2015 Saveur Blog Awards | The Dinner Special podcast

103: Kaitlin Leung: Connecting with Family Through Cooking

December 30, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Woks of Life

The Woks of Life is written by Bill, Judy, Sarah and Kaitlin a family that has been cooking and serving up meals for a combined 139 years. Their blog is for anyone looking to try their hand at grade A authentic Chinese cooking whatever their background may be. The Woks of Life were the 2015 Saveur Blog Awards winners in Readers’ Choice Best Special Interest Blog, as well as Editors’ Choice Best Special Interest Blog.

I’m so psyched to have Kaitlin Leung of The Woks of Life with me here today.

(*All photos are The Woks of Life’s.)

On Starting The Woks of Life:

Food blogs are not new obviously but there were a couple of big ones that we did follow, me and my sister mainly, which were The Pioneer Woman. So she kind of blew up and she has her own show and she is like a complete celebrity now and also Smitten Kitchen. So those were the two blogs mainly that we enjoyed looking at and that sparked the idea like, “Why can’t we start a food blog too?”

After she (Sarah) graduated she wasn’t really sure what she wanted to do and she had the whole summer to think about that. So she came up with this idea of starting a food blog. My mom and I were pretty excited to help out and start cooking things and take photos. So it organically became this family thing. She had the idea we could call it The Woks of Life, and we could be the four people at the center of it, and it could be a family thing.

At the time my parents were sort of transitioning into that idea of living in Beijing and then I think four months after the blog was started they actually did move. I’m getting my timing a little bit wrong but she graduated and they were moving to Beijing and everything was kind of in flux.

It was a good way for us to gather our family recipes and have a way to connect with each other across spaces. We communicated mainly through iMessage, Skype and emails. I would email my sister from the library at midnight being like, “Hey, I’m really bored what did you eat today?” That kind of little small talk, chit chat that you would normally have but you don’t really have when you are at two different schools and your parents are living in Beijing. It was all sending pictures of food that we made and we were almost already in the mindset. So to actually make it official was not that big of a job. It became a great family thing and a way for us to stay connected.

On Growing Up in a Family Where Food Played a Big Role:

Growing up it was always gathering around a big table full of food, and everybody reaching across loading up their plates. It was just a really great atmosphere. My dad was very active in the kitchen and his sisters loved to cook too. So from a young age we were like sponges just soaking up all this cooking knowledge and the Food Network. Those were the glory days of the Food Network, classics like Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray was just starting and Giada De Laurentiis, she was unmarried and without her baby so that was when she was starting out too. It was a really great time to be interested in food.

We would always just be in the kitchen like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that,” it’s a passive and an active thing. You’re just watching but at some point you kind of have to roll up your sleeves and when me and my sister were teenagers my parents would have dinner parties and we were like catering staff. We knew so much and we could handle so much. All of my parents friends would be like, “Oh my God your daughters, they are so effective in the kitchen.”

It was kind of always growing up with that mentality of food is important and food is at the center and that’s the big reason why we get together, extended family too, it’s let’s get together and have a barbecue or let’s go get dim sum. It’s just an integral part of not just our family specifically but I feel like the Asian experience in general. You have a big extended family and what’s the best thing to do when you have all these huge amounts of people in the room? You eat.

On Learning About Chinese Cooking:

When we were younger you’re seeing Emeril and you’re seeing Rachel Ray and they’re not making Chinese food. So it kind of got to a point where it was… my grandma always loved saying this to her friends. She brags about us like, “Anything you want, they can make it,” it doesn’t necessarily apply to Chinese food. So when my parents moved to Beijing it was tough because I never ate Chinese food anymore.

You can’t go home and have a home cooked meal. That was another big part of why we wanted to start the blog, is documenting these recipes, which for years was like, “a little this, a little that,” like, “eyeball it, just pour it until it feels right.” You can’t really make that. So Chinese cooking has definitely taken on a bigger part of our repertoire, I guess for me and Sarah, but it was always within the expertise of my parents.

