Why is Baking so Hard?

a nightmare? Well, I mean, I think it comes down to, like I think it's based on I think it's based on individual personalities, you know, meaning like some people have the personality to be really successful in baking because it takes a lot of patients, and it takes a lot of focus and a lot of um faith that what you're doing is gonna work and you can't adjust it.

You are you hard to adjust? You know. It's like, um, I was saying to somebody the other day that like when you compare, you take some chicken thighs out of the refrigerator, you just gonna wing it, you know, Like,

what do I have my refrigerator? Oh, I'm gonna make a sauce that's gonna have some like vinegar in it, maybe some honey, I'll do like an adults, Um, I can add some you know, some asparagus to the I mean you basically can just do whatever you feel like doing, and you can adjust as you go because you're staring at it on top of the stove mostly and you

can play with it. If you want to bake something, you need to go get a recipe because because unless you are like a baking genius, which there are there are there, there are definitely those people. You can't just go like I'm gonna take a few cups of flour, add this in that, put this in this, and then

create this amazing cake that's perfect. It doesn't happen. You have to go to a amula and um and I guess that's you know, it's one of those things where I always say to people like they're like, oh can't you aren't you really a really good baker or do you do pastries really well? Because you can, you know, you're a chef, And I'm like, it's like two different professions completely. It's like I would say, it's like a plumber and electrician right, A chef and a pastry chef.

They wear the same uniforms, but they do different jobs. And you know, I think in both cases, you know, if you're an expert in one, you can kind of get by in the other. But it's not what you're it's it's really not your focus. Now that said, I know there's chefs who do both. Um. The first person I think about is you know who Lauren Turndel is. Lauren is an old friend of mine, great chef, and he started out as a pastry chef in France and

uh makes beautiful pastries. But then he came to he came to New York and he was the first person to open those those b LT steakhouses. Yeah yeah, but but he but he can do both. And there was there were a handful of people that can really that excel at both at the highest level. Um. But for the most part, people either pastry chefs or their savory chefs. And you know that said, I I get challenged a

lot to pastry and baking and stuff like that. I'm beat um and I'm I'm I have curiosity, but it's just not the thing that I look forward to doing. All Right, We're making uh. One of my favorite pastries to make, which is a crostata. Do you know what that is? I mean pastry usually with like fruit. Well, crostata is an Italian tart like pipe for us situation. And the thing I love about it is that it's very rustic. What do you mean, It's basically you're taking

poto and what and what? What? What? This one is? This is a This is a buttermilk pie crust that was taught to me by my long time pati chef, Clear Sa Martino, and I think it's one of the best pie crusts I've ever had because it's light and flaky and crispy. It's so good and so basically what you're doing here. And I just so you know, I took this this pie. I've took this dough out of the freezer freezes really well. I always have a little bit of this buttermilk pie crust and the freezer just

in case somebody comes over. I want to throw a coastater together. That's so crazy. Why is it freezing? I like have like chips and salsa. Someone's coming over. You've got like a full like full cris data. There's a lot happening in this kitchen, Sophie like, oh my god, I've got like a few cheeses whipping up a cristata. Well we're different, oh man. Yeah, So so you can see I'm rolling this out and it's not perfect, right, It's like it's in a circular shape, but not an

actual perfect circle. Right. We're not putting this into a pie pan. We're gonna cook this free form. Okay. So the other day I had some time on my hands. I'm not really sure how, but I decided to make my one of my all time favorite sweet things to eat, which is what the morning buns at Tartine. Oh yeah, So luckily for me, on my bookshelf, I had the Tartine Cookbook and I I set out on the quest to make the morning buns. To make a morning bun.

