Interview With Tourlami Founder Susannah Schoolman

Susannah Schoolman—a world-class pastry chef turned founder of plant-based butter startup, Tourlami—knows that sometimes, looks can be deceiving.

“If you’re just handed a packet of butter, it’s not very inspiring,” she told me.

But unassuming looks haven’t stopped the pastry teams at Eleven Madison Park, Maman, Eataly, and ABC Kitchen from working with with Susannah’s vegan butter—and that’s because it produces desserts (and more!) that are just as good as dairy-based ones.

“With every single restaurant meeting I have, I’ll bake a puff pastry, some cookies, and a cake,” Susannah said. “Then all of a sudden [the chefs] are like, ‘oh my god, if I can make puff pastry with this butter, then maybe I can make a croissant or maybe I can do a kouign-amann.’”

Creating this sort of fearless, culinary wonderment is the former pastry chef’s primary goal. Prior to creating Tourlami, Susannah was set on developing her own high-end, plant-based pastry line to showcase the laminated doughs she’d perfected while working for chefs such as Belinda Leong, Richard Hart, and René Redzepi. But during research and development, she kept encountering problems.

“There were no plant-based butters specifically formulated for food service use,” she told me, “A lot of these butters were formulated for retail applications, so they have this kind of one-size-fits-all product.”

In professional kitchens, we don’t have one butter that’s used for all those applications. Most of the time we have two different butters—at least all the kitchens I’ve worked in—you have this high butterfat European style French butter for your croissants, for your brioche, for your pie doughs and biscuits. And then you have a bulk butter that’s used for everything else,” she said.

So, Susannah created the former—and, to be blunt, it rocks. And because we’re now selling it in our shop, I caught up with her to find out exactly why her butter works so well.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Paul: From an ingredients perspective, what makes Tourlami different from most plant-based butters?

Susannah: I use cocoa butter as our main saturated fat, not palm oil—and that makes a huge difference in the outcome of the pastries because of the nature of what cocoa butter is versus what palm oil is.

How are they different?

Palm oil is a saturated fat, but it’s a semi solid saturated fat. When you work with it, you have to work with it super cold, otherwise it’ll start to melt when you bake with it. When palm oil cools, the fat doesn’t solidify, so you have this greasiness on your hands, on the packaging, on your palate.

But cocoa butter, on the other hand, is solid at room temperature. So things resolidify and you get that flakiness, that crispiness, and you get that richness. Also, it’s a natural stabilizer and emulsifier—so I can make something like lemon curd without egg replacers because the cocoa butter is just so rich.

How did you land on this recipe?

57 rounds of research.

Um, what does that look like?

It took me four years to go through the research and development process, then figuring out manufacturing, and then distribution, before I sold anything. For those first two years, I built out a test kitchen for myself and would make croissants, chocolate chip cookies, and shortbread. After each test, I looked at it and said: Are the croissants greasy? Do they have the rise I want? What does the lamination look like? Are the cookies gooey? Do they have a crisp exterior? Are the shortbread cookies sandy? Are they buttery? Are they rich?

Why did you want Tourlami to be specifically geared towards restaurants?

Because that’s the language I speak and that’s the industry that I’ve been a part of for so long. I still have the connections to the food service distributors that I was working with when I was in kitchens and I still know a lot of people working in different kitchens in these different cities—so it just made sense.

Obviously, Tourlami works in all cooking situations, but what are some recipes or dishes you’d recommend a home cook make first once they’ve gotten your butter?

When it comes to baking, I would definitely recommend starting out with cookies. Cookies in general are super approachable, and we have a lot of great cookies recipes on our website that people can try out. When it comes to cooking, you can actually brown the butter, so it makes for a great pasta sauce or on vegetables. Just make sure that when you are browning the butter, you are working on high heat! There is organic cane sugar in the recipe which is what is browning, so if you go low and slow, it will be harder to brown.