YouSaid · the spoken record

Christina Tosi

lines on the record: 77
first: 2019-10-14
most recent: 2019-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so I was embarrassed that day because I thought this is the first time I'm going to put up a family meal dessert that I'm not proud of. It didn't even set. That just, that's everything about that is bad technique, threw it in the fridge, didn't think about it, threw it up for family meal at 4 p.m. and kind of went and hid in a corner and ate my meal quickly. And before I knew it, there was just like loud ooze and ahs and strange things. And I was like, does I get a fight in the kitchen? What's going on? And these guys that I worked with were just like just buzzing all over the place. Like, what is this? What'd you make? And I'm like thinking that I'm hiding in the shadow around this dessert instead. They're freaking out about this like gooey, buttery, delicious mess of a pie.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never really set. And the meal that you make for family meal is an important one because it shows your peers what you're made of, what you think tastes good, what you cook for them is almost maybe more important than what you're cooking for your guests. Not really, but in theory it is.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make apple pie or pecans to make pecan pie, you make just pie with the southern twang said over and over again, chess pie, and I loved the idea of like it's kind of pie with the filling and none of the other probably better for you stuff. And I love the idea of putting just whatever you have together, the basic pantry items, butter, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, and whisking it together and putting it in a pie shell and baking it. I was never one for really following the recipes of another cookbook because I was always tinkering. And so I kind of, I purposefully didn't measure anything, just sort of tasted the batter, put it in the shell, baked it, went off to do my normal pastry cook duties.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a Sunday, and the fact that it was a Sunday is an important part of it. It was a Sunday. I was showing up to work early as I always did, and I was going to make something for family meal. That was my routine. And I was looking in our fridges and I was like, we don't really have anything extra for me to work with. And it was a Sunday. And in restaurants, you don't get deliveries of supplies of your raw food goods on Sundays. It's like, what am I going to make? What am I going to make? What am I going to make? And my favorite cookbook at the time is still today is the joy of cooking. It's like equal parts, dorky, and historical. And there's like not really pictures, so you have to really be into the words. And was deep into the pie section, and I fell in love with the story of chess pie. And chess pie is this pie down south that you make when you don't have enough apple.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I found a way to both experiment through the ideas of my pastry chef at the restaurant and learn so much about technique and flavor manipulation and how to bring the flavor of cornbread into an ice cream base. And then I started realizing because I didn't really have a kitchen in New York City in my own home that if I just showed up to work early, I could just like make my homespun dessert before my shift started, work through the crazy technique driven demands of the shift, and then serve my brownies talking to him cookies for family meal. And that was my first step into serving my baked goods in an environment of discerning culinary mind.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It was it. It was probably the last great restaurant in New York City that, that. Oh my gosh, no stuff. That existed before eater and food blogging and access to these great restaurants existed online. It was the restaurant that only existed in this beautiful way in the underbelly of the New York food scene by word of mouth. It was in the lower east side. No one even went to the lower east side back then.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You needed this like 60 page analysis of everything from you bring the watermelon in and who's receiving it and who's taking the temperature and is there a potential bacteria contamination step and if so is there a kill step all the way through landing perfectly placed on your beautiful plate”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say, Hey, Chef, like, is there extra credit I can do? Because I was raised to be that person in school. And first he was like, what are you even doing? What are you talking about not understanding that lens? And he was like, I need help with the health department. I'm trying to figure out what this HACP plan, what is it? They just are telling me I need it. And he was a super smart, super savvy guy, but there were a lot of walls up that he had to figure out how to break down. A restaurant had...”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I left Boule because I had learned everything about that technique and that style. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was starting to think about who I was in food, not just learning how to perfect someone else's techniques, but who I was through food. And I knew I was all about like the home baked good, but I also knew I was super curious in adventure-seeking. And so I did the same thing. I stuck my foot in the door at WD50 and said, I want to intern for you as a pastry cook. Until you have a job opening, and then I will happily wedge my way in there. And it got to a point at WD50 that my role was beyond pastry cook. I was helping the chef think about hazard analysis plans with critical control points. You listen to this.