Pastry Chef – Consultant
Pastry Chef – Consultant
Megan Belle, formerly of Harvest Restaurant and Batch Bakehouse, will be in charge of Field Table’s bread and pastry, which may include a loaf of bread and baguettes for carry-out.
And on weekday mornings, Field Table makes delicate, not-too-sweet pastries ($2-$4) for the downtown office crowd. Berry’s Swedish cardamom bun was out of this world, a perfect knot of crunchy, glazed croissant dough. A saskatoon almond scone was moist and airy, dotted with purple berries and whole toasted nuts.
Inspired by a stint at Batch Bakehouse, pastry chef Megan Belle developed a puffy, lightly salted croissant/pretzel hybrid called a cretzel, piped full of beer cheese with the consistency of Velveeta. It’s developing a following.
http://isthmus.com/food-drink/three-to-try-cheese-bread/
The cretzel
Field Table, 10 W. Mifflin St.
This love match between a salty, crusty pretzel and a soft buttery croissant comes stuffed — sometimes with pimento cheese, sometimes with beer-cheese spread. It’s diminutive in size but not in flavor. Addiction potential is off the charts.
But oh, the desserts. Pastry chef Megan Belle excels at textural and flavor contrast, with feather-light tuiles and dense cakes offset by fruit sauces and sorbets.
Narrow wedges of dark chocolate hazelnut ganache cake ($7) brought out both sweet and bitter notes in the chocolate, brightened by a swirl of passionfruit glaze and the crunch of candied hazelnuts.
Salted caramel set off a miniature chocolate cake ($7), balanced with raspberry fruit leather — basically the world’s fanciest fruit roll-up. With a glass of chilled Frangelico ($5) or Miles Malmsey Madeira ($6), the whole combination seemed at once gleefully childlike and elegantly adult.
For Megan Belle, pastry chef at Harvest, Thanksgiving is a day for her and her husband, fellow chef Ian Stowell, to take a break from the kitchen. Belle brings a pumpkin cheesecake made with goat cheese (“it adds a tang”) but leaves the rest of the meal to mom.
“I like a very traditional Thanksgiving,” she said. But unlike Stouffer and Stalboerger, Belle is “definitely more of a sides person.”
“I love cranberries,” she said. “My mom does a cranberry relish with orange zest and cranberries, not a lot of sugar — she keeps it pretty tart.”
One of Belle’s favorite dishes used to be her mother’s stuffing. But since the secret ingredient is sausage and Belle has become a vegetarian, she doesn’t eat it anymore.
