{"id":41928,"date":"2025-12-30T00:42:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T00:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-5-red-flags-a-michelin-star-pastry-chef-looks-for-when-visiting-a-bakery\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T00:42:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T00:42:30","slug":"the-5-red-flags-a-michelin-star-pastry-chef-looks-for-when-visiting-a-bakery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-5-red-flags-a-michelin-star-pastry-chef-looks-for-when-visiting-a-bakery\/","title":{"rendered":"The 5 red flags a Michelin-star pastry chef looks for when visiting a bakery"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/660d93ac1caec1275a6c6f79?format=jpeg\" alt=\"A graphic of a layered cake with two red flags sticking out of the top of it.\"\/><figcaption>\n<p>Chelsea Jia Feng\/BI<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Michelin-star pastry chef Camari Mick shared the red flags she looks for at upscale bakeries.<\/li>\n<li>Filled cannoli shouldn&#039;t sit in a pastry case for long, and bread shouldn&#039;t be wrapped while warm.<\/li>\n<li>If a pastry looks different in every photo, it&#039;s probably not going to be consistently good.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Food can get expensive, which means it&#039;s as important as ever to seek out good value with every purchase \u2014 even the croissant you have with your morning coffee.<\/p>\n<p>Just ask Camari Mick, the executive pastry chef at The Musket Room, who&#039;s also a partner at Raf&#039;s.<\/p>\n<p>Mick knows her way around a bakery. She grew up visiting local shops and then studied the art of pastry in fine-dining restaurants across New York City. At Raf&#039;s, Mick turns out breads, croissants, and more for the restaurant&#039;s daytime bakery while leading the rest of the pastry program.<\/p>\n<p>Dubbed NYC&#039;s dessert doyenne, the chef has developed her own set of red flags to look out for whenever she visits high-end bakeries.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#039;s how you can tell if you&#039;re at a spot that&#039;s serving high-quality products.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>A great bakery should be able to nail the basics<\/strong><\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/660c4c6116bde8d4ead4d2fe?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Person using tongs to pick up an almond croissant from a bakery\"\/><figcaption>Croissants should never be so uniform that they look machine-made.<\/p>\n<p>Thai Liang Lim\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The first thing Mick does when she walks into a high-end bakery is study the classics. If she sees croissants, she&#039;ll look at the plain variety, taking note of the folds that make up the pastry&#039;s lamination.<\/p>\n<p>Some great bakeries will have croissants with layers that look perfectly aligned, others might take on a more rustic feel and seem more obviously hand-rolled. Both are welcome characteristics, Mick says.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#039;s a bad sign if the lamination is &quot;very thick, or small, or not uniform,&quot; she told Business Insider. And if the croissants look perfectly machine-made, something may not be right in the kitchen.<\/p>\n<p>Mick also looks at the color of the croissants, which can clue you into how they may taste. If it&#039;s too blonde on the outside, it may not have much flavor inside.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, she says, a pastry probably won&#039;t be super flaky if it looks as if it was &quot;sweating on itself&quot; after being covered while hot, and you can see its layers are wrinkly.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, Mick says, if it doesn&#039;t look as if love has been put into the pastries, she &quot;probably will only just grab a coffee.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Beware of bread that&#039;s wrapped<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Mick says high-end bakeries should only be selling fresh bread.<\/p>\n<p>Ideally, you should touch the bread to see whether it&#039;s too hard. If that&#039;s not an option, there are telltale signs a loaf could be subpar.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you were looking at any bread and it looks super voluptuous and almost fresh out of the oven, you&#039;re good to go,&quot; she told BI. &quot;But if you see that the bread is already wrapped, whether it be in plastic or paper, it&#039;s probably an indicator that it was wrapped warm and is not going to be good.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Mick says fresh bread needs room to breathe, and wrapping it even while it&#039;s only slightly warm will cause it to steam itself, potentially making it soggy.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>If the pastries don&#039;t look the same in most photos, it&#039;s hard to trust they&#039;ll be consistently good<\/strong><\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/660c4d361caec1275a6c0cb0?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Colorful eclairs in display case\"\/><figcaption>It can&#039;t hurt to check customer photos of pastries from a bakery.<\/p>\n<p>ciobanu ana maria\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Before she even steps into a bakery, Mick may turn to Instagram for visuals.<\/p>\n<p>First, she&#039;ll comb through the location tag for any given bakery, keeping an eye out for whatever item she was hoping to order.<\/p>\n<p>She tries to see whether the baked good looks the same in all of the photos shared by diners. If it looks different every few pictures, she&#039;s probably not going to order it because it&#039;s unlikely to be very good, or the quality may vary depending on the batch.<\/p>\n<p>And when you&#039;re going to be spending a chunk of change at a pricier bakery, you don&#039;t want quality to be left up to chance.<\/p>\n<h2>Some pastries should only be made to order<\/h2>\n<p>The pastry chef says her understanding of chemistry also makes her hesitant to buy certain pastries that aren&#039;t made to order.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You know that a crispy something filled with a moist, wet filling is going to be soggy after sitting for, like, 10 minutes,&quot; Mick said.<\/p>\n<p>For example, a bakery that fills cannoli shells and leaves them in the case until they&#039;re purchased raises some concerns.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Cleanliness in customer-facing spaces says a lot about cleanliness in the kitchen<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Look out for flies around the pastry case, Mick warns.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you see any type of fly problem or any kind of insect infestation in the case, be sure it&#039;s everywhere,&quot; she told BI.<\/p>\n<p>You may even want to peek into the bakery&#039;s bathroom before placing an order.<\/p>\n<p>She added: &quot;I&#039;m a big believer on if their bathroom is messy, their kitchen is messy.&quot;<\/p>\n<p><em>This story was originally published on April 3, 2024, and most recently updated on December 29, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chelsea Jia Feng\/BI Michelin-star pastry chef Camari Mick shared the red flags she looks for at upscale bakeries. Filled cannoli shouldn&#039;t sit in a pastry case for long, and bread shouldn&#039;t be wrapped while warm. If a pastry looks different in every photo, it&#039;s probably not going to be consistently good. Food can get expensive, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41928","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}