The Baking Education Center: Instructors
Staff instructors
Staff instructors
Elisabeth Berthasavage
Elisabeth Berthasavage is a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vermont. Prior to King Arthur Flour, Elisabeth worked as a baker for several Vermont bakeries and was the bakery rounds instructor for the New England Culinary Institute. She loves all things pastry, with a concentration on custom cakes for weddings and other special occasions. Elisabeth's training took her to Germany for a year, where she had the opportunity to focus on modeling with marzipan, and this influence continues to have a real place in her cake designs today. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two children.
Amber Eisler
Amber Eisler is a bread baker in the King Arthur Bakery and teaches classes on baguettes, sourdough, wood-fired baking, and other topics in the Baking Education Center. Amber graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, where King Arthur Bakery Director Jeffrey Hamelman first piqued her interest in bread baking. "I love the process; I love creating something totally new," she says. "When you cook a chicken, it's still a chicken, but when you add ingredients to flour, you make it something completely different." Amber enjoys sharing her passion for baking through the hands-on experience in the classroom. Amber lives in Royalton, Vt., where she spends lots of time outdoors with her husband and daughter.
Sue Gray
Sue Gray has been an employee-owner at King Arthur Flour since 1997, joining the team in The Baker’s Store and quickly working her way into the test kitchen, where she first developed and tested recipes for the Baker’s Catalogue and The Baking Sheet subscription newsletter. Growing up “surrounded by flour and chocolate” in a family of bakers and eaters, Sue’s interest in food – and how ingredients work together – seems only natural. After graduating from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, with a dual degree in culinary arts and food service management, she worked for a number of restaurants in the Northeast before joining King Arthur Flour. As product development specialist, Sue has overseen the growth of King Arthur Flour’s line of award-winning baking mixes from about a dozen when she started, to about 180 today. She was the lead developer on the company’s newest line, gluten-free baking mixes, a subject in which she became the in-house expert during more than two years of experimenting. She does the baking and food styling for photographs in the Baker’s Catalogue and at kingarthurflour.com, using only real, edible baked goods. Sue is also co-author several King Arthur Flour cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion.
Jeffrey Hamelman
Jeffrey Hamelman came to King Arthur Flour in 1999 to open both the bakery and the teaching facility; he is now director of the King Arthur Bakery. He’s one of a limited number of Certified Master Bakers in the United States, and past captain and coach of Baking Team USA. He is the author of BREAD:A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. Jeffrey is a recipient of the Bread Baker’s Guild of America’s coveted Golden Baguette Award. He spends about three weeks of each month involved in production baking, loving the choreography of baking with others. The remaining time he spends teaching in the Baking Education Center, meeting people from all over the world, sharing his accumulated experience, and always learning from others.
Bonny Hooper
Bonny Hooper has been with King Arthur Flour since 1995. After working in a local bakery, she joined the customer service team, taking orders and fielding questions on the Baking Hotline. She moved to the Baking Education Center as an instructor and assistant when it opened in 2000, and teaching has been her passion ever since. She also runs King Arthur Flour’s busy retail store kitchen, turning out delicious baked goods daily and sharing her knowledge with the store’s many visitors. Bonny received accreditation from the American Institute of Baking and completed the Fundamentals of Bread Baking professional class with Jeffrey Hamelman. She is King Arthur’s resident pie expert and enjoys spending time with her husband, children, and grandchildren.
Michelle Kupiec
Michelle Kupiec has been with King Arthur Flour since 1997. She manned the Baking Hotline, fielding baking questions from all over the country, before joining the Baking Education Center in 2001 as an instructor and assistant. She helped build a clay wood-burning oven with Kiko Denzer, and loves creating naturally leavened breads and flatbreads in her own Vermont clay oven with her husband, Tom, and daughter, Gwen. In 2008, she traveled to the Dominican Republic as part of a group of volunteers to help local women learn recipes and skills for baking in volunteer-built wood-fired ovens. Michelle has completed both the Fundamentals of Bread Baking and Advanced Bread Baking classes with Jeffrey Hamelman.
