Dessert First
"I wasn't good at baking until I learned about it on an academic level."
Editors's Note: This is one of three Culinary Arts Alumni profiles that appear in the Spring 2018 issue of HCC's Alumni Connection magazine.
One class was all she wanted. One. Introduction to Baking.
"Just for fun," says Jessica Labonte. "Just to keep my mind occupied while I worked full time to save some money to figure out my next step."
Labonte discovered, though, that if she wanted to take baking she had to enroll in HCC's Culinary Arts program.
"I said, why the heck not? Everyone needs to know how to cook. I put my all into it. I discovered I really liked it, and I was actually kind of good at it."
She earned her certificate in May 2016 and stuck around another year to add an associate degree in Food Service Management.
"I'm one of those people that likes to have a piece of paper that tells me I'm qualified for something," she says with a smirk. But in food service, she adds, real world experience means just as much, and HCC provided that foundation.
As a child in Granby, Mass., Labonte often baked alongside her grandmother, who liked to say, Life is short; eat dessert first. "I try to live by that quote," says Labonte. At HCC she discovered a talent for baking she did not possess as a youth.
"I wasn't good at it until I really learned about it on an academic level," she says.
The truth is, she hated baking. At first. Too meticulous. Too exact. You have to be super precise. "Scaling can be nerve-wracking," she says. "If you don't scale the flour right, then your whole pastry will be messed up."
Initially she'd hoped to learn enough to work as a line cook. But as she progressed, she found, more often than not, instructors assigned her to the bake shop.
"Obviously, they figured out before I did that it was something I'm good at, the meticulousness of it. Being exact," she says.
Ultimately she embraced it. She especially learned to love plating desserts for large events.
"It's one of the most intense, adrenaline-rushing, exhilarating things I've had the opportunity to do," she says, "pushing out 150 plates that look identical."
After completing her culinary certificate, she left a job as a prep and line cook at an Amherst retirement community for a 3 a.m. shift position at Tart Baking Co. in Northampton.
For her bench test – that's a kitchen audition – she prepared blueberry galettes. "It's a French thing. Very rustic. Just some flaky dough with a fruit filling, egg wash and sugar coating on top and bake it for 25 minutes. Nice little breakfast pastry. They're delicious."
At Tart, she baked bread every day before dawn – baguettes, ciabatta, pain demi, pain de campagne, deli rye, a lot of sourdoughs, some with fruit and nuts (cranberry pecan, raisin walnut, golden raisin and fennel).
Every Wednesday, she made doughnuts, but her favorite menu items were tarts, in particular torched meringue lemon cream tarts. She was frequently entreated by HCC classmates and teachers at HCC to bring in samples, which she continued to do even after completing her associate degree last August and returning in the fall as a volunteer assistant in the Introduction to Baking class.
She's a bit jealous, she says, that she won't be a student in the new Culinary Arts building but glad to see HCC taking its program to a new level. That's exactly what she's doing with her own career.
Late last year she started a new job as a team member in the baking department of Whole Foods in Portland, Maine, where she's been focused on cakes.
"Tart is very small," she says. "For the number of people that work there, they push a lot of product, but I need that next level. I think working at Whole Foods will aid me in my goal."
That goal is to one day be an executive pastry chef or run a restaurant bakeshop, directing a team of bakers and crafting beautiful desserts.
"Dessert is the last thing a person sees at a restaurant," she says. "It's the most memorable thing, really."
"Unless you're at my restaurant," she adds with another smirk, "in which case you're eating dessert first."
STORY and PHOTO by CHRIS YURKO: Jessica Labonte '17 helps out in the HCC Culinary Arts baking lab.
