Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.
Win Son Bakery opened in 2019 with just six baked goods on the menu, specializing in Taiwanese American treats like red date cake and pineapple buns. Today that number has now grown to 14, thanks to a larger staff and greater production capacity.
Since its opening days, the bakery’s pastry chef Danielle Spencer had wanted to make Taiwanese taro cakes, also called spiral mooncakes, a highly labor-intensive flaky dough filled with soft, nutty taro filling.
Spencer got a nudge in that direction last year when Susanna Schoolman, who makes a line of vegan butter called Tourlami, showed up at her door with 3 pounds of butter wrapped in ivory-colored wax paper printed with her company’s name, and an accompanying box of flaky biscuits.
I have no experience with vegan baking at all, which is maybe why I am so open to it.
Spencer knew that many of her customers were eager for more vegan offerings, and that Schoolman’s product could be an easy swap for the butter that gives the taro cake’s dough its flaky, tender layers.
“I have no experience with vegan baking at all, which is maybe why I am so open to it,” Spencer says. “I have nothing to be super confident about. And once Susannah came and introduced me to the butter, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to revisit the taro cake.”
Schoolman knows how to talk to bakers and pastry chefs; she knows their needs and their preferences because she’s worked in kitchens around the world.
She began working in kitchens at the age of 18, and worked pastry in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco and Hawaii before moving to Copenhagen to open Hart Bageri, a much-lauded bakery from a Noma alum, where she designed the menu. But she had her eyes set on a new…
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