Christina Tosi from Momofuku in Sydney

I was very lucky last week to get to meet Christina Tosi from Momofuku New York. She is here for the Crave food festival in Sydney and also visited us at Breville to give us a bit of an insight into her little success story. She is a pastry chef and runs a quite unique and highly successful bakery in New York called milk.

I found her story most inspiring and despite the success she seems to be very grounded. She told us that she always enjoyed baking, even as a kid and naturally would chose a path in the hospitality industry. She did a degree as pastry chef and worked in kitchens in the US, one of them was WD40 in NY.
Even though baking was her thing she wasn't too happy in restaurants kitchens and started an office job, at Momofuku. Missing her home baking though she would bake when at home to feed her colleagues and they were all in awe of her creations. Her boss (David Chang) took notice as well and when he got offered a small property spot in NY to run a bakery he came to Christina Tosi.

She now runs several Milk bakeries across NY and has gone from strength to strength in her endeavor to challenge the pastry world with unusual adaptations of old time classics.

Take her compost cookie for instance. That's what I heard first off. A very tasty cookie , so American in shape but with a list of, at first, weird ingredients, but it so works! And so it goes on... Milk also invented the cereal milk - toasted cereal steeped in cold milk, then strained and bottled up. She uses different types of cereal milk for her cookies and cakes but reckons that cornflakes gives the broadest spectrum of yummyness.

Instead of shortcrust she uses a range of crunches to cover the base and one of her most popular pie is the crack pie, which I yet have to try myself thanks to her cookbook. So far I have tried a few different cookie recipes and my family was most grateful. Home baking, but a little bit more fancy without the queues, that's quite something.