249: Camari Mick

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Since the pandemic, I've loved seeing the micro bakeries pop up. I've tried to support every single one because their creativity from their own culture is being highlighted in their pop up. And it is eye opening.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

0:59Running one pastry program alone is a feat of organization and carbohydrates. But two? Well, that's all in a day's work for Kamari Mick. She's the executive pastry chef at The Musket Room, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan's Nolita neighborhood, and also creating breakfast pastries like candied orange almond croissants for the newly opened rafts up the block. Kamari is a star in New York's white-hot pastry scene, So we're thrilled to have her on the podcast to talk about developing dessert tasting menus, being nominated for a James Beard, and how she's making the industry more equitable.

1:40Kamari Mick, this is Taste. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for coming uptown with pastries in tow at that. Oh, yes. I brought you some candied orange almond croissants, some plain croissants, and a bachirama. Wow. Okay. I hate to make you choose between your children, but out of those three, what's your favorite right now? The candied orange almond croissant. How do you even make a candied orange croissant? So I would like to say ours is a little bit different from a traditional almond croissant. It has candied orange, obviously. But what we do is in our syrup that we soak the croissant in is a saline syrup with lemon juice in it and salt.

2:21So we season it really well to make sure it's nice and balanced and not that overly sweet croissant that you get from the bodega. Wow. I love that. I'm normally a savory croissant girly. I like a ham and cheese moment. So I was struggling between, I was like, oh my God, what should I bring? And I was going to bring you the telegio prosciutto croissant. I messed up. I'm so sorry. This is even better because now I have like a real excuse to come by and get the other one. Other than to see my face. Other than to see your face. Great. No, you definitely have to come and get it. It's so good. When it's nice and hot, like you do that like cheese pull because of the telegio.

2:58So good. Wow. I like that you're thinking about the cheese pull. I feel like that's a very, I don't mean to like stereotype generations, but I feel like the cheese pull is like a newer thing. And so like a pastry chef that's thinking about the cheese pole in a croissant, I feel like we're really vibing. Oh, yeah, for sure. Who doesn't like a good cheese pole? Like, come on, that's just so sexy. So do you often think about the way that your desserts or your pastries are going to like be photographed or kind of have that visual moment when you're developing? I do and I don't. For the reason of Instagram, like that's free publicity and free advertising.

3:34So you definitely want things to look good as much as they taste good. But I feel like if you focus too much on the aesthetics of it, you lose some of the flavor and the heart that goes into it. Yeah, that's a really nuanced reply. I think that it can be really easy to think about like the black tap milkshakes that have all the things on it. But also like just a plain croissant when you cut into it, it has that kind of honeycomb structure. Like that is beautiful and that is all flavor. Yeah, that is all flavor. And that's also the signs of a great lamination and a great croissant. So you definitely want all of that.

4:07And now that people are becoming more educated and knowing what to look for, that also makes us as pastry chefs a little bit more excited because you're going beyond the flavor and now going into the precision of it and like the quality of it. Oh, I love thinking about that. OK, I want to step back for a second because we're talking a little bit about how you're conceiving of these desserts. But I know that like being a pastry chef can be kind of a solitary experience sometimes. Like maybe you're in the restaurant early and you're kind of doing production for the day. So I'm curious about what a typical day looks like for you.

4:41Can you take me through it? Sure, of course. So let's start with the weekend, which is my earliest day. I'll wake up around like three and head to the restaurant and be there by four to start pulling the croissants that we shaped the day before. We'll proof those for about three hours and then bake off. So now we're at like seven o 'clock. So bake off. We'll start out of our little oven doing the croissants, which I'll go through our flavors. The candied orange, almond, the telegio prosciutto, our vol avant, which is a French onion soup vol avant. Sorry if I'm making you hungry. The savory pastries.

5:24Yeah. The telegio prosciutto. We'll bake up all our cookies, amaretti, biscotti, the bacchi da dama. And then we'll go upstairs in our bread oven and we'll bake our baguettes. So cherry, rye, sourdough, milk bread, any and everything at that point. So now we're at 9 o 'clock and we're setting up the shop. We're setting up the bread window. We're starting to serve customers coffee. It smells like golden France, you know, in Paris, walking down the street. So it's really romantic. So at that point, you might even see myself in the shop serving you. Because you don't have enough to do. I don't have enough to do.

