Sometimes people line up for hundreds of meters in front of the Lune bakery to buy and eat one of Kate Reid’s croissants.
“There are times when I’m really still shocked and thrilled,” Reid told Jonathan Green on ABC RN Life Plan.
“But honestly, I eat it at least four or five times a week and I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’m not sick of it. And I don’t really like eating someone else’s croissants. So maybe I would get in line too.”
Reid has a reason to evaluate his own work.
In 2016, a New York Times food critic wrote that its classic croissant “with its sacred balance of buttery weight and feathery flakes, is perhaps the best you can find in the world”.
Israeli-born British chef Yotam Ottolenghi says Conde Nast Traveler in 2019: “This is the croissant that should serve as a prototype for all the others.”
A croissant is both an incredibly simple and complex pastry.
Reid remembers delivering his croissants to a cafe, after spending the usual three days making them, including waking up at 4 a.m. on the day of the delivery.
“A guy came up to me at a cafe and he was like, ‘Oh, so you get up in the morning and make a batch of croissants?’ and it was so cavalier.
“I was like, ‘I hope you realize what you’re biting is three days of blood and sweat and tears.'”
Since opening in Melbourne in 2012, Kate’s business has grown from a one-person store to a five-site bakery in two states. Now, Reid has also published a cookbook: Moon: Croissants All Day, All Night.
But being Australia’s croissant queen wasn’t always her dream job. First, she made a pit stop in Formula 1.
Formula 1 and achievement
Reid’s love affair began when she was 13 and her father took her to the Melbourne Grand Prix.
From then on, she oriented her studies towards engineering work in Formula 1.
She studied aerospace engineering at RMIT University and, at age 23, started working for the Williams F1 racing team.
Reid told Patricia Karvelas RN breakfast: “I am extroverted. I like to be around people. I like to work with my hands. I like to be collaborative.
“And when I started working in Formula 1, I discovered that the life of an engineer is definitely not that. It’s very isolated and solo, you spend a lot of time working on a computer .”
It was the early 2000s and her dream job had taken her to the UK, away from her family and support networks in Melbourne.
“I thought I would get everything I needed from a career in Formula 1 to feel completely fulfilled and unfortunately that was not the case.
She developed depression which later turned into anorexia.
“I got really sick and the ironic thing about an eating disorder is you can’t stop thinking about food,” Reid says.
“If you starve your body, your body is just sending signals to your brain all day long telling you to think about eating, and you’re not dreaming of eating a leaf of lettuce.”
Cooking and recovery
Reid was drawn to baked goods, so every night after an unsatisfying day at work, she baked.
“I was starting to experiment a bit and lived vicariously through this process of working with raw ingredients, like flour, sugar and eggs…through the magic of science and baking, you find yourself with a product that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.”
Reid then shared his creations with his colleagues.
“Seeing how happy this would make everyone, I started thinking, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t be an engineer. Maybe I should be a baker instead.'”
But she had also become so ill that her father had to fly to the UK and bring her home.
Back home and still incredibly sick, but eager to do something, Reid signed up for a gig as a counter-hand for a local bakery.
“[I] put myself in the most torturous position possible, surrounded by all that food that I wouldn’t let myself eat. But… I loved it,” she recalls.
“The only thing that drove me crazy was that I wasn’t doing what we were selling…all this time I was on a slow road to recovery.”
Then Reid worked for the next two years, off and on, baking cakes and cookies for a small cafe.
“But I was starting to get a little bored with the simplicity of this style of baking and I was getting a little more interested in French pastry because it’s so technical,” she says.
So Reid, mesmerized by a double-page spread of pain au chocolat in a book about Parisian pastries, booked a ticket to Paris.
“Little moment of joy”
In Paris, Reid visited Du Pain et des Idées, the famous bakery where that fateful pain au chocolat photo was taken.
“I was so impressed with the experience I had at the bakery and the beauty of the pastries I ate,” she says.
There was a constant queue outside the bakery.
“I realized that every single person standing in that queue had that little moment of joy…that moment of happiness while they ate something they were looking forward to.
“[Pastry chef/owner Christophe Vasseur] can give that to several hundred people a day – it’s pretty special.”
The next day, she writes an impassioned email to Vasseur and eventually musters up the courage to ask him to hire her as an unpaid apprentice.
He told her, “At the bakery, we don’t have anyone who speaks English, and it’s very small. Normally we don’t do that. But for some reason, I can see the same passion and drive in you than in me. . Yes. When do you want to start?”
“That’s when my love affair with the croissant really started.”
She writes in her cookbook of her month-long stay at Du Pain et des Idées in 2011: “I felt like I had finally found my thing.”
Reverse engineering a croissant
Back home, however, Reid found that she had really only touched the tip of the iceberg of the croissant-making process.
Her first attempts were “pitiful” but, undeterred, she invested in commercial bakery equipment (including a kneader, laminator and proofer) and decided to open a bakery that only sold croissants .
“I naively thought I was armed with the information I needed, but clearly I wasn’t, and I had already spent all my savings,” she says.
“So instead of going back to school or doing an apprenticeship to learn, I thought, ‘Well, I’m an engineer, maybe I can reverse engineer this process. So I imagined this perfect end product.”
Every day for three months, she tested, experimented and refined until she came across her own Moon-style crescent, which is quite different from the classic French style.
Reid opened Moon in 2012 in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood. Initially, she provided cafes, but after her brother joined the business, they turned the site into their own retail space.
In 2015 they expanded the operation to a large warehouse in Fitzroy, North Melbourne. Other stores followed.
The experimentation continues
When it comes to Moon, Reid approaches everything with the mindset of an engineer rather than a baker.
“In the past, a lot of journalists laughed at me saying, ‘Well, from Formula 1 to croissants, it’s ridiculous! But I’m not testing croissants in the wind tunnel yet,” laughs Reid.
“Studying engineering not only taught me the very technical things about designing a Formula 1 car, it taught me how to think, problem solve, experiment, refine and improve some things.”
Just as Reid developed her own croissant, she says her pastry chefs, like the engineers, have the agency to test the process.
“It’s not common for a bakery to challenge the status quo of a classic recipe. Usually you come in as an apprentice, you’re taught the traditional croissant recipe, and then it’s just your day job. day after day to replicate that treat.
“But these guys have the ability to change it and make it better, which I love.”
Reid was experimenting again when she started writing her cookbook.
It coincided with Melbourne’s extended lockdown in 2021, when Reid was at home, armed only with a rolling pin and a stand mixer. She ended up reformulating her dough for the home cook.
“I really had to start from scratch and think about it from a completely different angle. It was a challenge, but I got there,” she says.
Reid’s advice for those starting the three-day journey to a crescent?
“Just because something doesn’t work the way you thought it did doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It’s just a different outcome that you can learn from… I think it’s probably a bit of a state as well. engineering mind.”
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