Original article/video by: Stephanie Graham, Tom Murray

An Evening of Elegance is coming up in April at the Crowne Plaza in Milwaukee.

Organizer Tammy Flynn was on Live at Daybreak to tell us all about it, along with Crown Plaza General Manager Patrick Palmer and Executive Chef Bob Druschitz from Kilawat at Intercontinental Milwaukee.

Jennifer Carlson, executive pastry chef for Marcus Restaurants, hails from Brooklyn, where she began her career working in fashion design. The creativity of the industry appealed to her, but she didn’t enjoy the transition between the excitement of New York fashion week, and the hum-drum of every day work. So, she decided to rethink her career.

She attended the New York Institute of Technology for culinary arts.  After an externship in an upscale kosher catering hall, where she got experience making wedding cakes, specialty cakes and high-end plated desserts, she turned her attention toward the pastry end of things.

Carlson lived and worked in Orlando, Fla., for over eight years after graduation, working for a variety of hotels, including the Ritz Carlton, where she learned the art of sugar.  At the tender age of 24, she took an executive pastry chef position at the Westin Grand Bohemian.

In 2010, she moved to Milwaukee with her husband and took a position as pastry chef for Mason Street Grill before transitioning into her current position overseeing all pastry work for The Pfister Hotel and Mason Street Grill.

I sat down to talk with Carlson about her work at the restaurants, her biggest influences, and her experiences with the infamous Pfister hotel ghosts.

OnMilwaukee.com: After getting your degree more broadly in culinary arts, why did you choose pastry?

Jennifer Carlson: I feel like I can showcase my artistic side more effectively. Plus, I’m really a bit OCD, I’m meticulous. With baking you need to be precise, and I like to be a bit more restrained.  It’s very regimented.  I love balancing the creativity with the restraint. The key is balance for me.

OnMilwaukee: There’s been resurgence in appreciation for pastry and pastry techniques – here in Milwaukee, as well as across the nation. What do you see coming back?

JC: We don’t necessarily do it here, but more of the artisanal breads and homemade pastries are back. People in the past, everyone was rushing and making things simple and easy. I think people now are getting more in tune with themselves, trying things at home. People are taking more time with some of those things.

To me, I hope that what I see coming around is people really getting back to the old ways… taking the time, using quality products.  That’s what I want, not something out of a factory. I, personally would like to see more of the sugar arts – candy making, taffy pulls, caramels. I’m making these bacon caramels that we’re going to sell here. We’re really excited about them.

OMC: How does the creative process work for you?

JC:  Well, right now we’re in the midst of changing our banquet menu.  It’s a given that certain things never change – like the carrot cake at Mason Street Grill. It’s so beloved.

But, the process is pretty simple.  All of the chefs sit down together. We look at trends, what’s available seasonally.  And we go from there.  I really like to take a classic dessert and put a spin to it.

For instance, we threw a hotel anniversary party with an 1893-themed menu. I decided to do a classic dessert, the Charlotte Rousse – ladyfingers soaked and filled with custard. But, I changed the mold and deconstructed it a bit. It was a more modern twist. A bananas foster version.

OMC: What classic techniques are you working to master?

JC: Well, it’s been a while since I did chocolate and sugar sculptures. But, I’m going to be taking some classes in Chicago so that I can shine up my techniques and use them more here at the hotel. I try to keep my finger on the pulse of things, and I’m always willing to learn and stay one step ahead of everyone else.

OMC: Are there things you would love to do here, that you just can’t right now?

JC:  Yes. Gosh, I would die to have a chocolate room here.

OMC: Are there any classic techniques that you use, but that really drive you nuts?

JC:  I hate working with pastiage. It’s an edible decorative technique – kind of like plaster for pastry.  It comes out white, you can roll it out and cut it into shapes.  It dries really quickly, so you have to work fast.  I’ve had experiences where it cracked and I wanted to cry.

