I Am all In Again.
Let's I Am all In Again with Scott Patterson and iHeartRadio Podcast.
Hey everybody, Scott Patterson, I Am all In Podcast one eleven productions, iHeartRadio Media, iHeart Podcast. We have a very special Luke's Diner episode with none other than mister Brian hart Hoffmann. He is a world traveling baker, cookbook author and founder of Bake from Scratch and one of the biggest baking platforms out there. He started as a flight attendant with a sweet tooth, visiting bakeries around the globe
and recreating the recipes at home. Now he's published best selling book cookbooks, hosts a hit podcast called The Crumb, and leads sold out baking retreats all over the world. Brian, Welcome to Luke Steiner.
After that introduction, thank you for having me. That was making me feel bigger and better than I am. But I'll take every word of it.
That's my job. That is my job. You have baked all over the world. How'd you get started on this journey and what really kicks started your love for baking and traveling?
You know, that's a question I get a lot because in the baking world, I think so many people start their story by saying I baked with my mother and my grandmother, and it was all a part of the upbringing and being from the South. I did bake with my mom, biscuits, corn bread, like we got the basics down. But my mom wasn't a passionate baker. She's an entrepreneur. She started our company forty four years ago. So I actually grew up learning my professional world from my mom,
and then the baking aspects all happened later. I had a high school job a bakery. I didn't realize I was being inundated with the baking world. I thought I was just working in the bakery because my friends worked there. But maybe it did stick with me. Maybe it was all the buttercream I was eating out of the containers every day that got in my system and really stuck with me. But it was my years of being a flight attendant and traveling the world.
And again, this.
Boy that grew up in Alabama with not a lot of exposure beyond the area I grew up in, I took people's advice seriously. They say, you got to go to this cafe or bakery and try this thing. It's from this town, it's from this country, and it was like this quest of discovery that led me to my own kitchen and it was I want to recreate this and that was so good, I've got to have more of it. And it was just this kind of insatiable
thing that lit my fire for baking. And it became a little bit of a therapy for me, being in the kitchen on my off days, just to let my brain escape and be a part of something else.
Discovery so.
Fascinating. But correct me if I'm wrong. Your focus is more on baking than cooking. Right, So when you're testing recipes, how do you sample without wasting like a full cake or a whole batch? I mean, do you taste the batter, make a smaller version? What do you do?
Yeah?
You know, I think the testing process it, you know, I think baking failure is a part of baking. You know, in cooking you can you can revive something, you can change your spices, change your liquid, you can revive and correct along the way. Baking is an education through testing failure and getting right back in there again. But it's like my mom taught me that even if a cake crumbles or falls apart, when you take it out of the pan.
That's what you make a trifle out of.
So I always find a way to take what I test, and I take the failures and I'll still enjoy them. You know, when you've baked long enough, not all of the failures are disgusting. They just may not look the right way. So I'll eat it or share it with family and friends ask for their fear feedback. I think that's some of the best ways to get yourself taught a little bit more is to have other people give you some advice. But yeah, I try not to waste things,
and yeah, I'm team dough. I eat the batter, I taste everything before it goes in the oven.
It's good. So let's talk about oven temperatures. And I already know the answer to this question. But how important is oven temperature? Bake baking temperature, and baking time time temperature. It's everything, isn't it?
And I'll add one more to that next time temperature and the weight of your ingredients. Oh, American bakers do not learn to bake by weight, but weighing your ingredients and grams is the international language of baking, and I learned that early on in my travels in France and England and other places where I was taking classes, they were weighing everything. And when I started weighing my ingredients,
the outcome changed immediately. One day something would be great, the next day it would be off.
And I was like, I don't know.
I did everything the right way, and then I realized I wasn't weighing my flour correctly. I wasn't weighing my ingredients. And then weight, time, and temperature became the three variables that the outcomes. They're kind of like self correct yourself pretty quickly.
M I cook a lot of salmon. I bake a lot of salmon, and I always use the same temperature in the same time, but the size of the pieces of the salmon can vary. Not a great deal, but sometimes they do, do you know. And from doing this these episodes and talking to people like you, I discovered that the more butter I use, the more grass fed butter I use, the more it covers up my mistakes. Like I can nuke the hell out of the salmon, it's still going to be moist.
Yeah, you've got your butter.
You gotta Hey, if you doubt something in butter or a glaze or icing, you can hide a lot of the imperfections.
That's right, that's right.
You know, I swore that whoever invented butter cream was not because they wanted butter cream. It was to cover up an ugly cake they made, and that was the invention of butter cream. I'm convinced of it.
Right, right, right, Okay, So all the recipes that you've created, what's three are you most proud of? And why?
