Nick Malgieri: A date with a pastry chef

WHILE PEOPLE say cooking is a relaxing habit, we don’t think it could compare to the act of baking. Sure, measuring and mixing might make you sweat a bit, but once you pop your confection in the oven, all you’ll have to do is wait, cool, and taste. It’s not that it’s easier, but the longer, more stretched-out timeline allows one to really immerse oneself in the act.
A person who might embody this relaxing activity is Nick Malgieri, a New York-based pastry chef who has been baking since the late 1970s. Mr. Malgieri has been honored several times for his baking and his cookbooks, awarded the Chevalier d l’Ordre de la Channe du Valais for promoting Swiss gastronomy, and receiving the Philadelphia Toque Award in 2006. He has written 13 cookbooks, some of which have received awards, including the James Beard Foundation cookbook award for Best Baking Book of 1995. He also appeared on TV next to Martha Stewart and the legendary Julia Child. Despite all this, he speaks with an air of a grandfather delighted with the achievements of his progeny, and enters a room with the same aura as a birthday cake: it doesn’t announce itself, has a soft glow around it, and it’s something we’ve wanted and waited for.
Mr. Malgieri is in Manila this week for a cooking demo titled “A Date With Chocolate” at the World Food Expo at SMX Convention Center at the Mall of Asia complex from 10 a.m. till 1 p.m. on Aug. 3.
“People love it,” he said of chocolate in an interview with ����ý during a press conference earlier this week at The Conrad Manila. It’s supposed to stimulate the pleasure sensors of the brain, but I don’t know.
“Things that are made with chocolate, most of them taste really good!” he said. “I like chocolate. I like the smoothness; it feels good in your mouth.”
Of course, with a career as long as his, one picks up many influences along the way, like being mentored by Albert Kumin, the head pastry chef in the White House during the Carter administration. “He’s a very, very hard worker,” he noted. However, an earlier influence was his grandmother, an Italian immigrant who spoke the Neapolitan dialect. “I have a recipe in my grandmother’s handwriting, for something that I’ve never made. I have it framed with a picture of her.” His earliest memory of food was his grandmother’s pastina, made with milk, sugar, and cinnamon. “I hated it,” he recalls with some laughter.
Harried home cooks today have the luxury of ordering a cake from shops or some other great baker, but judging from Mr. Malgieri’s cookbooks, it means that some people would still find the time and energy to bake today. “I think it’s relaxing. People want to have that pleasure being able to do it,” he said. Of course, he warns about getting too carried away: “Anytime you start to go to the psychotic edge of something, it’s not pleasurable for anybody.”
“It’s satisfying to make something and have it turn out well.” — Joseph L. Garcia
The World Food Expo runs from Aug. 1 to 4 at the SMX Convention Center and at the World Trade Center.