Finding her sweet spot with caramel
How Cassandra Chen changed her career to make desserts
What do banking and brittle have in common?
Absolutely nothing — which is why Cassandra Chen quit her job as a junior trader to become a restaurant pastry chef. She started her company, CC Made, with the caramel recipe she had perfected while working at Jardiniere.
“I realized a lot of commercial stuff just didn’t taste the way I remembered it when we were making it with real butter and real cream in the kitchen,” says Chen. Last year, she debuted a line of innovative brittles that will upend your worst preconceptions about a candy that’s too often nothing more than a sugary jawbreaker.“It’s just about finding the right balance of salt, baking soda and butter,” says Chen of developing her brittle recipe. She would test batch after batch, making minuscule changes — adding ¼ teaspoon baking soda, an additional ounce of butter or a pinch more salt — before landing on the right combination. “I’ve always said you have to develop a flavor that you don’t mind eating a lot of,” Chen says. Her children and husband, Manuel Guzman, are the official tasters.
Chen insists on making caramel over an open flame on the stove. She trained her employees to rely on their sense of smell rather than a thermometer to judge the exact point when the caramel should be removed from the heat.
Once she mastered the basic formula, Chen started creating flavors that reminded her of childhood snacks. Growing up in Shanghai until the age of 9, she often munched on nori and sesame seed brittle. (“But they didn’t make it with butter,” she says, “and I liked the richness of the butter.”) Her rendition brims with toasted sesame seeds, but then forest-green flecks of roasted nori interrupt with a suggestion of the sea.
It’s that layering of flavors, where one seems to chase the next like a row of dominoes, that makes these brittles remarkable.
Take her potato chip and black pepper brittle: Salted crinkle-cut potato chips pattern every piece. You taste them first and then, just before you swallow, the black pepper tickles your throat. It’s a reminder that this treat is not just for kids.
Her latest flavor involves Tajín, a chile-lime seasoning blend beloved by her mainly Latino staff. She combines it with loads of toasted pumpkin seeds for a brittle that’s bright and tangy. “I feel like I could go for days,” says Chen of her brittle line. She intends to continue developing flavors that reflect culinary traditions
around the world. “It means I get to go travel,” she says with a laugh.
For now, you’ll only find the brittle online, but you can check out CC Made’s other goods at a variety of retail shops. When she was starting the company, Chen would chase down buyers with samples. Nowadays, stores often approach her because they’ve already heard of her caramel sauces and caramel corn infused with fresh herbs or fancy salts.
Despite her successes, CC Made is definitely not flush with cash. “I’ve been able to now start paying myself, which is really nice,” Chen says, “but it comes and goes, because it’s very seasonal.” Chen and husband have been able to finance CC Made entirely by themselves, but because of that, they’ve been growing the company slowly. “It was our savings — our money,” she says. “You can’t take too much risk with that.”
Chen’s caution didn’t stop her from taking advantage of one unexpected opportunity. When Cafe Fanny in Berkeley closed in 2012, she approached departing owners Alice Waters and Jim Maser about taking over their kitchen lease.
To Chen’s surprise, they asked if she would buy their Cafe Fanny Granola line. “It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down,” she says. She has added two new granola flavors with more on the way and started selling in bulk and to restaurants. That income has helped her grow CC Made.
While banking might have been a more lucrative career, Chen never considers going back. “I do miss working at restaurants at times,” she admits. “There’s that energy of a team that you start a dinner service with, and it’s hot and it picks up and reaches a peak, and then the end of the night you finish and clean up and everything is done, and you relax and laugh. We (Chen and husband) talk about how we miss this. But we realize that we really like our lives now and not working until 2 a.m.”
“I realized a lot of commercial stuff just didn’t taste the way I remembered it.” — Cassandra Chen, CC Made