Tesha Borin is championing the cause for vegans, vegetarians, and those with food intolerances. Having trained as a chef and worked for the likes of Ian Curley, she has now teamed up with her mum to create Buku, the cakery providing delicious clean treats for those who previously would have had to go without.
Hi Tesha. Let’s start with where it all began. What made you become a pastry chef?
I always knew I wanted to be a chef even from when I was in Year 7 at high school. Then my brother became a chef and I thought, no, we can’t be the same. But I always enjoyed baking cakes and pastries and I did that a lot with my grandmother, my nonna. She would show me lots of her tricks. That’s what initially got me into the pastry chef side of things. More specifically, the dietary requirements behind Buku are because of my mum. She is fructose and lactose intolerant and gluten sensitive. She started doing this on her own at home and then we had the great idea to really make it happen.
A lot of people miss out on things. I remember in the early stages of my career, my bosses would complain about people who had gluten intolerances and they’d say; fructose, lactose…what is this and everyone would freak out and have no idea. It dawned on me that it would be a good idea to help people enjoy food as much as chefs get to and have whatever they want.
And can they have whatever they want? Are you able to recreate that?
Sometimes people spring things on me, like vegan cake with no gluten and no nuts and I want to try and make that happen because these are people who miss out on a lot. It’s really important that we can provide. That’s my job; my mantra and my vision in life is to make that happen.
I was looking at your website with all the really beautiful photos of delicious looking cakes and things and I’ve tried making some recipes for my sister-in-law who is vegan and it can be quite expensive. How do you go with the price point on that?
It is expensive. A lot of the time we wear the costs as a business. But we do also have customers who eat like this all the time so they are aware of the fact that this kind of stuff does cost a little but more. But we try to make it as affordable as possible or as enjoyable as possible so that when you do have it, you enjoy it and you don’t necessarily think about how much it is costing. We try and make it fair; we wear a little bit, they wear a little bit. It’s a balance.
Did you need to do a lot of research about this kind of baking or did the techniques you learned as a chef lend themselves to experimenting?
It’s completely a 360° difference. Again, a lot of my skills are transferable so I think about a lot of the things I’ve learnt and I think about ways I can manipulate them to get a better result. We made a mud cake with egg; a gluten free mud cake because we are 100% gluten free, and it was shit; really, really horrible. We took the eggs out and replaced them with something else and it was phenomenal. It’s our best seller. You eat it and you don’t even know its vegan. These are the kinds of experiments I do that are so successful. But sometimes it takes me months to get something right. I was experimenting for two and a half years before we even opened so it was a lot of playing around. Half the time, you won’t even know our stuff is vegan or gluten free, or vegetarian. We try really hard to mimic a standard recipe.
That’s amazing because not so long ago, that just didn’t happen. If you were vegan or gluten intolerant, you just couldn’t have certain things or what was provided was…
Shit
Yes, that’s right.
It’s really true. A lot of the options that people have of these foods are horrible. They are either loaded with sugar, which is something I refuse to do. People don’t want that. People who are vegan or vegetarian often don’t want excess amounts of sugar. So we also went down the refined sugar-free line as well. We have everything covered and I think that makes it a lot more difficult for me because I’m manipulating, not one but three different elements. People’s perception of vegan stuff also sometimes is quite painful for us. They don’t have good options so they just think everything is going to taste the same. But in fact they are pleasantly surprised.
Are you vegan?
No. I tried going vegetarian for a couple of months and I only lasted that long because I’m used to having all the other stuff. I think I’m just going to have to do that because otherwise you’re not going to get a good replication of a phenomenal cake.
If you eat our cheesecake, which is raw, the texture is cheesecake, the taste is cheesecake. We try so damn hard to make these things amazing.
There are others doing some good raw vegan treats, but it does feel as though you have really cornered the market here.
We do have a few people who are direct competition for us with regard to the raw, not cooked, standard coconut stuff. We get a lot of feedback from people who say they are so sick of having a raw cheesecake that just tastes of coconut oil. If you eat our cheesecake, which is raw, the texture is cheesecake, the taste is cheesecake. We try so damn hard to make these things amazing. We do have some competition and we are a small business. People still don’t know that we’re around which is sad because sometimes you see articles or and Instagram blogger who says these are the vegan places to try and sometimes we’re not even on there because people don’t even know where we are. It’s sad because we offer a lot of food for these people.
You are also supplying to some cafes, like Kitty Burns in Abbotsford.
We do a very select amount of wholesale at the moment and we are looking at expanding that because we are getting so much demand for us, which for us is phenomenal. A lot of people on the south side of town just can’t get here. I get it. It’s painful crossing town and they want good stuff. I can only be in one place at one time.
You’re young…and I don’t mean that in any kind of condescending way; I’m really in awe. You have done incredibly well to get here. It must be a really big leap from working for other people to running your own business.
It’s completely different. It’s a mother daughter business and we learn and grow together. For me, it’s a completely different side of things having to know front of house and back of house and the money and blah blah blah is confusing but we get there in the end. We have really good people who support us and that is great.
You probably didn’t imagine this as the progression of your career and yet it feels really natural and as though you are doing what you are supposed to be doing.
We have had so many incredible opportunities just from opening this business. I have so many international connections now with other companies and I’m really lucky to be able to have the opportunity to fly overseas and work with other people on getting them to the same stage as Buku.
It’s fascinating that there are Instagrammers here who aren’t acknowledging you and you’re being acknowledged internationally. That’s pretty good.
It’s ironic. It’s ok, we’ll get out there, it’s just a matter of time.
555 High Street, Northcote