Interview with Tourlami founder Susannah Schoolman

Susannah Schoolman, a world-class pastry chef turned founder of plant-based butter startup Tourlami, knows that sometimes appearances can be deceiving.

“If they just give you a packet of butter, it’s not very inspiring,” he told me.

But the simple appearance hasn’t stopped the pastry teams at Eleven Madison Park, Maman, Eataly and ABC Kitchen from working with Susannah’s vegan butter, and that’s because it produces desserts (and more!) that are just as good as dairy. some.

“Every restaurant meeting I have, I bake puff pastry, some cookies and a cake,” Susannah said. “Then suddenly (chefs) say, ‘Oh my God, if I can make puff pastry with this butter, then maybe I can make a croissant or maybe I can make a kouign-amann.’”

Creating this kind of bold culinary marvel is the former pastry chef’s main goal. Before creating Tourlami, Susannah was determined to develop her own line of high-end plant-based pastries to showcase the laminated doughs she had perfected while working for chefs such as Belinda Leong, Richard Hart and René Redzepi. But during research and development, it continued to encounter problems.

“There were no plant-based butters formulated specifically for foodservice use,” he told me, “a lot of these butters were formulated for retail applications, so they have this kind of one-size-fits-all product.”

In professional kitchens we do not have a single butter that works for all these applications. Most of the time we have two different butters (at least in all the kitchens I’ve worked in). You have this high fat European style French butter for your croissants, brioche, cake batters and cookies. And then you have bulk butter that is used for everything else,” he said.

So Susannah created the first one and to be frank, it’s great. And since we now sell it in our store, I sat down with her to find out exactly why her butter works so well.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Paul: From an ingredients perspective, what sets Tourlami apart from most plant-based butters?

Susannah: I use cocoa butter as our main saturated fat, not palm oil, and that makes a big difference in the outcome of the cakes due to the nature of cocoa butter versus palm oil.

How are they different?

Palm oil is a saturated fat, but it is a semi-solid saturated fat. When you work with it, you need to make it very cold, otherwise it will start to melt when you bake with it. When palm oil cools, the fat does not solidify, so you have this greasiness on your hands, in the container and on the palate.

But cocoa butter, on the other hand, is solid at room temperature. Then things solidify again and you get that flakiness, that crunchy texture and that richness. Plus, it’s a natural stabilizer and emulsifier, so I can make something like lemon curd without egg substitutes because cocoa butter is so rich.

How did you come up with this recipe?

57 rounds of research.

What does that look like?

It took me four years to go through the research and development process, then figure out manufacturing, and then distribution, before I sold anything. During those first two years, I built a test kitchen for myself and made croissants, chocolate chip cookies, and shortbread cookies. After each test I looked at it and said: Do croissants have fat? Do you have the raise I want? What does lamination look like? Are the cookies sticky? Do they have a sharp exterior? Are shortbread cookies gritty? Are they buttery? Are they rich?

Why did you want Tourlami to target restaurants specifically?

Because that’s the language I speak and that’s the industry I’ve been a part of for so long. I still have connections with the food service distributors I worked with when I was in the kitchens and I still know a lot of people who work in different kitchens in these different cities, so it made sense.

Obviously, Tourlami works in all cooking situations, but what are some recipes or dishes that you would recommend a home cook make first once they’ve gotten their hands on the butter?

When it comes to baking, I would definitely recommend starting with cookies. Cookies in general are very accessible and we have many great cookie recipes on our website that people can try. When cooking, you can brown the butter, making it an excellent sauce for pasta or vegetables. Just make sure that when you’re browning the butter, you’re working on high heat! There is organic cane sugar in the recipe, which is what is browned, so if you go low and slow, it will be harder to brown.