First things first! Bubbles! Our favorite kind of wine. Champagne, prosecco, cava, and pet nat.

We're veteran cookbook authors Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. We may have written over three dozen cookbooks but we love bubbles! Every day should be a celebration, right?

After we're done being enthusiastic for bubbly wine, we've got a one-minute cooking tip about a common kitchen tool. Then Bruce interviews former race-car engineer and now croissant queen Kate Reid about her book LUNE. And we tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE AND MARK:

[01:07] All about bubbles: champagne, prosecco, cava, and pet nat.

[19:11] Our one-minute cooking tip: Get yourself a serrated vegetable peeler!

[21:35] Bruce interviews Kate Reid from Lune croissant bakery and the author of the LUNE, the ultimate guide to engineering perfect croissants.

[41:27] What’s making us happy in food this week? Braised brisket!

Buy our latest cookbook, THE INSTANT AIR FRYER BIBLE, here.

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough.

And together with Bruce, we have written 36 cookbooks.

Hard to Believe it, and Still Married.

Can you fathom that?

I can, I can, I guess.

Including our, excuse me.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, good grief.

Working together.

Living together.

We've been watching too

Couples therapy on Showtime.

Oh gosh.

That is how well that you can go down with US.

Couples therapy.

It's real.

It's actual couples in.

Therapy, oh my gosh.

Is horrific and fascinating on Showtime.

Anyway, we're not advertising for Showtime.

Instead, this is our, and we're not doing Therapy Today

podcast about food and cooking.

We are gonna talk about bubbly wine of all kinds of the different kinds There are.

We've got our one minute cooking tables.

Always.

We have an interview f.

Fabulous interview with somebody who's used to be everywhere right now.

Mm-hmm.

with Kate Reid, the owner of Loon in Australia at Bruce's.

Snagged an interview with her and that is quite an amazing thing,

and we're gonna talk about what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Not.

All bubbles are created equal.

And you know, if you listen to this podcast that Mark and I love to drink

bubbles, it is our favorite form of wine.

I think that if I could choose one kind of wine and leave

it there, and I only could have one, it would be bubbly wine.

And it's really funny because I am such a red wine drinker, and yet I would go for

bubbles as my and only choice if I could.

Well, there are some bubbly red wines.

I mean, there are the Italian Lambrusco.

Most of them give me a headache and make me kind of queasy.

Oh.

But I'm sure that

there's some really great, I'm good one ones out.

There's great lambs goes out there and I Not at our local pizza place.

No, no.

And not that crud.

You ordered those four bottles that we kind of had to

finally give away to people.

Um, . Not that I'm sure there's great lambrusco out there.

In fact, if you know a great Lambrusco, drop us a note and tell us some fabulous

Lambrusco that you absolutely love.

I've had some red champagnes from California champagnes red

bubbling wines from California.

They're.

Okay.

I wouldn't go crazy about it.

Did they come in a can?

No, they should've because that's about what they do.

Like they're okay.

I wouldn't go crazy about it, but we wanna talk about the different kinds of bubbles

and we wanna start off with Champan or champagne because there, there's something

you should know about Champan if you don't know, and that is to be champagne.

You have to be from the region of champagne.

Yeah.

Well that makes

sense.

That's why they call it that.

That means if you live there, your champagne No, the, the wine has to

come from the region of champagne.

So here's how they make the champagne from Champaign.

Right?

They start with wine.

Actually, they.

Do a, a first fermentation of wine.

They take chardonnay, pinot noir, munk grapes.

Those are the three most common.

Yes, there are some small champagne producers that use different grapes there,

but those are basically the three, and they get fermented, a single ferment.

I think a lot of people are surprised.

Wait, I'm gonna interject and say a lot of people are surprised

as so much champagne's made at a pinot noir, which is a red.

Pinot Dark, Pinot black, Pinot dark.

And uh, that's because the skins don't rest in the wine, so No, they don't.

You can get, you can get white wine from red grapes.

You can, you cannot get red wine from white grapes.

Correct.

Nobody can get it without food coloring or blood.

Oh god.

Okay, go on.

So they do, uh, an initial first fermentation in VAs.

Then they put this wine into bottles and they add more yeast and a little.

For a second fermentation.

Mm-hmm.

. Right.

And that fermentation makes the bubbles.

But it's very complicated process, isn't it?

It is.

It's very complicated.

It involves storing the bottles upside down.

It involves a process called riddling it.

It is all about getting the yeast to resettle back in the neck to get

it to blow out after fermentation.

To reco the bottle, they add a little wine and then reco the bottle.

It Champagne is a really labor intensive process to produce the product.

There's a reason why it costs as much as it does.

Yeah.

Not just because it's, you know, fancy and people think it's fancy.

I, I, I'm gonna tell a story, um, about from us early on in our food career,

we were French correspondents from Wine Spectator, believe it or not.

Nice job.

It was a really great job.

Back in the day when you.

