You Can’t Digitize Dessert: Milk Bar’s CEO on Why Sweets Will Matter

Ms. Tosi, the chief govt of Milk Bar, began the bakery and dessert restaurant chain in 2008 as an offshoot of David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York. It’s now a privately held company and a nationwide model with a dozen areas within the U.S. and Canada, a thriving e-commerce enterprise and plans for its merchandise to be in additional than 5,500 grocery shops by year-end.

Ms. Tosi’s profile is rising as nicely. After showing on the

Netflix

collection “Chef’s Desk” in 2018, she now hosts her personal collection on the streaming platform, “Bake Squad.” She began a weekly Instagram Stay known as “Bake Membership” throughout peak pandemic quarantine. She’s written cookbooks, a kids’s ebook and in March launched a memoir known as “Dessert Can Save the World.”

She spoke with The Wall Avenue Journal about what’s subsequent.

Your new ebook—half cookbook, half memoir, half self-help and inspiration useful resource—is named “Dessert Can Save the World.” That’s a reasonably daring declare.

I don’t really suppose dessert can save the world, however I believe dessert can do quite a lot of issues. I’m a pastry chef. So I very deeply know dessert’s superpowers. It connects us to ourselves, to 1 one other, to strangers, to the world. I do know the bridges it kinds. Even once we disagree on different issues, dessert has a robust method for us to seek out one thing in widespread.

Milk Bar was just a little bakery within the East Village and now it’s this enormous dessert model. How has that enlargement impacted your strategy to recipe creation?

Our seven-year-old aim is to feed each single particular person on this world a cookie. Our progress and technique and strategy has been, how can we try this? The place are our individuals? How can we meet them? How can we get a cookie of their arms?

So this has at all times been the plan?

Due to our collective actuality over the past two or three years, we take into consideration making recipes in two alternative ways. One is the best way that we at all times have, which is to say that we’re at all times making an attempt to determine the way to faucet into individuals’s dessert reminiscences.

The opposite aspect of it’s growing recipes that individuals could make on their very own at residence, which is one thing that I began doing with Bake Membership in the midst of the pandemic, and nonetheless do each Monday. As a result of we now have discovered that feeding each single particular person a cookie doesn’t even should be us baking the cookie. It may also be us giving individuals trigger to bake a cookie with us.

The place do you see the dessert world in 2050?

The fact of meals, particularly dessert, is you can’t actually digitize that stuff. We want meals to outlive, however dessert is inherently not an crucial a part of our survival. It’s a selection that we make as a result of it strikes us and it engages our senses, proper?

That will get me enthusiastic about being a pastry chef, as a result of it implies that making a fantastic dessert will nonetheless be very a lot a robust factor that we stay up for. Visually I hope desserts proceed to be extra magnificent—{that a} fluffy cake is tremendous fluffy and a dense and fudgy brownie is unbelievably dense and fudgy. And that we work out the way to make desserts style wonderful whatever the allergic reactions that individuals have.

We’re seeing all types of substitutes—and I fear that is sacrilege for me to say to you—however what do you consider sugar substitutes?

I’ve a very open thoughts about it. I don’t love something that’s in the marketplace proper now. The way in which that it lands on my tastebuds is cloying in a method that takes the enjoyment away, however I additionally don’t have well being or allergen issues in the best way that others do, and so they do create the power for individuals to take pleasure in. I’m a pastry chef, however I’m additionally a mad scientist in my mind the place I’m at all times taking a look at components or issues that develop within the earth to go, “Ooh, what about this? What about that?”

The place do you go to get inspiration?

One which I simply did this morning over a cup of espresso, I’m going and have a look at outdated cookbooks. We discuss 2050—however what have been we consuming and doing 50 years in the past? What have been our mother and father, what have been our ancestors making? What was their model of nostalgia? What was their consolation meals?

Do you’ve got a favourite? Or one that stands out lately?

“The Pleasure of Cooking” might be my go-to as a result of it’s like an encyclopedia of nostalgic meals and flavors, however I used to be studying the Fearrington Home Cookbook this morning.

What do you wanna be if you develop up, Christina?

I need somebody to let me be answerable for

Mondelēz

[International] or Hershey or Mars or

General Mills.

Like, can I be answerable for all of the cereal and the break-and-bake dough? Can I be answerable for each taste of Oreo? Can I be answerable for McCormick the place I can let you know all of the extracts that we have to have in our houses? Can I be answerable for all of the Betty Crocker baking mixes?

Interview has been condensed and edited.

Write to Katherine Finnerty at katherine.finnerty@wsj.com