6:05And then if I am not serving you, I'm probably downstairs prepping for the following day or I'm across Towson at Musky Room. I was going to say, we're talking about rafts right now, which is like a daytime breakfast pastry situation. But then on this other side of your brain, you must be thinking about doing kind of plated tasting menu dessert. Yeah. So I have both sides of the spectrum. So we have the bakery that's at 4 a.m. ramping and running and doing all the yeasty things that you can imagine. And then at Musket Room, I am thinking about fine plating and tweezering and just all the micro herbs and creating tubes for of mousses and just doing any and everything like so much creativity and to be in one person.

6:52I'm so in awe of that. How do you divide up your brain? I utilize my sous chefs to the full extent. I, you know, do weekly emails saying like, OK, this is what we're doing for the weekend at Rouse. This is the idea I have for Musket. How can we do this? I need your help to help me execute it because I am one person. So I rely on them heavily. Do you like having these two kind of opposite forms of pastry going on at once? I do. It's amazing because I do have a lot. of savory experience. So being able to put that into the bakery and, you know, elevate our traditional ham and cheese and making that telegiacresciutto, while it's not reinventing the wheel, it's being able to express myself in a different way.

7:42But taking in the same light, taking those savory elements and putting them into a parsnip mousse served with rum cake at musket room is still like very relieving. Yeah, I love that. And I know that like, you obviously have a lot of different experience that led you to this moment. But I'm curious about like, how do you even get the skills to be executing and making pastry at this like very fine dining upper level? So I went to college, I got my bachelor's and associates in pastry arts at the restaurant school at Walnut Hill College. And then I, after that, I went to Nantucket for two seasons and then came to New York.

8:26I did a stint in Paris at Chateau Le Rouge. But after that, I came to New York when my sister was pregnant. She had my nephew. Shout out to Aiden. He always loves me to shout out. A bun in the oven if there ever was one. Literally. Sorry, I had to. No, I love that. And while in New York, well, I'm still here. I was at DB Bistro under Daniel Blude. Then I went to Liberton and working on it under Thomas Raquel. I was at TAC Room, Thomas Cullors restaurant. And then the pandemic hit and I started doing pop ups on my own, selling donuts and whatever I could think of through my Instagram. and one time Nicole Vittagliano bought my donut and then I got an email from Jennifer, her twin sister, asking if I wanted to come in for an interview for the musky room.

9:24That's so crazy to me because I think out of all of the things you could make in pastry, donuts don't necessarily get that much respect. So the fact that it was a donut that kind of landed the job interview for you sounds really special and I need to know what donut it was. So it was my apple butter brown butter donut that gets rolled in a caramel, a hard caramel. So it's kind of like a creme brulee donut. Oh, my God. OK, I get that now. That's a job interview donut. That's job interview worthy. And I remember, is this the pop up that was happening at Misanyaki that was kind of highlighting Black Chefs?

10:01Yes, it was. Yeah. I did two weeks over there selling pretzels that were stuffed with pimento cheese. I did some soup and sandwiches and along with some sweet stuff as well, like ice cream sandwiches. So you have all these different kinds of experience feeding people and like getting to see them eat in real time at the bakery or at this pop up versus I don't know in the musket room how much you're like peering into the dining room. Do you have like a favorite method of feeding people? Definitely. Definitely. So whenever I need Mary to taste something, I know you didn't mean this literally, but I like to just like put a spoonful of food in her mouth.

10:43And I just like to see her reaction like, what do you think? OK, so the next tasting menu iteration is going to be that you're hand feeding everybody. Yes, exactly. Just like, here you go. Like just walking around the dining room. That's so fun. And I'm curious, like now that you're in the musket room at RAFs, like I imagine you have fun tools that you're getting to play around with in the kitchen. What's like the craziest one that there is? The craziest tool? I don't have too many crazy tools. I like the basics. But I guess my favorite tool is the sheeter. I just love to laminate any and everything.

