Pastry chef sharpens skills at competitions

To Kelly Bellmore, cooking has always been important. The pastry chef trained at the Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts, but her journey in cooking started long before her training.

“When I was in middle school, I used to wake up before school, and I would cook,” Bellmore said.

She chose early on to make a career as a pastry chef. Now an executive pastry chef at NC State, she keeps challenging herself and her team. On Jan. 30, the American Culinary Federation named her Pastry Chef of the Year for the Southeast region at a competition in Atlanta. After one hour of the cook-off-style competition, during which she had to make a banana chiffon with milk chocolate ganache, her dish was awarded first place.

To participate in the competition, organized by the American Culinary Federation, Bellmore had to submit an application based on different criteria, which included being a mentor.

Bellmore has experience as a mentor through her work with interns at NC State.

“We do a lot of training and teaching with the staff,” Bellmore said. 

For the ACF National Competition in July in Phoenix, Bellmore has chosen one of her interns to assist her. Although as executive pastry chef Bellmore is baking every day, she said competition-style events keep her skills sharp.

“I like to compete,” Bellmore said. “I am always interested in finding what I can do next, a new competition to help me practice, because in pastry you need to practice a lot.”

In the future, Bellmore hopes to get the Master Pastry Chef certification awarded by the ACF, the largest professional chef’s association in the United States, and may one day apply for the World Association of Chefs’ Societies certification.

“She has brought great leadership and has lifted the quality on campus,” said Shawn Hoch, associate director of Dining and Catering Operations. “By supporting her in question to attain certification and gold medals, it brings positive attention to our dining program, help to build credibility. Most of all it shows we support and value her hard work.”

When Bellmore started to work at NC State three years ago, the pastry department was only making items for Talley’s Port City Java. The department now does all the catering, covers events, cooks for the pavilions and has a retail bakery. You can even order your friend’s birthday cake thanks to the online cake program that was launched about a year ago. 

“There is a huge movement now; expectations are changing,” Bellmore said. “There was a huge push from University Dining to make fresh food and it really did.” 

Serving more than 30,000 meals per day as well as planning and ordering at 36 locations or concepts can be challenging when the goal is to serve healthy and innovative dishes. University Dining relies on chefs with backgrounds like Bellmore’s to build a successful program.

“Dining has worked hard to recruit the best culinary talent,” Hoch said. “We have approximately two dozen chefs with formal culinary train from the best schools in the country with diverse backgrounds. …we are yet to find another college campus with as many certified executive chefs as NC State.”