Expense accounts, like serious expense accounts for

feature articles in magazines.

So we did not, we were not allowed to write about wine because of

course we were not wine experts.

The way, let's say James Suckling was who Ro wrote and worked at Wine Spectator.

We weren't on that level, but we were allowed to write about

luxury travel and food experience.

It was a.

Yeah, really tough job.

Unbelievably tough.

And one of the things we did is we went to Shaman and we spent time there

and it was, I'm, this is really silly.

I was writing for Wine Spectator.

We had published a couple cookbooks and it was about, oh, I don't know.

Two nights in, maybe three nights in to our stay in Champan that

we were having these dinners with champagne, with every course.

And I looked up at Bruce with this shocked look on my face as I was

eating, I think, I don't know, a piece of beef with a glass of champagne.

And I, I said to him, Oh my gosh.

Champagne is wine , and what I meant by that is you can drink it with dinner.

You can, it was, it was this shocking thing because I only knew champagne.

Really, honestly, I'm gonna be really honest about myself, is before I

got fancy in my food career, the way I handled all relationship

breakups in my life was a bottle of.

State Taylor Sparkling wine and a bath.

And notice he didn't call it champagne because

it came from New York state.

It's true.

And so Taylor, New York says, stop.

Just stop.

It's what I could do.

It's, I was an assistant professor of American Lit.

It's what I could afford.

So I would get my bottle of.

Taylor Sparkling wine, New York State, I would make a big bath and I would what?

Ease away my pain.

Have a breakup.

How sweet was that?

Champagne?

Oh, it's not that bad.

Okay.

Because the way champagne gets its sweetness is, as Mark said, they dis.

Gorge all that yeast from the bottle and before they recap it, they put

what they call a, which is a little bit of sugar water in, depending upon how

much and how high the dosage is, will depend on how dry the champagne is.

And you can actually get some super dry champagnes that have zero dose sauce.

You can't.

I love those.

So let's move on to talk about another kind of sparkling

wine that is not champagne, right?

You have to be from champaign to be champaign.

Let's talk about Perseco, and I have to say that Perseco, I think, gets a bad rap.

And I will tell you right up front before we say this discussion, it

gets a bad rap from me quite often,

So I am not mark of the pair here.

A grand fan of a lot of perseco.

Well, it doesn't have the subtlety, it doesn't have the individuality that

most champagnes have, and the reason.

Because Prosecco, again, it starts with a base wine that's fermented

in a tank, just like champagne.

But then things change.

They have to do a second fermentation to get the bubbles

right and to get it sparkling.

But instead of doing that in individual bottles with yeast added

to that bottle, they dump all that wine into a giant tank with yeast.

Yeah.

They go seal it.

Pressure builds that carbonates the wine.

Yeah.

And it's much faster.

You could take six weeks to get a super bubbly perse.

In the same time, it could take up to nine years for a bottle of champagne.

And now I'm gonna say something.

This really, please don't leave our podcast when I say something

that is this snotty and nasty, but I'm being very serious.

The bubbles in champagne, in champagne are infinitely more sophisticated than

the bottle bubbles in most perseco.

What I mean by that is they're smaller, there are more of them.

They rise on a more continuous basis in a, from a glass of champagne.

All of this says to me that the carbonation is much more elegant

and I, you know, God, you're gonna turn our podcast off right now

because that's the snotty thing I said, and I will admit smart.

The carbonation is,

The carbonation is more elegant and there's a reason why like perseco is

used in things like an aole spritz, right?

Right.

But you would, it's perfect in an aole spritz, but the, the most you would do

in France or Champaign is put like a drop of creme Desis to make a Kia Royal.

Oh.

Like,

And even that, to me is just horrified . I can't deal with that.

But there's something that you can say about Perseco that's

actually for the business end of it.

That's quite nice.

Yeah.

And that is every single bottle from every single giant VAT batch

of Perseco will be the same.

Yes, that's true.

That does not happen with champagne.

Nope.

It doesn't for every.

Batch of first fermented wine that goes into the bottles with the extra

yeast, every single bottle from that year is going to be slightly different.

And I have to say this, since I've disked Prosecco, and I don't mean

to dis it since I've disked it, I have to say that we bought some perseco

about a case of Perseco a while ago.

We still have about half of the case here at our house.

I have to say that we went up and when I tell you Bob, in the cost

of our Prosecco, we went to like $13 a bottle and $12 a bottle.

So no, I'm not speaking of $30 a bottle.

We went just slightly up.

And I have to say that Prosecco is better.

It is, and than a lot of the Prosecco that

I've had.

Well, Prosecco is much cheaper because it's so much easier to

make, it's mass produced as opposed to the labor intensive champaign.

Now when you go to Spain and you look at their wine kava, you're gonna look at

prices that are a little higher again.

Yeah, we

Can I, before we get to kava, can I say wait?

Yes.

I, and I love Kava and I wanna talk about Kava, but can I say something

about Prosecco and Champagne?

