Fresh Dish: Camille Cogswell on baking stardom, legacy ovens and pie crust

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted several weeks before Tropical Storm Helene. Check the end of the story for post-storm updates.

Poised on a hillside along a winding mountain road in Madison County, pastry chef Camille Cogswell’s Walnut Family Bakery seems to joyously embrace all things opposite of fast-paced, big-city restaurants and celebrity-chef buzz. 

Outside the bakery, against a backdrop of forest and grassy slopes, a large brick bread oven crouches under a shelter like something from a fairy tale. Inside the small, sunlit kitchen, fresh local peaches and plums ripen on trays, while the arched door to another wood-fired oven watches from a nearby wall. 

It would be hard to guess from the rustic surroundings at Walnut Family Bakery that Cogswell is a bona fide culinary star. The former executive chef and executive pastry chef, respectively, of Philadelphia’s lauded K’Far Cafe and Zahav restaurant, Cogswell was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award in 2017 and won the title in 2018 at age 27 — she was the only pastry chef to receive the nomination both times and just the second to win (the first was famed Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi). Two years later, Cogswell was tapped as one of Food & Wine magazine’s 10 Best New Chefs of 2020. 

But right now, Cogswell says, there’s no place she’d rather be than Madison County.

Her first taste of culinary training was at Asheville High School with former chef instructor Joe Lilly. After finishing all the school’s cooking courses, she undertook an internship at West End Bakery with then co-owner Cathy Cleary.

After graduating high school in 2009, Cogswell enrolled at UNC Chapel Hill. “I was obsessed with food and cooking and baking, but I was unsure [about pursuing it as a career], because it was a less traditional route,” she says. But after three semesters, she realized her future was in professional kitchens.

She studied pastry at Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. — including a four-month externship at Blue Hill at Stone Barns with chef Dan Barber. Next came two years in New York City, first with Austrian pastry chef Alex Grunert at Brooklyn Fare followed by a year doing pastry with Mark Welker at The NoMad.

At age 25 she moved to Philadelphia, where she began gathering national accolades, awards and media attention. Then in 2020, with her star growing steadily brighter, Zahav and K’Far owners Steven Cook and Michael Solomonov suddenly pulled the plug, letting her go from her role with their CookNSolo company during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Cogswell sat down with Xpress in August at her bakery over a bowl of her freshly made biscotti to talk about her early success, the journey back to WNC and her plans for the future.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Xpress: What did it feel like to win the James Beard Award? How did it impact your life?

Cogswell: It was completely unexpected and insane. … Also it was incredible — really, really affirming and exciting. And I’m so grateful for the experience and the attention that it brought to what we were doing [at K’Far Cafe]. 

As a chef, I put a lot of pressure on myself, especially in the year or two afterward, but I continue to catch myself even now doing that. You are awarded something like that, and you feel like you have to keep up a certain pace or a certain standard or push farther.

What happened with your separation from K’Far Cafe and the CookNSolo company?

It was a new concept. It was something that they had not done before, and there were some growing pains in figuring out how to make it a successful and sustainable business. And there was a pandemic, right? I was working my ass off trying to make this thing work — it was three services a day, and they really wanted to have a restaurant piece that was a sit-down, full-service restaurant in the evenings. And I think it is telling that after the pandemic, they never brought that piece back.

We were just figuring out how to hit our stride, and the pandemic hit, so the company decided to make some changes, and letting me go was part of that, which took me and a lot of my peers in the company and in the Philly industry by surprise.

But I had a really amazing time in [the Cook and Solomonov restaurant] group, and it was a very formative experience for me. I am grateful that my exit from that company led me here.

This bakery is considered by many to be the cradle of modern wood-fire baking in Western North Carolina. How did you end up owning the property?

I was unemployed in 2020 and down here for an extended period of time visiting family that October. For a few years, I had been following the people who were here before — Tara [Jensen] when she was here, and then when it changed hands to Brennan [Johnson]. … I had never been here, and I didn’t know those people personally, but literally the first morning that I got down to this area from Philly, I woke up and looked at my phone, and the first post that I saw was Brennan posting that his time here was going to be coming to an end soon because the place was being sold. 

My mom contacted a real estate friend of hers, and we set up a viewing for that Sunday. We came out here, and I wasn’t thinking like, it would be so cool if I bought this place. I was just thinking it would be so cool to see it. But then, quickly, as I was here and touring the place, it became, like: How special is this place? Dreams were kind of forming in my subconscious. And I was surprised that my partner at the time was like, “You know, maybe this is our next adventure.”

Jennifer [Lapidus], the property owner and founder of Carolina Ground flour mill] asked for letters of intent, so I wrote about how I could see myself carrying on this legacy that she had built and loving this place and could see visions of what this property could be and raising my own family here. 

Can you talk about the history of the two wood-fired ovens and the process of learning to use them?