On What Authentic Chinese Food is to Her:

For me personally authentic Chinese food is the food that I grew up eating. It’s the Cantonese spread of salt and pepper pork chops and the pork bone soup and the big plate of green veggies with garlic and the steamed fish. It’s all that but I think that today when you think about traditional Chinese food it’s almost like it’s more about who made it for you.

The food itself is anything that tastes good that’s pretty traditional. I guess authentic is traditional. But I think that it’s almost more important who made it for you. Going into Queens to visit my grandparents and going to the restaurants around there, a lot of those places are owned by people that are technically Chinese citizens but they opened a restaurant in Flushing, Queens. It’s almost in my mind this set of dishes that my family makes most often and eats most often. So you could watch A Bite of China which is this documentary and there’s tons and tons of variety and dishes that you could have that are traditional and authentic, but to me it doesn’t resonate as much because I didn’t grow up eating it.

On Who in the Family is More Traditional and Who Likes to Experiment:

I would say my mother is definitely the most traditional which makes sense because she grew up China and she came over to the U.S. when she was 16. So she definitely has the most knowledge so therefore the most respect for those traditional dishes. I think my dad has a similar level of traditionalism but he grew up more on the Americanized Cantonese side of things. So he has more of an expertise in take-out dishes. He is the king of General Tso’s chicken and the pork fried rices and the lo meins, he can churn out anything.

In terms of who’s the most experimental? I think it’s probably a tie between me and my sister. I think we sort of alternate in our bolts of lightning moments of culinary brilliance. There’s one dish that she made that was so good. It was kimchi french fries and it’s this delicious kimchi mixture and then you put over french fries and then you put cheese on top and it’s 10 times better than chili cheese fries. But chili cheese fries are also good.

And then I’ll make something like Sichuan peppercorn Cacio e Pepe. Which is just cheese and black peppercorns but I wanted to incorporate an Asian spin so I used Sichuan peppercorns and white peppercorns and black peppercorns. It can become hard honestly to come up with those interesting ideas. You can’t fully hang your hat on just traditional Chinese food because that’s good but sometimes you just want something more interesting. We’re definitely always watching and seeing what the food world is doing and trying to get ideas.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I do watch The Pioneer Woman just because it’s a wonderful escape from real life. She’s got this amazing ranch and she makes all this delicious, comforting, fatty food, it’s great. I love that show and Jamie at Home. That was a short lived show but that was a really good show by Jamie Oliver. He has a beautiful garden, he sits outside with a little cutting board and just cuts and reaches over and plucks fresh herbs, it’s great.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

So the sense that we get in the food blog world is that there’s just so many blogs out there and I think a lot of them don’t get enough credit because everybody’s really passionate about food and just telling their story. A couple that we like, one of them would be, Omnivore’s Cookbook which is this girl named Maggie and she actually was living in Beijing at the same time as we were and my sister and her actually met up and talked about food. She has a great blog that has authentic recipes. She makes them a little bit easier and more approachable but they still have that good authentic taste of Chinese food. So we really like her blog.

Another blog would be Little Cooking Tips which is a really cute, really friendly couple in Greece named Panos and Mirella, and they are so nice. They have really good Greek recipes. I just was on their website today and they had a finger licking feta and sausage mac and cheese. That sounds really good. They have a lot of good fusion Greek recipes. So we definitely like them. Hummingbird High, I think she was one of your most recent podcast guest. Her photography is gorgeous and her cakes look so good. Every time I want cake I just go to her Instagram and then I visually eat it.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

I’m not sure about Pinterest because that’s my mother’s domain. She is the Pinterest master but on Instagram we follow a bunch of people. But I would say a couple of really good accounts are…there’s one by Dennis The Prescott, his photography is gorgeous and all of his food just looks so freakin yummy. He’s just one of those people that I go to time and time again.

