Next Steps

I had to decide whether it was worth it to go to cooking school. I had taken a class at Blue Ribbon Cooking School with pastry chef William Leaman, formerly of Essential Baking Company. We learned how to make several classic French cookies. The first was Sable Bretons, which could also be used as a tart crust and could be either cut into shapes or formed into logs for slice and bake cookies. We also learned about financiers, which were easily used as a tart filling or as their own cookie. Financiers were baked in special pans, and you could also sink whatever fruits you had into the batter. We also made madeleines, which were also baked in special shell shaped pans. For some reason, I don’t remember being too impressed with the madeleines, but they were good when they were very fresh. What I remember most about the class was that these were just basic things that you could do anything you want with…that the sky was the limit. This fit with how I baked because I never really followed the recipe in its entirety, and I was always mixing and matching fillings with crusts and such.

Around the same time, I took a business class at the community college adult education division. The instructor seemed a bit new at teaching, and he had this funny habit of repeating himself several times, sometimes even within the same sentence. He would also smile a bit after he said something so I got the feeling he just liked hearing his own voice and being in front of a few people while he spoke. We got to take home one of his books, “Business Plans for Lemonade Stands”. I liked the book title because I like lemonade and have always felt that if people can learn how to make and sell great lemonade, they can do anything. Turns out the book was written just like the author spoke: random uncollected stream of consciousness notes on a few general ideas about running a business. But despite the shortcomings of the class, in the end it was good to have a few hours a week to sit in a room and think about what my business would be. I remember there was this guy who was starting a Pho restaurant, and there was another guy who was going to start a doctor’s office. The attendance was really low towards the end of the 6 weeks, and I remember thinking that these people who don’t show up aren’t serious about starting a business.

In February 2003, I wrote a business plan for Sugar. As typical Seattlites, we frequented espresso shops, and noted that they usually had a very poor selection of baked goods. We thought this was odd that places with very high end and pricy drinks had such not so elegant baked goods. None of the pastry offerings ever seemed as special as the coffee drinks. We talked this over with several of our friends, and some people in the industry, and most people agreed that there could possibly be an opportunity, although we were warned that the volumes of pastries for espresso shops were small. Nonetheless, we decided to sell French style tarts mostly to espresso shops, and I began schooling myself on the art of making pastry professionally.

Culinary school crossed my mind again, but I had already had a Masters in Photography and didn’t do anything with that degree. There comes a point in one’s life where you are supposedly able to figure it out on your own. Plus, there would be about 6 months of waiting to get into a program, in addition to the two years in the program itself. Self-schooled, I could learn what I wanted at my own pace, so armed with a book on baking chemistry that I had picked up on my lunch hour, I set to work learning about crust, fillings, and anything that would help me fix mistakes and such that invariably came up when working with food.