The Secret Ingredient: Vinegar
"I got through the worst of it and then realized the worst of it was just going to be forever."
I met Emily on the sidewalk outside our Zen temple. She’d brought cookies to share and the minute I tasted one I knew I needed to talk to the person behind it. We learned that we’d both worked at Dirt Candy and pretty soon she was coaching me through my pastry projects like Mushroom Pavlova over Instagram DMs. She has a tremendous amount of knowledge and technique from her years in pastry and shares it graciously and ecstatically. She radiates excitement about weird cooking projects that makes me excited too.
I love that her secret ingredient is vinegar because it’s just like her and just like this interview: doesn’t shy away from being sharp and infuses everything with brightness and energy. You should definitely keep an eye on her “micro-bakery” Dirtybird Sweets, because when a dessert drops, it’s like nothing you can get anywhere else.
My background is 13 years of fine dining pastry, and I feel like you get caught in this box: You’re a pastry chef, you’re a sweet person, you don’t explore with savory. You’re told, don’t go there, you don’t need that, that’s not correct, that’s not safe. Using vinegar recklessly is something very empowering that I got started on only in the last couple years, when I started cooking at home again and reconnecting with that as an art practice. Every time I add a splash of vinegar and it works, it’s so freeing, it frees me from the shackles of what is correct in restaurants.
Kate: What’s one of your favorite ways you’ve used vinegar?
I think it was the cookie we met over. I used vinegar with some confectioner’s sugar and lemon juice and a little bit of pink food dye. I’ve been doing my, like, inner child healing work or whatever and I’ve been wanting to recreate things from this bakery that was near my house as a kid. They had these flower cookies with berry jam in the middle and a dollop of bright pink royal icing that were my favorite things ever. And I was like, how do I recreate this, but a version that adult Emily would want to eat? So I used nice butter for the shortbread and my own homemade jam and this Tart cherry vinegar. What’s important for me in these sweet applications is that you don’t taste the vinegar. Like you add a splash to the cookie frosting it doesn’t taste like vinegar, it tastes like sour cherry. But I can never sell them in my bakery business. I could sell them if I advertised them as sour cherry sandwich cookies, but the part that makes them fun for me is the vinegar. I was trying to sell them as cherry vinegar shortbread cookies and not surprisingly no one wants to buy them. But I'm just a stubborn Taurus and I refuse to do things in a way that will actually benefit my business.
Let’s take a field trip to my kitchen, I pulled out all my vinegars to show you. There’s so much and they're all so different. Like this I got in a farmers market in France and it’s a cherry tonka bean vinegar, it’s dark bloody red. This is honey vinegar. I made a chive blossom vinegar last summer. This is Filipino coconut vinegar. I use a ton of rice vinegar for mild neutral seasoning. Black vinegar, and then all my little Tart vinegar friends. And then honestly this [Heinz white vinegar] is probably the one I use the most. For me it's a bit nostalgic because I'm half Puerto Rican, half Jewish, and Puerto Rican food is usually very heavy and meat-based and the one thing we’d have on the table that was a refreshing vegetable was watercress with sliced raw onion and tiny bit of the Goya brand olive oil and a big ass splash of Heinz white vinegar in it. So when I think of vinegar to satiate, it’s white vinegar. When I think of accessing a creative spiritual flow state, there's these other vinegars.
K: Can you talk about how you got into pastry?
Since I was like five years old, I was always gonna be a pastry chef. There was never a question. It was one of those things where no one taught me, it was just the thing I did. There’s pictures of me where I could barely walk and I had this little stepstool to reach the counter and I'm using the Kitchen Aid. I insisted on doing my own projects — I was like, You’re making your pie, I want to make my own pie.
When I was 15, as soon I could convince someone to let me in a kitchen, I was working at Del Posto with Brooks Headley, who was one of my all-time pastry nerd idols. He also does such cool shit with vinegar! When I worked with him, he was in his rehydrating fruit into verjuice era. Getting dried cantaloupe and rehydrating it and reducing to basically vinegar but a step before. It's between vinegar and wine. He made these champagne vinegar caramels. I remember being a 15-year-old in this restaurant kitchen not knowing what the fuck I was doing and him handing me a bomboloni fresh from the fryer, or a celery sorbet. He’s crazy. He's like a punk rock pastry chef, he just embodies that mentality. You know, he served a Satsuma orange once just on a bed of ice. Because doing anything else to that orange would be disrespecting it and its perfect nature. In a way it's a fuck you to every restaurant chef ever, and at the same time the most respectful possible thing.
Being the kind of person I am, and because I didn’t go to culinary school and I was younger than everybody else, I always went into those environments like a sponge. Like, You're in debt for culinary school and I'm not, teach me things, teach me techniques. I ended up being around all these super talented, amazing people who were formally trained and just asking questions and learning from them. And I'm really grateful for that because it allowed me to take what I wanted and leave the rest. I didn’t get stuck in, like, this is the French Western way that an old white man taught you to cook things properly.