Another one that I really like is Symmetry Breakfast. I think it’s a couple and they just take pictures of breakfasts that they have together and it’s perfectly symmetrical. It’s just so perfect for somebody who’s a little OCD like me. It’s just beautiful, I love it. They’ve got really great stuff. They have like a bagette that’s cut open and baked with eggs inside. They know how to live. They eat good for breakfast. I just roll out of bed and I’m lucky if I have a piece of toast. So those are just a couple that I like but there are so many people on Instagram that have just amazing photography. It can be hard to keep up because so many people are just putting out amazing content but those are two that I love.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I would say unusual for a nonChinese audience that is actually very useful is a tong device for picking up plates. If you put a hot dish in a steamer you don’t want to grab it and it kind of goes like this and then you can grab the plate and lift it out. That’s a really amazing underrated and not that well known tool. So for anybody listening, you should go buy one.

Most treasured I would say is probably my grandfather’s cleavers from my dad’s side. He was a chef and they actually had a Chinese restaurant for a number of years. We have his old cleaver that actually has his initials carved in the side. Because there are a bunch of chefs in the kitchen and you want to differentiate which one’s yours. We don’t use that one often but it’s still very sharp. It’s interesting. It’s years and years old but it’s still really good.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Cilantro. I didn’t hate it. There are some people out there that hate cilantro, I never hated it but I never really liked it maybe until I was 14. It adds so much flavor. If you have a guacamole that has no cilantro, I’m sorry, but that’s not real guacamole. You need it. When you’re putting it on steamed fish with soy sauce and scallions and ginger, you need the cilantro, it adds a little something.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Ina Garten has a cookbook that is… I don’t know exactly what it’s called but it’s the pink one so people that know Ina Garten’s cookbook, there’s a blue one and there’s an orange one. But the orange one is Barefoot in Paris and there’s a pink one which is her basics cookbook. There is a chocolate cake recipe in that cookbook called Beatty’s Chocolate Cake it changed my life. This chocolate cake recipe is the only one you will ever need. It’s so moist and the frosting is perfect. It’s kind of sad actually because if you flip through the whole book, almost every page is totally pristine, and then when you go to this chocolate cake recipe, there’s just schmutz all over it. There are stains and drips of buttermilk because that’s how often I make that cake. This is more of a PSA than an interview question I feel because that cake is truly the best. We make it for friends and they rave. They love it.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

For my sister it would definitely be Nat King Cole. For me, I would say, if anybody’s ever seen the movie Something’s Gotta Give with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, that soundtrack is our favorite for cooking. It’s all French bistro music and whets your appetite and you feel so jazzy walking around the kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with The Woks of Life:

The best way to keep posted is to follow us on Facebook or Instagram. If you use Twitter, definitely follow us on Twitter, and I would say subscribe to our email list because we send out an email noon everyday when we have a new recipe.

086: Samantha Seneviratne: Cooking Up A Career in Baking and Food

October 19, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Love Comma Cake

Sam has been a food editor at Good Housekeeping, Fine Cooking, and Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food. Today, she’s a freelance recipe developer and food stylist and recently released her first cookbook called The New Sugar and Spice: A Recipe for Bolder Baking. She was also a Finalist in the 2015 Saveur Blog Awards for Best Baking and Desserts Blog.

I’m so psyched to have Samantha Seneviratne of Love Comma Cake here on the show today.

On Baking and Sweet Things:

I think I knew I was going to be a baker from when I was a really little kid. I told my family that I was going to be a baker and a librarian when I was five. I always loved dough and sugar and butter. I always loved working with those things. So as soon as I knew that people needed jobs to keep afloat, I realized that dough was probably the way I should go. So I think it’s in my blood.

I went to culinary school and I studied both savory and sweet, and I worked as a food editor at different food magazines. So in doing that, I pretty much have to do both sweet and savory, and these days I do some styling and recipe development both sweet and savory. I do both. I love doing the baked goods. That’s what I really want to do all the time.