One more thing?

Sure, sure.

And that I, you bring this up, and I think this is really what I was

trying to get at, and I think you were kind of implicitly getting at it too,

is that, If you go up in price with Prosecco, you get a better product.

Yep.

You don't necessarily get a better product in champagne because you,

because there are differentiations amongst the very bottles themselves.

That's one problem, but two in champagne, you run into brands.

You do, you do run into the.

Upcharge for vco or the upcharge for

mow, like the upcharge for Tito's vodka.

And that doesn't mean you're getting a better vodka Right?

Exactly.

And stretch of the imagination.

And so you, you're running into upcharge with champagne.

Mm-hmm.

based on brand known, you know, brand recognizability.

What is Brandness?

Mm-hmm.

, is that a word?

Ownness?

Sure.

In Prosecco, if you bump up your game as we did just slightly, you are almost

guaranteed to get a better product.

That is true in champagne.

You might bump up your price point, and what you're guaranteed to get is a

more well known brand, not necessarily a better bottle of champagne, although

sometimes you do.

Sometimes you do.

And in.

Fact, if you go to a small wine store with a very curated stock of

champagne, you are likely to find some grower champagnes and unknown

champagnes that aren't more expensive because they want to make inroads.

They want people to know who they are, and you might get them at a really good price.

Yeah.

So when you're looking at champagne and you're looking, cuz generally

when you're looking at real champagne, you're looking at spending some box.

Just remember, Piece Uced by the brands.

There are lots of small micro producers of champagne, right, that more and more

of it is imported into North America.

Yep.

And there are ways to get better champagne without paying, you know, the Louis

Vuitton Mar, as it were, the brand markup.

Okay.

So now on Kava, which I'm gonna tell you, I am an unabashed fan of

Kava and part of why Mark and I love Kava so much is that it.

The subtlety and the sophistication of champagne because it's

made in the very same way.

So we're talking about Spanish sparkling wine.

Yep.

It's made just like champagne is.

The wine is made in vats and then has a secondary fermentation in

the bottle with yeast and sugar.

They do the riddling, just the way Mark described it, to get

the yeast down to the cork.

They disgorge all that.

They had a little, and then they finally, Fill the bottle with a

little bit extra wine and cap it.

And this is why Kava can have the same toasty brioche quality like champagne.

And, and I got a second thing and Yep.

Champan the region, region in France is, Hmm.

Wet.

It's, it's getting less wet, but it's notoriously a wet.

Region of France in Spain, the grapes do have to suffer more.

Spain is, you know, uh, one of the northern most outposts of the Sahara

microclimate, and so the grapes do have to suffer more in Spain.

and I think they add an incredible comp.

I like my grapes to suffer.

I think they add an incredible complexity to kava.

It's not the same grapes used.

It really doesn't matter the varietals of the grapes, but

it's not the same grapes used.

Well, that infects the flavor tremendously.

It is too, but.

But also just the environment.

Mm-hmm.

, just the dryness of Spain.

It, the, the, the lime quality of the, the lime content of the soil, the

basic versus acidic nature of the soil.

I mean, all of this stuff is part of what makes Kava.

Really interesting and a really great choice.

And the other thing about Kava that I love so much is it's not very expensive.

No.

Because people want champagne for that thing.

That's, oh, champagne.

It's the brand thing thing.

Again, it's the brand thing.

And people who don't know kava don't know that.

Like for champagne, you've gotta go up to 50, 60 bucks to get

a decent bottle of champagne.

Often at Kava, we have found that $30 is the top of what you need to spend to

get a spectacular Cava really expensive.

And you can get Kavas down at 12 and $13 that are kind of mind boggling.

And remember, those are.

All still done with that hand labor intensive way Champagne does.

Now, there's a fourth sparkling wine that Mark and I have fallen in love with.

We have talked about Pet Nats on this podcast, endlessly

Pet.

Pet Nat.

Pet Nat.

It is the oldest method of making sparkling wine, also

known as Methodo Ancestral.

The wine is moved from the VATS where it has its initial fermentation.

Into bottles wallet is still fermenting, so they don't add any extra yeast.

They just transferred in with a bit of cloudy yeast

that's already still in there.

Yeah.

They seal it with a crown cap like you get on soda pop

bottles, like a bottle of coke.

It's not filtered.

There's no added, so they're usually very dry and they can be a little

cloudy, but the They are often cloudy.

Yeah.

And because the Petnet wine only undergo.

Primary fermentation and then never get a secondary by adding more yeast to it.

They're much lower in alcohol and the bubbles are

usually much fine.

Now I wanna tell you something about this and it's something

that's kind of fascinating.

So I'm old and the first time I went to Paris, I will tell you was

in, I was a in college and it was a summer trip and I went to Paris.

It's late seventies, 1970s.

I'm staying in a flop house, hotel, and.

Flop house in which the shower, it costs this pre Euros.

