Sablé Breton
The Brittany region of France is known to produce some of the best butter and sea salt in the world, and there is no question that a high-ratio butter cookie is simply sumptuous. I believe&n...
Bruno Feldeisen is Canada's Friendly Baker
Bruno Feldeisen has become the friendly face of CBC’s Great Canadian Baking Show.
Bruno Feldeisen has become the friendly face of CBC’s Great Canadian Baking Show — the quiet French pâtissier anxious contestants look to for approval and support. With his relaxed demeanour and warm smile, it’s hard to imagine this accomplished chef has a worry in the world. But along with his ability to calm the fears of home bakers on television, while judging their very public successes and failures, Feldeisen has been very public about his own struggles with anxiety.
“Did you know that one in six men will experience a serious anxiety disorder in their life — I did not know that,” says Feldeisen, who openly speaks about the debilitating panic attacks that have dogged him over the years, volunteering his time to support Anxiety B.C. and other mental health organizations.
“Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was a solution for me,” he adds. “It’s no miracle recipe — anxiety will always be part of you — but CBT helped me understand the problem and how I could address it.”
Using his public platform and celebrity, Feldeisen tells his story to raise money and awareness, and to help end the stigma of mental health issues. He hosts dinners and cooking classes for donors to Anxiety Canada, makes videos to help kids cope with anxiety and recently popped in on Zoom to cheer Biology undergrads at McGill, for a “cell biology” baking project designed to combat pandemic isolation.
“When you are on TV you have a huge impact on peoples’ lives, so for them to have me in their screen, talking to them directly, they are super grateful,” he says. “It’s my little contribution.”
He also works with Coast Mental Health to teach baking and cooking skills to youth coping with mental illness and substance abuse in Vancouver.
“Baking is used as one of the mental health therapies,” Feldeisen says of the life skills courses. “By teaching you basic baking skills, I teach you to become more social, I teach you to communicate, to create.”
Still, mental health care is expensive and difficult to access, while it should be free and available to all, he says.
“Being such a rich country, we should not have people with mental health issues left in the streets,” he says. “We can do a better job. And I think chefs are becoming more [keen] to help.”
A chef with a cause
Feldeisen’s resume reads like a Cinderella story — an orphan in France, who rose above a difficult childhood to apprentice as a chocolatier and chef, and build an impressive career in top kitchens around the world. He’s worked in prestigious places, Michelin-starred restaurants and top tier hotels in Europe and North America, with big name chefs from Alain Ducasse and Joachim Splichal to Daniel Boulud. He’s been recognized with awards for his pastry work (back-to-back James Beard nominations and New York Times stars), taught at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts. He was executive pastry chef at Four Seasons hotels in New York and Vancouver and most recently the executive chef at the Semiahmoo Resort just across the international border in Washington, making it a popular destination for food lovers.
Today Feldeisen can add television personality, culinary consultant and cookbook author to his list of achievements. But even as his star rose, his dark past clawed him down, and he spent a decade mid-career, slaying the demons that surfaced as crippling panic attacks and PTSD.
Though rooted in childhood abuse — with an addicted mother who died of a drug overdose — Feldeisen’s own mental health issues were exacerbated by the stresses and abuses that were common in the professional kitchen. Today he’s outspoken about the problems in the restaurant industry.
“The kitchen world is not a healthy work environment,” Feldeisen says, adding that more needs to be done by the industry to sup- port marginalized groups, from women and LGBTQ to visible minority cooks and chefs. He’s also outspoken about the need for restaurant reforms, from paying a living wage to a four-day work week, paid vacation and an end to the toxic tipping culture that sees servers disproportionately rewarded while low-paid cooks struggle and owners take large profits.
But it’s an uphill battle.
“The industry is based on greed,” he says bluntly. “The whole system is not working and needs to be changed.”
Baking a difference
Working as a culinary consultant has freed Feldeisen to pursue new projects, including his judging gig on The Great Canadian Baking Show (now filming its sixth season) and his new cookbook writing career. Baking with Bruno was published by Whitecap Books in 2020, and there are two additional cookbooks in the works, including The Bacon, Butter, Bourbon & Chocolate Cookbook, to be released in 2023.
Baking with Bruno — subtitled “A French Baker’s North American Love Story” — is an eclectic collection of homestyle recipes, many acquired by the chef during his long career and recalling specific times and places along the way.
“They are all different, and they all mean something in my life and time and situation,” he says.
Baking and cooking are an easy way to reduce anxiety and cope with isolation, especially when you share your creations with others, says Feldeisen. But while cooking is a necessary skill — to feed yourself, he says — baking is for fun.