On Finding Her Career in Food:

Well, it took me a long time to figure how I was going to do it. I went to college. I went to a liberal arts college, and I studied Latin American studies, and Spanish Literature, and then I got a job after school in public television, and then worked for a different non-profit. I had a bunch of other things that I was directing my life towards. Then, all of a sudden, I just realized what I really loved to do is cook, and that I should just go to culinary school and make it happen. But it took me a while to figure out how to do it because I’m not really a restaurant chef. I have great respect for restaurant chefs but that’s not what I do, and I knew that wouldn’t be my path. So it took me awhile to figure out exactly how I was going to make a living cooking. And magazine test kitchens were the place for me for awhile and that worked out well.

I had a friend who worked at the magazine, and she played on a soccer team with an editor at Gourmet magazine. So I told her I was interested in food and she said, “Well, why don’t you meet this guy. He’s a food editor at Gourmet.” And he took me on a tour of the gourmet test kitchen and showed me what he did, and I thought, “That looks like a good job. That looks like exactly where I should be.” So after that visit with him, I went to culinary school and that’s what I did.

On Her Food Heroes and What She’d Make for Them:

I mean the baking heroes like Dorie Greenspan and David Lebovitz, and there are so many, Rose Levy Beranbaum. There are so many baking stars, so many classics.

I’m really into fried dough. Lately, I’ve been really making donuts and just this morning we made apple fritters and funnel cake. I think fried dough is what I’m really feeling these days. It’s not good for you, but it’s fun to make.

The thing is the difference when you fry it and then eat it right out of the oil, toss it in sugar and then eat it. It’s a whole other ball game. It’s so much more delicious than anything you can ever buy because it’s a timing thing. So I’d probably make some fried dough of some kind.

On Her Blog:

I wanted to get more of an online presence that was just me. I was working at different magazines, and I love working in magazine test kitchens because you’re really part of a team, and you’re all creating this food in this vision and under this brand name.

I wanted to have a body of work that was mine, and that I could contribute to and that was 100% my voice. Just exactly what I wanted to make whenever I wanted to make it and so that’s what I did.

I just was craving a place where I can have complete control over everything I did. So that means any whim that I had I just was able to do it.

On Simple Rules of Thumb for Baking for Greater Success:

I think people are more scared of baking than they need to be. There’s a little more flexibility than people think there is. Things could vary slightly depending on how warm your butter is or something like that, but your disasters are rare, right? So measuring flour is important, temperatures are important. I think measuring flour is number one. Once you’ve learned how to measure flour, things are going to improve greatly, or get a scale, also, a really good way to go.

(On baking with cold eggs.) You can totally warm them up. There are little tricks like you can keep your eggs in some warm water and that’ll heat them up. Or you can even if you crack them into a bowl and then let them warm up that way. That also works. You can warm up your butter by pounding it with a rolling pin or sometimes I even microwave it on a low 20% power, 50% power, you can warm your butter up. Which a lot of people don’t recommend because it’s easy to go from cold butter to melted butter and then you’re kind of screwed. But you can do it. It works. But I think measuring flour is number one.

On Her Cookbook, The New Sugar and Spice:

It was a long process. I probably started a proposal for that book four years ago. It took me a long time to write the proposal. I wrote a proposal for a book I wasn’t that happy with, and then I scrapped it and then wrote a new proposal, and it took a long time to get the proposal in good shape. And then I shopped around with agents. Then she helped me work on the proposal and then we pitched the book. It’s a long process, but I always had the dream of writing cookbook. So just finding the book that felt right and it took me a long time to get there, and I think I did. I like it.