Oh, the three I'm the most proud of, Well, they're all you know that sentimental comes back into play. It's I've baked a lot of things, and I always love to bake something new. I think that's my favorite thing to make is something I've never made before. But the three things that I think I'm the most proud of would be my cinnamon rolls. I spent months perfecting what I call a pan of centers. I do not like a dry edge of a cinnamon roll that bakes to
the side of the pan. I reach right for the middle, unapologetically take that middle one right out of the pan. But then I figured out the solution so that every cinnamon roll tastes like it just came out of the center of the pan. So I love my cinnamon rolls. I love my oatmeal cream pies. As a I would always beg my mom to buy the Little Debbie oatmeal
cream pies at the grocery store. And so a baking quest for someone like me is, well, surely I can make a better one than I could buy at this like snack food, you know, box of stuff.
At the grocery store.
So when I perfected the oatmeal cream pie, that was another baking accomplishment. And then when I recreated a cake that my mom loved from childhood, this cherry pecan cake from a bakery in Birmingham that's no longer in business, and I had her in the kitchen for all the tastings, like, Mom, are we on the right track? Does it taste like it should? And when she nodded her head and said, oh, this tastes like the cake from my childhood, I knew
it was like a dang good one. And that was a recipe I created the mother's day before she passed away three months later. So she got to have this cake and for me, that will forever be a connection to my mom and a memory that I'm glad we got to have together.
That's very nice since you've baked all around the world. Okay, what dish or ingredient you think we could use more in our everyday lives in the United States that we typically wouldn't think to use.
Carda mom explain place carda mom in baking is so nice and it pairs perfectly with cinnamon. You know a lot of the Swedish breads and pastries they're either cardamom or cinnamon. But even the cinnamon versions have some cardamom in it, and it just has such a way of changing the flavor profile even if you don't like it too strong. And I think that's where people get in a version to cardamom as they say, oh, it's too much.
I don't it's overpowering. I say, mix it in with some cinnamon and that'll start being a game changer when you bake.
Okay, and you know you're teaching all the time online, in person on TV. Have you ever learned something unexpected from one of your students?
Oh? Always, that's the thing.
I I It's hard to say I'm the teacher because I always feel like the student. And I think if you're always learning and then sharing, what you learn, it just continues to help everybody. And I believe in a community of people learning together. I learn from I learn
everywhere I go. If I teach alongside another baking you know, cookbook author or chef, I'm learning something from them that I bring back into the kitchen and use the next time I do something Like when I was in England a few years ago, I was in a class that the instructor was needing dough a different way than I had, and I loved a handkneed dough and when I watched her do it, it was another AHA moment for me.
And then I incorporate it in now to my teaching as an alternative way to need doe and help people build their confidence. So yeah, I'm always learning and then sharing it with people that are learning from me.
Right, and you've published a number of cookbooks over the years, and you have two more coming out later this year. It's time to bake and cook cookies in everyday cooptails.
Yeah, so I've got the I've got the range for you, yeah too.
What can we expect from these two new books of yours?
So it's time to bake cookies is exactly what it sounds like it is just my love letter to baking cookies. I created a recipe for what I call a taste just like wedding cake sandwich cookie, because I love the taste of wedding cake. That almond extract is the hidden ingredient in a wedding cake. But you don't get many cookies that have that almond profile. So I took cream of tartar that you haven't a snicker doodle, you get that really tender cookie.
I use cream of tartar in it.
I put almond extract, I put sprinkles in it so that it felt like a celebration, and then I put butter cream between two cookies and it's it's fabulous.
So that's on the cover of the book.
I love language in baking two cookies.
And then baking and hanging out.
In the kitchen also makes you want to have a cocktail. So I have another cocktail book coming out. It's called Everyday Cooptails. I love a coop glass. I love the shape. I love the vintage ones that I find when I'm in Europe. I love collecting them, and so I thought, there's got to be more than you can drink from a coop glass than champagne or maybe a few artisan cocktails at a bar where the mixologists are doing really great things, but you could never recreate it at home.
So my colleague Broke Bell and I put our heads together and we came up with all these cooptails that you drink every day, from a not frozen pina Colada to a Bushwhacker, which is a frozen cocktail that is so good, blueberry lemon drop, a la Vie and rose, my tribute to my love for France and the pink colored sky and the sunset. So it's a cocktail for every mood and every season.
Beautiful.
Okay, So this week we recap season two, episode fourteen. It should have been Laureli, where we got a glimpse of Friday night dinner at the Gilmore's. Tell me what you might want to prepare and serve at one of those Friday night dinners.
Well, I love that they started with a Manhattan that like was a complete like I could sit down at the table and be totally fine because the Manhattan is probably my signature cocktail I want to have most nights of the week. So I felt like, okay, I can come to family dinner. It looks just so very formal setting. You know, I think a Friday night family dinner is something like casual, and I was expecting this very like
get the family around the table vibe. And then in the episode when the mood is a little cold, with some temper tantrums and some emotions, I really wanted another Manhattan to get through the drama of it all.