And now let me just tell you about Tartine really quickly. It's my it's one of my favorite bakeries in the world. Um. They originated in San Francisco. But like the breads, there are some of the best in America, you know, their bad gets, their country loafs, I mean they're just so good and um, but they have morning buns, which are

think about it this way. It's a croissant dough and it gets rolled out and it has butter, and then it's flavored with orange that cinnamon and sugar rolled like a cinnamon bun cut, but then put into a muffin pan. So when they bake, and you sent me that photo the other day when you were making them, and I thought it was a cinnamon roll, that's what they look like,

but they're different. And then because they're on the muffin pans, when they cook on the muffin pans, and you invert them like the tops of the muffin pans, like around the circles, the dog sort of like bakes on top of them, so it gets really caramelized because it's cooking on top of the pan. So when you take them out, they're inverted. So you get this crispy caramelized topping and then the buttery flavor and tech sure in the middle, and then you like you tossed them and sugar. I mean,

how do they taste? Insane? Yeah? I mean like I literally had to like give them away because I would have never recovered that said it took me. I'm not kidding you. I'm not exaggerating. Took me three days to make twelve morning bus. It took me three days. Now you could probably do it in two days, but you can't do it in less because there's so many steps

to it. You know. You make this crossanto and that's the that's the big that's the big lift here, which is you know, you're you're you're creating this sort of like um, this very buttery dough that that has to get rolled and and proofed constantly. So it's like, you know, mix this, let it prove for three hours. You know. That was the first three ingredients, you know, and then then you then you take a mixture and you and

you beat it in the mixture. Almost killed my mixer because it's a thick dough, you know, and I think I need a new kitchen. Eid. It's it's not it was crying, you know, like when the when the machine cries like trying to get from the dough. Yeah, exactly. So then you beat the dough with the with the dough hook. Then you let that rise for like nine hours and then and then you know, then you roll it out. Then you take then you make this butter block and you lay with the butter block in between

the layers of the dough. You roll that out and then you fold it over a couple of times. You let that rest. Then at one point you let it rest overnight in the in the freezer. You take it out eight hours ahead of time to the thought out.

Then you know I'm missing fourteen steps. Then you brush it with butter, melted butter, and then this beautiful mixture of orange dest and centiment in sugar, and then you roll it and you cut the rolls into rolls and then you put them in the muffin tins that have a sugar bottom to them, and then you let it rest for three more hours and then you bake him in four hundred degrees forty minutes. And they're insane. Actually,

Tarteina Bakery took my photo. They asked me, of course they honestly, they didn't have to ask me, but they took my photo that I posted and like, can we post this on our funny I know? They were like they look so great. I'm like, well, it's your recipe so far away. But my point is like I can't do that very often. That is a labor of love, like it will and and also like I can go buy one for five dollars, which like, is probably the

bargain of the century. I told the guy that owns the place, Chad Robertson, I was like, you should charge a hundred. I just did the labor for these. They're worth a hundred and fifty a morning. But it's fun to do stuff like that for me because but, but, and here's the problem. A lot of times I think that I can mess with the recipe even though you're not supposed to, and I mess up the recipe. And that's why baking to me is so hard, because my

personality does not fit in the baking personality situation. That's a I was saying, because it's so precise. Do you bake? Um? Yeah, I actually have a few questions for you. I don't know the answers. Well, we'll try that. Why is it like when you're when you're doing a recipe, you're baking and it says to mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another bowl. Is that really important? It is important? So that's why I messed up the muffins that I tried to make your cookbook

the other day. What muffins did you make Do you mean the biscuits, no, muffins, the ones. No, they're buttermilk biscuits. They're not buttermilk, but their buttermilk muff Oh my god, they're buttermilk muffins. I have the book. I didn't. I missed that part. Were supposed to you brought my book to my house. No, I stole it from your closet. But okay. But in the meantime, why is it? Why

is it important? Well, A lot of times, like when you when you're making like for instance, like when you're making like a biscuit dough, you don't want to mix it completely. You want to mix them so you want you want the liquid and the drying greens to to just be mixed. Same thing when you're making waffle and pancake batters, because if you mix them too much, the butter gets spread out. It's usually about the butter. Usually that the butter gets spread out too much, and then

