If you notice a certain urgency among the Friday morning traffic at Crema coffee shop, that's probably because it's the season for cannelés de Bordeaux, and the caramel-skinned custard-textured cakes are in short supply. In fact, this Friday, when chef Mayme Gretsch, owner of Utterly, makes her weekly delivery, there are likely to be just a dozen of the shiny bronze rings. And if previous weeks are any indicator, the cannelés will be gone by 9 o'clock.
Then they'll be gone altogether in January, because cannelés de Bordeaux are a wintertime treat. Made with a base of custard and flour and flavored with vanilla and rum, cannelés de Bordeaux look at first blush like diminutive though statuesque chocolate Bundt cakes. But beneath the oven-burnished surface is a cream-colored center, with a confounding texture that is simultaneously custardy and porous.
The color of cannelés depends on how long you bake them, Gretsch explains, drawing a comparison with another sweet seasonal delicacy: roasted marshmallows. If you're a patient campfire patron, you can twirl your StayPuft low and slow to get a light blond color. Otherwise, you can plunge fast into the flame for a crispy char. When you take the fast and fiery route with a cannelé, you get a singed frill of caramel at the base of the cake, like the lacy hemline of an exposed slip.
Of course, baking cannelés is not nearly as easy as roasting marshmallows. That slick shiny skin with amber traces of molten sugar and floral notes of vanilla and rum is the legacy of a baking tradition that discovered copper molds lined with butter and beeswax can turn out something extraordinary.
Cannelés are a specialty of France's Bordeaux region, where legend holds that nuns baked custard and flour over an open fire to make treats for poor children. Ultimately, the cakes became a signature of the region, and the bakers of Bordeaux became possessive of their recipe. Not unlike their neighbors over in Champagne, they lay claim to the delicacy by removing an "n" from the word. (The single "f" in Double Stuf Oreos comes to mind.)
Canelés — one "n" — refers to pastries made in Bordeaux, while cannelés can be found elsewhere, as in Paris or Nashville. Gretsch refers to her confections using the generic term, because she doesn't "want to piss off the French."
In fact, it is nostalgia for her time in France that led Gretsch, 27, to chose cannelés as an anchor product of her Utterly brand. In her early 20s, Gretsch left home in Minneapolis and headed to Bordeaux, where she encountered the tiny baked indulgences at a patisserie. After a European tour that included a culinary internship at Spain's Michelin-starred Arzak, she returned stateside and ultimately landed a gig on the pastry team at Chicago's famed Alinea.
Fast-forward through a few more years in fine restaurants, and Gretsch is striking out on her own to provide extravagant tastes to a non-extravagant clientele.
"Like the nuns baking cannelés for forgotten children?" I ask.
Gretsch laughs and dismisses my arch comparison. (OK, I admit it was a stretch.) But Gretsch agrees that her entrepreneurial mission is to make sweet culinary luxuries available to the mainstream market. Her starting point was asking herself, "What would go well with coffee?"
For one thing, cannelés. For another, macarons, the gluten-free confection — also frequently attributed to nuns — made with almond flour, powdered sugar and egg whites. On Fridays, Gretsch delivers a few dozen pastel-hued, slick-skinned disks to Crema, where they sell for $2.75 a piece or $5 a pair, alongside the $4 cannelés.
A sandwich of two almond disks with buttercream is so thick I am tempted to pull it apart, like a child eating a certain stuf-ed cookie. Gretsch stops me and recommends I bite straight into it. "The real test of a macaron is whether it pops," she says.
And pop it does — not only its texture, like a smooth and fragile plaster shell giving way to a chewy center, but also its flavor. A yellow macaron pops with bright citrus of cured Meyer lemon pulp in buttercream. An autumn-inspired coffee bean cookie crunches into sweet orange buttercream and a fried pecan. A macaron that looks like the lost cousin of a Southern beaten biscuit pops with a sweet and savory fusion of lemon thyme and brown butter, with traces of salt and caramel.
It's tempting to say I have never tasted anything like this before — but I have. It was at The Catbird Seat, when chef Trevor Moran arrived from Copenhagen and launched a menu of flavors foraged from springtime in Nashville. The final course — pristine pink macarons served on a bed of cherry blossoms — was prepared by none other than Mayme Gretsch, who was lured to Catbird by fellow Minnesotan and opening chef Josh Habiger. She was also responsible for the exquisite quenelle of tea-infused ice cream nesting among foraged redbuds. Two years earlier, she dreamed up the charred oak wood ice cream with cherry crisp, pineapple gelée and bourbon capsules that helped catapult The Catbird Seat into the national media spotlight.
Working at The Catbird Seat, with freedom to experiment and fail, gave her the courage to strike out on her own, Gretsch says. Now that she has flown the nest, her fledgling business, Utterly, is getting its wings with help from Catbird's sister restaurant. Pinewood Social offers Utterly ice cream — made with milk from G&G Family Dairy in Orlinda, Tenn. — for $5 per 4-ounce serving or $9 for a sundae topped with whiskey-soaked cherries, scratch-made devils' food cake and fudge sauce made with cocoa from Brooklyn-based Mast Brothers. Nine dollars for a swirl of ice cream is extravagant, but the rich parfait of deep and balanced flavors and contrasting textures and temperatures hints at the culinary standards of a landmark like Catbird, without the steeper investment.
Going forward, Gretsch has plans for a micro-storefront inside a stand-alone enterprise, where she can experiment with flavors such as the tea and oak ice creams at Catbird.
Meanwhile, she already has a merger in the works. Her fiancé Wesley Walker, owner of Street Provisions food truck, has outfitted his traveling kitchen with a keg refrigerator to serve his house-brewed sarsaparilla. Gretsch and Walker plan to serve sarsaparilla floats with Utterly soft-serve.
Until Gretsch hangs out a shingle, her Utterly soft-serve is available at Pinewood Social all week, and her cannelés and macarons are at Crema on Fridays. As for tracking down the sarsaparilla floats, you can follow @utterly_nash on Twitter and Instagram — a thoroughly modern twist on utterly decadent traditions.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
