Genevieve Meli / Culinary Institute of America, New York

Baking an Impact

Pastry Chef Genevieve Meli is passionate about smarter baking. Her 2024 book, “Baking an Impact: Small Changes for More Sustainable Baking,” is packed with small, practical changes to help home bakers address food waste at a micro-level without compromising quality or integrity. There’s plenty of chocolate, flour, and cream, but also banana peels, sour milk, and coffee grinds. Leftover corn and celery can be made into roasted corn ice cream with quick-poached celery curls and blackberry Chantilly sauce. Alternative ingredients like ancient grains, nut flours, and homemade vinegars are touted for sustainable production and better nutrition.

The Perfect Purée features in numerous on-menu items at the CIA and in the book, including Chantilly with Blackberry Purée; lavender tart with Blueberry Purée; Black Forest Cake with Cherry; and a lemon olive oil dessert with Strawberry. Genevieve, associate professor of Baking and Pastry Arts at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, has used 25 flavors and counting.

She says The Perfect Purée mitigates food waste in professional kitchens because it guarantees consistency at scale and saves the worry of what to do with large amounts of fresh produce. “You don’t have to waste produce. Something is going to taste different from yesterday to today to an hour from now,” she says. “It might be, ‘This is too sour, this is too sweet. I’m going to use this for something else,’ then it goes moldy in the fridge.”

Besides offering consistency, The Perfect Purée sources fruit from growers who value sustainable practices. All of its products are GMO-free and made without additives, preservatives, or artificial sweeteners. One of Genevieve’s favorite flavors is Sweet Hibiscus, which she discovered when a jar was left behind after Next Gen Chef was filmed at the CIA. Sweet Hibiscus is made from the hard-to-find extract of the edible hibiscus flower. “First off, you can’t get it anywhere unless you make your own, but hibiscus is really expensive,” Genevieve says.  “Then the flavor is so on point. I love the consistency, and I need consistency.”

True Nature

Genevieve grew up in her family’s Hudson Valley restaurant and knew from an early age she wanted to stay in the industry and excel. She graduated from the CIA in 2007, exactly 30 years after her father, Gerard Meli. Within a decade, she became the youngest-ever Certified Master Bakers and in 2016 made Zagat’s 30 Under 30 List of Rock Stars Redefining the Industry.

Genevieve sharpened her pastry skills in some of New York’s most prestigious kitchens, including Craft, Café Boulud, Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, and Jacques Torres Chocolate, where she developed her expertise as a chocolatier. Before returning to the CIA as a faculty member, she served as the executive pastry chef at Fishtail by David Burke and Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria. “Baking an Impact” is her second cookbook after “Sweet Nature” in 2016.

“Baking an Impact” starts with a foreword from celebrity chef Eric Ripert, who, like Meli, considers food waste an ethical issue that needs to be solved. By some estimates, a third of the global food supply is lost to inefficient harvesting practices and waste from households and foodservice and retail establishments. The United Nations designates Sept. 29 as its annual International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste.

Changing the World One Batch at a Time

Genevieve’s classroom is a testing ground for recipes and small experiments in sustainability. One is the process of testing itself. “I make really tiny [test] batches,” she says. “It’s enough for everyone to try, and there’s no waste. A lot of people over-produce when they’re recipe testing, but if you set it up in Excel, the computer does it for you. I just don’t get why people don’t do that, adjust the recipe.”

Her philosophy evolved from her conviction that small changes are impactful. She finds ways to reuse empty Perfect Purée jars. She recommends trying spelt or einkorn sometimes instead of wheat flour. “Ancient grains are just way more nutritious, that’s a nice consequence, and they really don’t need that much water, whereas wheat, you need to baby it, you need to give it a lot of inputs,” she says.

Genevieve’s students graduate to bakeries, restaurants, and hotels all over the world, hopefully taking with them some of her philosophy about food waste and sustainability. “I try to educate my students, and I even have in my bake shop a little sustainability corner,” she says.

In it are edible flowers and jars of natural food coloring made from powdered dragon fruit, turmeric, green and blue spirulina, black cocoa powder, charcoal, beet, sweet potato, and more. Students can play with them to influence the color and flavor of dishes. “You will get some of the flavors from them, so be careful when using them,” Genevieve cautions. “Some you can add more and some need to be added conservatively.”

User Tip: It’s a Small World

Genevieve’s user tip is more of a life tip. She says to her students, “Always be kind. No one is better than you; you are not better than anyone.” She tells them to think about repercussions if they’re ever tempted to be rude. “Fine dining is a very small world, and you are going to meet these people again. You burn that bridge and it’s burnt forever.”