GALO: Speaking of mass production, La Tulipe Desserts has received noticeable prestige during its lifetime, including Westchester Magazine’s pick for Best French Macaroon in 2012 and the chance to make Chelsea Clinton’s gluten-free wedding cake in 2010. Given its popularity and prestige, your patisserie is amazingly small and impressively produces many of its products largely by hand, including La Tulipe’s handcrafted truffles and hand-piped butter cookies. How much are you really producing on a daily basis? For example, how many macaroons do you expect to produce in a day or week? And how do you manage to produce large volumes of product without “mass producing” them; to balance the craft and art of pastry making with the robust demands of your business and the precision necessary to the craft?

MS: Basically, all the products we make over here, we sell, unless there’s, you know, a caterer, or a large party. On a regular basis, we have 14 different kinds of macaroons, about 22 different kinds of individual desserts, and 20 different kinds of cakes. So, besides the specialty tools [that] we have to make those desserts, it takes a whole organization to make this. And, of course, the freezer is a very important thing.

A lot of people come into my store and think every morning when we open up, ‘oh, everything is fresh.’ But that’s just not possible. You have [to] work in series, basically. So, for example, we make 600 macaroons in one shot, one batch. And we normally make two [batches] a day, so even for a small place like this that’s a lot of macaroons, because that’s 1,200 macaroons a day. And we do that normally on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so four times a week. But we have 14 sorts, so those [that] we make, we let them rest, we bake them at night, and then the next day, we let them sit out after we bake them. We [then] fill them, with the fresh fillings, and we freeze them. When they’re gonna be frozen, we have special bags that go over the trays that seal them completely; the faster you freeze those products, the better it is for the process and the smaller the ice crystal stays. So that’s side number one: we freeze [them at an] extremely cold [temperature], with a freezer that’s minus 20 over here, and that’s how we store them then. And whatever we need to take out of the refrigerator for defrosting, we just take it out. So it’s just organization.

It’s the same for the pastries — sponges will be made in the morning for that particular cake, and then we make the mousses, either chocolate or a bit of fruit or whatever. We put it all together, same thing — freeze it. Once it’s frozen, cover the whole thing with plastic, so it never gets any freezer burn. That’s very, very important. Once it’s covered, it is fine. A lot of people always think, ‘Oh, freezing is not good.’ But gelato or sorbet, it’s all like a frozen product as well. It’s just knowing your ingredients and knowing how to do it. It’s also not possible anymore to make everything fresh in the morning. You have to work in large charges and on the basics — the basic products are ready, and in the morning we just take out what we need, we finish it off, and we display it. It’s still a gamble, ‘cause you don’t know how much you’re gonna sell, basically it’s a roller coaster. What I tried to say [before] is that it’s [all about] the organization. Our kitchen is extremely well-organized.

GALO: Speaking specifically of macaroons, yours are award-winning and a hot item at La Tulipe Desserts. And though the French macaroon can be one of the most stubbornly elusive recipes to master, you’ve got the process down to a science, and you even offer cooking classes to help other hopeful bakers master the art. Can you tell us what are the most common pitfalls amateur pastry-makers fall into when they attempt it for the first time, and what advice do you have for aspiring macaroon-makers?

MS: There are a lot of things that are important with macaroons. The oven is very important and the right way of mixing, as well as using the right ingredients and the right quality almond flour. ‘Cause even the macaroons from Ladurée — you know Ladurée, that big place in France — and also here in New York, they use California almonds, because there cannot be too much oil in there. See [with] marcona almonds, those you can recognize; they almost look like hazelnuts. They’re very small. But the California almonds are much longer, so there’s a difference in quality. The marcona almonds from Spain, they’re very small and very high in oil. The California [ones] are much lower in oil. In the macaroons, you don’t want to have the high oil content; you want low oil.

It’s very hard to learn this from a book. You have to do it many times over and over and over to try [and get it right] — but an oven is very important. Some recipes require a little bit more drying. You want to form the right skin on top before you start baking it; that’s very important. I think the most difficult thing is just the baking. We bake the macaroons [at] two different temperatures, first hot for half the time, and then we lower the oven down to bake the center. So that’s a little bit tricky. You really have to just do experiments.

And every oven is different… I remember when we had a new oven installed, we had a lot of problems with the macaroons. They all started separating, the top and the bottom. So you just gotta try [again and again] till it’s good… Also, an important thing if people try to do this, the egg white has to be not fresh, almost like watery, so then it’s just better at solidifying. Also, the right way of mixing, piping skills and drying skills [is important]. But I think the baking is still one of the most important things with the macaroon because a little bit over or under baked — over baked gets dry and under baked they start falling back. And that’s basically what it is. But once you have it mastered, you can use anything. Like I said, we have 12, 14 different kind of macaroons; in the holidays we have another four, so we go to like 18, 20 different kinds of macaroons sometimes.

