The Adorable Story Of Duff Goldman's First Time Cooking

Given his focus on all things sweet, you might assume bakery owner and television personality Duff Goldman got his start in the kitchen by making simple baked goods such as cookies or brownies, eventually progressing to complex, multi-layered cakes with all kinds of decorative elements. Pastry chefs have a whole range of techniques they need to master, as Binwise outlines, learning how to make everything from delicate puff pastry to sturdy shortcrust pastry with ease.

However, the sweet end of the spectrum isn't actually where Goldman got his start in the culinary industry. As Christopher Kimball's Milk Street explains, he began making cakes as a side hustle in his Baltimore apartment while he was working as a personal chef and trying to succeed in the music industry. Before that, while attending the Culinary Institute of America, Goldman worked as a baker, creating loaf after loaf of bread, not carefully laminated pastries and perfectly decorated cakes, as per Los Angeles Times.

His success with his cake side hustle led him to pivot and focus on the sweet treats, eventually leading to him opening Charm City Cakes — and the rest is history. However, have you ever wondered what one of Goldman's first experiences with being in the kitchen was like?

When Duff Goldman was a child, he got his first taste of life in the kitchen when his family indulged in a popular dish of the '70s and '80s: fondue. As Goldman told The Travel Addict, his family regularly had evenings where they'd bring out the fondue pot for a satisfying meal with a DIY component.

With cheese or chocolate fondue, there's not much you need to do once the fondue pot of the piping hot mixture comes to the table. You can just sit back and relax, dipping morsels of food into the mixture. However, with fondue bourguignonne (also sometimes simply called meat fondue, as per Taste Atlas), you're a bit more involved in the process. That's because this particular type of fondue involves a pot of hot oil and raw meat — then, you can skewer the morsels you want and cook it in the hot oil. As Goldman told the publication, "I would get so excited. I really learned how to cook." He would secretly turn up the temperature on the oil so that the exterior of the meat would get crispy while the interior still remained pink and tender, creating bites exactly to his specifications.

Nowadays, Goldman is constantly looking for culinary inspiration while he travels, storing up memories like his childhood fondue experience to fuel his creativity in the kitchen.