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my first year was just about getting to a point where I wasn't getting my butt kicked. At some, if not every point of the day. And so for me, it was this pursuit of learning, almost like in the Sisyphian complex of just like, you're just rolling the boulder up the hill and thinking about like, oh my God, okay, tomorrow, how am I going to do it better? How am I going to do it faster, quicker, more technique-oriented? And after about a year of it is when I really started to see opportunity, not just meeting the standard, but seeing opportunity.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All those things. Yeah. It's tough. I mean, it was tough. It's tough work. It's a tough pursuit. And somehow I was totally built for the ride of it on some level. I think my dad raised me enough as a tomboy to be like, let's go. Like, let's go. We're not like, we're not crying over spilled milk. We're not like, I like, I see you skin your knees. You're fine. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. And to not think about the barriers that were put in place, to just like, are you here? Did you show up? Do you mean it? Nothing that's worth it is ever easy. And I didn't think about anything other than that. I just charged forward.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a kitchen, you have a prep list, and so you look at the prep list, and it's a list of things that you need for the day based on the desserts you sold the night before, the number of covers that you were expecting in terms of reservations. Like in the morning, when I worked the double, I would always have to make this white chocolate mousse, pipe it into this beautiful tiny little cup, and then make this green tijolet. And it was with super expensive green tea, and you had to boil it to a certain temperature and it could only sit there for two Mississippi's and then you had to whisk in the agar. And still, and if you messed it up, which I messed up plenty of times, you would really get hammered for it. And even now to this day, the smell of green tea. There will never be anything green tea flavored on the menu at milk bar because it's like the most beautiful PTSD even though I so appreciate why other people love it.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got my first job while I was in culinary school. I was a pastry cook at Boule. And I just wedged my way, my foot in the door. When I was still a student, because I was like, again, like I'm behind. I was like in my 20s and was like, I got to play catch up. So I basically convinced them to hire me as an intern and then convinced them to give me a full-time job the second that I graduated. And I was working like the fine dining four-star hustle, which is basically working six days a week. My schedule was from 11 a.m. until 3 a.m. And on the sixth day, you had to work a double, which meant you had to go in at 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. to get your seventh day off.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uniform, I didn't go. I went to public school, like the thought of wearing a uniform that someone tells you how to wear the things I wear were always an expression of what I was. So there was part of it that was militaristic and curious to me. And then the other part of it, I realized very quickly that with culinary school, just like any part of my education, you get as much out of it as you put into it. And that's when it's really started clicking. I was learning all of this technique. I was eating a lot of chocolate. I was making friends and I was on my path. I was going to culinary school by day. I was working at restaurants to pay the rent at night and I was never home because who can really afford any livable space in New York City?”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I loved every minute of it. I mean, part of it's kind of goofy because you're wearing a uniform and your uniform is like a white chef's coat and a kerchief that you have to tie a certain way and a white paper toque that kind of makes you feel very goofy the second you like lean over it falls off your head and”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't give them much time to react because I knew how they would feel about it and I knew who I was and I knew what made sense to me and I wasn't asking for permission. So I think I told my mom two days before I got on like the Chinatown bus and with a suitcase full of cleaning supplies and a sleeping bag and a change of clothes. And she wasn't happy. And that I did everything they asked me to do, and that it was my life to live.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew my answer was baked cookies, and so I took a step back and I was like, okay, am I going to do this at home? There's no way I'm going to do this at home. And I knew I wanted to get out and I was always drawn to New York City. And so I kind of said like, all right, I've been doing this formal education thing for a few years. So I already feel behind on this newfound dream. So like I got to go to the like most fast-paced, most well-known food place and I got to figure out how to make cookies a profession. So I enrolled myself in culinary school to become a pastry chef. That's like what you would call a formal cookie maker. And at least in my term, that was my translation of it. And I moved to New York City having only been here for a few hours once as a teenager and just hit the ground running.