So I feel like I had confidence and then it was convoluted by the restaurant industry. Like I would make family meal and everyone would love it, but I would be self conscious about it and doubting. That wasn’t real. That was just what came up being in this environment where I never really felt safe and didn't allow myself to realize that I was feeling unsafe till I stepped out of it because of COVID. And I was like, Wow, I can't do that again. It's that momentum, like once you're in the industry and you’re mentally committed to it, you go from job to job to job with minimal breaks, very little vacation, you just have to keep going with it. COVID forced us to stop, and I've heard a lot of people talking recently about how they approach food differently and cooking differently, in what sounds like a generally healthier way.
One of the reasons that I left the restaurant industry is, I was the executive pastry sous for Ci Siamo. I was working with Claudia Fleming, who is my lifelong idol. We got through the R&D. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance and a lot of lead-up to this opening and I got through it, hired my staff, trained my staff, had the menu set, everything was done, and we're up and running and I was standing there burnt the fuck out. Exhausted, not having had like one day off and I'm like, That's the standard but it's not okay. This was my dream job. I got through the worst of it and then realized the worst of it was just going to be forever. So we’re standing at the pass one day, and I guess I just looked miserable. Claudia looked at me and was like, Are you happy? And I’m like, Right now? And Claudia was like, Yeah, why are you here? And it wasn’t mean, it was genuine. She’s like, Why are you doing this? and I was like, It’s what I’ve always done, and she’s like, But do you like doing it? And I’m like, I did. I don’t think I do right now.
I don't think even with the best intention that people can encourage pastry chefs to stay in the industry and work on their craft because it is restrictive and abusive by definition. Like, I was hanging out at [REDACTED] for a month in their kitchen. At one point, it was just me and their pastry chef who I'd also idolized for years, and I'm like, oh my god, we're just like, chillin. This is wild. We're just in the cage in the basement with all the pastry ingredients standing there talking about how savory chefs don't understand. And this is one of the most brilliant pastry chefs of this generation. And then I see him being talked down to by other people in the kitchen, or by ownership or by executive chefs and I'm not gonna name names of course, but this is everywhere. And seeing this happen to brilliant artists who are technically textbook in their execution of pastry, in every single restaurant I've worked in through my 13-year-career, again and again and again, it's the same thing. And then it was me being talked down to and I'm like, you know what, I just cannot be talked down to by someone else who’s impatient, who’s also overworked and also stressed out and also has their career on the line. The job itself is so grating and exhausting and then having that on top of it? That’s when I was like, I cannot be a mentor. I cannot be a manager. I cannot be a leader because I'm going to end up encouraging these goals and these dreams that I cannot ethically encourage because this is not a good place to be.
K: How has it been since you left the restaurant industry?
I think my favorite activity ever is cooking for people in my own home and being able to be in that flow state and feel comfortable and feel safe and I haven't been able to do that in my life until recently. Restaurants aren’t a place where your nervous system is aligned and you feel safe getting in touch with yourself. Restaurants are not a spiritual place despite what a lot of chefs want to think or project.
The other day, I had these gorgeous little purple yukon gold potatoes that I got at the market and the texture was like super — you know what, I’m not going to start talking about the potatoes because I could just keep talking about them and that's not what we're here for. But in that moment, I was in my flow state. I was having a grand old time with these potatoes and I had everything I could have wanted to cook with and it was like the best moment for me. I’m always honored to make things from the farmers market. I feel like it's an honor to be a vehicle to let them see how they want to be cooked. And I did a bagna càuda inspired dressing, like a warm German potato salad with lots of fresh garlic and anchovies and I had some carrots that I cooked in brown butter, and I put the extra brown butter back into the potatoes. And I knew it needed vinegar, but there are so many to choose from. But the Tart Vinegar, the herbe verte one, is so mild and so light and so accessible. It brings this classic French trio of herbs but in like kind of a punk rock way.
Tart vinegar was also a quarantine passion project. I just love her ethos in business and the way she makes her products. Before then I hadn't really used a lot of fancy vinegars but I think the way that her vinegars are so light and modular and approachable, they encourage you to think about vinegar differently and use them in a more nuanced, adaptable way. So her particular brand has influenced the way I use vinegar and how I've seen different vinegars. And then I've traveled a lot and collected different vinegars wherever I go because it's also like…People think of terroir and they think of butter or wine (well, butter is what I think about first, but most people think of wine). And I think fermentation projects like kombucha or vinegar or sourdough starter, in a way it’s even more like they’re capturing the exact moment of a time and a place and I think that's really beautiful. There’s this quote, It's not what's in your head, it's what your head is in. And I love these kinds of things that literally capture what is around you and make something out of it.
What I’m Cooking
Buttery cabbage with lemon, artichokes, & capers (gf)
The cabbage gets meltingly soft cooked in butter over the stove, and the capers and artichokes show up to balance out the richness. Lemon adds a great tang, but if you’ve just finished this interview and want to substitute vinegar instead, go for it.
Recipes for paid subscribers:
