Best Chefs in Pittsburgh: Food Network Summer Baking Champion Zoe Peckich Displays Her Indulgent Desserts at Ritual House

By Olivia Miller

Ritual House pastry chef Zoe Peckich has put Pittsburgh on a national stage as the first winner of the Food Network Summer Baking Championship. After eight weeks full of suspenseful culinary twists and turns, she was crowned winner for not only her innovative flavor combinations but also for her artistic dessert design.

A lifelong fan of The Food Network, Chef Peckich got her start baking as a child. It was while baking goodies for school projects and bake sales that she decided it was what she wanted to do as a career. She fondly remembers “always [wanting] to conjure up something crazy in the kitchen when my mom was at work.”

She was working at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto on Mount Washington when a representative from The Food Network reached out to her about being on the show. Chef Peckich was nervous at first, thinking “oh gosh, this is something I dreamt of happening” but knew she had to take the chance.

Her time baking in the Summer Baking Championship was simply “amazing.” She enjoyed working with their “state of the art equipment” and awe-inspiring pantry with “every ingredient you could think of.” She says watching it back on TV every week is “crazy” and jokes that it is “humbling to say the least.”

Chef Peckich’s baking philosophy is one that is community driven. Her biggest inspiration for her dishes comes from “the community [she is] around.” She believes the true job of a pastry chef is not one of just icing cakes and tweaking recipes, it is also to “feed the city.”

She uses this inspiration in some of her new desserts she is introducing to Ritual House. She is reinventing Pittsburgh’s classic iconic strawberry pretzel salad. She hopes her new rendition will trigger memories of family recipes as creating “nostalgia [with] desserts” is one of chef Peckich’s main goals as a pastry chef.

Another of her goals is to build up Pittsburgh’s dessert scene as well as cement her own culinary legacy in the city. She says there is “not an elevated dessert place around here” and hopes to “bring that theme forward.” Her personal goal as a pastry chef is for guests to visit an establishment just to have her desserts. She hopes to differentiate her baking so patrons will be able to decipher “that is a Zoe dessert” or “that is not a Zoe dessert.”

Post Summer Baking Championship, Chef Peckich will continue her award-winning culinary artistry at Ritual House. Along with the elevated strawberry pretzel salad, she is also introducing desserts that appeal to her favorite part of baking which is the ability “to be creative in a different type of way.” For instance, she is introducing a dish that is a “play on a big Ferraro Roche” featuring hazelnut mousse in a big chocolate domal garnished with gold leaf that guests must crack open. She is also introducing a lemon dessert that draws on five different culinary techniques. She says it is “interesting to see the technical forward plate.”

All in all, Chef Peckich would “love to have my name well known, especially in the city of Pittsburgh and have an influence [in the dessert scene].”