From F1 to baking the world's best croissant. The path to pastry perfection with Kate Reid of Lune Croissanterie, Melbourne.
There are certain professions which require precision and an exacting eye for detail, and Kate Reid has successfully navigated a career in two of them - Formula One and Patisserie.
In the former, she worked as an aerodynamicist for the Williams F1 team before deciding that she’d really rather work in the latter, and following a stint working in Paris at renowned Cafe Du Pain et des Idees under owner and head baker Christrophe Vasseur, Kate returned to her native Melbourne and the idea for her croissanterie, Lune, was born.
“I came back from Paris after a month and I wanted to recreate the days off that I’d had there, when I’d go put my laundry on and then head to a boulangerie near my apartment and have a coffee and a pastry - a croissant normally" she says. "So I started going to all of the Melbourne bakeries…and all the croissants were terrible! And eventually I thought, well maybe I’ve got the knowledge - I could make croissants and I could supply them to Melbourne’s small amazing espresso bars, so I can recreate that experience”.
Searching for a suitable location for her fledgling enterprise, Kate eschewed more popular areas for an up and coming spot instead. “I found the tiny space in Elwood, a bayside suburb south of the city which had terrible transport links and there was nothing happening in the area, but I leased the little shop and I fitted it out with all the equipment that I needed and spent my life’s savings" she says. "One of the jobs I’d had in Paris at the boulangerie was to make the dough, so I had a bit of an idea. I adjusted the recipe because it’s different with Australian water and I wanted to add a couple of things that were different to the recipe that I’d learnt in Paris. So I made my dough, tipped it out on the bench, and then I stood there and looked at the dough and thought ‘Oh my god. I don’t know what to do next’".
“"I’d never been taught how to flatten it, create the layers with the butter, I’d never been taught how to roll out that final sheet of pastry, cut the croissants…I never knew how to prove them or bake them! All I knew was how to make the dough and roll the croissants, which is maybe 10 per cent of the process” Someone less determined may well have questioned their new chosen career path at this point, but Kate drew on her previous experience in Formula One to help her.
“I’d spent all my money and I had this little shop fitted out, and I thought well, instead of going back to school or doing an apprenticeship, I’m an engineer - maybe I’ll apply my engineering principles and I’ll reverse engineer what I think the perfect croissant is. I literally worked backwards and changed one variable at a time then analysed the effect on the workability of the dough - how does the croissant prove? How does it bake? How does it taste? And then if the variable that I’d changed made a positive improvement on the product, then that became the new baseline, and if it was negative I’d try to understand why it hadn’t worked and then I’d try something new. It was really with an engineering mindset that I embarked on Lune and why our croissants and the process we use are quite different to normal bakeries” she explains.
Kate worked on refining her croissant recipe for three months until she had a product she was happy with before supplying them wholesale along with serving customers from a window at the Elwood premises. Word spread fast and soon people were queuing outside from 5am to get their hands on a fresh Lune pastry. “People would queue for the experience as well - you’d come for the croissants, but then Cam (Kate’s brother and business partner) would be so entertaining at the window" she laughs. "In the middle of winter it was zero degrees and there would be 100 people lined up around the block, watching movies on their ipads. They’d come down with toast and tea and find this super happy dude with long hair in a man bun making coffees for them and handing out raffle tickets when the window opened at 6.30am. We’d started to get people who would jump the queue which was upsetting some regulars, so we’d hand out raffle tickets and if you didn’t have a ticket you wouldn’t get served, and a ticket meant that you could buy 6 pastries maximum”.
Competition for coveted raffle tickets was fierce hence the early start for dedicated croissant fans, although pastries still weren’t guaranteed. “I knew down to the exact number how many croissants I had, so if we had 300 croissants it meant we could hand out 50 tickets and they would definitely get croissants. When we gave out the 51st ticket we would say “you are not guaranteed croissants - if everyone in the line in front of you buys 6, there’s not going to be any left” and you’d sometimes see the person with the 50th ticket saying “I want them all!” and the person with the 51st going “noooooooo!””.
This model clearly worked and it wasn’t long before the wholesale side of the business was scaled back in favour of face-to-face customer interaction, but the success of the hole-in-the-wall shop meant that sometimes the only time Kate would get to see her friends was when they would come and sit on the staircase next to her and chat while she egg washed the croissants early in the morning, and she would give them a hot pain au chocolat fresh from the oven.
“One day my friend Matt called me and said “I’ve got a guy from America here with me - can we just come and sit on the steps next to you while you bake?” so they came down and I gave them a croissant to share because that was all I could spare” The guy from America turned out to be Oliver Strand from the New York Times, who then wrote a piece suggesting that the classic Lune croissant “may be the finest you will find anywhere in the world”.