it creates no texture. That's why my biscuits are really flaky, because the butter there's there's like pockets of butter, and if you mix it all together, you're not gonna get that. You're gonna get a cakey biscuit as opposed to a flaky yeah. Okay, well yeah, it's your master muffin mix. In Bobby at Home, it was combined flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder and a large bowl with the Eigen medium bowl into smooth and then add then add buttermilk,

melted butter, oil, and vanilla and whisk until smooth. Add wet ingredients to the drying green Like I just didn't. I didn't mix the wet ingredients in a different bowl because it didn't say it depends what the recipe is. Not every recipe matters, but it says add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. So clearly I just didn't

think about that ahead of time. And so then I it was just all the same bowl and I baked it, and I was like, this isn't right, okay, But also I have another question, like why are there so many different types of sugars, and like why is a cook chocolate cookie with like dark ground sugar better than white sugar. Yeah, well just think about it. It's like it has it has a molasses flavor to it. M M okay, it's gotta, it's gotta. It's like sticky are almost Yeah, exactly right.

I mean that's that's brown sugar. What's the well, what's the difference between light brown sugar and dark brown sugar? The amount of molasses. The more you know, there you go. So obviously light brown sugar is going to have less of a very rich, deep almost like what is molasses? It's made out of sugar cane from sugar cane, okay, okay, And but you know molasses is very strong. Yeah, I

like molasses though. Do you know what um sorgum is? No? Yeah, sorgum is a sweetener like that somewhere between honey and molasses. I think that's that's it's very southern and um they use it in a lot of Southern baking. I think that that's a good like if if you like the if you like molasses, but like you think it's too strong, suragum is a really good one. What about like maple syrup? Do you ever use maple syrup in your baking? Yeah? I use honey, maple syrup, molasses, sorgum, I lose that

stuff all the time. You know what. I don't like to use a goabe really. I don't like the after taste of it. That's so interesting to me. I don't like it. Um okay, what about in like a cocktail. It's not my favorite interesting. I know why they're doing it because you know, it's tequila, which is cactus, and yeah, I get it, but like you don't like it. It has never tast Okay, okay, So we have the pie crust. Now we're gonna make it. We're gonna make strawberries because

that's what we have. And then we have we have some lemon zest and some sugar, some vanilla bean. We have some cut strawberries. What time much should we bake this at? Be fitty four? Okay? Four in degrees? All right? So we have vanilla beans. I love vanilla beans, some lemon zest. You love vanilla bean too. I always put more than what the recipe says, which is part of my problem of baking, which we're gonna get to in a second. Um. So at the seas and lemon and

the sugar altogether, we throw this over the strawberries. We had some some sugar, a little corn stars. The corn starts is going to um kind of thicken the strawberries as they cook, because you know the juices of the strawberries are going to create, you know, a lot of moisture, and so we want them to be held together by something. So that's what the corn Stars is gonna do. Okay,

one of the things that's important. I should have done this prior, but we want to make sure that we get the We roll the dough over the rolling pin, and you want to put this over. I want to put this on the on the pan first, because otherwise if you if you do it on the board, you can't lift it up. Exactly. We take our strawberries put them in the middle. So basically we have our our flavored strawberries and we're gonna mound them up a little bit.

And then basically you just kind of you kind of yeah, you just fold it over and it's very free form. This is a very rustic art, which is for somebody who doesn't bake well like myself. It's perfect, but it's beautiful, yeah it is. It's gorgeous, you know, and you just kind of create like these uneven pleats. And then I take a little butter milk brush them the dough, the edges of the dough, a little buttermilk wash, yes, exactly, So he's gonna help make it a little more golden

crisp beer. And then we're gonna take some of this brown sugar sprinkle it on top. We have a preheated oven in fourign degrees. I was sprinkled it on top of the dough, on top of the dough, so it gives a little more crunchiness. What do you think? So pretty and so simple? All right, let's put this in the oven. So are you gonna keep past you're doing your freezing now, just in case someone comes over and you don't wite me over. That was the funniest thing ever.

