Nosh Pit

Slideshow: Ba Bar Pastry Chef Karen Krol Makes Pate Chaud

The restaurant has a new(ish) pastry chef, and she wraps meat in delicate pastry.

Posted by: Allecia Vermillion on Jan 10, 2012 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Krol prepares herself and her work area, located right by Ba Bar’s entrance.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Krol prepares herself and her work area, located right by Ba Bar’s entrance.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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First, she flattens the dough using a massive machine that is basically an automatic rolling pin.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Next Krol cuts out circles for the base of the pastry.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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The inside of the pastry is a mixture of pork, onions, carrots, white wine, spices, and of course, pork pate. You can even call ahead to pre-order a tofu version.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Rolling out pastry tops to cover the porky centers…

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Krol lines up the pastries and bastes them with egg wash before baking.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Out of the oven…

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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The finished product: Pate chaud, served with a cup of bacon gravy and a fried free range egg.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

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Krol also makes desserts, like this hazelnut banana crunch bar with tamarind sauce. It’s garnished with a chocolate curl and a tiny macaron.

Photo: Lucas Anderson

If you’ve been to Ba Bar lately, you may have noticed the anteroom is now home to pastry chef Karen Krol’s workshop. Krol, who came to Seattle from Chicago in 2010, has dramatically expanded the baked offerings at Eric Banh’s Vietnamese street food-inspired restaurant.

Her pastry station is the first thing you see when you walk in the door, and buffers the front area from the spacious dining room. Here under the casual gaze of daytime drinkers and diners, Krol prepares all manner of French pastry, including croissants, madeleines, palmiers, and, yes, the highly on-trend macaron. She also makes cookies and cakes that diners can order up, or take away.

Her savory duties include the pate chaud, the buttery, flaky puff pastry, made in house and wrapped around a mixture of onions, carrots, ground pork, and pork pate. In case you didn’t consider pork and pastry enough of a selling point, the final product is topped with a fried egg and served with the world’s most adorable cup of bacon gravy. It stays on the menu all day, since there’s no really meal that can’t benefit from the addition of pork, pastry and gravy.

Our Seattlemet.com photographer extraordinaire Lucas Anderson visited Krol in her workspace. Check out the slideshow to see her take the pate chaud from ingredients to seriously tempting reality.

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Tags: Pastry, Ba Bar

Trending: Bread and Pastries

Carb-free? Not around these parts. Local bakeries say Seattleites are buying up baguettes like crazy.

Posted by: Tiffany Ran on Apr 12, 2011 at 02:33PM 2 Comments

Whatever, Hollywood. Seattle still loves bread.

In the Trending series, Nosh Pit talks to local food providers, shop owners, chefs, servers—whoever’s appropriate, really—about those consumables Seattle can’t get enough of right now. This week: bread and pastries.

1. At Columbia City Bakery, breakfast staples like the cardamom coffee cake sell out quickly in the mornings while grab-and-go sandwiches are grabbed and gone by the afternoon.

Operations manager Andrew Cleary has noticed his customers returning to old favorites that were less popular in recent years. “Bread in general is way up this year, and there is a return to classics like baguettes.”

2. Macrina Bakery’s seasonal raspberry rhubarb tartlets are a big seller in spring. Like Columbia City, Macrina is selling a lot of baguettes these days too, said wholesale manager Rebecca Early.

Local restaurants, meanwhile, have been stocking up on the bakery’s olive bread, mixing it in with wheat and white breads to lend a little diversity to their baskets.

3. At gluten-free bakery Flying Apron, customers tend to gravitate towards heartier, rustic breads like the buckwheat seed bread.

“I’ve noticed that our customers prefer [pastries] to be less sweet, so we tend to add less sugar,” said general manager Benjamin Lesperance. Pecan cinnamon rolls are the bakery’s most popular sweet sell.

4. Fruit tarts, eclairs, and lemon and peanut bars are choice grab-and-go desserts at Hoffman’s in Kirkland, according to manager and part-owner Eugenia Velez. But the classic Princess Torte, a sponge cake paired with Bavarian cream, raspberry jam, and marzipan remains Seattle’s signature special occasion cake.

