It all started back in August, when Laura Yee received an email invitation from Urban Belly to a multicourse backyard barbecue event with Aperol. She noticed that there wasn’t dessert on the menu, so she texted Chef Bill Kim, offering to bring miso chocolate chip cookies. Her cookies were so well-received that Kim suggested she do pop-ups at the side window of Urban Belly’s Wicker Park location. That was the encouragement Yee needed to launch her fledging baking business, the Chinese Mom Kitchen. Yee had been perfecting recipes and giving away sourdough bread, milk bread, and cookies to friends for more than a year, but in a few short weeks, she scrambled with branding, packaging, and logistics to make the pop-up a reality.
“Pulling off nine consecutive Sunday pop-ups at Urban Belly has been the most physically challenging but the most exhilarating work I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s given me greater appreciation of the people in food service and the commitment they bring to their craft.” Yee is a veteran food journalist and editor, most recently overseeing production for US Foods’s Food Fanatics magazine, but this is her first foray into owning her own business.
Credit: courtesy Laura Yee
“You can research, interview, and write about the business for the last 25 years like I have, but you don’t really know how hard it is until you do it regularly,” she says. “It’s certainly not lucrative, at least not in the beginning.” Friends chipped in to help, standing on the street corner offering samples of miso chocolate chip cookies and chili crisp crackers to passersby. Her Sunday pop-ups strategically coincided with the Wicker Park farmers’ market just down the street to glean traffic from neighborhood foodies. Yee still isn’t sure whether she made money from the nine-week endeavor, but she considers the pop-up an experiment. “It’s more about what I learned and how I can do this better.”
Figuring out how much product to make was always a challenge. After selling out one week, Yee made extra the next only to have it languish because it was the Chicago Marathon weekend, and many potential customers had decided to stay home. “I never got it quite right,” she muses. “It might be gangbusters one week and crickets the next.”
Miso chocolate chip cookies are one of her best-selling items. She originally called them “umami chocolate chip cookies,” but after several weeks of customers asking what was in them and not understanding what the word “umami” meant, she changed the name, and suddenly, they took off.
“Every time it rises and it comes out of the oven, you think you’ve split atoms, and you get this great joy.”
“I love the miso spice cookie with its fresh ginger, spices, and crispy edges, but people seem to prefer chocolate chip,” Yee says. She uses white and red miso in the miso spice and miso chocolate chip cookies, with a slightly different ratio for each cookie. “Red miso tends to have a deeper, saltier flavor,” she explains. “When you put miso in the cookie batter, it’s already heavenly. And then when you bake it, it tastes totally different.” On the savory side, her ultra-crunchy and buttery sourdough chili crisp crackers are a hit, along with scallion pancake-inspired sourdough crackers.
Yee’s love of baking stems from her childhood growing up in Boston in the 1970s with an Easy Bake Oven. “My mom was a single mom who worked three jobs to support us,” she says. Yee recalls making her mom meals that she could enjoy at home in between shifts at a Chinese restaurant and as a cocktail waitress, where she sometimes worked until 2 AM. Yee’s peach and cream cake was one of her mom’s favorites, made with yellow cake mix, canned Del Monte peaches, and Cool Whip.
Credit: courtesy Laura Yee
“Every time it rises and it comes out of the oven, you think you’ve split atoms, and you get this great joy,” she says. Yee still feels that same joy from baking and loves sharing tangible treats with friends, family, and customers. “It’s really gratifying in a way that sometimes other work is not.”
For now, Yee is baking out of her home kitchen, but her next step is looking for commercial kitchen space to expand production. She plans to be at a Chicago farmers’ market next year, and for now, she is taking orders online for local delivery and nationwide shipping.
“I’m crazy about freshness,” Yee says. “You can’t send things overnight, because it’s just too expensive.” Cookies and sourdough scallion and chili crisp crackers will be available for shipping, along with a lemon verbena peach jam that she makes with Mick Klug Farms peaches and lemon verbena from her own yard. More perishable treats like pineapple buns, cheeky furikake buns, sourdough, and milk bread are only available for local delivery and pickup. Follow along on Instagram @thechinesemomkitchen to learn about upcoming pop-up events at Urban Belly this holiday season.
The Chinese Mom Kitchen
Holiday pop-ups Tue 11/26 and Wed 11/27, local delivery and pickup available Sundays, Urban Belly, 1542 N. Damen
thechinesemomkitchen.com
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