11:17And I couldn't imagine doing croissants at the level that we're doing them without the sheeter. Yeah. Can you explain this to me? Because I have heard about I remember when Convy was doing great croissants in L.A. that they had this special laminator and that it's a thing. But I can't really like picture what is actually going on. Can you walk me through it? So it is a tabletop laminator or sheeter rather that has two arms, if you will, that fold up and down. and then a operator wheel where if you go this to your left, the rolls will go to the left and the sheet will roll the dough through. So you're going back and forth and it's just kind of fun to watch and zone out and do.

12:04So it's almost like driving, there's a wheel? Kind of, yeah. Wow. Some machines have buttons, which I really don't like those, and some have levers at the bottom that you just kind of seesaw. That's cool. And I guess really integral if you're making a lot of laminated pastries at scale. Yeah, it speeds up the process. It's consistent. And there's no room for human error when it comes to the leveling of something when using a sheeter. So beyond the fact that you knew you were going to have laminated pastry on the daytime menu at Raff's, how did you approach making that lineup and how much does it evolve through the seasons?

12:42So the lineup at Rav's is pretty stable. I like to keep it very consistent. We do have some rotating danishes in the works. Right now we have a strawberry ricotta danish and a mushroom and garlic scape danish. So those are two very seasonal ingredients, garlic scapes and strawberries. I'm probably going to keep the ricotta in the sense because who doesn't like a cheese danish? like fruit and cheese. It's so classic. So I'll probably be changing to a cherry ricotta soon to, you know, highlight the summer or like a nectarine. And then for the mushroom, I have not even come up with that one yet. Who could say?

13:25Yeah. At the end of the day, it's kind of like whatever is in season and whatever makes us happy. And, you know, we want people to enjoy our food. Yeah, definitely. And between rafts and the musket room, you have so many different opportunities to be playing with produce. So I'm curious, like, what's the thing you're looking forward to the most this whole summer to get to cook with? Okay, so if Mary doesn't take them from me, I really want to use squash blossoms. I have a very high interest in filling it with the cheesecake batter and frying it. Oh my God. I know, right? Yeah, It's like a country fair, like mixed with a country fair that studied abroad in Europe.

14:06Yeah. Yeah. All right. So like maybe then serving that with some compressed melon and I don't know. The idea is there. I just don't know how to execute it. What is compressed melon? I would just take the melon and probably compress it with some liqueur, maybe like a little bit of Kirsch or Luxardo brandy and just compress it to get those. flavors and make it like a little bit translucent. Is this the kind of thing I should be doing? Should I be compressing my melon or is this not worthwhile if I'm not a pastry chef? It's not worthwhile. No. I need you to be honest with me. No, no, you're good.

14:46It's just one of those things that make it a little bit more sexy on the plate, you know? Yeah, I'm here for that. My summer baking doesn't exist. I feel like I always buy fruit with the goal of making something and then And I just eat so much of it that if I'm going to serve it, I just do like fresh whipped cream and macerated berries on top and just kind of call it a day. I think that's kind of the best way to highlight seasonal fruit because you don't need to be adding too much sugar. You don't need to like add too much frou-frou to it, you know, to make it better than what it already is. If you're going to do anything, I would start baking croissatas.

15:21Like make a big batch of paprize pie dough and freeze it. And whenever you get some excess fruit, all you have to do is roll it out. You don't even need like a pan for it. Just roll it out into a round and then toss your berries or your fruit in a little bit of sugar, a little bit of cornstarch, and then put that in the middle. Fold up the sides, egg wash it, throw some sugar in the raw on it, and it's going to be a hit at any party. I love that. I do have pino in my freezer right now, but I think I'm being overly precious. I'm waiting for stone fruit, but I think that I should probably just use strawberries, you know?

15:59You can use strawberries. You can use a mix of stone fruit. You can even buy, you know, those frozen—they get, like, a little watery, but you could buy those frozen bags of fruit from the farmers that they just, like, don't want to sell fresh and use those instead. Like, those are really good. Speaking of things that aren't too fussy, I'm curious about your favorite, like, store-bought prepackaged desserts. Maybe if you were like going to the bodega and you needed a snack. So I am obsessed since childhood with a Caravelle birthday cake. Where did you grow up? Eastern Pennsylvania. Yeah, I was going to say this is like an East Coast thing for sure.

