think I’m a more casual person, at least in the kitchen and how I think about food. [So] I was trying to come to terms with the fact that maybe my role in the industry was supposed to be something other than what I thought a pastry chef was.”
She took on a more administrative role and found herself writing up food safety plans for David Chang’s highly respected Momofuku restaurants. She enjoyed being part of the dynamic team and was happy to do whatever needed doing, from bookkeeping to payroll. Chang, however, had other plans. “I think Dave sort of had a secret plan, he knew before I knew and was just waiting for the right point to nudge me into it.”
Chang pushed her to come up with desserts for his restaurants and, when an opportunity to open a standalone Milk Bar came up in 2008, he nudged her into running it. There are now five highly successful Milk Bars in New York.
Although she readily attributes the success to being part of the Momofuku family and the team’s dedication to creating the most delicious treats imaginable, she says a big part of it comes from creating interesting food that’s “getable”.“Where it’s not so far out that you can [think] “I get it”. She points to their multilayered apple pie cake. “It has all the flavours and textures of an apple pie but it’s layered into a cake. You get all the soothing familiar flavours, but you get it in a creative way that makes you feel creative.”
As beloved as the Milk Bar creations like Crack Pie and Compost Cookies have become, she wants to keep on innovating. “People love to come in and ask what’s new on the menu. It’s a delicate balance of figuring out how to create a well-rounded menu: so that you have people’s favourites but also have new things.” She pulls the Crack Pie out of the oven: it wobbles in its dish – the sign of a perfect Crack Pie – before she puts it into the fridge to harden. We break apart a still-warm smoked oat and Violet Crumble cookie.The chocolate and now-chewy chunks of honeycomb set off the distinctive flavour of the oats. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted.
She’s enjoyed her time in Sydney, so much so that she could see a Milk Bar opening here. “I feel like Australians have an open mind about food and about baked goods. I feel like you guys take baked goods seriously, you take coffee seriously, but you have a wide range of where you’ll go in terms of a point of view.”
She’s also working on a follow-up to 2011’s Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook (Absolute Press, $49.99). While that book was a hand in rubber-gloved hand guide to all the treats prepared in the bakery, the next one will be more casual and about “what we bake when we’re not baking Compost Cookies”, she says.
In May last year Tosi was named Rising Star Chef of the Year by the highly respected James Beard Foundation. Between that and the increasing media attention, Tosi could quickly become yet another obnoxious chef, but she’s avoiding the hype. “I like that we do what we do, we live in our own little world and that’s how we’re able to create what we create. [I want] to try and maintain and evolve a point of view that belongs to us.” She wants to protect that. “If I don’t feel like I’m myself and can’t still jump around and be a dork without feeling self-conscious, then there’s no point.” And without that, there’ll be no more Crack Pie or Violet Crumble Smoked Oat Cookies.
Published in Vogue Australia January 2013
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