Oh yeah, those Friday night dinners on Gilmore. That's not casual. That's an inquisition. That's that's Emily's weekly inquisition against her daughter. Yeah.
I felt Emily needed to set the tone for the whole evening. But I would help her out and make a beautiful cake for dessert. You know, I felt like that family dinner needed a beautiful layer cake to finish the evening with.
They rarely last that long. Somebody's like getting up and storming out by you know, the middle of the main course.
Hey, that brings some fun to it. Also, again, another reason you need an everyday cooptail.
They need a lot of them. Yeah, do you think so you saw the episodes, do you think it would be harder to impress Emily or Richard with your meal?
Oh, Emily Emily's the one you've got to break. It's the way I perceive it. It's her show, it's her when the door opens till the end of the evening, from drama and all.
It's the way she needed it to be.
So I think it's one of those dinners I would be shaking in my boots at the door if I were bringing a dessert. Probably not going to live up to her expectation.
Right, right, right?
Did you notice that that my diner, Luke's Diner was very empty in this episode? I mean, it's so it happens. So what's your take on diner food? Do you think diners should evolve with the times or is it the charm and keeping it.
Classic the charm?
You know, you say the word diner and I want to slice a pie. I don't even love eating pie that much, but you say the word diner and I need a cherry pie.
That is like, hands down.
That word takes me to a place with dessert that I know I'm going to have to have pie. Right, I'm intrigued by what was it bagel hockey on your on your bar counter? I mean, the empty place was calling for something else with baked.
Goods, right, right, right, right, let's go off food a little bit. But since this happened in the diner, Christopher's little freak out, you think it was justified. And I don't get where the moral equivalency is where Christopher coming down the Laurel line that way after so many years of sort of absconding and being a deadbeat. So what do you think of all that?
It took me down at the end of the episode. I mean, I had felt like so much emotion. I felt this connection obviously dealing with the drama of him bringing his girlfriend unexpectedly and how to interact with a child and her father and the now the girlfriend of all of that, So you already have this emotional maybe tension building.
But then when he flipped and freaked in.
The diner, I was maybe that was like the like, I don't know, the t bone of the car accident that I didn't see coming. I was sitting there with her with my jaw open at the end, like, no way.
How inappropriate was it for him to bring sharing?
Yeah he should.
Have told he told, right.
He should have told, you don't surprise, No, you don't, and and yeah, you don't surprise with that you gotta tell.
I mean, he really I could really give him some coaching after this.
But poor Laurel I right, I mean just she handled that with as much grace as as she could possibly muster.
I always appreciate someone's honesty. She duves so deep to convey something to him that I think she thought would bring them closer, like you. Being in this relationship has allowed me to reflect and now I know how I can move forward and not feel so maybe this weird unspoken thing. And then he took it so like, how dare you put that on me? I was like, how dare you react this way?
Do you think that he did that because he didn't get the result that he was seeking? Do you think it was a manipulative thing? Do you think he set her up, brought Sherry in because he really does want Laura l I back, and she didn't react the right way.
I thought about that, But I also thought, maybe this is just that great that some people have that they can't hear an honest conversation that should have brought just maybe acknowledgment and support for Larlai. Instead, it was made it about him, and how dare you lay this life burden? On me, and I was like, you know, I've known people in my life like this, and I was like, oh my god, that trait is something I hate in people.
You turned it all around, made it about you, and it was so inappropriate.
I can't I can't imagine. I can't imagine a person or a character with more objectionable traits than that. Christopher. I just it's amazing to watch, isn't it.
Yeah? Yeah, I was like, God, I's just shocked by it.
Wow. All right, here's the biggest question of them all. No one's ever asked you this question. I don't mean to drop it on you. This is not like a law or AE thing on Christopher. I'm not dropping a bomb on you, but it's kind of like that. So get ready.
I'm ready.
If Brian, if Brian you were to come in to Luke Steiner, what would you order? Where would you sit? Sorry, I don't mean to put the pressure on you like this.
Well, I loved in the episode you offered them anywhere they wanted to sit, So it did get in my mind about where would I go if I had an entire place, and I would have turned left and gone to the table by the window.
Always looking for. I like the where it sits by.
The bar, and then I have to say, just being in the bar and the references to canoli and bagel kind of made me want to have a weird hybrid of of everything bagel canoli like a savory thing, So I thought, maybe we go somewhere hybrid on that.
Excellent Brian hart Hoffmann.
You are.
Not only a world traveling entrepreneur, but a witty rock anteur. Thank you so much for your time. Please please come back. Okay, absolutely we want to talk more with you and hear more about your adventures in baking Land and beyond. All the best to you, and that's going to wrap us up here, folks, best fans on the planet. Keep the cards and letters comeing, and remember where you lead, we will follow.
Stay safe everyone, everybody, and don't
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