The shower is one frank to take a shower and the shower is a hose on a fire escape.

What are you,

James Beard.

So he used to do that in his townhouse in New York.

Seriously.

So I, I gave the guy, my Frank, and he like gave me the key and I

opened the door and it's just the fire escape in the interior of the

building with a hose hanging off it.

I'm like, oh, thanks.

So, I'm staying in Alop house.

Yeah, what you pay for it.

Exactly.

And we drank a lot of petnet.

We had no money.

We drank a lot of Petnet.

There was a wine bar just around the corner from this flop

house hotel I was staying in.

We, it was, it was on the bottom basement floor.

We would go down there, we.

Being idiots in college.

Idiot boys traveling around Europe.

Of course we called it champagne.

It was not champagne.

It was pet that, and I now know that pop top in, in retrospect, right?

They came over and I couldn't believe it.

I, I was a rube, but still, you know, she brought over the bottle opener

and opened it and I was like, what?

What are you doing?

And but it was so cheap.

It was.

Just dirt cheap to drink pet nap because it was a l

definitely low quality wine now.

Oh, this is what's so funny.

Yeah, the kids, meaning the, the, the, the younger millennials

and Gen Z have gone insane.

Over pet nets and petts are now expensive.

It just blows my mind.

They're now expensive.

It's hard to find a decent pet net under $25.

It, it's crazy.

They, it used to be the rot cut stuff, but they are so delicious.

Now the thing is, they, they're made everywhere.

They're made in Germany, they're made in Italy.

They're made in France.

They're made in Spain.

We were having dinner in Boston one night with some very dear friends of

ours, and we had actually gone to Boston for a weekend just to eat and drink

And the first,

the best reason to go to Boston, no wait, there was a third.

Eat, drink and be merry.

No.

And look at great art.

Oh yes.

Look at, look at.

Great.

We spent so much time in the art . Museums in Boston

and we bought, uh, And we ordered a bottle of an Italian PET net to start

dinner and it was so delicious that by the time the first course came,

I had already been on my phone and ordered a case of this to be delivered.

When we got back home,

he found a case in California.

Yeah.

And he bought it at the table as we were drinking it.

So, but, but I will say Petnet has become very popular.

It's become very up.

If you go to any kind of.

Restaurants these days, uh, that are frequented by the

20 and 30 year old crowd.

You're gonna see a lot of pet adss and you're gonna pay for 'em.

kavas gonna still be a better bargain all around.

I know this thing that used to not be the, the fancy thing has now become the.

The fancy thing, but if you can find pet Nas, check in your local stores,

they are well worth the effort to find.

They are not as refined as champagne or kava, but they are

an interesting summer drink.

Okay, that's as much as we wanna say about sparkling wine.

Let me say for now.

Forever for now.

Let me say right now that if you don't know it, we have a newsletter.

Uh, it comes out oh, about every other week, sometimes once a

week, sometimes every other week.

Uh, if you wanna be a part of our newsletter, it includes, uh, sometimes

knitting patterns from Bruce.

Uh, the latest one included my current lunch obsession, a recipe for it, which

is this way you make ramen eggs and, oh, that's my whole thing right now.

Um, if you wanna see that newsletter and be a part of it, you can go to our.

Bruce and mark.com.

There's a signup form there for the newsletter.

And let me say upfront, we guarantee you will never have your email sold or used

for any other purposes for than our own.

We lock them on the mail service we use so they cannot be gleaned in any way.

So if you're interested in that newsletter, go to bruce and

mark.com and you can sign up for it.

Up next as he is standard, our one minute cooking tip,

if you have a recipe that says you have to peel tomatoes or peel peaches,

you have probably been taught how to do it by scoring them and dropping them and

boiling water, and then very, very fancy.

You're very fancy subway.

You don't need to do any of that.

Skip the boiling water.

Buy yourself a serrated vegetable peeler.

That's it.

It's like the, it's like the simplest thing.

It's, it's something I didn't even know existed until a few years ago, and I

was buying some new tools from Oxo and they had this serrated vegetable peeler.

It takes the skins off soft, ripe peaches and soft ripe tomatoes without boiling.

It's fabulous.

I have to tell you that, uh, I didn't even know people were offended by

peach skins until I was an adult because we just, we just for fuzzy.

Yeah.

We just ate 'em.

Come on.

My grandparents grew peaches.

Oh.

To eat a peach.

S but not to have a cook with them.

Oh no.

My grandmother just cut the peaches up for peach pie skins and all.

Come on.

Fair.

No, no, there's no fat involved and I didn't know people like freaked

out about tomato skins either until I became an adult, but okay, so they do.

So if you need to take off right pair peach or tomato skins, look

for serrated vegetable peelers.

They will do the trick before our, I.

Segment, let me say that.

If you would be so kind as to subscribe to this podcast, rate it like it, drop

a comment on whatever platform you're on, no matter what country you're in.

We see the downloads in Canada.