“That experience was pretty wild” remembers Kate. “Oliver Strand wrote the article for the NYT on the back of eating half a plain croissant sitting on a step in a tiny bakery in Elwood in the middle of nowhere…Lune was already busy, but the article put us on the global map - it had massive impact. I love pressure and I only ever felt that it was the greatest of blessings.”
In the 8 years since Lune first opened its window to customers, things have changed significantly - not least with a move to much larger warehouse premises in the hip and artistic suburb of Fitzroy, and a second smaller site in the central business district of the city. Gone are the raffle tickets and pre-dawn queues, but on weekends you can still expect to wait in line outside for a while. Central to the cavernous space is a glass climate controlled ‘cube’ where half a dozen bakers deal with the raw pastry and you can watch them working with quiet efficiency measuring and cutting the rolled out dough.
“You don’t really need to be a pastry chef to do this - it’s more like olympic origami. For 10 hours these guys, they don’t taste, they don’t cook, they’re literally working with the dough…it’s more like being a carbon fibre technician in a Formula One team - you’re working with the perfection of layers and creating shapes" explains Kate.
These days Kate isn’t as hands on as she used to be, instead entrusting her team of 70 talented staff with the day to day business of croissant making. This is clearly something that she sometimes struggles to accept. “I do miss it, and I think I’ve maybe gone through a bit of a…I think crisis is the wrong word. In the last few months we’ve finally got to the point where the business has gone to the next level. My responsibility has really shifted from making sure that every croissant is perfect, to making sure my staff have the environment, the equipment, the support, the training and the skills that they need to make sure the croissants are perfect, and that they can bring their unique personalities to impact the business in a positive way" she pauses before adding "that means letting go of control which is really hard for me, and yes, every day I miss the making.”
Whilst spending less time in the Lune kitchen is proving to be bittersweet, Kate has found it ultimately freeing and is occupying herself with a new pursuit, with a little help from fellow antipodean and former Williams colleague, and ex-F1 driver Mark Webber.
“I’ve started flying lessons!" she says excitedly. "I’m not a hobby person, I’m all or nothing and recently I’ve decided that my creative outlet can be something that doesn’t necessarily have to be related to work, which is a very new concept for me. For my entire life the thing I loved to do had to be my job, so I loved Formula One and had to work in Formula One. I loved baking so I had to work in baking. I’ve always wanted to get my pilot’s licence and recently I just thought that I’m at a stage in life where I feel that maybe I’ve got the time to go and learn how to fly, and Mark recommended someone for me to speak to”
You might be forgiven for thinking that Kate has taken her eye off the ball and the business, but you’d be wrong - there is plenty for her to be busy with alongside taking to the skies. With plans for expansion and a site in Sydney poised to be turned into the next Lune outpost, soon more people will be able to sample the perfect croissant.
“There’s no such thing as the best croissant in the world" she says, "it’s a subjective thing - you might prefer your croissant slightly sweeter or less buttery…I mean who would want less butter?! With a Lune croissant it’s about 43% butter, whereas a normal croissant is about 25%. The process by which we create the layers in the pastry and how we prove and bake the croissant, locks the butter in so it’s not greasy but still super buttery. It’s also maybe two thirds to half the weight of most croissants you’ll find on the market, but the same volume which is actually the science that’s difficult to achieve - getting that beautiful honeycomb structure, those open pockets of air inside the croissant, created by the layers”.
Those months of perfecting her recipe back in the tiny shop in Elwood may have led to the heart stopping amount of butter in each pastry, but also resulted in her unique process. “The way we create our layers is a different ‘turns’ pattern, and we have a slightly different number of layers to the very classic French way of making a croissant. I experimented with the folding and rolling and creating the layers, and eventually a pattern of turns that I thought was better than the original. But you might prefer the original”.
Kate believes there’s also a less tangible reason that someone might prefer one croissant over another. “It’s so often tied to memory" she says. "My brother Cam says 'imagine you’re 15 years old and your parents take you on holiday to somewhere beautiful in Provence, France. You make friends with the local kids and you all go out and have a massive night, and you’re walking home at 5am past the back door of the local boulangerie and the baker says “the pain au chocolat have just come out of the oven - here, have one”. Even if it wasn’t a very good pain au chocolat, nothing is ever going to beat that'" .
I suspect Oliver Strand and the legions of fans who queue around the block to get their hands on a fresh Lune croissant, would respectfully disagree.