• September 12th, 2016
• Comments Off on People of Southport: Mackenzie

Mackenzie, our Lead Baker, has been at Southport for about a year and a half. Creating the perfect chocolate mousse was an obsession of his as a kid, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise that he ended up going to culinary school and focusing on baking. He really enjoys making food for people and likes the level of detail and focus that baking requires.

Culinary school was the perfect foundation for a baking career and now that he’s getting a lot more practice making different breads each day, he feels like he has massively improved his technical skills – rolling, shaping and getting each bread just right. Dutch crust, focaccia, English muffins, burger buns, soup rolls, biscuits: the list is long!

He hails from Portland, Oregon, and while he might miss the mountains and outdoorsy lifestyle, Chicago more than makes up for it by having his cousins nearby and then everything a city this size has to offer. “You can get whatever you want exactly when you want it.” Being a baker means you get to see another side to the city too – he enjoys the peaceful quiet and empty expressways at 5am.

The Southport biscuit is his favorite baked good and we can’t blame him. There’s something so comforting about flaky, buttery dough. In terms of our cafe menu, he’s all about the Mushroom Melt.

He loves baking at home and provides the cookies for pretty much every social gathering with his friends, so they’re the lucky guinea pigs for all the recipes he’s testing. His go-to cookie is a pecan meringue with coffee buttercream. When he’s not experimenting with flour, he loves video games, watching a good show on Netflix or learning some new Parkour moves.

Grabbing biscuits out of the oven

Comments are closed.