When I worked for the Ritz, we used to make our own pastiage display shelves and airbrush them.  They would crack and it was frustrating since you had to make so many, and there was only so much time in the day.

OMC: Where would you place yourself on the continuum of classic to innovative?

JC: I’m solidly in the middle. I appreciate both and like to dabble in both, but I’m always willing to learn new things. It gets boring if you don’t.

OMC: Who are your biggest influences?

JC: I would say that a lot of the chefs I’ve worked with – some from France and Germany – I’ve learned so much from them.  Everyone I work with, I take a little bit from. And it means a lot to me. That’s how I take them with me.  For instance, I first learned how to blow sugar from Philippe at the JW Ritz.  It was really cool.

OMC: What’s one of your favorite things you’re working on right now?

JC: It would have to be the banquet menu right now. I’m really excited about it, but I’m not really allowed to say much yet.

OMC: In your work, what ingredient is currently over-used?

JC: Honestly, anything with chocolate. Honestly. People think it has to be chocolate to be considered pastry. I lean more towards the spices and herbs, more of the savory side.  I like to do spice cakes.  We have a dessert that’s white chocolate mousse with lavender. We have a honey cake with honeycomb.

That and crème brulee … I can’t stand it.  People act like it’s something special.  I have to make it every day because people want it. I tolerate it by doing new flavors. One I’ve done is a chocolate orange version that reminds me of those chocolate oranges that you crack on the table.

OMC: Well, there is something to be said for the caramelized sugar on top of the crème brulee. The texture of it.

JC:  Yes, yes there is.  I remember when I went to France when I was in high school, and I looked around at the pastries and thought everything looked burnt.  But it was caramelization – and that’s flavor.  The darker the better sometimes.

OMC: What ingredient or flavor combination should be used more often?

JC: I think working here at The Pfister, I have the ability to use and order what I like. I’m more of a savory person, so I like autumn spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom … people need to use more cardamom.  Right now we have a pumpkin cranberry bread with cardamom in it.

I also love herbs. I like to use lavender, dried rose petals … fold them into a mousse or a cake. I use a lot of different essences – elderflower, rootbeer.

OMC: What are some things that home cooks should keep in mind?  Any techniques that would change their lives in the kitchen?

I think people should have certain staples in their kitchen that can be used in multiple applications – simple things … sugar butter, eggs, cream, and vanilla beans – beans, not extract, I hate extract … it just adds alcohol flavor.  You can do so many things with those ingredients – from making crepes and pancakes to pastry cream.  It’s a great way for people to start learning the easy things.

Also, a big one people forget about is tempering.  People don’t realize that they need to introduce hot liquid slowly into the eggs.  People say “I did this at home, but my eggs scrambled.”  You’re slowly heating up your eggs so that they don’t cook.  It brings the temperature up and closer to the product.

OMC:  And now, I have to ask you about the history of ghosts in The Pfister. Have you seen any?

JC: Yes, there are definitely ghosts here. They’re all friendly, though. One who hangs around in the baking kitchen is a little girl. She plays tricks on us all the time.

OMC:  What kind of tricks?

JC: Like turning off the timers while we’re baking things. Apparently she has a different idea of when things are done than we do.

Connect Magazine – InterContinental Milwaukee

Indoor bocce ball tournaments, food events and a weekly music series are just a few of the freetime activities entertaining meeting attendees at the InterContinental Milwaukee.

SLICE Magazine – Not So Old Milwaukee

If your first thought when you hear “Milwaukee” is “beer, ” you’re not alone. Beer is big, but the city is so much more. It is heritage and Harleys, eats and arts, waterfront and a wonderful time.

By Elaine Warner

If you’re an optimist about the state of green business, don’t read this.

Shit. You’re still here.

To put it bluntly: it’s not working. That’s the rose-colored takeaway of last week’s GreenBiz Forum in New York City.