“You don’t bake a cake because you are starving, but you do bake for a celebration, as a gift, to bring people together, to connect,” he says. “I always talk about it, because that’s crucial to understanding the power of baking.”
That was the impetus for Baking with Bruno, a chance to encourage everyday people to bake, every day. “The book was to show people it’s not complicated, you can have fun in the kitchen,” he says, noting he gave up the professional baker’s precision weights for household volume measures to simplify the recipes. “Baking can be simple, it’s magical and it creates memories.”
While many pastry chefs produce highly technical, professional cookbooks, Feldeisen wanted to share recipes with ingredients that are easy to find and basics such as comforting custards and flans, shortbread and biscotti, simple cakes and fruit crisps.
Feldeisen says he learned to open his mind, beyond the classic French culinary traditions, when he began cooking in the U.S. There were people from diverse backgrounds and cultures in his kitchens in California and New York, and ingredients he’d never worked with before.
“I moved to U.S., with my very French state of mind and then I worked with a great chef called Joachim Splichal at Patina,” says Feldeisen, remembering his friend’s advice when he questioned the idea of infusing popcorn into cream for crème brûlée.
“He says, ‘It’s good Bruno — if you’re going to make it here you must be open-minded and cook what people can connect with. Everyone can connect with popcorn and it’s good.’”
That crème brûlée recipe, infused with the nutty flavour of corn, is still a keeper, says Feldeisen, who lists popping corn as a pantry staple in his baking book and uses it in his Chocolate & Caramel Sea Salt Popcorn Tart.
“I actually believe when people can connect with something, popcorn, cotton candy, everybody knows what it is and it’s fun,” he says. “It’s like pop culture, like pop art, like Andy Warhol in the kitchen.”
And while there are classic recipes in Baking with Bruno — think buttery Sablé Breton cookies, Linzer Torte and Chocolate Orange Soufflé — the book is filled with tempting innovations, from jiggly Japanese cheesecake to lemon and nori biscuits and little raspberry chocolate cakes, microwaved in a mug.
When he’s teaching new cooks, Feldeisen says his lemon curd recipe is a favourite, because it’s a tart silky spread that can be used in many different ways.
“It is delicious on its own, and it makes a great filling for a lemon meringue tart, a choux pastry or for layering cakes,” he says. “Lemon curd is so versatile, you can make it in advance, do it as a gift, in little Mason jars, you can freeze it, you can do so many things and that’s why it’s probably my favourite recipe.”
His upcoming book will combine his love of cooking and baking, with a third of the recipes on the savoury side and every recipe made with bacon, bourbon, chocolate or butter.
“It’s a bit less from the past, and more what I enjoy cooking today,” he says of his Bourbon Glazed Sockeye, Black Truffle and Porcini compound butter, or homemade Bacon Mayo.
“Nothing complicated, but every recipe uses at least one of these ingredients, if not more.”
Fatherhood and moving forward
Feldeisen has three passports — Canadian, American and French — but he put down roots in Vancouver when his son was born here 15 years ago. It’s home.
Becoming a father was a turning point in Feldeisen’s life — he recently wrote a piece for HereToHelp.bc.ca, describing how it helped him open a new chapter in his life.
He’s now working on a third cookbook and consulting with the Joseph Richard Group and creating pop-up events to showcase his creative baking. You’ll also see Feldeisen behind the stoves at fundraising events for good causes, from the Vancouver Opera to Growing Chefs.
“I’m a man of many projects,” he chuckles.But working in television, and coming into Canadian homes regularly on The Great Canadian Baking Show is one of his favourites.
“Every day I get a message from someone saying they are inspired by the show and the book,” he says, “and that they are baking on Sunday afternoon with their kids. That makes me proud.”
While The Great Canadian Baking Show is modelled after the British original, Feldeisen could not be more different than his swaggering BBC counterpart. He knows firsthand what it’s like to cook in the pressure cooker of a television reality show — Feldeisen has faced off on Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped Canada, among other culinary competitions — so empathizes with the home bakers who take up the challenge.
Humble is the word that comes to mind after a conversation with the open and self-effacing Canadian chef. Care and self- care are his message.
“I learned to respect people in the kitchen at the Four Seasons Hotel, where the mission statement is The Golden Rule,” he says. “To treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves.”
And when you’re feeling anxious, share some love and compassion. Pay it forward with a coffee or a cookie.
“Kindness is the highest form of intelligence,” he says. “I think helping helps you.”
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