
Amber Rose Cancino, Executive Pastry Chef, Bryn Mawr CC
When preparing pastry, salty and spicy aren’t always top of mind. But for recipes that incorporate more complex flavors, breads, rolls and biscuits can be transformed into unconventional dishes that take dough to a whole new level.
For Executive Pastry Chef Amber Rose Cancino, being able to recreate the flavors she grew up with and introduce them to a new audience at Bryn Mawr Country Club is a treat all by itself. She has spent the past four years at the Lincolnwood, Ill. facility, finding creative ways to add childhood favorites to the club menu and expand the membership’s palate.
“For the past couple of seasons, savory pastries were offered just for banquet events,” Cancino says, noting the additions of lavash, popovers, gougères, and cheddar scones. These were simple items we could roll out on top of our regular production and with a limited staff.”
With more opportunities to experiment during the off-season, she and her pastry sous chef have been working together to create new savory items for dinner service, including tomato goat cheese focaccia, challah rolls, and buttery gruyere biscuits.
Although Bryn Mawr marks Cancino’s first private club culinary experience, her previous stints in the restaurant business and luxury catering have prepared her well. The former pastry chef for the Rosemont, Ill., convention center harnessed her high-volume production skills at the club where Cancino is currently pulling double duty as the interim executive chef.

Mexican chorizo y queso Chihuahua quiche with chipotle adobo crema
“I’m not doing parties of 2,000 anymore,” she notes, “but with multiple outlets here, plus banquets, lunch and dinner service, we are cranking out a lot of pastries daily.”
Cancino has been rolling out some new quiche recipes in the kitchen for the brunch crowd. Her favorite is the Mexican chorizo y queso Chihuahua quiche with chipotle adobo crema. On the banquet appetizer menu, she will be adding mini pastelillos: deep-fried empanadas made with a flour tortilla dough and filled with seasoned ground beef and manzanilla Spanish olives.
Both savory items were inspired by Cancino’s Puerto Rican-Mexican upbringing. The quiche concept is a nod to her favorite breakfast, chorizo con huevos, prepared by her mom on Saturday mornings, along with flour tortillas, while the pastelillos were lovingly prepared by her abuela. “The smell of deep-fried dough and spices greeting me as I came home from school or work always made me happy,” she recalls.
The ambitious chef has come to realize that preparing savory pastries has its fair share of ups and downs, like adding too many components.
“The flavors I loved growing up were getting lost in all the busyness,” she explains. “So, I had to pull back a bit and let the flavors of my childhood shine.”
For chefs who have yet to dabble in savory pastry, Cancino advises them to start with one or two items and not be afraid of making mistakes.
She adds, “Spotlight your savory items and make them special—something that your members and guests can notice.”
Thinking Outside the Bun
A robust pastry program at Greystone Golf & Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., has enabled Pastry Chef Kat Arredondo to expand her repertoire, enhancing her creations with savory elements. Having spent the past 20 years as a pastry chef—everywhere from bakeries and restaurants to catering and, finally, private clubs—Arredondo has learned how unique pairings can amplify bread and fresh pastry. She works closely with Executive Chef Alan Martin, whom she met during her first restaurant job.
“[Arredondo] excelled at making all our desserts and bread. She was a valuable member of our team,” says Martin.

Greystone G&CC Pastry Chef Kat Arredondo
When the two met up again six years later at Greystone, Arredondo was able to partner with Martin and help grow the club’s pastry program into a full-scale operation. She went from a part-time line cook handling mostly premade desserts to all house-made desserts, a fresh bread program, and freshly baked pastries and breakfast items for the club’s café. Arredondo prepares French bread, ciabatta, and biscuits for breakfast sandwiches and adds pepper jelly as a special enhancement to the menu in one of the club’s restaurants.
Also on the savory pastry menu are pizza dough, pâte à choux, lavash crackers, savory tart doughs, and buttermilk biscuits. On the banquet side, her mushroom leek tart is a member favorite. For it, she makes savory tart dough and savory egg custard, cooks mushrooms and leeks, and adds them to the filling.
“The meatiness of the mushrooms and the onion flavor from the leeks with the savory custard and flaky crust go together like a peanut butter chocolate cake,” says Arredondo. “It’s a match made in heaven.”

mushroom leek tart
She acknowledges that finding new ways to reinvent flavor profiles in savory treats can be challenging since many concepts have already been developed. When tasked with making savory tarts, Arredondo recommends imagining what ingredients would work for a breakfast omelet and cooking them together. For instance, she suggests swapping out mushrooms and leeks for bacon, cheddar, and spinach and then adding some fresh garlic.
“It is amazing how things like garlic, a little lemon zest, or a pinch of nutmeg will add another layer of flavor you didn’t even know you needed or wanted,” she adds.
Inspiration for Arredondo’s recipes stems from a variety of sources.
“I talk to our chef about what product he is looking for, and then it’s just researching different cookbooks and reading about it or just looking on the internet for something I can manipulate,” she explains. Her pairings have earned high praise from the kitchen.
“Kat has a fantastic work ethic and is incredibly talented,” says Martin. “Her near-perfect balance of sweet and savory, richness, acidity and texture complements every dish.”
But Arredondo’s mastery has not been without its challenges, including when she first crafted pâte brisée.
“To me, sugar and salt are essential in everything baked goods,” she says. “[I had to] find a balance between enough sugar for color, but not so much that it tasted sweet and also upping the salt to taste, but not overpower the flavor of the dough.”
With some trial and error, Arredondo found her happy medium.
“Once I got the sugar where I wanted, I started working on the salt, going up half-teaspoon increments until I got the balance I was looking for,” she adds.
When advising others on how to achieve equality in sweet vs. savory, Arredondo believes in doing your homework and looking at different examples, but not shying away from creativity.
“I was lucky enough to have been educated in an environment where pastry and savory flowed from the beginning,” she says. “I would tell others to think outside the bun and not be afraid to experiment.”
And as any good chef worth her salt knows, when it comes to figuring out what works and what doesn’t, Arredondo goes with her gut.
“I pay attention to what I am working on and have the education to understand how to manipulate and alter ingredients to get the desired results I’m looking for,” she says. “I am also not afraid to experiment and try flavors that aren’t always traditional.”