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is very common when you are super studious. You work really hard, you study all night, and then your way to sort of like shed the weight of expectation and stress is to bake. It's an outlet. And for me, it was like a social outlet because I would bring it. I'd bring it every day to high school. You ask people who went to high school with me. I would show up every single morning. Something baked. So”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a little short sighted. I basically took as many courses as possible to get out of the formal education process. So I graduated in three years being like, I got to get out of here. I'm over getting straight A's. And I know I don't actually want to do anything for a living with these things. And so it was kind of on the eve of graduation that I was like, uh-oh, I can't go home. sped so fast through this formal university education, but I don't want to do these things for a living. And so I just asked myself the simple question of like, all right, girlfriend, like real talk, what is it that you're passionate about that you want to make into a living? And it was this one thing that I just did every single day habitually without thinking about it. And it was baked cookies.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't. So I figured out how to transfer from UVA to JMU, but instead of going to JMU on campus, how to enroll myself right into the study abroad program in Italy because the thing that I knew for sure about myself was that I was a wanderlust and I still am today. And I just started over that time frame of being in my late teens and early 20s just starting to be like who are you? And whenever I'd get an answer to one of those things, I'd start to collect the answers. And I want to be out in the world. I feed off of that. So I went to Italy, not under the guise of food, under the guise of education. But I got so much more out of it.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My very practical mother after my first year of college was like, Great, I got home, first day of break. And she was like, great, when are you starting your summer job? And I was like, what are you talking about? And she was like, let's go. And I got a job and an actuary office. And I was like, oh. Don't know that this resonates with me. And I was raised by these people that were so passionate about what they did for a living, and they always raised us to follow that passion. I think they just would have preferred that it was like as an actuary. As a”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to engineering school at UVA first, and then I was like, Science, what's this about? I like math, and I like to bake, not really seeing.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I so I like grew up being trained to be super studious and super yielding and the place that I resonated with most was when we were making cookies or baking brownies or lemon bars or just like ho-hum home baked goods but it was the place where I kind of like broke the rules and acted out was like stealing a little bit more cookie dough and my grandma wasn't looking or like the little the little nibbles that I knew I wasn't allowed to have but that was also what resonated with me most because we would bake every single day or every single night and it was less about having dessert on the table and more about”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Baking was part of my life from a super early age. I grew up in the home kitchen, and it wasn't with the nuance of technique or like culinary wisdom. It was just, I was the youngest and that was like kind of where childcare happened. My mom was a working mom, so it would just be like, go hang out with your grandmas, go into the kitchen because they're making dinner. I grew up in the suburbs and like you didn't, food wasn't a thing back then. Like you didn't go out to eat maybe if I read all my books for school I was like a booket member and went to Pizza Hut to get like a pan pizza or if we were really really really good as teenagers we would go to like baskin robins on Thursday nights. That was like if we were very well behaved but everything else happened at home and”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad's side of the family is from northern Italy. He's first generation American, and I didn't realize, I didn't even occur to me that that was interesting or strange or different. It kind of just was. But I grew up with like romance languages for sure.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a mix of all those things. I was very much an academic because my parents would be like, Tozies, don't get anything but A's. And I was active. I remember loving running at a young age and I just have always had a lot of energy and just found places to put it. But I was always a curious kid.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just remember my blackberry kept buzzing and buzzing, and I was like, What is going on? Like, did the bakery catch fire? Is my family okay? What could this possibly be? And I had all these voicemails. And my favorite voicemail was from this woman in Kansas City who I think maybe was someone's grandma. And she was just like, well, I heard, you know, Anderson Cooper talk about this crack pot and I just, I'm never going to make it to New York. So like, would you mind shipping me one? And it was like... Are you going to tell her? Are you going to call her back and tell her no? Because I was not going to call her back and tell her no. And we now have an online business where you can email us. That is like when opportunity knocks, what are you going to say? Like, not today. When it's time to rise to the occasion, you rise.”
2019-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Milk Bar: Christina Tosi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT