Iryna Mykhalchuk:
One of the first apprentices – and now a sought-after cook and baker
“In a kitchen, to keep your calm, you have to be prepared.”
Iryna was in Project Feast’s inaugural class of apprentices in 2017. Now, she makes gnocchi for a Seattle area restaurant group – and gorgeous cakes for lucky family and friends.
On one cake, sliced strawberries bloom like flowers along a pool of chocolate. On another – baked for a 7-year-old birthday girl – cherries, blueberries, flowers and a perfect lavender macaron are nestled in cream. A favorite repeat request: thin layers of chocolate spartak cake topped with a striking geometric pattern drawn with dark chocolate and white cream.
Iryna Mykhalchuk’s Instagram feed is sprinkled with photos of elegant cakes she’s made for Seattle area bakeries and her family. But it’s a picture of a simple loaf of fresh bread, baked by her two oldest children, that she points out on a winter morning.
“The first food on our table is always bread,” Iryna says. She grew up in a tiny town outside Lviv in western Ukraine, and her mother was the sole provider for the family of five. Sometimes at the end of the month they ran out of bread before payday. “When I was 12, I learned to pray,” Iryna says. “I prayed the bread in our house would never end. This is why I teach my kids to make bread.”
As a child, Iryna dreamed of being a scientist. She studied advanced chemistry and biology during high school, and earned her university degree in ecology. But she was never able to find work in her field. “It’s hard to get a good job in my country because you actually have to pay,” she says. “The problem is you almost never get the money back because even if the position is really cool, the salary is really small.”
After university, Iryna found a job as a cashier, and then cooked in a school cafeteria. During summer breaks, she worked at the town bakery making eclairs, strudels and cookies, and she baked cakes for her family, which grew to include two daughters and a son. “For my son’s birthday, I made a big cake like a turtle, with different colors, and it was really good,” she says. “That made me interested. I was not afraid to try new recipes.”
In 2017, Iryna and her family moved to Federal Way, joining her husband’s grandmother and dozens of other relatives who already lived in the Seattle area. Just a couple of months after arriving, while taking English as a Second Language classes at Highline College, Iryna learned about Project Feast, which was starting its apprenticeship program. Iryna was in the first cohort, along with women from Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The first two weeks, oh my gosh, it was so hard,” Iryna says. “We were talking a lot about the future, about my goals – but I had just moved to the U.S. two months before. Life here is so different. New language, new everything. I didn’t know what to say.”
The classwork grew easier when the focus turned to recipes and measurements. “It was still hard because we use the metric system in Ukraine,” Iryna says. “But I was good at math, so it just took time. I could understand more and more because we talked about what I already knew, just in English, and so I got it. Mostly, I learned English here in Project Feast.”
The apprentices learned how to create menus and calculate a per-customer price for each dish. They prepped ingredients in advance and coordinated a schedule so the three cooks could share one oven. “We learned teamwork,” Iryna says.
During the program, Iryna developed a friendship with Lisa Nakamura, Project Feast’s first chef instructor. “Her goal was to prepare us,” Iryna says. “She was teaching us that we have to be on time, and we have to be organized. She was trying to prepare us to work in commercial kitchens or at a bakery or as a line cook. I liked that a lot.”
Project Feast’s Ubuntu Street Cafe in Kent opened while Iryna was an apprentice, and the first cafe menus featured dishes from the students’ three countries. Iryna made borscht and pampushka – dinner rolls with a warm garlic-butter sauce – and she also created a Ukrainian menu for a dinner event.
Through Project Feast, she also discovered new flavors, like the Mexican pozole that her husband now loves, and a baked eggplant dish shared by an Iraqi student. “And hummus!” she says. “My gosh, that’s my favorite. I learned how to eat it, and I can make it.”
After graduation, Lisa invited Iryna to stay and work with the Project Feast team. “She started teaching me how to be a sous chef,” Iryna says.
Iryna worked in the cafe and catering programs for about a year. When Lisa left Project Feast in 2018 to focus on her Gnocchi Bar business, Iryna continued to work with her. And when Lisa recently sold Gnocchi Bar to Tutta Bella Neapolitan Pizzeria, she encouraged Iryna to continue. “Lisa told them I’m the right person to make the gnocchi because I’ve been doing this for years,” Iryna says.
Lisa was happy to recommend Iryna. “She is really coming into herself and recognizing her own strength,” Lisa says. “I wanted her to be in a place where she could grow in her career.”
A few of Iryna’s beautiful cakes.
One of Iryna’s deepest passions continues to be making her beautiful cakes. She worked in local bakeries before the pandemic, and she loves to bake for family and friends. “I don’t use fondant; I use a different kind of cream,” she says. “And I don’t like fake stuff. I do flowers, but buttercream flowers. Or cookies or meringue. It has to look nice, but it also has to be delicious.”
“Making cakes is not only about making money,” Iryna says. “For me, it’s also relaxing. It makes me feel good.”
Iryna credits the Project Feast apprenticeship with making her a more confident, organized cook. “We have fire, heat, knives. So in a kitchen, to keep your calm, you have to be prepared,” she says. “I learned so much from Project Feast about how to work and how to keep your calm. I’m so thankful for that.”
Looking back, Iryna traces her love of food to childhood summers spent with her paternal grandmother in Ukraine. There weren’t many desserts, but Iryna remembers a pantry stocked with gleaming jars of jams and preserved vegetables – and especially the plate-sized pancakes her grandmother would serve with three different savory sauces. “We never ate them with jam or something sweet because it was food for all day, to make you full,” Iryna says. “I asked her so many times, ‘Tell me the recipe.” She said, “I don’t have the recipe. I just put in what I know.’
“It was so good,” Iryna says. “Those are my memories. They keep me warm.”
Interview and writing by Denise Clifton, Tandemvines Media
Mylinci (Iryna’s Grandmother’s Pancakes)
Ingredients
- 1 to 2 cups of all-purpose flour, depending on how thick the buttermilk is
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- Pinch of salt
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 2 cups buttermilk
- 2 tbsp butter or bacon fat for frying
- Sour cream, melted butter and/or chopped cooked bacon for serving
Instructions
- 1. Combine all dry ingredients, starting with 1 cup of flour. Add the eggs, mix well. Add the buttermilk and mix well with a whisk. If the batter is too thin, add more flour. Batter should be smooth and creamy, coating the whisk, but still easy to ladle into a pan.
- 2. Melt ½ tbs of butter or bacon fat in a skillet over low heat. Pour enough batter into the pan to make a plate-sized pancake. When tiny bubbles start to appear, flip the pancake over. Cook each side until golden brown. Repeat with remaining batter.
- Makes about 4 large pancakes.
- Serve with sour cream, a little melted butter and chopped bacon.
