Seasonal Cooking: Food and Family with Jessica Castañeda

I have a confession to make. I’m something of a baking groupie.

I love watching baking shows. I follow my favorite bakers from “The Great British Baking Show” on social media. There is alchemy in the way that such simple ingredients – flour, sugar, and water – transform into breads and pastries. It’s miraculous.

But I don’t bake. I can’t. Baking is exacting. It’s precise. Baking is, at its heart, a series of chemical reactions that need precision, and I almost failed chemistry. A baker has to be a chemist, and a baker must be patient. Patience isn’t one of my virtues.

But I love watching bakers perform miracles in the kitchen. So perhaps that’s why I was fangirling so hard when I recently met Jessica Castañeda for coffee at Cherry Coffee Shop. Her Instagram account (@chefjessbakes) is a baking groupie’s dream. Luscious cakes decorated with beautiful flowers. Stunning breads made with fragrant herbs. (I swear you can smell the bread baking through your phone or laptop.) I will neither confirm nor deny that I squeal when Jessica posts a new story or reel.

Photo credit: Omorfia Imagery

As beautiful as her Instagram account is, it’s nothing compared to Jessica in person. Her hands are strong and capable but surprisingly graceful. She smiles with her eyes, and she radiates a serenity that is rare in a chef. Yes. A chef.

Because Jessica isn’t just a baker. She’s not just a pastry chef. There is a false dichotomy in the world of professional kitchens that says you can cook or you can bake. Jessica is proof that that just isn’t true.

Jessica Stampley Castañeda grew up in Minneapolis in her family’s kitchen. She and her family lived with her father’s mother (aka Big Mom) and two uncles. She absorbed her family’s food traditions and watched her parents as they ran a food truck.

“It was the ’90s, long before the food truck craze started,” Jess laughed. (She almost always answered my questions with a laugh or a chuckle or a giggle.) “This was a side hustle for them on top of their full-time jobs, but I saw how people lined up around the block for their fried catfish and fried okra and fried chicken. I saw how my parents took my dad’s family’s recipes and tweaked them to make them their own.”

Her older siblings helped their parents run the food truck, but as the youngest, Jessica just sat back and watched. And ate. And absorbed. She not only learned how to make the perfect fried catfish, but she also learned about food safety and customer service. She learned how to hustle, and she learned how to make your dreams a reality.

Photo courtesy of Jessica Castañeda

So, it’s not a real surprise that Jessica decided to go to culinary school after high school. While she was still in high school, she got a job in a café/bakery that made everything from scratch, and the lessons she learned there, combined with her time in her family’s kitchen and food truck, made her realize that she was destined for a career in cooking.

Most people who attend culinary school choose either the culinary arts program or the baking arts program. When Jessica was accepted to a culinary school in St. Paul, she decided to do both. So now she brings a pastry chef’s precision and eye for detail to her cooking and a chef’s love of experimentation and improvisation to her baking.

While still in school, Jessica was asked to stage at one of the area’s best restaurants. [Editor’s note: “Staging” (pronounced with a French accent) is essentially a kitchen audition. A cook or chef will work in a kitchen to prove they have the skills and training necessary.] Very few people are asked to stage while still in culinary school. Jessica was. She’s that good.

Jessica’s very first job out of culinary school was at the renowned Piccolo in Minneapolis. Chef/owner Doug Flicker created a tiny restaurant with a huge reputation built on small plates. (This was when the tapas and small plate revolution was in its infancy.) Anthony Bourdain, a New Yorker to his core who had the New Yorker’s disdain for any food from outside the Five Boroughs, waxed rhapsodic about it.

Jessica remembered, “The food at Piccolo was so dialed in. It was so precise and adventurous, and I love that we could run the kitchen with four of us, putting out up to 15 plates per person. A busy night for us was 60 people. But I learned so much there. You need to care not only what the plate looks like but what the ingredients are that go into making that beautiful plate.”

Photo credit: Omorfia Imagery

You might think that after working at one of the best restaurants in the country, anything else would be a comedown, but Jessica’s resume is studded with incredible jobs. After moving to the Metroplex in 2015 (her mother had moved to Irving earlier, and Jessica got tired of visiting every month), she got a job as the sous chef at Kate Weiser Chocolates, a luxury chocolate company that was founded in the DFW area. Weiser nominated Jessica for Zagat’s Dallas 30 Under 30, and she was one of its inaugural honorees.

Since then, Jessica has baked at the Black Rooster Bakery here in Fort Worth. She was the pastry chef at Gemma in Dallas. She worked at MELT Ice Creams. D Magazine called her a “renaissance woman.” And in each kitchen, she not only eagerly learned everything she could about the food, but she also watched and learned how to run a kitchen. “I went into each job ready to absorb everything I could about it so that I could use it in another season of my life,” Jessica said.