We see the downloads in Australia.

Thank you very much for listening to this podcast from other

places besides the United States.

We hope that we offer enough beyond just the US food scene that we can actually.

Make friends across the globe.

Thanks for dropping comments there, and thanks for being on the journey with us.

Okay, now the big interview, I feel like that we need a drum

roll for the big interview.

This is Kate Reed, the owner of Loon.

Her croissants have been rated the.

Best croissants in the world.

In the world.

Yep.

By the New York Times and she is the author of the New Croissant

and Laminated Dough Cookbook.

Loon, l u n e.

That seems to be absolutely.

Everywhere right now.

Great.

Get for our podcast to have Kate Reid on.

Can't wait to hear the interview.

Good morning.

Hey Kate, man, your book is beautiful.

I am thrilled that you're on this big us tour for it.

Oh, look,

it's really exciting to take like, essentially loon on the road.

I mean, we are very well known in Australia, but I think you, you

pop out of the borders of Australia and you know, it's like a, what's

loon, so it's, it's nice to be able.

Come and talk about it and also that people are interested

and want to hear about it.

So very exciting to be here with the

book.

Any chances of expanding Loon outside of the Australian borders.

I love that you've just hit me with the big question first.

, um, I would absolutely love to.

We've got a bit of a, I guess we'd call it a two year plan now looking.

Forward to 2025.

We're opening our first really big store in Sydney this year, which we've been

working towards for a number of years now.

And it was obviously slowed down by the pandemic, but very excited that we

are going to have presence in Sydney.

Um, we're definitely looking abroad and I mean, I'm looking out over the view

of incredible Manhattan right now and.

Hard not to be inspired and, and dream of having a loon on us soil For sure.

Well, I know there are very few really good CRO songs in Manhattan,

so I, I know it would be welcome.

I actually just had a really good one this morning.

There's, there's certainly a few good croissants popping up, but honestly

there's nothing like a loon croissant.

There are variations with croissants all over the world, but I still haven't eaten

one that's quite like a loon croissants, so I can see it fitting in in Manhattan.

Yeah,

, Bruce: well, we'll get into that.

Uh, but today I'm so excited cuz I'm here talking with Kate Reid.

She's the culinary master Brains behind Loon Cro.

That's Loon, L u N e.

Although she's based in Australia, even the New York Times has called

them the best croissants in the world.

And now she's also the author of one of the most beautiful cookbooks

I have ever seen, also called Loon.

And in it, she offers up the exacting task of making the

most perfect croissants at home.

And then also how to turn that croissant do into dozens of other amazing

pastries, both sweet and savory.

Welcome Kate.

Thank you so much for having me, Bruce.

So being heralded as the best croissant maker in the world makes us

think, Hey, you must have been doing this your whole life to be this good at it.

But that's not true, is it?

No.

Uh, croissants are probably my second big career.

I started off my professional life as an engineer.

So what did, did the journey look like from engineering to croissants?

Well, if we take it right back, um, I have a really close relationship

with my dad and growing up as a little kid, we bonded over watching Formula

One together and it was, you know, it was a treat every second Sunday

night, we'd make tea and toast.

And sit in the middle of the night watching this incredibly exciting sport

that, that traveled around the world.

And eventually, uh, Melbourne got the Australian Grand Prix in 1996.

And so Dad bought me a ticket.

It was the first time I'd ever witnessed the cars in person.

It was a, a cloudy, muggy Melbourne day.

And we arrived at the track and the F1 cars had just come

out to practice and they had.

Distinctive squeal of the V 10 engine.

And I was like, oh my God, what's that?

? And then we rounded a hill and I saw this thing flash past me and you

know, it was going so quickly that you couldn't even lock eyes on it.

And I just knew in that instant that I had to be a part of that world.

So, From the age of about 14 or 15, totally laser focused on a career

in Formula One, and that led me to focusing on maths and science

subjects at school and then studying aerospace engineering at university.

And yeah, a year out of university being offered a job with the Williams

F1 team as an aerodynamicist.

And I thought that day-to-day in the office, it would be exciting

and inspiring and motivating and.

There'd be a lot of talking and working together, but the reality of working

in an F1 office is very different to that, especially if you're not working

in the team that's winning that season.

, first of all, you work incredibly long hours.

A lot of conversation in the office was discouraged, so it

was a very quiet working space.

You'd sit in front of your computer for 16 or 18 hours a day.

We were being paid absolute pittance.

But if you are not happy with the hours and the money that you are making

every week, 3000 resumes land on the desk, so you are very disposable.

So working in Formula One led to me developing depression, and then, uh,

that turned into an eating disorder.

It wasn't like I had body image issues.

Um, it was far more to do with control.

Sort of found myself in a position where I wasn't in the career that I wanted to be

in, and I'm very close to my family and I was living over in the UK away from them.

So, I went back to Australia, a very sick girl, and started the pretty

long recovery in an eating disorder.