Jessica Meyers
Jessica Meyers has a culinary arts background and has worked at King Arthur Flour since 2001 as a Baking Education Center instructor and assistant, an instructor for King Arthur's Traveling Baking Demos, and on the Baking Hotline. She lives in Canaan, New Hampshire, with her husband, Ryan, and her children, Alanna and Brayden, as well as two golden retrievers and a cat. “I feel that everyone has the potential to be a great baker and feel very fortunate to be a vital part of the learning process. As an instructor I see to it that the joy of baking lives on, and that makes me very proud,” says Jessica.
Susan Miller
Susan Miller is the Director of the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center, where she has worked since its opening in 2000. As Director, Susan teaches baking classes, oversees the creation of classroom curriculum and operations, and schedules classes and guest instructors. She is also a co-author of King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, nominated in 2007 for a James Beard Foundation Award. Susan came to King Arthur Flour after working for years in the food industry – baking for restaurants and developing truffle recipes for a Vermont chocolate company – and teaching elementary school. She enjoys baking everything from artisan breads to cakes and says what she loves about baking is the combination of its strict structure and the opportunities for creativity once a person masters the basics.
Sharon O’Leary
Sharon O'Leary bakes bread in the King Arthur Bakery and teaches about bread in the Baking Education Center, particularly baguettes, sourdough, and wood-fired baking classes. After raising children and then spending nearly 20 years baking professionally, Sharon came to King Arthur in 2001 and began teaching in 2005. She says her mother brought her to baking, and she's always been most interested in yeast bread. Sharon lives in Meriden, N.H., and when she's not baking or teaching she enjoys being outdoors, biking, cross-country skiing, hiking, running, and swimming.
Robyn Sargent
Robyn Sargent has been with King Arthur Flour since 1993. For many of those years she manned the Baking Hotline, fielding baking questions from as far away as Japan. She spreads the good King Arthur word through classes at the New England Culinary Institute, baking segments on local television, as instructor and curriculum writer for the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center, and on the road in King Arthur's Traveling Baking Demos. She also writes a column for The Baking Sheet. She received baking accreditation through the American Institute of Baking and lives in Vermont with her husband, Scott, and daughter, Megan. When not teaching and writing, Robyn enjoys gardening and foraging for wild mushrooms.
Irene Shover
Irene Shover came to King Arthur Flour’s customer service team and Baking Hotline in 2008. She joined the Baking Education Center in 2010 and is also a contributor to the Baking Banter blog. The oldest in a family of five children, Irene started baking in earnest around 8th grade. Her first batch of biscuits was disastrous (the stuff of family legend!), but her yeast breads were successful. She persevered to accomplish croquembouche, pies, and other baked goods. Irene has a bachelor’s degree in home economics and a master’s degree in education, and she taught home economics in grades seven through 12 for 29 years. She began attending baking classes at King Arthur Flour in the 1990s and still has notes from those classes. Irene lives in Bradford, Vermont, with her husband, Michael. When she’s not baking, she enjoys sewing, reading, going to her happy place with music from the ‘70s, and baseball – she’s visited more than half the major league parks in the United States.
Guest instructors
Gesine Bullock-Prado
Gesine Bullock-Prado is a baker, and author of My Life From Scratch: A Sweet Journey of Starting Over, One Cake at a Time. Born in Washington, D.C., Bullock-Prado spent her early years in Germany and Austria. She moved back to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. After serving as head of her celebrity sister’s production company, Bullock-Prado turned her hobby of baking into a new life in Montpelier, Vermont, where she opened Gesine Confectionary. Her confections have been featured on Food Network’s Road Tasted with the Neelys, and in such publications as InStyle, People, Vermont Life, and Boston Common.
Sarah Copeland
Sarah Copeland is a passionate baker, gardener and curator of good living. By day, she is a seasoned recipe developer; by night, a consummate forager for edible adventures. After training in both New York City and France, Copeland spent over 5 years as a recipe developer for the Food Network. Her recipes have appeared in The Food Network Magazine, Real Simple,and Saveur magazines, and she is a frequent guest instructor at culinary schools and destination resorts in the US and abroad. Copeland is the author of the blog Edible Living and The Newlywed Cookbook: Fresh Ideas and Modern Recipes for Cooking With and For Each Other (2012, Chronicle Books). She's currently working on her next book, due out in 2013.