No one’s career path is straight and without difficulty. Jessica’s turn as executive chef at an urban farm that had expanded to include a coffee shop and café was not as positive as she had hoped. “I had all sorts of ideas of what we ‘should’ be doing there,” Jessica remembered. “I knew that there were going to be sacrifices to be made to balance my priorities of using the best ingredients to create the best food with the necessity of running a profitable kitchen. I was really, really proud of my team there. They were so great. But there was a lot of miscommunication with the management…”

Of course, the global Covid pandemic altered the world of restaurants, and Jessica was caught in the chaos of 2020. She said that she tried her best to keep her integrity as a chef while dealing with the increasingly impractical demands from management and the various safety regulations during the pandemic, but eventually, she realized that she had to prioritize her health, both mental and physical, so she left the world of professional kitchens in 2021. “That season of my life was ending, but I knew that there was something else on the horizon.”

By this time, Jessica had met and married Mark Castañeda, an engineer for Siemens who lived in Fort Worth. They live in a lovely house in Fairmount with a great kitchen and a beautiful garden. Jessica decided, upon leaving the restaurant, to take a page from her parents’ playbook, so she began to cook and bake for people on her own terms.

Jessica started a cottage baking business, taking advantage of Texas’ regulations that allow a baker to sell products directly to the consumer from the comfort of her home kitchen. She also continues to cook as a private chef and does pop-ups around town with other chefs like Victor Villarreal. She built up her clientele using her photographic and social media skills and now offers cooking classes and baking workshops.

“I never pictured leaving [the restaurant business],” Jessica said. “I have dreams and goals to open a place of my own at some point, but after all I’ve learned, I’m very particular about what it will look like versus the naïve ideas I had before. I want something very specific and small and particular. And that’s perfect for this season of my life and my family’s life.”

Photo credit: Omorfia Imagery

It’s perfect because Jessica and Mark have a young son, River. When I asked Jessica how it was working in her kitchen with a toddler, she burst into peals of laughter.

“It’s something else! I’m really glad that I honed my multitasking skills by working in a chaotic environment like a professional kitchen. I feel like it set me up for success. I’m working in my own kitchen now, and I get to see my child grow up. I still vividly remember seeing him roll over for the first time while I was elbow-deep in sourdough.”

Jessica paused for a minute. “Of course, it’s harder now that he’s walking.”

But if she needs to, Jessica puts River in the sling and keeps going. And she’s found a nurturing element in cooking that kicked up after having her son. “I grew up having my grandmother and my parents cook for me, and now I understand that they were not only making delicious food, but they were doing it because they love me and wanted to nourish and nurture me.

“I know that’s how I got to this season in my life. I get to cook and nurture my son. And when I’m cooking for my customers, I have this extra connection of care and nurturing for them. I’m not just making them food to make money. That’s why I’m so particular about how I do things, why I do things, and the ingredients I use. Cooking is truly sacred to me.”

It’s a cliché to say that Jessica cooks with love, but let’s face it, clichés are clichés for a reason. She also cooks with her family’s traditions and history to guide her.

“My husband’s aunt asked me to make potato salad for a family gathering. My potato salad is my mother’s potato salad. She learned how to make potato salad from her mother, but she also learned to make potato salad from her mother-in-law. When I called her to make sure I was doing it right, she said, ‘Well, Big Mom made it like this, but my mom made it like that, so I just took it and tweaked it for myself.’ And everyone at the party said it tasted just like the potato salad their grandma made.”

Photo courtesy of Jessica Castañeda

Jessica is not only bringing her son up in her family’s traditions, but she’s also bringing her husband’s Mexican roots into her cooking. She taught herself to make tortillas because her mother-in-law didn’t learn how to make tortillas. “It was important for me to learn so that I can teach him. It’s a part of who he is, and I want him to know and appreciate his roots.”

During the holidays, Jessica juggles a lot of different traditions in the kitchen. “My German mom basically took on my dad’s culture because she raised her kids in her mother-in-law’s house. She makes collard greens and cornbread and macaroni and cheese. We also do three different kinds of turkey – roasted, smoked, and fried. But we also have the beans and rice and tortillas from my husband’s Mexican roots, and do the roasted and smoked turkeys, too. It’s a lot of food, but these are the traditions that transcend logic. They are so intrinsically tied to our family and how we remember our family and our holidays, and these foods are what we need to see on the family table.”

Food doesn’t just fuel our bodies. We don’t eat just to get nutrients. Food is part of us. It makes up our souls. Every memory of family is intertwined with memories of Grandma’s pecan pie or Dad’s smoked brisket. Food connects us to the past and to the future.

Chef Jessica Castañeda understands this better than most. She left professional kitchens because she was entering a new season of life. Now, she can put her heart and soul into everything she makes, whether it’s a multi-layered cake made to her customer’s specifications or the roasted carrot soup she shared with Madeworthy for our Fresh Family Recipes. (See page six.) She uses only the best ingredients for the food she makes for her clients and for her family. She uses her family’s recipes, and now her son will grow up knowing his past. He’ll use her recipes, and his kids will use them, and they will become part of her family’s story.