What a lot of people don’t know is, once the macaroon is made, they should actually stay for 48 hours in the refrigerator. ‘Cause what happens is when the macaroon is fresh, the cookie is a little crispy. So you want a little bit of the moisture from the refrigerator, but also the moisture from the filling inside the macaroon, [to go into] the whole cookie. That makes it nice and chewy. That’s actually the secret about it. Most people think, ‘Oh, the macaroons are done, we can taste it!’ But you should actually put them for at least 24 hours (the best thing is 48 hours), in a container in the refrigerator, so they get nice and chewy.

GALO: Your patisserie incorporates a unique educational element into its business model by offering baking classes that help patrons explore pastry making on their own. How are they important to your cooking ideology and you and your wife’s vision for the patisserie?

The baking classes, the reason why we started [them] was actually just to show my customers what we do over here. I wanted to show them what is behind the scenes and what it takes to make a cake, a good macaroon or good cookies. And that worked out really, really well. We had normally four classes, and always in the slow time of the year, so January, February, March, and then I used to do like two in October. And there was like a waiting list for it; it was so busy — it was very nice. Every four Wednesdays or four Tuesdays, we did like a cake or we did a section of macaroons or a section of petit fours, so every night something else — and it did very well, until recently. The problem was I think people [didn’t] want to commit to those four nights. It was always like, one night they couldn’t make it or something. So we decided to split it up. Right now we have half hands-on demonstration classes, and that works really well. We do like a single night on macaroons, or a single night on chocolate. And we really go down to it; it’s not like we make a little bit of chocolate truffles. We really show what chocolate is all about: you know, how you have to temper it, how you have to handle it, what you can do with it — make a little decoration, make a chocolate mousse. And the recipes we use [in class] are actually the recipes we use over here as well.

GALO: And what do you tell young chefs who are looking for ways to make a business of their own?

MS: Well, it’s a really tough business and you really have to love it with your heart, 100 percent, otherwise it’s not gonna work out. If you want to have a good place, it’s got to come from your heart — it has nothing to do with making money. That’s number one. If you want to make a lot of money, go somewhere else, do something else, because it has nothing to do with that. [We’ve been here] 14 years by now and we still have to (I won’t say count the pennies) know what we order and how we do it. And there’s very little left over at the end of the month. All the expenses [add up] — and maybe that’s for every business right now, but food business is very hard. I’m a little bit, maybe…I call myself crazy, but I always put a lot of money back into my place because I want it to look good, to make sure it looks clean. You have to do it good; it’s not like, just open up a rentable place and say, “oh, we’ll see [what happens].” I wanted to buy my building; I wanted to make sure I owned it, because if the landlord runs it, you’re nowhere. You can say what you want then, but there’s no business. You basically just own that little handful of equipment.

[And going back to the young people], I think if [the chefs] make interesting products, cool products, with good ingredients, people will get inspired by that. The macaroons, [for example], we had them when we first opened up over here, and they were just sitting there! So, I can still say, we were one of the first in Westchester that were making macaroons, with seven sorts at that time. And they were going, but they were nothing special. Now it’s ten times as much! Basically, I think [it’s] very important to bring out new products, bring out new flavors, and let people taste — don’t be scared. We have a dessert over here that’s chocolate with chili pepper. [So spices are good to try], and also old products. On my logo still we have: “La Tulipe Desserts, tradition and quality.” But tradition — you bring a traditional product back and you just kind of redo it, reinvent it. And that makes it really cool, I guess. The flavors are there, you just have to try and give that little twist to it.

GALO: So in terms of your career and this place, what does the future look like? Do you have any plans of further expansion, perhaps to a place like New York City, given its proximity as well as its busy streets and tourist appeal?

MS: Well, we still keep going, we’re not gonna give it up! I would love to have another storefront somewhere. In, I think, a busier location. I don’t know if New York City is the solution, but a busy town, a busy shopping street — keep producing here, and just probably deliver there, that’s what I’m thinking of. And if that works out, then you could have another one, almost like a little franchise, But I’d like to keep the production here at La Tulipe, at this location, ‘cause once you do this at two locations, it’s not gonna work. I can only be in one place at a time. I’m very happy with this location. It’s cute; it’s not like a shopping mall. And it makes it special — it makes it La Tulipe. But still, it’s a little bit out of the town, a little bit out of the way of the center. It’s a destination; you’ve got to drive over here. We have people that drive all the way up from Greenwich, Connecticut for a couple of croissants, so that’s really cool. I mean, we have a lot of French people who come from Larchmont on the weekends, just for buying a quiche, a little cake and a couple of croissants. It’s amazing! You want to keep going like this. It inspires you.

Featured image: Portrait of Chef Maarten Steenman in front of his copper work bowls. Photo Credit: Elizabeth Perry.

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