Jessica Bedor, photographed at Proper Bagel
Jessica Bedor is probably thinking about dessert right now. Wherever she is, and whenever you’re reading this, chances are her brain is tossing around sugar-coated possibilities like a rock tumbler full of soon-to-be polished gems.
“I’ll never get away from pastry,” Bedor says, her words conveying a mixture of pride and exasperation, like she’s relieved to be owning up to some kind of secret. “I went on vacation last year, and the night I got back I baked something at my house because I hadn’t baked in an entire week. I’m just always thinking about it! It’s always in my brain.”
Bedor is currently the pastry chef at Proper Bagel, where she fills the popular Belmont shop’s East Coast-inspired dessert display with tried-and-trues including black-and-white cookies, housemade Pop Tarts and rugelach. Before landing that gig, she was the pastry chef at Sinema.
There she churned out stunning plated desserts. Dip back into her Instagram to see a bright-golden wedge of mandarin semolina cake topped with a vibrant strawberry coulis and a lacey piece of almond Florentine. A bit further back you’ll see her dome of shiny tempered chocolate, which has to be cracked open to get to the stack of chocolate wafer cookies, blackcurrant ganache and cocoa meringue tucked inside. (I ate that, I loved that, I have had dreams about that cocoa meringue.)
Bedor’s flavor combinations have always been surprising and rooted in experimentation, but wrapped in a fun, familiar package — free from the intimidating frills other pastry chefs can get lost in.
“A.D.D.,” she says with a laugh. “Honestly, it’s not diagnosed, but probably. I can’t focus on a damn thing, and that translates into food like crazy. I never make the same thing twice. At Sinema I made curd in every flavor you can imagine. Peach curd! It was so good! That was a good dessert.”
At Proper Bagel, Bedor has a new challenge: creating comforting and familiar grab-and-go sweets that still appeal to her modern, innovative impulses. So far she has embraced that challenge, and Nashvillians with a sweet tooth are happier for it.
“I do cookie sandwiches, red-velvet doughnuts, whoopie pies. There’s this one cookie-dough dessert they’re actually asking me to bring back. It’s a brownie crust with chocolate-chip cookie dough and buttercream.”
Sounds like a dense brick of sugar, right? In Bedor’s hands it becomes an addictive feat of skill and balance.
“One person on staff will buy it and can’t eat the whole thing at one time, so they’ll pass it around,” she says. “And then one by one, people will come back to my station being like, ‘Um, this is amazing, how did you do that, what is it made of, I need more.’ Everyone went crazy for it.”
Bedor has topped blondies with slices of fresh blood orange. She’s placed a slice of red-velvet cake upon a swirl of bacon-fat caramel, forgoing the cream-cheese frosting for a brown-butter buttercream — a move that could be seen as sacrilege by some.
“Sometimes I make crazy things for myself,” she says. “Sometimes I have to dress [ingredients] up as something else, but then people eat it, and they love it. Several people have had something and been like, ‘I’ve never had this flavor combination before, I never thought about putting this in a dessert, and I really like it!’ ”
She pauses and grins. “I live for that shit.”