We’ve succeeded in building an entire industry of sustainability professionals, individually doing yeoman’s work to further the cause, but collectively falling short in how we validate our work beyond our bubble. When Sandy Frucher, Vice Chairman of NASDAQ, says that adopting sustainability reporting standards by the world’s stock exchanges is the “right thing to do,” it insinuates that such practices don’t lead to higher returns. Mr. Frucher admits as much when he notes that, until one investment analyst poses a single question about a company’s sustainability performance, we should be content with relying on corporate goodwill as a driver of sustainability — not because operating sustainably mitigates risk, but because of the warm fuzziness of taking the moral high road.

When Jeff Rice, Senior Director of Sustainability at Walmart, confesses that consumer response to their progressive environmental strategy is virtually non-existent, the reality becomes clear that, more than 10 years into the modern sustainability movement, we are pedaling uphill, against the wind.

To echo the thoughts of another conference goer, “We’re all getting really good at operationalizing sustainability and filling out surveys, but at the end of the day, we’re just a small universe, talking amongst ourselves.” What really drove this home is when, upon my return to the office, I discovered a flyer for the upcoming FUSE event in Chicago on brand strategy and packaging. The word ‘sustainability’ appeared not once on the agenda. In fact, I would bet my mule that sustainability doesn’t even get uttered at FUSE.

So, where do we go from here? To borrow from Timothy Westbrook, the quirky, undeniably talented low-impact artist-in-resident at the posh Pfister Hotel, we need to turn our paradigm on its head. More so than looking at a Coke can and seeing a pair of aluminum shoes, we need to blow up our tidy little world of “green bizzers” and explore more effective ways of becoming inclusive of the everyday Joe. Joe Marketer, Joe Consumer, Joe Investor, Joe the Plumber… all the Joes and all their female, inter-racial, socially-conservative, LGBT counterparts.

To start, we need to take Amy Hartzler’s advice from Free Range Studios and become sustainability “mythmakers.” If we’re spending millions of the company’s money on low-carbon energy solutions, we need to be a hell of a lot better at framing it with a compelling story, replete with sexy men and women, little puppies and all the other surefire ways of getting people’s attention. It needs to go beyond the enterprise, down to the brand and product level. And, as much as we enjoy seeing our initiatives represented in the traditional CSR media outlets, these things need to be Super Bowl ad-worthy.

During their sneak preview of the latest Ernst & Young/GreenBiz Group survey results on sustainability risk management, Brendan LeBlanc and his band of EY consulting dudes contended that the increasing materiality of resource scarcity and extreme weather is steadily growing the demand for environmental risk management, which, in turn, is driving the inclusion of the CFO as a stakeholder in the sustainability discussion. This is good because it helps to sell upper management on the business case for the next solar project, but it does little to get consumers to join us as a dance partner in saving the world.

Outside the fraction of light and dark green consumers who shop on eco-values, the rest of society still shops on price, quality, fashion, taste, etc. Understanding this to be true, it’s time we up our game, pool our resources and begin telling people the story of not just how green we are, but what’s in it for the consumer, what they should do about it (see Amy Hartzler’s piece on empowerment marketing).

It can be argued that a corporate sustainability program will only go as far as its meager budget allows. How can we be asked to change how consumers behave and investors invest? Compared to the folks in marketing, the annual corporate spend on sustainability is a mere drop in the bucket. But as someone so wisely quoted of David Mitchell at the forum, “What is an ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

Mike Bellamente is the director of Climate Counts, a consumer outreach organization that rates corporations on how well they measure, reduce and report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In February 2012, Bellamente was named to Ethisphere’s 2011 list of 100 most influential people in business ethics.

Stephanie Barenz’s work is sometimes about the in betweenness of travel and the things we carry with us always.

As she applied for the Pfister Hotel’s artist in residence program, she was working on a painting based on her husband’s stories about travel in India. Rich imagery, colors and architecture of a distant place and the familiar touchstones of home combined and seemed to float up and out of a suitcase in the work.

