From Formula One to creating the ‘world’s finest’ croissant, how baking saved Lune founder Kate Reid’s life

As she walked by way of the doorways of one of the well-known bakeries in Paris, Kate Reid was overcome with pleasure, hope, and a renewed sense of goal.

It was 2010, and the younger girl from Melbourne was nonetheless within the grips of the anorexia that had nearly claimed her life.

“I don’t know if many people could say they’ve had an overwhelming experience in a bakery, but that’s exactly what it was,” she says.

It’s truthful to say not many individuals are like Kate Reid.

An aerospace engineer who had meticulously secured a job working for a global Formula One (F1) crew by the age of 23, Kate’s spiral into anorexia started when she realised that the truth of working in F1 did not match the dream.

Feeling as if she had misplaced management of her life, Kate turned all of her dedication and resolve in direction of the one factor she might management — her physique.

“I’ve never had a period in my life where I haven’t had something to obsess over,” Kate tells Australian Story. “For me to be inspired to get out of bed … I need something to latch all of my thoughts, intellect and focus on.”

Turning her controlling nature inward would have near-deadly penalties for Kate; her dedication to proscribing meals meant she turned obsessive about the one factor she craved most.

Delicious, completely made French pastry.

“When you suffer from anorexia and you fall in love with baking, it’s almost an oxymoron. I mean, the two don’t go together,” says her father, Bob Reid.

Yet for Kate, pastry — and specifically, the croissant — would finally rescue her from the sickness that has the best mortality price of any psychological well being dysfunction.

A piece placement on the well-known Paris bakery Du Pain et des Idées enabled Kate to study the fundamentals of croissant manufacturing.

Returning residence to Melbourne, she then started a fastidious strategy of reverse-engineering the croissant to perfection.

It would result in opening Lune, now a enterprise of seven croissanteries and residential to what the New York Times suggested could be among the finest croissants on this planet.

“The croissant to me is the Formula One of the pastry world,” Kate says. “It’s incredibly technical, and I guess it’s where I found the intersection of baking, art, science, and engineering. It healed me.”

Building bonds

The want for management began early for Kate.

At 18 months, she was recognized with continual bronchial asthma and was admitted to hospital 13 instances earlier than she was 4.

“The asthma was the earliest example of a huge element of my life being out of control,” Kate says. “So the things I could control probably became more important than maybe they should have been.”

Her mother and father, Bob and June, turned her lifeline, June spending lengthy days monitoring Kate’s well being whereas Bob took the evening shift.

As somewhat woman, Kate would get up alone in a panic, unable to attract a breath. Bob would come to her rescue, administering the nebuliser machine.

It would result in a powerful bond “that otherwise might not have been there,” Bob tells Australian Story.

Kate grew up idolising her dad and was eager to search out any alternative to spend extra time with him. Cars have been a simple in.

The F1 manifesto

Bob labored as an engineer but in addition cherished automobile racing. On chilly winter nights, he and Kate would keep up late and watch F1, the weekly ritual changing into a shared curiosity.

Then, within the house of a day, Bob’s ardour turned Kate’s obsession.

It was March 10, 1996. Bob had agreed to take Kate, 13, to the Australian Grand Prix, which was being held in Melbourne for the primary time.

“It was just a blur and a noise and a vibration. I’d never felt such an intense pull to something,” Kate says. “It was that moment witnessing it in person that I was like, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.'”

With her life objective firmly in place, the decided teenager set about writing her “Formula One Pledge”, mapping the trail to her dream of changing into the primary feminine technical director of an F1 crew: graduate highschool with high marks, full a level in aerospace engineering, and get a job working for British F1 crew Williams by age 25. 

She achieved all of it two years forward of the timeline. 

“She was absolutely elated,” Bob says. “For a girl to get a job in the aero lab at Williams F1 was unheard of.”

The dream shattered, Kate spiralled

In 2006, Kate moved to the small English city of Wantage to start her new life as a junior aerodynamicist at Williams.

Yet the joy ultimately started to dissipate. Where she had imagined a dynamic setting alongside inspiring minds, the function was static and missing in any collaboration.

Talking was discouraged and the 16-hour days have been lengthy and lonely.

“I was simply just a monkey put in front of a computer to design parts that I had no input or influence in,” she says.

Adding to the problem was the truth that Kate was the one feminine working in a technical function within the crew of 120 folks. There wasn’t even a feminine rest room.

This was her dream job, but it surely was leaving her depressed. She began having panic assaults, and her psychological well being started to say no.

Kate began to make selections to tug management again into her life. She joined the health club and commenced obsessively recording her progress, weighing herself and measuring her meals consumption towards energy burned.

“I needed an obsession and control to latch on to, to feel like there was a purpose for me existing,” she says.

On a visit residence to Melbourne for Christmas, Kate’s mother and father have been alarmed by the deterioration of their daughter.