But the ironic flip side of an eating disorder is all you can think about

all day is eating because your body is starving and it keeps sending signals

to your brain to remind you that you should be putting fuel in your body.

I mean, when we're hungry, none of us think about a lettuce leaf or spinach.

You know, you go to the thing.

You're craving the most.

Oh, I started dreaming about baked goods and I got a job at a local bakery just

working on the counter, selling the products, and I absolutely adored it.

But the one thing that I found difficult was that I was just sad that I wasn't

making the things that we were selling.

So that was enough of an indication to me that it was a career worth pursuing.

Yeah, so I got a job in a local cafe doing their morning baking,

and it was very simple things.

I was loving it.

over time.

I needed something a little bit more technical and challenging just to, you

know, I think for someone who'd studied aerospace engineering, I like something

that's pretty difficult and technical and I'd started to research French pastry

cuz I think of, of all the, the cuisine cultures, French pastries by far the

most technical and it's very challenging.

So I bought myself this book about Paris Patisserie.

It featured maybe 10 or 15 of Paris's most famous bull, laies and patisseries.

And then it had a recipe from each of them that was one of their iconic products.

And I randomly opened up the book to a double page photo of Pank.

And you know, it was a photo from a counter and a bull

lingerie, and they were all just.

Perfectly stacked, and the photo was really zoomed in, so you could see every

like macro detail, every perfect layer, and the little chocolate ends poking out.

And I was so mesmerized by.

By this hypnotic photo that I closed the book, I walked into town to the

nearest travel agent and I booked myself a ticket to Paris Driven,

very driven

, Kate: a little bit

So I ended up going on this trip to Paris, and when I was there I

wanted to visit the bull linger where the photo had been taken.

And I just had this transformative experience visiting this

bull lingerie where.

There was this little cue of people just snaking out of the bakery waiting

for their morning quan, and everyone was just happy being surrounded by this

scent of like butter and toasty flour and the anticipation of the product that

they were about to buy and have their little moment of joy for the morning.

And I got to the front of the counter, and in broken French, I tried to

explain to the sales assistant.

That I'd seen a photo of their bull lingerie in Australia and it

had made me wanna book this trip.

So she raced out the back and got the owner who did speak English and

I explained it to him and he gave me a bunch of pastries for free.

And you know, I took them and I tasted them all and.

The next day I couldn't stop thinking about this bakery.

It had left a real imprint on me.

So I emailed the owner and just thanked him for his generosity.

And I just said how inspiring I'd found my visit to the bakery.

And on a whim, I said to him, look, I don't suppose you'd ever consider

taking me on as an apprentice.

And he wrote back to me within the hour and said, oh look.

Normally no, because you don't speak French and we're a very small bakery of

only French speaking, you know employees.

Yep.

But for some reason I can see the same passion and

motivation in you that is in me.

When would you like to start?

That was a game changing moment for me, and I then ended up going back to

Paris and I did what's called a starge, working unpaid in a food business.

That in return for your efforts there.

You get to learn the art and the craft of what they specialize in.

So I went and did a one month starge, and towards the end of that month, the

cafe that I was working at in Melbourne asked me to return to Melbourne because

they were expanding and they needed their full team of pastry chefs on board.

And I thought to myself, oh, I've worked for a month making croissants.

I know everything there is to know about croissants and so it

also is getting pretty expensive living in Paris, earning no money.

So I headed back to Melbourne, very inspired by what I'd learned at DUP Japan

and totally in love with the croissant.

Like I'd found this product that hit all the, like the positive

receptors in my brain in terms.

Very like long technical process to make it over three days and many

different parts of that process that could be honed or improved.

Um, and then at the end of it you get this perfect, like very

difficult product to make that like to the consumer is so simple and

it's like inhaled in five minutes.

I think nobody has any real idea how incredibly challenging

it is to make that product.

But when I got back to Melbourne, there was just nothing like it.

I mean, there are many good bakeries in Melbourne, but at that point in

time, I became obsessed with visiting bakeries on my days off to try and

find a croissant that came anywhere near what I'd experienced in Paris.

And I came to the conclusion that at that point in time in Melbourne,

all bakeries that had cro.

There was simply a token item on the menu that, you know, where we own a bakery.

A bakery should sell croissants.

But no love had gone into the making of them, and they were a

bit tasteless and dry and heavy and doughy, and not that like light.

You know, flaky, buttery, cloud of a pastry that I'd experienced in in France.

Well, let's talk about that for a second, because with an engineer's

mindset, you talk about in the book how you took the perfect croissant, this

buttery flaky croissant from Paris.

You reverse engineered it to create your own car song, and

you came up with the loon cro.

My job in France had been to make the croissant.

. And then I begged the head pastry chef to let me roll some

of the croissants with him.

But until the day where I was standing in loon for the first time, and I'd made

this dough and I tipped it out on the bench, and I remember looking at it and

Bruce, I had no idea what to do next.

