For most New Yorkers, the word "Balthazar" instantly evokes perfect baguettes and full-flavored rustic loaves. ICE® students now get to be a little closer to a man responsible for such great things: Sim Cass, one of the founding bakers of Balthazar, joined the ICE® faculty in June 2007. Born and raised in London as a "butcher's boy," Cass started baking in 1973, he recalls. He pursued a five-year apprenticeship in London, spending one day a week in college, training as both a pastry chef and a baker and then continuing with advanced pastry training. A typical apprenticeship would have seen him work every station in the kitchen, but he began in pastry, made puff pastry on his very first day, and stayed put for the remainder of the program. Upon graduation, he worked at a number of high-end pastry shops and hotels, including at the famed Hyatt Carlton Tower with French chef Robert Mey, who left a lifelong imprint on the young pastry cook. Cass then left the gray English skies for the open sea, spending several years baking bread on luxury liners. On his way back to London from one such trip in 1983, Cass stopped in New York for what was to be a five-day layover. Completely taken by the city, he never left. Twenty-four years later, and with a 17-year-old daughter born and raised here, Cass says he very much feels like a New Yorker. His love of water still intact, he keeps a boat on the Hudson River, in which he lived for five years.

In 1989, Cass became Keith McNally's head baker, a position he retained until a couple of years ago. He worked at Lucky Strike with partner Mark Tasker, who now runs Balthazar's downtown bakery, before the two of them became the founding bakers of Balthazar, with Paula Oland. Cass was head baker there for eight years, and then became head baker of the company's large-scale production facility in New Jersey when it expanded. Today, Cass still consults for Balthazar, still in charge of research and development.

"I like the alchemy of bread baking," Cass says. "I don't look at it like chemistry, I look at it like alchemy. One is experienced-based, whereas chemically you add numbers up. When someone asks 'why does it do this?' I sometimes want to answer 'because it does.' I'm happy living with the magic of it, with the mystery."

After what he calls a 15-year tangent of only making bread, provoked by an overdose of sugar, Cass is happy to work with pastries again as part of the ICE® curriculum he teaches. He also particularly appreciates that teaching allows him to empower students with knowledge and the capacity of producing on their own. Not one to like anything too "frou-frou," Cass favors the large rustic, rye loaves he developed for Balthazar over any other type of breads. Generally, however, he says that a "good bread is a good loaf of bread." Before coming to ICE®, Cass started working with the City of New York to build a guild similar to those found in Europe, launching a trade school in Queens. The program ran out of funding, however, so Cass found himself having to teach. He became certified, and developed a two-week bread course, functioning as a retraining program for unemployed people, that he still teaches today. Every year, Cass goes to Japan to participate in the Fuji Rock Festival, Asia's answer to Burning Man. He belongs to an art group, the Mutoid Waste Company, that produces large-scale sculptures out of scrap metal. Cass compares melding the various pieces of metal to cooking, both consisting of combining ingredients to create a whole.