
Buddy Valastro, also known as the Cake Boss, has been a household name since his eponymous show premiered on TLC in 2009. He’s been baking at the family business since he was only 11, and what was once a single location known for special occasion cakes and Italian treats is now an industry unto itself. With baked goods shipped nationwide, available in grocery stores, and even in their own vending machine, you may think that the quality of Carlo’s Bakery’s products has gone down, but, as Buddy explains below, the factory setting has allowed for greater consistency in their scratch-made cakes. Beyondish chatted with the big boss about how technology benefits bakeries, the changes he’s had to make with expansion, his long career doing his dream job, and how his home cooking has influenced his work.
On baking in a factory:
In the original bakery, I don’t know that things were ever handmade. We used to use a 140 quart mixer and then we would put the ingredients in and mix it. Then, my batch was like 200 pounds. Now my batch is like 800 pounds. It’s just in a bigger mixer. We still have the same kind of rhythm and motion, and it’s the same exact cake batter and recipe that we always used, just instead of doing the 2000 pounds that we would do at the bakery, now we do 100,000 pounds.
On new technology:
The equipment that we have now actually has more technology in it. We call it a continuous mixer. You make your mix halfway and then it pumps into this big silo and it goes into this homogenizer where you create exactly what you’re looking for in terms of specific gravity, the amount of bubbles inside the cake. In our old mixer, you had to almost guess that. We would whip it and then we would take a measuring cup and weigh it against the weight of water. With this, the consistency is always the same.
On the cost-benefit analysis of baking:
You think about the machine that ices the cake. If I had to ice 100 cakes, no problem. I could ice them by hand and do it the old fashioned way. But if you’re trying to do 20,000 cakes in a day, how are you gonna hand-ice them? And then again, you have to say to yourself, if I did hand-ice them and I had enough bakers to do it, how much would that cost to be able to sell it to the supermarket? The supermarket wants to sell a cake for $12, so we’ve got to be able to make them cheap enough. The only way you’re able to do that is to make efficiencies. Our cream cheese icing, it’s 50% cream cheese. When you eat it, it tastes like cream cheese.
On limitations:
You always think, what’s the holy grail of cakes that you want people to be able to eat? But then you have to think of how you can make them and make them efficiently and how it will last through the freeze and how much shelf life it will have without preservatives. Take a strawberry shortcake, my favorite cake on the planet, delicious, but day two, the strawberries start to go. There’s nothing you could do that can really control that. As good as that is, that’s a harder cake to mass scale. So we pick things that will last. We don’t use any preservatives.
On freezing:
There’s a huge misconception with freezing. Just in case everybody doesn’t know, I would say 99.9% of every single cake you’ve ever eaten that you’ve bought somewhere has been frozen at some point. If I baked the cake and left it on the shelf, then I gotta cut it, decorate it and everything else right away. It’s better off being in the freezer because you stop the drying time right there. Cake is like a sponge. Sometimes it’s even more moist when it comes out of the freezer. And we’re using liquid nitrogen to freeze our product, which makes it even faster. We freeze it inside out. So we freeze the cake layers, build the cake and then freeze the outside. If you try to freeze a whole pallet of cake, it would probably take two to three days to penetrate through the cardboard to get that center cake to freeze. We’re freezing cakes individually. It’s more costly but I think it preserves the product.
On community:
I’m still on the street, we still have our retail bakeries. If you met me ten or twenty years ago or today, I’m still the same person. I never forget where I came from and I appreciate it. I’m doing some collabs with some old school bakers on social in the next few months because I watch their videos and it reminds me of the old bakery, of what I used to do. It’s nostalgic to me.
On finding your dream job:
After all these years and all these cakes, I still get a kick out of it. If I’m at the factory, I eat cake every day and I don’t get sick of it. The best part of my day is where I come into the factory. I didn’t do it purposely, but the ovens vent right out our front door. When I walk in in the morning, I can smell and know what’s baking. It becomes fun — oh, today’s carrot cake, you can smell the cinnamon and pineapple. It’s pretty cool. I think back to my dad. If my dad could have seen the way we do the cake, he would be so proud and blown away. You couldn’t ever dream it. We do 25 to 40 cakes a minute, it’s pretty insane, and it’s all still 100% scratch made, quality cake.
On running a family business:
Pros and cons: the pro is, I’m always with my family. The con is, I’m always with my family. Depends on the day and everyone’s moods. I’m really proud. My daughter just graduated college and started working here full time. I’m happy to see my kids follow in my footsteps and to build something great with them like I wanted to do with my dad.
On television:
It was kind of the start of reality TV when I started. There weren’t a ton of cooking shows, but I always loved watching the Food Network OGs like Emeril and Bobby Flay. And they’re such nice guys. The kind of chefs that after you meet them, you want to inspire people like they do. We’re actually a tight community. We love and respect each other because we’re in this together.
On career longevity.
I love doing television. I don’t wanna say it comes easy at this point because I’ve done it for so many years, but last year I won an Emmy, which was the cherry on top. I would never in a million years have imagined. I got so many messages from all my childhood friends. That lets me know what I’m doing means something to people. My favorite part of making television was that it inspired people. When people would watch Cake Boss, they wanted to bake. I was just at a convention and so many people told me how I helped them go into baking.
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