Tyler Jividen wasn’t big on cakes, cookies, and doughnuts as a child. “Growing up, I really wasn’t a huge sweets eater,” he says.
But now, as head baker at Dvour Desserts at 523 South Main Street, Jividen creates — and samples — about three new cheesecake flavors a week. Doing the math, he’s made more than 150 different cheesecake flavors in the past year.
Jividen, 33, grew up in Brighton, Tennessee, as one of two children of parents who cooked. He was an “open-minded eater,” who “kind of wanted to try everything,” he says.
When he was 12 years old watching the Food Network, Jividen got “super obsessed” with preparing food. “Just the basic alchemy of it. The building and layering of flavors. Being in tune with nature. The more I got into cooking, the more into nature I got.”
He always liked being outside. His parents always had a garden. “Mushroom foraging is something I do now as a hobby,” he says. “Instead of just roaming the woods, I now have a little more purpose for it.”
As a student at the old L’Ecole Culinaire, where he graduated in 2013, Jividen wasn’t interested in baking at first. Baking “involves too much science and precision. You have to be precise with everything, which ended up being what I liked about it.”
He “noticed something was there” when he worked with dough. Jividen met chef Derek Buchanan, an instructor at the school and “a phenomenon at making bread.”
Jividen stayed after class and watched Buchanan demonstrate all the steps it took to bake bread, including shaping and fermenting the dough. “I was hooked from there. When we were making dough and starting shaping it, there was something about having my hands in dough, shaping it, pressing it into certain shapes. There was something I really enjoyed about it. And I wanted to keep doing it.”
When he was 20, Jividen got his first restaurant job as a busboy at Texas de Brazil. “I got to wear the regular pants. It was just the gauchos that got to wear the big pants.”
But even as a bus boy, Jividen learned something about cooking. “There was the meat aspect over the fire that I really liked‚ something really primal.”
He worked in the prep station at Hog & Hominy before manning the pizza oven. Jividen was more interested in baking, but, he says, “There’s not really much opportunity here in Memphis. When you’re looking for a job as a high level bread baker, you don’t really have much of an option.”
Jividen moved to France for about eight months after getting an internship at Le Calabash in Yzeures-sur-Creuse, France. Working with Michelin star chef Sidney Bond, Jividen learned to “care for product and ingredients and keeping things seasonal, keeping things as local as possible.”
Care for products involved treating the refrigerator as a “cold garden,” he says. Carrots were carefully wrapped in paper towels that had been dipped in water. Fish had to be stored in the same direction. Flat fish that swam on the floor of the ocean had to be stored “on its belly.”
Jividen then moved to Dubai, where he worked with another Michelin star chef Greg Malouf at the Dubai International Financial Centre.
He didn’t get to do a lot of baking for the year and a half he was abroad, but Jividen did a lot of observing. “I went to every baker I could when I was in France.”
Jividen learned how bakers made “different types of croissants. The way they handle the dough. Types of butter they use. The butter they use there is just incredibly rich. Way more rich than the butters here.”
While in Dubai, Jividen got married. He and his wife Joyce, who is from the Philippines, moved to Seattle, where he worked as head baker at Canlis restaurant. “The West Coast has more access to local grain and different types of them. Whole grain is what I like most. It has more flavor. It’s more technical to work with.”
He also worked as a head baker at Bakery Nouveau. “That’s where I started learning about croissants, Danishes, and more warm brioches and puff pastries.”
After they had a child, Jividen returned with his wife and son to Memphis, where he worked at Catherine & Mary’s, P. O. Press, Erling Jensen: The Restaurant, and the cafeteria at Rhodes College.
He also was pastry chef at Comeback Coffee, where he used brioche dough instead of croissant dough.
Jividen learned about the job at Dvour Desserts from Tony Nguyễn, who was head bartender and a server at Texas de Brazil when he was there.
Dvour owner Travis Brady described what they were doing as far as making cheesecakes and cookies at the time. But, Jividen says, “I had the freedom to create new stuff and take it in a different direction. Assuming it didn’t suck.”
He makes little cheesecakes in silicon bowls and freezes them.
He also sells slices, including his turtle cheesecake. For example, he made a caramel cheesecake with an Oreo pecan crust topped with “Heath pieces, toasted pecans, and chocolate chips. I like to echo flavors a lot instead of doing a bunch of different flavors.”
Jividen also makes his popular Italian “bombolonis” — fried brioche stuffed with jams, jellies, or namelaka. “I like to add namelaka. The texture is lighter than a ganache but denser and richer than a mousse.”
He makes bombolonis every Saturday “from 9 until we sell out.”
They also make savory brioche with white cheddar cheese, sausage and a sweet brioche with pecans, brown sugar, and cream cheese on Saturdays.
He usually makes “one or two or three” new cheesecake flavors every week. “The cheesecake book is filling up pretty quick.”
And, he adds, “We keep five staples. Two flavors rotating seasonally and two rotating weekly or biweekly.”
Jividen’s key lime cheesecake is his most popular flavor at Dvour. “Somewhere between a key lime crust pie meets cheesecake. Rich, smooth, and creamy like key lime pie, but a lot denser. Rich and decadent like a cheesecake.”
For the Teladoc Health gala on January 31st at Clark Tower, Jividen is making a chanterelle cheesecake.
Dvour cheesecake staples include key lime, strawberry, cookies and cream, and one made from ube, a purple sweet potato from the Philippines.
He did a cranberry and gingerbread spice cheesecake with an Oreo crust for Thanksgiving. And, for the holidays, he made a bourbon praline pecan cheesecake.
Cheesecake flavors dance in Jividen’s head like sugarplums. “Making a peanut butter and jelly cheesecake has been on my mind for a long time. But every time I get ready to do it, muscadine season is over.”
Jividen also wants to make a cheesecake using caviar and espuma, which is “a foam you make in a canister. Not as thick as whipped cream, but like a champagne foam almost in a way.”
Biting into this cheesecake will be “like biting into air.”
