Meg Broderick
Culinary Arts Instructor,and Pastry Chef
Hello hello hello and welcome back, my sweet friends! It’s a new year and there are so many exciting things in the oven.
I’m kicking off 2021 with a profile of Meg Broderick. You may not know her name but you might recognize her influence in some of the pastry chefs working at local restaurants and bakeries. Meg is an instructor in the Culinary Arts department at Southern Maine Community College, a highly regarded program that provides local students interested in a career in the kitchen the opportunity to learn from professional, experienced faculty. She’s been teaching there full time for the past 15 years, and has a reputation as a no-nonsense teacher who loves what she does. “I try to get kids prepared for what it’s like out there,” Meg tells me. She would know. Chef Broderick has been baking and selling her goods since she was 14 years old, when she and her best friend spent the summer on Bustins Island. The two would bake breads, pies and cookies, then pile them into a wheelbarrow to sell door to door. There was no electricity and no running water on the island, and “no one really helped us,” she recounts. The two summers she did this prepared Meg for a baking life that took numerous twists, including a stint at the infamous Alice’s Restaurant in western Massachusetts and several months as part of the cooking team at an Antarctica military station. Back in Maine, she worked for the late Cranberry Island Kitchen, preparing fancy holiday peppermint cakes that were sold through Williams-Sonoma. She also helped the owners there prepare for a whoopie pie throwdown with Bobby Flay.
But what the chef really wanted was to share all this knowledge. “Baking is a proprietary thing,” she says. “ I want to share the knowledge I’ve learned along the way and get new people ready for the field. I was ready to share the shortcuts that work, and how you can take things a step further.” Two years ago, I took her Basic Baking class, along with five other more traditional students, aka 18 year olds. We each had a monogrammed chef’s jacket, with a Sharpie and thermometer tucked into the pocket and a clean apron each day. Together we learned our way around a commercial kitchen; how to measure and sift ingredients correctly; how to beat a pound of butter into submission for puff pastry; and that if your pie crust isn’t working, it’s okay to throw it out and start again.
Her students respectfully call her Chef Broderick, and she’s been known to strike fear in their hearts, especially when it comes to the “practical”. That’s the end of the semester, hands-on exam, where students have to take everything they’ve learned and put it to the test. Hands in your pockets? That’s a point off. Didn’t scrape out the bowl thoroughly? More points deducted. Don’t even think about using a timer for the oven. You should be able to assess doneness by sight, smell, and touch. The demanding parameters she sets has good results for those serious about baking. “The best comment is when I hear a student say ‘I’m never going to get a store-bought cake again,’ " Meg says.
During a normal holiday season, Meg and the other SMCC instructors would bake dozens of gingerbread houses for the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital. They’d spend an afternoon helping the kids decorate with piles of candy, and everyone would feel like a million bucks afterward. Sadly, the event was another victim of the pandemic, but Meg did make 20 decorate-yourself houses for other faculty members.
Friends and relatives often ask for baking help, so this year Meg held FaceTime “pie clinics”. She’s a self-confessed pie snob and has strong opinions on the dessert. “I don’t buy too many,” she says. “I like mine. Pandemic baking has given me so much instant gratification. I love sharing with friends and family.”
Sharing one’s knowledge with the next generation is a generous gift. The students who have had the good fortune to share the kitchen with Chef Broderick are aware of that. Along the way, there may be some grumbling about the rigor, but they’re grateful for her insights, experience and views on pie.