Irvine's Rachel Klemek Pillages the Pastry World
Jun 21, 2012
By Rayna Jensen
It takes quite the baker to fit a yeti, a farmer’s daughter and a shortbread all in the same oven.
But for pastry chef Rachel Klemek, it’s all in a day’s work. For the past seven years, Klemek’s aptly named Blackmarket Bakery, inconspicuously tucked away in an industrial park behind Irvine’s John Wayne Airport, has been cooking up treats that can’t be found anywhere else. The white chocolate chunk and shredded sweet coconut yeti—a slightly beastlier take on a classic dark chocolate drop cookie—or the spicy cayenne and corn nut farmer’s daughter are just two Blackmarket staples. Just a bite is enough to show even the most astute pastry aficionado that Klemek does things a little bit differently. She has plundered the tried-and-true basics of traditional baking, but each of the creations at Blackmarket carry Klemek’s unique flair. Baking just seems like it’s in her blood.
But until recent years, becoming a pastry chef was hardly on her radar. “It was a really long journey actually,” Klemek laughs, standing by the sink in the Blackmarket kitchen. She’s scrubbing the dishes she needs for this morning’s challenge: she’s perfecting a recipe for the three hundred tuile tacos she’ll be serving at the Share Ourselves 19th Annual Wild & Crazy Taco Night fundraiser tomorrow afternoon, but she doesn’t seem daunted.
Klemek does come from a sort of family legacy—her grandmother was “an amazing baker,” churning out pound cakes, carrot cakes, banana puddings, all as a matter of course—but Klemek moved from her home state of North Carolina to California when she was thirteen, and the idea of baking herself didn’t come up until her own children were little.
Klemek attended UC Irvine, where she earned her Bachelor’s in Anthropology and met her husband. She got married, started a family, and then enrolled in the phD program in Anthropology at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. It only took one semester for Klemek to realize that this career path wasn’t for her. “I just did not get it, I didn’t enjoy it, it was just nothing what I wanted to do,” Klemek says, plopping butter into a silver mixing bowl as she glances at a recipe she’s scribbled down on the sheet of paper next to her. 8 ounces. She scoops a tablespoon or two back out. “And the people who were the professors seemed to not really be happy people. So you think, wait a minute, if I stay on this bus, I’m gonna end up where they are.”
After leaving grad school, Klemek focused on raising her family. Baking began for her as a way of keeping her mind alert and active in the midst of raising four kids. Klemek’s husband, realizing that his wife was becoming more serious about baking, encouraged her to go to Culinary School. Klemek attended the Culinary Institute at Greystone, graduated at the top of her class, and, after a few jobs working for other chefs, decided to open her own business.
Blackmarket Bakery was born, and Klemek has been setting new standards and defying old ones ever since. Her inspiration is what perhaps every chef’s inspiration should be: she makes what she gets excited about eating. She’s done the big, elaborate, cake sculptures, but she put it to rest after deciding that her heart didn’t lie with that kind of baking. “People see those TV shows and think that it’s, you know, no big deal. Those guys charge an arm and a leg! And most of those cakes aren’t even cake!” They’re pipes, wooden dowels, and that fondant stuff that nobody really even likes. She looks up from the egg whites she’s measuring, lowers her voice and smiles. “We’re much happier.”
The phone rings, and Klemek rushes to answer it after she clicks the bowl of butter, sugar, and egg whites into the mixer on the counter.
As she talks to a customer on the phone, the cogs of Blackmaket keep turning. Around the corner, one of Klemek’s assistants is decorating round sugar cookies for an Earth Day celebration, piping each one with blue and then green icing to look like little globes. In the back, a young man with his name and job title embroidered on his chef’s coat—David: Zombie Crew—is tossing diced apples in a sauce pan for the muffins and tarts Blackmarket bakes every morning. What does he like about working at Blackmarket?
“Her,” David points to Klemek, who is back to her tuile dough, tapping flour and cocoa powder through a sifter onto a sheet of wax paper. “It’s rare that you find an atmosphere like this, and people that you can just click with.”
David is right. From the personality of the head baker herself to the innovation she and her crew bring to the pastry world, what Blackmarket Bakery has is rare.
“We’re not French, we’re not southern, we’re not grandma’s home-style yum-yum, anything like that,” Klemek says over the whir of the mixer. What Blackmarket is, what Klemek has made it to be, is real food for real people. It’s the good stuff you can’t get in a world dominated by the mass produced and processed baked goods, or the over-the-top pastry creations of reality TV, or the cupcakes and cake pops that have seemed to be all the rage.
When it comes to what’s cutesy or trendy, Klemek doesn’t buy in. “I’m just…not a fan.” She watches the KitchenAid whip the butter and the sugar and the egg whites smooth, pouring in the flour and cocoa powder bit by bit. “I want to do more what my grandma would eat, or bake herself. Maybe update the flavors and make it more fun, but that’s the idea.” Klemek is embracing that heritage of making things from scratch, without fancy equipment, without fancy ingredients. “Just go to the grocery store!” Klemek says. “Butter flour sugar eggs. Chocolate. Cream. That’s it. And you can do practically anything.”