“We actually could see she was spiralling out of control,” June says.

But Kate’s dedication had turned dangerously inward, resulting in an anorexia prognosis.

“If I wasn’t this groundbreaking female engineer working in Formula 1, then maybe it didn’t matter if I didn’t exist anymore,” she says.

It was the midnight in May 2008 when Bob and June obtained a cellphone name from their distressed daughter, who had reached breaking level.

Bob requested if he ought to make the choice for her, and Kate lastly conceded she wanted to return residence.

“If he hadn’t have said those words to me, I’m not sure what the stop point would have been.”

After an emotional return to Melbourne, docs warned that with out therapy, Kate would have had simply six weeks to stay.

‘Trapped in an anorexic jail’

Kate’s love of baking began in her childhood when her mom would put together treats for afternoon tea.

The pleasure she bought from baking elevated throughout her time at Williams, the place she’d usher in brownies to perk up her F1 colleagues. It was a manner for Kate to vicariously get pleasure from meals with out consuming it.

On her first day again in Australia, she landed a job at a bakery. 

“I always push myself to be in the most extreme environment. And with the eating disorder, it was surrounding myself with tempting baked goods and testing my willpower,” Kate says.

If she ate even a morsel of a brownie throughout a shift, she would panic and punish herself with lengthy walks at evening.

Bob would drive the streets on the lookout for his daughter.

“When you know your kid is sick and you can’t fix it, it’s really hard.”

All they may do was assist Kate, enlisting the assistance of a crew of medical professionals as they started what would grow to be a five-year battle towards the sickness.

Taking over the kitchen, she would insist on getting ready all meals and baked muffins incessantly for her mother and father.

“From the moment I woke up, my entire existence was about avoiding food and controlling it,” Kate says. “I just became so insular and selfish.”

Desperately greedy for a brand new goal to outline her once more, Kate even auditioned — unsuccessfully — for the primary season of actuality cooking present Masterchef.

And then she discovered the e-book that modified her life. Flicking by way of a espresso desk e-book about Paris patisseries, she was struck by the picture of a stack of ache au chocolat, taken on the well-known Du Pain et des Idées bakery.

“It was the most hypnotising thing I’d ever seen,” Kate remembers, explaining that the layers of buttery pastry immediately reminded her of the aerofoil sections that type round an F1 automobile.

She booked a flight to Paris that day.

Perfecting pastry with ‘precision and management’

Convincing the proprietor of Du Pain to offer her a piece placement would revive the fervour Kate had misplaced in her life — and mark the start of her restoration.

“That four weeks might be the most fulfilled I’ve ever been in a job,” she says. “It was a reminder of me before the eating disorder, when I was excited to get out of bed and feel like I was productive.”

Back in Melbourne, the fireplace was lit. Nobody was promoting something just like the croissants obtainable in Paris. She was going to create the proper croissant, her manner — ignoring the detractors who questioned the logic of opening a enterprise that simply bought one factor.

Unlike her time at Williams, the place her failures have been shortly discarded, Kate’s check batches have been shared together with her household, who supported her new pursuit of perfection.

“All the things that are required in engineering are also applicable to pastry — precision and control,” Bob says.

Leasing a small workspace, she launched into months of recipe testing, obsessively recording and measuring the outcomes.

Retaining the three-day course of required to make a conventional croissant, she imported the butter from France to make sure the hero ingredient was the perfect it may very well be. The crust was crunchy with a fragile shatter, and the inside was fantastically buttery.

June witnessed her daughter slowly coming again to life because the dream took form. 

“When she actually perfected the croissant, that put the biggest smile on her face.”

How Kate realized to relinquish management

Lune Croissanterie opened as a wholesale bakery in 2012.

When her brother Cameron joined a 12 months later to assist convert the enterprise right into a retail operation, buzz was constructing.

“By 6.30am, there would be 120 people lined up around the block, and it was the dead of winter,” Kate says.

In 2016, The New York Times named Lune croissants as among the world’s finest, launching an avalanche that’s but to decelerate.

What began as simply seven batches a day has grown into seven shops in three states, run by 300 workers.

Earlier this 12 months, Kate was awarded France’s Order of Agricultural Merit for “redefining” the croissant, and can quickly launch her memoir, Destination Moon.

For the dream to develop, she needed to relinquish some management — an train that has been essential not just for her enterprise, however for her restoration.

“We think we can have control of everything, but we can’t,” Kate says.

“Managing an eating disorder is a lifelong struggle, but I am aware of not dropping back into those behaviours, knowing that it gives me the comfort of control.

She wants her story to offer hope to others battling eating disorders, that a rewarding life on the other side is possible.

And she’s redefined what success looks like: “Maybe success is having the self-awareness to grasp that you just’re truly dwelling a terrific second proper now, and to understand it.”

Watch Kate Reid’s Australian Story ‘All Consuming’ on ABC iview.

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