It’s basically a baking book and I use spices and the chapters of the books are all organized by spice. The general idea of the book is that I try to use a little less sugar. I don’t like overly sweet desserts, and I think that it’s easy to fall to that trap. I think sugar can be a crutch. So I try to develop recipes that were a little bit less sweet and used spices to amp up the flavor in a more complex and interesting way. That’s not to say they are low sugar or diet or anything like that, but they seem to me to be a little less sweet and a little more interesting.

I also wrote a lot of history. I got into researching the history of certain spices and how that related a little bit to my family history because my parents are from Sri Lanka. I started digging into the history of cinnamon, I realized that my great grandmother grew clove trees in her yard, and my great grandfather grew vanilla beans. And I learned that my family’s history was intertwined with spices in that fun way, so I wrote a lot about that.

I had fun writing the intros that were all about spice history and my family history and having really personal head notes about my parents, and my brother, and things like that. That felt unique, and fun, and special to me because, as a food editor for a magazine, you don’t ever get to just write about yourself or write about why you like something. You don’t get that opportunity very often and so I took it in the book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t have cable television so I don’t watch anyone.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

I have a lot of food blogs that I love. It’s going to be hard to list them. I love Brooklyn Supper, and I love Two Red Bowls. And I love The Fauxmartha. Those are three right now I’ll tell you that I love.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

The only thing I do out of all those things is Instagram. So I would say, I think David Lebovitz is really funny and his Instagram account makes me laugh.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I have a little dowel that I got at a hardware store. I had them cut it down so it’s like a four-inch dowel. I don’t know what they’re for when you buy them at the hardware store, but I use it to roll out little pastries, and I love it. It’s the most useful tool in the world and it was a dollar.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

I’m into anise seeds now and I didn’t think I was into it before. Actually the book, writing that book, I have a couple of recipes for anise seeds in a biscotti and in a pear tart, and I think they’re both delicious. I’ve really come around on anise seed.

I hate liquorice like so many people, but I didn’t realize that if you use anise seeds sparingly and if you pair it with something delicious, it can work in combination with other things. I just hadn’t figured that out yet, but I like it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Regan Daley’s In the Sweet Kitchen is one of my all-time favorite books in the whole world. I think that book is super smart. There’s a lot of information at the beginning. It’s a baking companion, and there are glossaries and flavor pairing charts and things like that, that make baking really easy and inspire you to do good things. And then the second half of the book is all these wonderful recipes. I think that book is genius. That book makes my life better.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Oh my gosh, anything. I just like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and all those guys. That kind of music, I love it.

On Keeping Posted with Sam:

Instagram probably. You can find me at @samanthaseneviratne, and you can follow me there or you can sign up to receive all updates on my blog Love Comma Cake.

031: Jodi Moreno: An “Ah-Ha” Moment That Lead to How She Cooks

April 27, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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What’s Cooking Good Looking, food blog.

Jodi is a natural food chef. On her blog, she features healthy, wholesome and tasty foods that are proven to have the power to make us feel good from the inside out. What’s Cooking Good Looking was a finalist for Best Cooking Blog in Saveur’s 2014 Best Food Blog Awards.

More recently, Jodi is a finalist in the 2015 Saveur Blog Awards for Most Delicious Food, and she collaborated on a cookbook called Grains as Mains.

I am so thrilled to have Jodi Moreno of What’s Cooking Good Looking here on the show.

On Starting Her Blog:

I was somebody who always loved cooking. I grew up in an Italian family where food was very important. Food is always a very important part of our family. However, I wasn’t really always allowed to take over in the kitchen. I was always there helping and doing things.

When I went to college, I realized that when I didn’t have my family cooking for me anymore, I was going to have to cook for myself. So I started getting my feet wet with cooking. I was terrible. I made many, many mistakes. I exploded a few things.

When I started working professionally after college, I started taking it more seriously.

After work every day, I would come home and cook 3-hour meals for just myself. These elaborate things. I try these crazy recipes and then I bring the leftovers into the office. My co-workers were like, “Why don’t you do this? Why are you working in an office?”