And there are dozens of processes between making the dough and

rolling the plane cross on.

Yep.

And then, If you actually get to the point where you've got this raw croissant

rolled, there are many processes after that with proving and baking it.

And I hadn't even touched on that in the bakery in Paris.

Like I'd worked in the raw kitchen, the bakery was downstairs and

I'd had nothing to do with that.

So I kind of realized I knew about 10% of what I needed to know, but at

this point in time, , I'd quit my job.

I'd spent my life savings setting up a business, and I think I had no choice but

to move forward and figure out how to, and I think this is where the engineering

mindset comes into play, where I imagined what my perfect croissant, like the end

product would look like and taste like, and feel like texturally everything.

And I was like, okay, I'm going to.

An engineering mindset to reverse engineer that end product that I'm imagining.

And every day I tested and if I didn't get close to the end product, I'd

change one variable the next day.

And it took me about three months from that first dire day of making

the dough and having the realization through to one day pulling croissants

out of the oven and thinking.

Yeah, I like, I think I'm pretty close to that, that end product

that I wanted in that three months.

Were you selling these CRO sauce or were these just,

you weren't even open yet?

Mom and dad were getting really sick of eating croissants, , . Look,

there were, there were fair few people who were putting their hands up saying

they were happy to be Guinea pigs.

But, but I think it requires a certain level, like, like

that Formula One laser focus.

Like, not even being okay with it, but almost getting off on this like

repetition of experimentation and just continually trying to work closer

and closer towards that end goal.

When you create the layers in the dough, you, you do this through a process

called turns, where you roll out your dough and butter and then you fold it.

and you let it rest and then you turn at 90 degrees and then you

roll it out and you fold it again.

So that's the process of lamination.

And the classic French technique is typically three turns.

Mm-hmm.

with a letter fold.

So like if you imagine how you fold a business letter in three.

And when I started, uh, doing all my testing, I started with the classic.

Three letter turns, but I actually landed on different types of turns and in a

different format because for me, I wanted slightly thicker layers than normal.

And by thicker we are talking like fractions of a millimeter.

Yeah.

But also the more turns you have, the more you develop the gluten in the flour,

so the tougher your croissant becomes.

So I wanted less turns than the.

And a slightly thicker layer so that outer shell has a shatter rather than, you know,

flaking into a million little pieces.

I wanted you to bite in and get a crack and a crunch.

So for me, that's one of the ways in which it varies from that classic French crole.

For a lot of chefs who write recipes from restaurant, Into cookbooks.

It's usually just a matter of scaling down amounts or occasionally

asking a home cook to search out, you know, an unusual ingredient.

But in your case, you offer up a recipe for the home cook to recreate the kind

of CRO songs you make at Loon, but it required an entire reformulation and

basically a different recipe in the book than you use in the restaurant.

And why is that.

To make a good croissant, you need commercial bakery equipment.

So this machine that we use in every bakery, it's called a laminator,

and it's a mechanical piece of equipment where there's two stainless

steel rolling pins and the distance between them you can control it and

it gradually becomes less and less.

So you gently roll out the dough, which keeps it incredibly even

and consistent, and it minimizes the development of gluten.

The only way we can do that in a home kitchen is using a rolling.

And humans, when they roll out dough, we do it inconsistently and we impart

a lot of strength into the dough.

So, I mean, I tried it when I got back from France 11 years ago.

I tried to make croissants at home based on books out of like home baking books,

and the dough kept springing back.

So the reason why the recipe had to be completely changed was

people don't have a laminator in their home kitchen and they don't.

Like a retard approver, which is the piece of equipment we use at

loo to really closely control the temperature and humidity when you're

proving a cross on, and they don't have blast chillers to like bring the

temperature of the dough down rapidly.

So there's a lot of limitations in a home kitchen.

I need to rewrite this recipe to give the home chef the best opportunity to create

a product that will look and eat like a loon croson, but they can actually achieve

it with a rolling pin and a KitchenAid mix

up.

So recreating that.

Doing the engineering for that must have been very exciting for you.

That is clearly.

Your passion is in creating something that's so amazing.

So let's go back to the Lum CRO song.

Now.

You've been doing this full-time for 10 years.

Yeah.

You live and breathe croissants all day, every day.

. Aside from the book, you're not recreating a new dough and a new process every

day, so you still enjoy what you do.

The thing.

on a daily basis, we are recreating the process, which again makes us

different from every other bakery.

So because the technique that I developed 10 years ago isn't tied to a centuries

old technique, because it was this brand new technique, just like in Formula One,

where we were constantly evolving the design of the car based on new technology

and information that was becoming available and different requirements

for different tracks and races.

Every single day at Loon, every part of our three day process

is up for critical analysis.

So one of our pastry chefs might come up to me on any given day

and say, Hey, this part of.

The creating the layers or this part of the rolling of the croon

or this part of the proving.

I have an idea that I think will improve the end product and I say to them,

test it change one variable at a time.