Oh my god. Maybe okay, you know, so, like I have no problem making quickbreads, things like buttermilk biscuits, keeny bread, pumpkin bread, corn bread. You know, these are breads that don't really you don't. You don't have to prove them. You know they're not there's no yeast in them. Those are the kinds of things that you should bake more because like you can just kind of toss everything together, put it, you know, and put it in the oven and for the most part it's gonna come out. Well.

I like making banana bread a lot, same thing, same thing. That's why banana bread was so popular during the quarantine version of the pandemic, all of our bananas were going back or like what are we gonna make with them? So it's the same thing. And then like when you go to culinary school, one of the first things they teach you about baking our two pastry crusts. One is a one it's called pat prise, and one is called pats sucre. Pats sucre is a sweet one. Pat Prise

is a savory one. So if you're making like savory dishes, he's the one without sugar. And then the pats sucre has sugar and that's good for like food tarts, etcetera. You know what I love is like a cheddar bacon biscuit. Where we're talking about savory and you were talking about biscuits. Oh my god. But here's the problem. But I just want to talk about some of the problems that I have that I think that a lot of people have

who are not like professional or professional bakers or great bakers. Now, you don't have to be a professional baker to be a great baker. My friends, Susanne lyons dad is the craziest baker who's not a professional I've ever seen. He brought some of the most beautiful pastries I've ever seen in my life to our Thanksgiving one year. I was like, where'd you buy these? He's like, I made them. Like I didn't even believe it. I mean, they were so great, But like for me, like you know, when I think

about baking pies, what are the issues? Okay, well, you know sometimes the filling isn't cooked the way you wanted to be, or it gets too cooked, or it's too juicy and it makes the crust soggy, or here's what here's here's here's when that happens to me a lot is my pie crust shrink in the baking. So like you you put them, you put the pie crust in the in the in the pie plate, and then you

fill it and then you you bake it. And as you bake it, it starts to shrink around the edges, so you lose the edges and I don't clearly I'm not putting enough of the dough around, right, I'm not. I'm not giving it. But you know this is people are gonna understand what I'm talking about. Okay, cakes like layer cakes, I can't ever get a level layer cake.

You ever cooked my birthday cake a few years ago? Okay, you have to bring that up every single time we talked about cakes, I know you, but you were nice about it. You didn't even mention, No, of course not. It's the thought that counts of it. I think it was just like a Vanella cake with chocolate icing sounazing. Sorry, trud have made it sound more complicated, and you're like, oh, it's bigg sick, Buddy Crocker. Yeah, I'll be buying your

cakes from now. But also, my cakes come out like the leaning tower of pizza, you know, it's like and then the frosting part of it, like, I mean, seriously, it's just actually I love frosting cakes. There's something so relaxing about it. Are you good at it? Yeah? I am actually pretty good at it. Like they're even and it looks pretty. That's that's the only part of use like a Palett knife for that, Yeah those, Yeah, okay.

I just the bottom line is I'm not interested. I mean, I'm interested in eatting, like I don't have the I just I'm not I don't have that. I mean I try to make my food look, you know, very pretty and but I was always will you know, I always try to go for that sort of organic state, you know, I don't try to like overpresent things at but I just feel like, you know, you know, just like decorating cakes and stuff like that. I did. I did a cake decorating competition with Buddy from you know, the cake

boss Bluddy Velastia. Well, I love him. You were in a competition for cake decorating. Oh my god. It was the worst thing I've ever done in my work. You should see my kid. I had a very rustic cake. Rusting is the key word. I mean. I just basically was throwing like like um, different color icings at it, like literally throwing it at it, you know, like I was trying to like I don't know who knows what.

