KC pastry chef on Food Network holiday show using moment to advocate for hungry
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Erin-Michelle Luttrell will compete on Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship.
- She invites the public to view the premiere at Serve & Lift Market food pantry.
- Luttrell leverages her platform to advocate for food security, dignity and aid.
Erin-Michelle Luttrell has been in tears lately, just as she’s about to spring onto a festive national stage.
The Kansas City chef will debut Monday on the Food Network’s annual “Holiday Baking Championship” where she’ll show the skills that drew crowds to her popular Éclairs De La Lune bakery on the Independence Square.
The public is invited to watch the first show at her workplace, the Serve & Lift Market food pantry in south Kansas City operated by Catholic Charities of Kansas City-St. Joseph.
This is a moment Luttrell has wanted for several years. But her Hollywood experience baking elaborate holiday-themed cheesecakes, cookies and other desserts comes at a time of great food crisis for many people, and it weighs heavy.
“When I went home yesterday I just broke down to my husband because I can’t take this lightly,” Luttrell told the Star on Wednesday. “I can’t take this for granted that I’m standing on a stage while two of my worlds collide.
“As a leader in south Kansas City working to help other people feed their families through self-choice and bringing dignity to that process. I’m competing on the Food Network in the midst of a real food insecurity crisis, and it just reminds me why all this work matters so deeply. Food connects us all.”
In her job, the wife and mother of five works on reimagining what a food pantry can be. Catholic Charities describes her as a “chef with the heart of a healer, a culinary entrepreneur turned mission-driven market manager and a woman who knows that food is never just food, it’s language, dignity, and love.”
On the day that brought her to tears, 105 families showed up for assistance. When she joined the staff in April, “we were seeing maybe between 18 to 30 families a day,” she said.
“Every volunteer here was feeling pressure. Obviously the climate in the media and politics is very — I don’t really know — it’s electric and not in a good way. ...
“(I)t’s one thing to not know where your next meal is coming from. It’s another level of accountability and responsibility as a human in this position to not know where the meals for hundreds of families or thousands of families are going to come from.”
The pantry is closed Mondays, but people have started showing up anyway. The pantry stays open until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays for people who work. It’s also open on the first Saturday of the month for people who work during the week.
On Saturday, SNAP benefits are slated to be suspended because of the federal shutdown. No new benefits would be issued. Luttrell expects to see the fallout here.
“Saturday’s our first market of the month and we’re open from 9 to 12,” she said. “And I am completely anticipating panic.”
She is determined to make the most of this national platform she’s been given.
“It’s interesting that I am a pastry chef and have this stage to talk about food insecurity. It’s hard to promote the show, hard to promote myself as a part of this beautiful, extremely talented, well-produced piece of entertainment at a time when it’s so serious in my job,” she said.
“So when those two things come together, I’m in the right place at the right time.”
‘Like being in a Hallmark movie’
“Holiday Baking Championship” pits professional and home bakers in a series of holiday-themed baking challenges. The winner takes home $25,000.
For the first time in the show’s history, bakers will compete in two teams. Luttrell was assigned to Team Nice. You can probably guess what the other was called.
“It was like being in a Hallmark movie doing the thing I love to do ... bake,” she said.
At 50, she was the oldest competitor, which landed her in a mama bear role in a cast that included teenagers. Motivating people proved to be her super power, the same drive that led her to lose 150 pounds over the last year after bariatric surgery.
“I handed out a lot of advice. I was really so proud that other cast members came to me and asked me questions, not necessarily about what they were baking,” she said.
“We talked about how they were feeling. I think I brought a lot of support. I said often to the producers, I came here for me. I’ve never done anything for myself ... a journey of autonomy for a 50-year-old mom.”
It wasn’t easy.
The intensity of cooking on a sound stage surrounded by cameras and bakers with different kitchen personalities challenged her.
She prefers to cook in a “dead silent” kitchen so she can hear every little sound, like the oven fan clicking on. “I’m of that age that to see better in the car I have to turn down the radio,” she said.
But some of her competitors sang while they baked. People danced. Some were laid back. Some were “get out of my way” types.
“I had a producer tell me, ‘you should smile more.’ But I have to focus, focus, focus,” she said.
