Alumni Spotlight Archives
Yvette Taylor PCP '06
by Lucia Jazayeri, CSCA Marketing Intern
It was a New Zealand winery that first introduced Yvette Taylor to dukkah. While working in marketing and kitchens there, she tasted a delicious mix of nuts, seeds, and spices, toasted and ground to a fine mixture. The flavor was aromatic and intense.
Dukkah, with roots in Egypt, was sprinkled and spread on everything from baked meat to flatbread dipped in olive oil. “Everybody in New Zealand ate it,” Taylor says.
Taylor returned to Massachusetts with hopes of attending culinary school, wondering if dukkah could delight an American audience. She enrolled at The CSCA and graduated in 2006 from the Professional Chef’s Program.
She had worked in kitchens before, but never in a formal classroom. “I was lucky to train under some pretty amazing chefs,” she says. “Many of them had been schooled in France, and I did hands-on work with them daily. When I went into the classroom, everything I had experienced in the kitchens of New Zealand made sense.”
Just three years after Taylor graduated, her dukkah is now the centerpiece of her Massachusetts-made condiment line, Queen of the Pantry, which was recently named to The Boston Globe Magazine’s list of 50 “Tasty, satisfying, surprising, fun, yummy, finger-licking” Food Finds of 2009.
Introducing a new product and building a brand around it hasn’t been easy. Taylor is the only New Englander marketing dukkah commercially, which she sells on her website, at Whole Foods, and other specialty stores. At The CSCA, Taylor met local chefs, business-owners, and future entrepreneurs, who lent advice when she was testing and marketing the condiments. “I’m still very close with the people in my graduating class,” she says. “It’s all about networking, word-of-mouth, and local audiences. You can’t figure out everything on your own, from the process of manufacturing a product to how to get it out on the shelves.”
Taylor’s passion for food goes back to tough times. When her mother and best friend were both diagnosed with cancer, cooking was a way that Taylor could help. A former figure skater, she had always paid attention to nutrition; but cooking for someone undergoing draining treatments had new rules.
Now, several of Taylor’s personal-chef clients are cancer patients or people on limited diets. Some can’t have fresh fruit because it interferes with chemotherapy; others can only eat puréed foods. “Everyone wants to help when a family member is sick, but you end up with a freezer full of lasagna,” Taylor says. “Simply being able to have a healthy meal together as a family is really important.”
Taylor consults with the patient’s nutritionists or the family, and makes meals packed with antioxidants and vitamins, in the patient’s home. “The way I look at it, and having experienced this myself, those meals are literally life or death,” she says. “Every single bite matters. Food takes on a whole new meaning.”
Taylor is also the executive chef of Hearty Meals for All, a service that offers free dinners every two weeks at the Community Baptist Church in Somerville. Taylor’s cousin, who is a social worker, asked Taylor to lend her expertise in helping to develop menus and to oversee the meal preparation. Much of the food is donated, and some is purchased from money received through donations. The goal is to get families eating healthy food together. At a recent dinner, bright oranges, greens, and reds of the bell peppers, chicken fajitas, whole grain tortillas, roasted dill potatoes, crispy slaw, and a giant apple crisp greeted guests as they arrived. Volunteers took orders from the guests, everyone applauded the amazingly energetic Chef Taylor, and the entire group then ate together.
Hearty Meals for All welcomes volunteers from The CSCA community. For more information on how to volunteer, contact Yvette Taylor at yvette@queenofthepantry.com.
To purchase Queen of the Pantry condiments, visit www.queenofthepantry.com.
Alumni Newsletter, Spring 2010
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