Brooke Baevsky, alumna and chef, competed on Meals Community’s “Chopped.”
Alumna and chef Brooke Baevsky ’18 (@InTheKtchenWithBae) will mix her passions for meals and creativity as she competes on Meals Community’s “Chopped” on Tuesday, Feb. 8, at 9 p.m. ET.
For the Valentine’s Day-themed competitors, Baevsky was paired with one other competitor—blind-date fashion—who she solely met a couple of minutes earlier than the competitors. Utilizing a basket of distinctive components, together with steak, passionfruit and matcha, 4 groups had been tasked with creating an appetizer in 20 minutes, an entrée in half-hour and a dessert in half-hour to impress judges and cooks Maneet Chauhan, Scott Conant and Mark Murphy. The successful workforce will obtain a $10,000 prize.
Baevsky’s curiosity in meals started at a younger age. Her hometown of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, is adjoining to a number of communities with meals insecurity charges as excessive as 30%. As a teen, she taught kids’s cooking lessons, specializing in the significance, affordability and feasibility of a nutritious diet.
After commencement from highschool, she didn’t instantly need the standard “highschool straight to culinary college” route.
“I didn’t need to work in a standard restaurant, creating the identical meals day after day. I’m very artistic with meals developments and distinctive meals product improvement. I wished my profession in meals to problem this creativity and span past restaurant partitions,” Baevsky says. “It has all the time been a dream of mine to create industry-disrupting well being meals merchandise and have my very own cooking present.”
When Baevsky got here to Syracuse in 2014, the brand new {industry} of meals media and “meals on the web,” from Buzzfeed to meal kits, exploded in recognition. At Syracuse, she discovered a technique to pursue her passions by pursuing a twin diploma in retail administration from the Whitman Faculty and promoting from the Newhouse Faculty.
After commencement from Syracuse in 2018, she went to work for Macy’s, the place she labored on the event of meals merchandise for all shops beneath the Macy’s Company. In 2020-21, she acquired a level in health-supportive culinary arts on the Institute of Culinary Training.
Baevsky focuses on “cooking for all,” catering to all allergens and dietary restrictions. Her authentic recipes are freed from gluten, dairy, refined sugar and soy. She is now the supervisor of product improvement for Freshly, the nationwide meal supply service. She works on new product innovation and menu improvement with among the largest meals corporations on the planet and caters to personal shoppers round the USA.
Beforehand based mostly in New York, she is shifting to Los Angeles this month to deal with her high-end non-public catering enterprise, whereas additionally planning to proceed her volunteer work by means of cooking lessons for inner-city youth.
And what did she take away from her “Chopped” expertise? “The timer is actual,” she says.
The expertise additionally confirmed for her the trail she hopes to pursue.
“It made me love being on tv and placing on cooking demonstrations,” she says. “I like cooking in entrance of a big viewers and educating what I like.”