She inherited her love of baking from her great-grandparens, who ran a bakery in Holden, Missouri throughout the Depression.
“I spent my life listening to my grandma, who’s my favorite human ever, talk to me about the old bakery in Holden, Missouri and ‘oh Holden’ ... and there were romantic stories about running through a small town and running in the front door and grabbing a bag of rolls and a jar of jam and going and eating it behind the store,” she said.
“And just seeing my great-grandfather’s handwriting in all of his recipe books. And longing for a connection to my roots is really where it came from. I would bake a lot with my grandmother, Maxine, who I named my daughter after.”
A marketer by trade, she was working as a financial marketing strategist for a labor credit union in Kansas City when she decided to go to culinary school. She and her husband were trying to start a family, too.
After years of infertility, she had a baby in 2017. The next year she and her husband took in a “family of four kiddos, so went from a family of three to a family of seven overnight,” she said.
“And I just cooked and baked and cooked and baked with them, for them, around them, near them, so that they could have the same experiences that I had with my grandma. It was really important to me to instill that in them.”
She opened the bakery in Independence at the tail end of the pandemic, “and just baked for everyone.”
At the grand opening, “we had lines around the building and I had pictures of my great-grandparents’ bakery during a grain strike in Holden where people were lined up down the street, around the block, just to get bread,” she said.
“It was very eerily similar and so fulfilling. Then it became 80-, 90-, 100-hour weeks ...”
And oh, some of the customers. Women got “into fistfights on Harry Potter’s birthday over how many chocolate frogs they were going to get out of our case that day,” she said.
She decided to scale back, but never did. “I said yes to everything,” she said. “So I learned a lot about don’t cheapen your product by saying yes to everything. Don’t cheapen your life with your family by saying yes to everything. I was missing out on a ton.
“And also, I was forming a relationship with diabetes I did not know about that went undetected for a very long time.
“So I came to the realization that it wasn’t worth it. I had a wildly successful business, but why wasn’t it as fulfilling as I needed it to be? I thought this was the thing I was supposed to be doing.
“Fast forward, I worked for a little at Drumm Farm Center for Children, worked in the foster community running banquets, setting up farmer’s markets and events and teaching culinary school to foster kids at Drumm before I was laid off in January when we were going to initially film the (Food Network) show. And then California caught on fire.”
About four years ago a recruiter for the show contacted her on Instagram. For a couple of years in a row she reached out, asking Luttrell is she knew any male bakers in Kansas City.
“And I would say ‘no, but you called me, so how about we talk about it?’” Luttrell said. “And it was never really right timing. And it was always the next year — ‘Oh, do you know any men NOW who are bakers in Kansas City that you could connect me to?’
“Then we started talking a little bit more about different options. A couple of other shows came up and then this opportunity came up with ‘Holiday Baking’ and I was like, that’s the pinnacle for me of Food Network programming.
“So I was courted for about four years before there was actually a show and a commitment. And never in a million years would I have thought it would have come to this. Me flying to LA and meeting just the most talented people in both TV and my industry. But here we are. I did it.”
She thought the entire season would be canceled when the California wildfires delayed filming there. Then, out of the blue, she got a call. Can you be in L.A. in two weeks?
“I think we got 10 days notice … and I had just started my job here at Catholic Charities as the market program manager. I’m building a volunteer base, I’m making changes in the market. I’ve got big ideas. I’m hittin’ the ground running.
“And then I get the call. ‘Hey, can you be gone for a month or so-ish. Can you come out here and film?’ I’m like, ‘I just started this job.’”
Realizing that the timing might be better than she thought, she told her new boss that being on the show would give her a chance to talk about the work they do and why she does it.
“He let me sweat it for three or four days before I got the OK. ‘We all really think this is cool and you should definitely do it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing for you, we’re not going to stop you.’
“And I’m like great, ‘cause I already said yes.”
The watch party Monday begins at 6 p.m. at the Serve & Lift Market, 8001 Longview Road. The show airs at 7 p.m. on Food Network.
The dress code is green for “nice” guests, red for the “naughty.” Christmas carolers and Santa will be there, along with hot chocolate.
Guests are asked to bring a canned good.
Luttrell is making the pastries.
.jpg)