It was terrible. And he like he was like laughing the whole time because he made this, you know, spectacular exactly. And he was like, you want me to come and help me. He's like, this is terrible. I'm like, I know, I don't want you to help me. But have you done have you done baking competition? Zwn beat? I have one? If you actually okay, what what were your what were your winning dishes we've done, like cheesecakes and oh I

don't know how to make a cheesecake like multen lava cakes. Um, yeah, but what happens is if I can get the basic thing done, then then what happens is I can I can kind of mess around with flavor in a big way. So you mean you need to get like the dough ride or the cake right sort of thing to be able to add your flare, and then after that I can bring like the finishing flourish that is going to taste good and you know, yeah, and so that's that's

what gives me a chance. But I have to be able to you know, get get the cake out of the pan, which doesn't always happen. I've had some disasters, for sure. Who cares. I mean I learned something every time I do something like that. Do you ever make monkey bread like that that pull apart break? Yea, yeah, it's so good. Um, but I'm I'm dedicated. I'm gonna

be I'm gonna dedicate myself a little bit. The baking have a little bit, like when I say baking, like specific things like I want to bake bread's at home. It's a long process. And you know, speaking of the tarteen Um guys, they just came out with um something called the Bread Book, So guess what they're making here. But I want to I want to learn how to make their bad gets. Yeah, sure, I want to. I want to learn how to make their bad gets, and I want to learn how to make some of their

country loaves. I feel like you have a good pizza dough. I do. But again I was actually talking to uh speaking of books, The Joy of Pizza, which is one of my favorite books of the year, Dan Ricker, who makes I think some of the best pizza in America, maybe in the world, at Rozza in Jersey City. If you haven't been there, you have to go. Um. I've worked with him a couple of times. He's he's taught me um how to make his pizza dough, which is

actually really good. I'm actually gonna make it Saturday. Oh nice, Okay, you've done it before. You haven't done it before. I have. It's really good. He's trying to see what what was in here? This book is beautiful, no, I know, but like when you read the recipes, even like they have something called mission rolls, which are like they're kind of like dinner rolls like Parker House roles. I mean the recipes take a long time. See, yeah, that's that's the

thing I don't have either. I don't have the patience a lot of the time. I really want to get good at making them, like blueberry crumble bars, because are not blueberry BlackBerry. Rather, I love any pastry with BlackBerry because it's so tard. You like blackberries, that's my that's my go to berry. Yeah, I wonder why. I wonder why I like them. I know you never still like berries? What you when you were a kid, you did not like berries? Strawberries? Yeah, you hated him. I love him

Now things change. I've already had two slices of the straw What do you like? Do you ever make desort at home? Not really? Never? No? No. What about if you're having a dinner party, do you buy something? No? Have I meat? I don't know that I've made. I've ever made any dessert for like a dinner party. Usually it's someone else. How about cookies? Although, oh wait, I made um like cinnamon, like snick or doodle bars or something like that for friends giving. I've never I don't

think I've ever made a pie. I'd love to learn how to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. That's pretty simple, actually, is it? Or or a pecan? I love pecans. Corn pie so good. I'm pretty good at making cakes, pumpkin pies like it's basically it's it's basically a pumpkin custard. So it's like you can use canned pumpkin because it's really consistent, you know, eggs, sugar. It's pretty simple. I made good. I made good and pine bars from a New York Times recipe. Yeah, really good. But I don't

know how to make cheesecake. And I love cheesecake. It's a bunch of cream cheese, No wonder is it hard lemon or orange? No? I should give that a shot and you spasically steam it. You know. The cheesecake at Horses is so good. Did you have that? No, we had the This is something I've never had before. We had an Amaretto Cremberley with black truffles on top. That sounds sick. That's what it was, right, Christina was Amaretto, Amaretto, Amaretto cramber lay. That sounds Oh. I love cramber light.

Oh my god, I love cramber light so much. Didn't you used to make a pistachio cramber leg. Yes, But but here's the thing about that. It's like the kremble, like the custard has to be perfect because if you overcook the eggs, it's grainy. What he wants. That can't fix it if it comes out, if you over bake it, it's over turn out the lights. That's the problem. Always Hungry is created by Bobby Flay and Sophie flag. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis. Always Hungary is produced, edited,

and mixed by Jonathan hoss Dressler. Always Hungry is engineered by Sophie Flay. For more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.