Ciril Hitz
Ciril Hitz is a baking/pastry instructor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hitz received his artistic education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree in industrial design. Upon graduating, he completed a 3-year pastry/chocolate apprenticeship in his native Switzerland. He competed in the 2004 National Bread & Pastry Team Championship in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his team took first place overall, and Hitz captured the individual honors for Best Bread Showpiece, Best Bread Degustation, and Best Viennoiserie Degustation. He was also the artistic category representative on the silver-medal-winning 2002 Bread Bakers’ Guild of America team that represented the USA at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris.
En-Ming Hsu
A native of Richmond, Virginia, En-Ming Hsu holds an A.O.S. degree in Baking and Pastry from The Culinary Institute of America and a B.S. degree in studio arts from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She credits her art education as a primary influence in the design and presentation of her pastry creations. Drawing from her education, Hsu has mastered chocolate and sugar showpiece work, in addition to creating classic European and American pastries. Hsu served as Team Captain of the United States team that took the Gold Medal at the World Pastry Cup in Lyon, France, in 2001. At the 2010 Amoretti World Pastry Team Championship, Hsu was named Pastry Chef of the Year. In 2009, she was named “Dame de l'Année’’ by Académie Culinaire de France. She was named “Rising Star Chef of 1999” for the James Beard Foundation. In 1997, she was named "Pastry Chef of the Year in America," for capturing the gold medal at the Paris Gourmet Pastry One Competition. Hsu’s work has been featured in Art Culinaire, Food Arts, Gourmet, Chef’s Magazine, Pastry Art & Design, Pastry’s Best, and Shelter magazines. She is a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier and Académie Culinaire de France. She is a Pastry Chef Consultant and teaches in the L’Art de la Pâtisserie program at the French Pastry School in Chicago.
Paul Krcmar
Paul Krcmar is a pizzaiolo at American Flatbread in Waitsfield, Vermont. He is a devotée of the Slow Food movement and is passionate about working with (and eating) organically grown foods and free-range meats. He works regularly with the restaurant’s soapstone hearth clay wood-burning oven, baking pizzas and flatbreads of all flavors and food combinations. He lives in Vermont with his wife and children.
Emily Luchetti
Emily Luchetti, executive pastry chef at Waterbar and Farallon restaurants in San Francisco, is recognized around the world for her award-winning sweet creations. Fundamental to her passion for baking is the belief that desserts increase the social experiences and interactions of friends and family as they linger around the table. Luchetti has written five cookbooks: Stars Desserts, Four Star Desserts, A Passion for Desserts, A Passion for Ice Cream, and The Fearless Baker - 175 Surprisingly Simple and Utterly Indulgent Recipes (due out Spring 2011); and created the dessert recipes for The Farallon Cookbook. Luchetti and her recipes appear regularly in national newspapers and magazines, and she has been featured on numerous news programs and The Food Network’s The Ultimate Kitchen, Sweet Dreams, Cookin’ Live with Sara Moulton, Sara’s Secrets and The Martha Stewart Show. She was the co-host of the PBS Series The Holiday Table. Luchetti’s honors include a 2004 James Beard Award, and being named one of 20 Visionary Chefs in the Bay Area in 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle.
James MacGuire
James MacGuire works as a baking consultant and teacher, and has held bread seminars for The American Institute of Baking, The Culinary Institute of America, and The Bread Bakers’ Guild of America. He is a frequent guest instructor in the Baking Education Center. With Dr. Ronald Wirtz, James translated Professor Raymond Calvel’s last book, The Taste of Bread, from its original French into English. MacGuire opened Le Passe-Partout in Montreal in 1981. The thirty-seat restaurant featured a small changing menu of cuisine du marché, where almost everything was made in-house. He later added a bakery, where his bread and viennoiserie were considered the best in the city.