And if the end result is better than what we are currently doing,

then that becomes the new process.

So at Loo, the way we make Croons is an ever-evolving process and

it, for me, that keeps like the passion and the love of quants.

Also, I never get sick of eating a Lo CROs on . I think I eat like four or five of

them a week and I'm, I mean, it's my job.

It's quality control, but it's an absolute delight to do so.

So, yeah, I'm never sick of them.

Kate Reid, thank you for this beautiful book Loon

named after your bakery loon.

It is absolutely stunning.

I can't wait to dive in and actually finally try my hand

at laminating dough at home.

Great.

Good luck with the book.

Enjoy the rest of your tour and, uh, I hope to see you in

Australia at your bakery someday.

Thank you so much for having me, Bruce.

It was so nice to chat to you.

All right, here's a secret I have always.

Wanted to laminate dough for CROs, and I never have I, I will tell you that I have

written 35 cookbooks and laminating dough for croissants is beyond my skillset.

Maybe I'll buy you a laminator for birthday.

No, I didn't wanna do it by hand.

I wanna do, it's the old-fashioned way, but I'm intrigued by this

way that she's developed to do it.

I'm intrigued by trying it.

I would, I, I mean, I really wanna do it because I know that this is just kind of.

Beating Project , it's gonna destroy me

Three days.

Takes three days to make him.

But nonetheless, I just wanna do it.

It's the kind of thing I wanna do once and just say I did it and

I made those . It was great to have Kate Reid on that podcast.

It was great.

And if you don't know her book Loon, check it out because it is just a it, it's a go.

Besides this crazy way she developed to laminate dough so you could get

a professional quality at home.

It's also just this gorgeous book.

Oh my God.

It's a beautiful book.

It's so beautiful.

I'm jealous.

Okay, so the last segment of our podcast as is traditional.

What's making us happy in food this week?

Jewish brisket.

Ah, that's what I was gonna go with.

Okay.

Well you go with Jewish brisket and then I, so, uh, well,

no, I'm gonna say it first.

Okay.

The go here made the Jewish brisket this

week.

Yeah, I've taken.

Five pound brisket outta the freezer.

And it was a nice point.

Cut.

So it had the fat running in the middle of it and had the two layers.

The deckle was still on it, right from a local farm, from

Howling Flat's farm in Canaan.

If you're anywhere near that area, look them up.

Call Kelly gets some meat from her.

Um, and I had taken it out and my Canaan, Connecticut, by the

way, Cannan, Connecticut, and I was planning on making the.

Brisket and Mark was like, make it Jewish style.

Don't smoke it.

No, it's okay.

So I was doing to do that on Monday and then a dear friend called me on

Friday or Saturday and said, would I play bridge with him on Monday

afternoon at the local Bridge club?

And I hadn't done that in a long time, so I thought, yeah, that'd be fun.

And I said, oh, but Mark, you're gonna have to make the Jewish brisket.

So I did.

So he did.

I did.

And I wanna tell you something that nobody knows about me.

Um, really, but I'm gonna tell you now, it's this little secret about me.

Brown the hell out of everything you do.

It's wonderful.

I trust you to make that in a braze.

It calls to brown the meat and it says, you know, oh, brown

the beef for five minutes.

Turning once, mark will do it for 12 minutes.

Turning once.

I mean, I brown it.

until I basically put one side of the brisket down in the pot and walk away.

I went away for about 10 minutes and I came back and I had to dig

it off the bottom of the pot, but that's where the flavor is.

I know.

And then I turned it and I brown the other side for about 10 minutes.

And yes, the stove was a greasy mess, but it made the fond and

the sauce around the sued brisket.

So

delicious.

And you put in carrots and parsnips and potatoes.

and red onions and garlic.

And I had a cheap bottle of red wine, which I said put it in, which my

grandmother never would've used wine.

But interestingly, my grandmother also wouldn't have used tomatoes.

Um, I know that tomato.

I know tomatoes are a controversy.

Um, Bruce doesn't put tomatoes.

Well, my mother didn't Jewish

style braised.

My mother didn't when I was growing up.

My grandmother didn't when I growing up.

I know a lot of people do.

It's a big thing.

And I put a healthy dollop.

Orange marmalade of Bruce's honey to orange marmalade in it.

I added lots of all spice and thyme and bay leaves and some,

because it's me and I'm from Texas, some red pepper flakes, which his

grandmother would never have added.

She wouldn't have known what they are.

Pepper flakes to the brisket and it was, I have to tell you, there's just the two

of us and we did eat on it for a meal.

Three nights.

Yeah, it felt like the last night of eating brisket felt a bit like a death

march, a frog march across the swamps.

But um, we did it and it was very delicious, and I'm glad we did.

That's our podcast for this week.

Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for joining us.

If you can rate it and subscribe, that would be great.

And download another episode next week and the week after and the week after

that, and we'll see you back for more on cooking with Bruce and Mark Mark.