Sometime between 1998 and 2000 [the outdoor oven] was built, then [the indoor oven] was built five years later, around maybe 2004 or 2005. The really well-known wood-fire baker and masonry oven builder Alan Scott’s designs were used for both of these ovens. He and Jennifer Lapidus knew each other well, so he came down and helped her build the outdoor one with a few other people in this area. Then she held a kind of community workshop to build the indoor one a few years later. 

I had done some wood-fire baking at Zahav — there’s the hearth oven there, but it is more of a dome-style oven, and we were only cooking with live fire making flatbread. … I like to bake bread and pastries and stuff out of these ovens, which is what they’re designed for. What you do is you build a fire in the oven for an extended period of time in a way that the heat from the fire absorbs into the bricks. Then you let the fire go out and you sweep out the ashes, so there’s just an insulated, hot box that you’re baking off of that absorbs heat.

I understand that after buying the property, you did a full renovation of the building and had intended to open it in late 2022. But then your plans suddenly changed. Can you talk about that?

It’s been quite a complicated journey. When I bought the place and moved here with my partner at the time, we were planning to open almost immediately, like that same year in 2021. Then once we really got into this kitchen, we decided it needed a very heavy update. … Then the goal became to open in fall of 2022. But just a couple months before we had a scheduled, planned opening and a scheduled, planned wedding, my partner left pretty suddenly. So I immediately put everything on hold. 

It took me a year to really decide what I wanted to do, if I wanted to continue this project alone or not. Once I did decide last year, I was like, I owe it a shot. I love this place. I love this property. It’s so special. It has felt like home for me from day one. 

What are you doing with the property now, and what are your plans for Walnut Family Bakery?

This year I’ve had a more formed vision that I’ve been working diligently toward, and I’m hoping that it will happen by the end of this year (see post-Helene updates below). … I’m going to open as a retail bakery two days a week on Fridays and Saturdays. That’ll be the first piece of the puzzle. And then, hopefully, soon after that I will add Sundays as a rotating calendar of events, like baking classes and pizza nights. … Everything will be to-go, but I have this lovely coffee bar here where people can wait for their pastries, and I’ll have a lot of picnic tables in the yard for people to hang out. 

And you’ve been working with chef Trevor Payne at Tall John’s? Have you been baking there?

I’m a server there. I was part of the opening team. I joined the team after my ex-partner left. I had been full-tilt working toward getting this ready to open, and so I was like, OK, halt all that. I need to just get a job. I need to get out of the kitchen. I just need to support myself and do something else. … It’s been the perfect landing place for me. 

Now for a couple of our regular “Fresh Dish” questions. First, is there a dish you’ve tried recently at a local restaurant that’s really impressed you?

The trout baloney sandwich at Good Hot Fish — when I first had that, I mean, mind blown. Like, it is insane. How Ashleigh [Shanti] is able to make that texture out of fish, and a local fish? So much work and care goes into that. And it is also so nostalgic; I think that’s another reason why I loved it. And it’s just executed so well.

Is there an ingredient or technique you think home bakers should be using more?

People are so scared of making pie dough themselves. And it’s understandable, because there are ways in which it can react and be very tough or difficult. It can be easy to screw it up. But there are a couple of easy tips to make it accessible and demystify it.

Are you willing to share one of those tips?

Sure. A lot of times people are scared about adding water, and there’s the whole trend of adding things other than water, like alcohol, so that [the dough] doesn’t become tough. … The way that I incorporate it — and I know some other pastry chefs do, too — is almost like a tossing method of breaking up the water and evenly hydrating the flour with my fingers instead of a mixing or kneading motion. I toss the water in with my flour, and it looks more like a crumble. I can tell it’s not dry anymore, but it’s not a dough yet until I compress it together. 

Last question: Which local chef do you want to tag for the next “Fresh Dish”?

My friend Luis Martinez. He’s going to be opening his own taqueria, and he has this venture that he’s been working on for the past few years outside of his actual cooking, Tequio Foods, so I definitely want to spotlight him. (Note: Martinez launched Taqueria Rosita inside The Odd at 1045 Haywood Road in late August.)

Post-Helene updates: Cogswell told Xpress on Oct. 30 that she and Walnut Family Bakery emerged from Tropical Storm Helene “fairly unscathed,” but she estimates that the launch of the physical Walnut Family Bakery shop in Madison County will be delayed until spring.

In the meantime, she is returning to part-time work at Tall John’s, now that it has reopened, and in late October kicked off an ongoing series of traveling bake sales hosted in partnership with bakeries in other cities to raise money for WNC nonprofits and businesses impacted by Helene. Her first sale on Oct. 26 in Raleigh raised $1,600 for Beacon of Hope in Marshall. Locally, she held two pay-what-you-can Halloween bake sales in Marshall and Weaverville and plans to do similar pay-what-you can sales for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

To learn more about and support Cogswell’s traveling bake sale fundraisers, visit avl.mx/e92. For updates on her upcoming WNC holiday bake sales, sign up for Cogswell’s email newsletter at avl.mx/e93.