16:39For sure. Like the artificial tasting whipped cream, the crunchies in the middle, a vanilla and chocolate. Like there's nothing that can go wrong. I just had one for my birthday like three weeks ago. You did? Yeah. Oh, my God. Happy belated. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Did it say your name on it or a picture of a childhood pet printed on top? No, no, it did say happy birthday, Kamari, but no, no printing on that one. Damn. I wonder if they knew who it was going to. That's pretty sweet. My sister picked it up, so I have no idea. I love that. I've never had a Carvel cake. I grew up on the West Coast.

17:17Yeah. Every time this is the exact reaction that I get. I'm scared to say it to most people. No, we have to get you one immediately. Maybe after this. There's a Carvel. There's a couple like random ones around the city. There definitely is. But it's not only like you can go to a supermarket and they'll have them in the freezer section too. It's dangerous that the C-town across from my apartment has like the four inch one. So every once in a while I'll buy one and eat it to myself. A personal Carvel cake. Yeah, exactly. What flavor do you go for? Oh, I go for like the crunchy, the classic vanilla crunch with chocolate and then the whipped cream on top.

17:57What is the crunch? I don't know. It's just like mystery crunch. Mystery crunch. It's like chocolate mystery crunch. And I don't think I need to know either. No, you probably don't want to know. No, no, no. I don't even want to try to recreate it. Like it's one of those delicious things that it's just leave it as is. Okay, I love knowing this about you. Something else that I know about you because I interviewed you last year over the phone, which is super fun, is that you were like listening to a lot of murder mystery podcasts at the time when you were doing production. Yeah. Is that still what's happening?

18:31It's still happening. And I am not ashamed to say, but I put my cooks onto it, too. So they're now like, all right, what episode do we want to listen to of Crime Junkie? I'm just like, yes. You're developing fan theories over who did what while you're making croissants. Yes. Yes. We cheat. We discuss and we enjoy each other's theories. Okay, so what about True Crime Podcast is so perfect for listening to in this situation? I just love when I'm working the cadence of somebody's voice. I just like podcasts in general. I feel like with music, I don't listen to too much new music. So you're going to have to put me on if you have a playlist.

19:12Yeah, I got you. Thank you. But I listen to the same thing over and over again. So hearing different stories and hearing the cadence of somebody's voice is very relaxing to me. And it just puts me in the zone. That makes sense. It's funny to me because I feel like there's this whole stereotype that like the energy that you have when you're baking something gets put into the baked good. And obviously you're making them with a lot of love. But in the background, there's like murder and crime and things like that getting like maybe slipped into the dough. Yeah. Her head was cut off. Her arms were cut off.

19:47I was going to quote that audio and then I was like, no, this would be too weird. I am a little morbid, but it is one of those things that like I bring a lot of people together, unfortunately. But it also brings awareness, too, because especially the one that I listen to, they're constantly like putting out and working towards all of these crimes being solved. So, you know, I like to not be a part of it, but like help at least, you know, raise some awareness. Yeah, I see that. Maybe one day the kitchen is going to solve a crime. I know. I'm looking forward to it. I'm picturing like you walk in and there's like red yarn like taped up on all of the walls, like in between the sugar and flour and like active crime solving happening.

20:38Yeah. Yeah. We're working on it. We're our own detectives. So another thing that we talked about when I was interviewing you last year was just like being aware of this position of responsibility and power that you have in the restaurant industry here in New York with making healthier workspaces like in general and specifically for black chefs. And so now that you've had more time in this role, I'm curious about how that's been going, like how your perspective has maybe changed. No, my perspective has not really changed. I'm still really working hard to change the narrative. In fact, I just did a dinner with the great Brittany Sticks Williams last night where we were celebrating Caribbean Heritage Month with 10 to 1 rum.

21:19Such a good rum. Such a good rum. So we did a six-course tasting menu. I did two desserts. Brittany did three dishes. And we kind of crushed it, if I say so myself. You got to say so yourself. Who else will? No one else was there. But what was so amazing, we made not only a lot of connections with the guests, but the team that they brought together was it was fully black women. So it's just such a reinvigorating experience for myself just to see all these women in such great positions and just crushing it overall. But with that said, I'm continuing to try and bring other people up. Not that like Brittany needs my help or anything, but bring other people up and put them in the spotlight to show them that like, hey, it's not just me that's doing great stuff.

22:12Like here's this other great person and here's this person who can do this. So the more opportunities that I get that necessarily they want somebody who is of color, I have a whole Rolodex ready to go. And for those younger people who don't know what a Rolodex is, a contact sheet. Oh, my God. Not the Rolodex explanation. I talked to my nephew, who's one of them is like 20 now, and he's like, what is that? I'm just like, oh, my God. I think it's really important to be talking about nurturing that and bringing people up with you. And I think an interesting thing that I've noticed coming out of the early pandemic is even this Mason Yaki pop-up, just the way that pop-ups have flourished and kind of provided platforms to people who maybe don't have institutional access in the same way.

22:59And I'm curious if that resonates with you or if you see kind of any other like shifts going on in terms of the restaurant food scene in New York and like who's getting access to platform and spaces. No, since the pandemic, I've love seeing the micro bakeries pop up. I've tried to support every single one because their creativity from their own culture is being highlighted in their pop-up and it is eye-opening because they never have a chance even being you know let's say you're the pastry chef or sous chef at a French restaurant you can't then go put a Jamaican dessert on that menu or a Filipino dessert on that menu so being able to take that time during the pandemic have the still getting paid and then being able to express yourself in that way.

23:49I was so happy to support so many people. And I was like, what do you need from me? How can I help you? Like, can I order stuff from you? Can I order stuff for you? Like using our Ballador account or what have you. And it's just I love to see it continue and thrive. I hope to see more brick and mortar. But I totally understand the fact that Like New York real estate is crazy, you know. So what has been essential to these pop ups are ghost kitchens, which have also like spiraled to, which is amazing. That's really interesting to think about. I know that like there are some restaurants around the city like Honey's or Winona's that are like often doing pop ups and giving their space to people.

24:32But I wasn't really sure about like how people were doing production for some of those other ones. So the ghost kitchen component is something that I didn't really put the pieces together on. Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of ghost kitchens in Queens and in Brooklyn where those spaces like can house at least 10 people at a time, like 10 companies. Yeah. So it's really good for people to be able to get to and access those kitchens. Yeah. Going back to this earlier conversation about like being able to put dishes on the menu that like speak to your heritage, your personal perspective. Are there any like desserts that you've put up at Musket Room or at Raphs you're especially proud of?

25:07Oh, yeah, for sure. So being in the position that I am in now, I'm able to source what I would like to use on the menu. So I source a Jamaican chocolate from 1-1 Cacao. It's in Portland, Jamaica, where my father is from, actually. And I use a 71 % Portland chocolate. And it is one of my proudest dishes. I serve it with a charred banana panna cotta. And then I previously put fried plantains on it and served it with white and black sesame ice cream. So I'm using a lot of different flavors and different components to bring out this like chocolatey, almost peanut buttery, salty sweet situation. I love that.

25:57And like chocolate, peanut butter is my all time favorite flavor combination. So thinking of a riff on that, but with these plantains and banana and tahini sounds like delicious to me. Yeah, right. You have to come by and have that one too. Yeah. So is that still on the menu? It is still on the menu. That one is. Has it shifted at all or it's the same thing? I have shifted it actually. Currently it is a coconut semifredo. And what's really fun, whenever I use coconut, I try never to use coconut milk just because I feel like that flavor is so muted and like... That's kind of what you're always expecting.

26:34So currently the coconut semifredo, I take the meat of the coconut, like cracking our own coconut, take the meat in the water, blend that together. And then I take coconut water, like the store bought, and make a roux out of it. And then I put the coconut milk into it. And then I fold in with egg whites as well. Wow. So three different kinds of coconut. Yep. Do you have any tips for cracking a coconut? it? I just use a hammer and go at it. Just do it. Yeah, you just do it. I mean, there's definitely better ways to do it. Like you're supposed to take a screwdriver and tap one of the eyes out and then hit it with the hammer.