Roland Mesnier
Born in Bonnay, France, Roland Mesnier discovered his vocation by accident on a summer day at the age of twelve. Apprenticing to his older brother Jean, he began working at the local patisserie in exchange for room and board. From there he worked as a pastry chef at well-regarded resorts in London, Bermuda, Paris, and the United States. Mesnier began his career as White House Executive Pastry Chef in 1979 and went on to become the longest-tenured chef ever to serve there, retiring in 2004. During this time he developed and taught the first professional Pastry Arts Program at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Maryland. Mesnier has won 18 gold medals, 4 silver, and 3 bronze for his pastry creations in competitions around the world. He is a member of the Académie Culinaire de France and the recipient of many awards and accolades, including the French Legion of Honor in 2005 – the highest honor bestowed on a French citizen; that same year he was inducted into the Chocolate and Pastry Hall of Fame in New York. He was awarded a Doctorate of Culinary Arts from the prestigious Johnson & Wales University in South Carolina. He is the author of three books, Dessert University, Basic to Beautiful Cakes, and All the Presidents Pastries: Twenty Five Years at the White House, A Memoir.
Richard Miscovich
Richard Miscovich is an instructor at the International Baking & Pastry Institute at Johnson & Wales University. He also owns and operates One Acre Garden and Bakery in Beaufort, North Carolina, where he bakes organic hearth breads in Magdalena, the wood-fired brick oven he built. He spends the summer in North Carolina growing a variety of grains and baking commercially for wholesale accounts. Since building his oven in 1996, Miscovich has been involved in the construction of several styles of wood-fired ovens. He moved to Johnson & Wales from the King Arthur Bakery and Baking Education Center, where he was head bread baker, baking instructor, assistant education coordinator, and bakery consultant. He contributed to The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, which won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award in 2004. A member of the Bread Bakers’ Guild of America, Miscovich is also deeply interested in the Slow Food movement and organic farming. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Michigan State University, and is currently working on his MBA in marketing at the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School. His formal training in baking includes master classes with Lionel Vatinet and Didier Rosada.
Dede Wilson
Dede Wilson is the author of 13 books including the best-selling A Baker’s Field Guide to Cupcakes and A Baker’s Field Guide to Christmas Cookies. Her most recent book is Unforgettable Desserts (Wiley, 2009). Wilson is a Contributing Editor to Bon Appétit magazine, for which she writes articles and makes frequent television appearances on TODAY and Dr. Oz, among other shows. She has worked professionally for more than 25 years as a restaurant chef, bakery owner, caterer, recipe developer, radio talk-show host, spokesperson, and frequent television guest. Visit her websites, Dedewilson.com and bakepedia.com, for more information. Wilson is a Certified Culinary professional; she lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Dan Wing
Dan Wing, a biologist and physician by training, is author of The Bread Builders and has written for publications as various as Fine Homebuilding and The Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He travels from his home in Vermont in a gypsy wagon of his own construction, towing the bread oven he built and sharing his deep passion and knowledge of bread (and his naturally leavened wood-fire baked loaves) throughout the region.
Scott Woolsey
Scott Woolsey, manager of Killdeer Farm in Norwich, Vermont, knows his vegetables; he spent years learning the fine points of the perfectly picked vegetable and the cooking techniques that enhance flavor. Woolsey is a member of the Fresh Food Network and loves cooking with organically grown produce, free-range meats, and local wild-gathered foods.
Peter Yuen
Peter Yuen is a second-generation baker/pastry chef who emigrated with his family from Hong Kong in 1981 at age 11. Throughout his childhood, Yuen worked part time at his family’s bakery, where he began learning lamination at the early age of 12. He later returned to Hong Kong, where he trained in the art of Classical baking as an apprentice to several legendary master bakers. He graduated from the world-renowned French Pastry School in Chicago in 2000 and was later recruited by Chef Keegan Gerhard to work at the Four Seasons Chicago – the chain’s flagship property. With a growing interest in bread making, Yuen became head baker of the newly opened Sofitel Chicago Water Tower. He and his wife, Susan, opened their own up-scale bakery – La Patisserie P – in 2004. Yuen was a member of Bread Bakers Guild of America Team USA 2008 in the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie and placed first in the Viennoiserie category. He placed second in the 2010 Masters de la Boulangerie.