It’s an approach to making work – gathering stories of travel and home – that seemed a perfect fit and attracted the expert judges of the Pfister program, who named Barenz the next artist in residence Wednesday.

Barenz will replace the current artist in residence, Timothy Westbrook, in the art studio off of the hotel’s lobby in April.

“The Pfister is the perfect stage for my work, which deals with how travel affects one’s relationship to place,” said Barenz in a statement. “The hotel carries thousands of stories from over a hundred years. The Victorian art collection, the antiques, and spaces have served as silent witnesses to all of it.”

Barenz plans to create 20 to 30 paintings during her residency, images she hopes will be part of a collaborative book project with the Pfister’s writer in residence.

As part of the program, she will work in an accessible spot, where visitors and guests at the hotel can come in, watch her work and ask questions. She will be able to share information about the hotel’s Victorian art collection, one of the largest of its kind in a hotel.

Barenz currently works as a full-time artist at Plaid Tuba, the studio of The Pfister’s first artist in residence, Reginald Baylor. Barenz has extensive experience teaching and holds a master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

“Each year, we are repeatedly impressed by the quality of artists who apply to our program,” said Joe Kurth, general manager of The Pfister Hotel, owned by the Marcus Corp.

Barenz was one of six finalists included in the four-week public voting period. She was chosen by a panel of art experts. The winner of the public vote, Eddie Villanueva, will have an opportunity to exhibit work at Gallerie M at the InterContinental Milwaukee.

If you want to take a weekend trip and are on a tight budget, Nilou Motamed of Travel + Leisure magazine is here to help. She shares five trips around the country that all cost less than $210 a night.

Wallet Friendly Getaways

Editors Note: This is a follow-up to “It’s in the Details, ” Anna’s recent blog about fiber artist Timothy Westbrook and his use of repurposed materials. Originally from upstate New York, Westbrook has enjoyed becoming part of Milwaukee’s robust arts community, itself at the center of a vibrant place of invention.

“Blue, blue/ electric blue/ that’s the color/ of my room/ where I will live— / blue, blue—”

These lyrics from David Bowie‘s “Sound and Vision” have been lolling through my mind ever since I began thinking about the hand-woven cassette tapes in Timothy Westbrook’s designs. If it wasn’t for Bowie, cialis after all, or the Clash or the Ramones or Troublefunk (you get the picture), I might not have felt such a familiar and sentimental pull towards Westbrook’s use of crinkly, sparkly, magnetic cassette tape. Who knew that old cassettes full of hiss could LOOK so good. Recognizing the tape in Westbrook’s jackets, dresses, and scarves was like seeing an old friend in a new context. In Westbrook’s Pfister Hotel studio, once-loved tape was woven into shimmering new life with pearl cotton, wool, and blended silk bamboo.

For those who remember, cassettes were high-maintenance friends: easily degraded by heat and humidity, often stuck in Walkmans, and with a tendency to spew ribbons of crumpled tape that had to be carefully rewound with a pencil. (This was best-case scenario: more often, the tape was mangled.) You work with what you have and I loved that technology. Soundtracks, mix tapes, and “cassingles” got me through.

Where do all the old “new technologies” like cassette tape go, though? I often think about that here at the Lemelson Center where we study innovative technology that supplants the old. While collections documenting the history of invention are carefully preserved by the Smithsonian and its counterparts, cassettes mostly go from shoe boxes to giant landfills where they degrade and leach pollutants into our water table and get into our food chain.

Thankfully, artists like Westbrook are inspired to re-think this cycle and imagine how materials can be repurposed. Each of his gowns, for example, use between 6 and 12 yards of cassette tape. He makes it a point to never use virgin materials: “The goal is zero-waste which is often confused as ‘take this rectangular fabric and make a muumuu wrap dress.’ I simply mean do not throw anything away that is not biodegradable.”