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Tags: Bread, Pastry, Trending,

Belle Pastry Opens Downtown

(How amped is Seattle Met that Bellevue’s best bakery has spun off to our neighborhood?)

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Jul 26, 2010 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Jean-Claude Ferre and those belles pastries.

Every downtown office has its go-to lunchtime commissary; the neighborhood joint that’s convenient serving food that’s edible. Some of them are even worth going to. For years, ours here at Seattle Met…well…wasn’t. All right sandwiches, okay soup, ho-hum pastries, you know the drill.

When it closed we all breathed a sigh of apathy and waited for a new tenant to arrive.

So imagine our delight to discover that the new tenant was to be Belle Pastry, Bellevue’s Main Street mainstay for croissants and tarts and other French pastries. Under skilled pastry chef Jean-Claude Ferre (whom I have it on good authority counts Thierry Rautureau of Rover’s and Luc among his fans), the popular Old Bellevue branch of the bakery became a beloved hub of that neighborhood, eventually branching out to a Ballard outpost, since closed.

Lucky for us…because now the Seattle beachhead is serving its meringues and chocolate chip shortbread cookies and black forest cakes and Caffe Vita coffee—and mighty delectable chicken salads, I might add, in addition to baguette sandwiches and soups—at the corner of Western and Spring.

Just down the street from us.

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Tags: New Seattle Restaurants, Pastry, Bakery, Belle Pastry, Jean-Claude Ferre

Mike McConell’s Expanding Empire, New Dinner Series at Emmer and Rye, Theo Chocolate: Now Even More Fair

Here’s your heaping plate of Seattle food news for the week of July 19.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jul 16, 2010 at 11:32AM 0 Comments

Fairly delicious Theo Chocolate gets new do-gooder certification.

CHS blog says the 15th Avenue East storefront formerly occupied by Tilden will be a Caffe Vita.

Yes, I agree with you that this little neighborhood is already clogged with coffeeshops. But Mike McConnell does plan to sell pizza there too, it seems. McConnell recently opened another pizza shop along Pike Street.

Woodinville restaurant Barking Frog welcomes new pastry chef Matt Kelley, who has previously spun sugar at Cafe Juanita and Rover’s.

Nearly in Kirkland, Bin on the Lake is now open for lunch from 11am-2pm every day. Voila le menu.

Theo Chocolate received a Fair for Life certification, learn what that means here.

The opening date for Ethan Stowell’s newest project, Staple and Fancy Mercantile, has been pushed back.

Boka has a new happy hour, wine list, and chef’s menu.

Emmer and Rye announced a new Thursday night “Market Series” dinner, a 5-course, all inclusive meal for $70 to be held every second Thursday starting July 22. The food will be sourced from nearby Queen Anne Farmers Market; the price includes paring with beers from Stone Brewing (bonus: guests go home with a six-pack). Call the restaurant for details.

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Tags: Chefs, Food News, Pastry, Ethan Stowell, Food News Roundup

The Herbfarm Announces New Pastry Chef

Woodinville welcomes a notable name in desserts.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jul 06, 2010 at 11:07AM 0 Comments

The new Herbfarm pastry chef has worked for chefs Thomas Keller and Paul Bocuse.

Cory Barrett will be the new pastry chef at The Herbfarm, the Woodinville restaurant announced today. Barrett comes to Seattle from Cleveland, where he headed up the desserts team at Michael Symon Restaurants. (You may recognize Michael Symon’s name from “Iron Chef America” and “Next Iron Chef,” his most famous Cleveland restaurants are Lola and Lolita.)

Barrett has also toiled under the glitzy likes of chefs Thomas Keller and Paul Bocuse.

Barrett replaces Anna Harlow, who left the Herbfarm to create desserts at Allium, the Orcas Island restaurant recently opened by another Herbfarm alum: chef Lisa Nakamura.

Want a sneak peak of Barrett’s style? Here’s a recipe for his famous Guinness ice cream with chocolate-covered pretzels, published in Food and Wine.

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Tags: Restaurant News, The Herbfarm, Pastry