Naysayers who think eco-friendly/sustainable fashion means burlap and muumuus will be more than surprised when they see Westbrook’s holiday dress. Made from a combination of gospel and holiday tapes, wire hangers, roses, grommets, and a Mrs. Claus costume, the materials inspire humor and play a metaphorical role in the visual story of the dress. Varying tape colors add visual depth.

The relationship between sound and vision is not only a constant in Westbrook’s work—it also is the inspiration for his experimentation with audio tape. As a child, time spent listening to books-on-tape with his blind grandfather made him think about ways that sensory experiences could be translated. What if the books they listened to could be transformed back into something visual that could be understood through touch?

Asked about the challenges of his medium, Westbrook muses, “I don’t really have problems with the cassette tapes—only inspiration. The story is in the wording: cassette tape is a kind of ribbon. So where else do we hear ‘yarn, thread, string, rope, ribbon’? Fabric. Weaving. What are other related things? Line, floss, string—violin string!—electric wire, silk. All of a sudden new materials make themselves available.”

His ability to look at things differently—to see all of the preceding materials as monofilaments to be woven, for example—keeps Westbrook’s work evolving. Strong mathematical ability and a fertile imagination stoke this fire, even allowing him to think about similarities between the sensorial process of weaving and playing audio cassettes reel to reel.

So what next? Coming off a successful final gallery night show at the Pfister Hotel, Westbrook is winding down his time as Artist-in-Residence. He plans to stay in Milwaukee where he will continue to explore new ways to create sustainable, low-impact works that challenge established ideas about luxury and beauty in our disposable culture. He is innately good at connecting different people, ideas, and industries together—an important figure in any thriving place of invention—and I expect we will hear remarkable things about the community-focused projects he and collaborator Alexis Rose have on the horizon.

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N.E., Milwaukee, requested the recipe for a soup served at the Pfister Hotel, 424 E. Wisconsin Ave.

She wrote: “I was recently at an event at the Pfister. At the dinner, the hotel served the most delicious squash soup I have ever had. I would like to make this soup? Would the Journal Sentinel be able to get the recipe?”

Brian Frakes, executive chef, sent the recipe.

Pfister Butternut Squash Soup, with Nutmeg Chantilly Makes 15 side-dish servings

Candied pecan dust (see recipe)

1 medium-size butternut squash, peeled and seeded

1 acorn squash, peeled and seeded

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 medium onion, chopped

1 carrot, peeled and chopped

2 cloves garlic, smashed

8 cups chicken stock

Pinch of ground cinnamon

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

½ cup crème fraiche

Pinch of freshly ground nutmeg

Prepare candied pecan dust. Set aside.

Cut flesh of both squashes into 1-inch chunks.

In large pot, melt butter. Add onion and carrot. Cook until translucent, about 8 minutes, adding garlic halfway through. Add squash and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook until squash is tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove squash chunks with a slotted spoon and place in a blender and puree. Return blended squash to pot. Stir and season with a touch of cinnamon, salt and pepper.

In a small bowl, combine crème fraiche, nutmeg, candied pecan dust and salt to taste.

Pour soup into bowls, and drizzle with the seasoned crème fraiche.

Candied pecan dust:

¼ cup pecans halves

Powdered sugar to coat

Salt to taste

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Put pecans in a small saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat. Drain and then let dry but do not cool.

Toss with powdered sugar and salt, then set on a small sheet pan and roast in preheated oven 15 to 20 minutes, stirring once or twice. Remove from oven and let cool.

Run through a coffee grinder or a food processor, or put in a bag and smash with a heavy pan to make pecan dust.

When you think of hotel properties with a longstanding record of impeccable service, The Pfister Hotel quickly comes to mind. This Four Diamond Award property offers more than 24, 000 square feet of meeting space. Guests will be impressed with the elegantly styled space that features antique chandeliers, rich draperies and marble accents. There are 307 guests rooms and 82 lavishly appointed suites. It’s located just steps from Milwaukee’s famed River Walk.

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