After several years, I realized that maybe I should just do this full-time. So after a few years of working up to that, I left my job and went to culinary school.

On Photography:

My first job was working for photographers, so I never even had that much experience behind the camera. A lot of the work I was doing was in post-production and scanning the film into the computer, so it was a huge jump.

The photographer that I worked for really believed in me and thought that I could get behind the camera and start taking pictures. So he bought me a camera and it sat in my closet for many years, which I think I mention on my blog that it just kind of sat there collecting dust. It literally did.

Then when I went to culinary school, it was when I really started picking it up and taking it out, and realized since I have this love for food and this background of photography, I feel like it came naturally to just pick up the camera and start taking pictures of my food.

If you see my early pictures though, they’ve come a long way, so it wasn’t like they started off so great. But I did have a lot of background in photography which led me to where I am now.

On Her Shift to More Wholesome Foods:

I think it was a gradual process. I’ve always had this love of food but I also was someone who liked to exercise. I was running half marathons all the time and things like that, so I feel like I slowly started to realize that the foods that I ate really affected the rest of my life. I started to make little changes one by one. I think buying organic was the first thing I ever did.

That was really exciting. But then, I got more and more like that. Then also, a few years ago, I discovered that I had some sensitivity to foods which my doctor figured out; dairy and cow’s milk in particular. I just kept growing.

Then when I went to culinary school, I was looking at programs and I just didn’t feel any sort of connection to the ones that were more traditional, like heavy French-type cooking, a lot of sauces and things like that. I really wanted to learn about nutrition and how it affects you and how food really can be enriching. Then, when I did that program, that’s when my life totally changed.

Now, I eat mostly a plant-based diet. I allow a lot of room for exciting things to come in. I’m not dogmatic about it by any means, but it’s just how I enjoy eating nowadays.

I feel like that was the biggest “aha” moment. When my doctor said, “Cow’s milk is really causing a lot of these problems that you’re having, try cutting it out,” I was like, “Wow, that’s a pretty powerful thing.” I mean, I had a chronic cough. I had acne. I had all these kind of nagging little things that you could brush off as one thing or the other. But when I stopped, after about a month, they all went away and they’ve never come back.

Once I saw the results of that, it really changed. I wanted to change more. I wanted to feel even better.

I feel like just learning that one little thing changed so much about the way that I started cooking. Then once you get that feeling of what it’s like to experience that wellness, you crave it and you’re addicted to it and you just want more of that.

On Learning to Cook More Naturally:

It was a program based here in New York called the Natural Kitchen Culinary School. It was the only one I could find of its kind that combined traditional culinary techniques, so learning the basics like the knife skills and how to not burn things. Just to cook, follow recipes properly so that they come out really well. But in addition to that, they also taught about nutrition and these different cooking techniques like Macrobiotic and Ayurvedic. So I was really fascinated by all of that and it was the only program that I found that taught that.

On Starting to Cook More Healthfully:

One of the biggest things I think for cooking healthy is that maybe you don’t have the time. I found that a big thing for me was to set aside maybe a half hour, an hour, one day a week where you cook a batch of something, whether it’s quinoa or your beans or even just chopping up vegetables so you could snack on those instead of chips or something. Just setting aside any amount of time you can; any small or large.

If you want to spend all Sunday cooking, great. But even if you just do an hour a week, I feel like that really can impact the way that you eat for the rest of the week.

Even I will run to the nearest whatever take-out place to get something when I don’t have the time or the stuff in my fridge to do it.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love Chopped. I feel like I get a lot of great tips from there. Top Chef, and of course I’m a sucker for Barefoot Contessa.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

One of the ones I learned about last year was Vegetarian Ventures. That was new to me and I find her recipes to be incredibly creative. I look at Sprouted Kitchen’s website all the time. I feel a real connection to the foods that she makes. There are so many.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Instagram is my favorite. I love Oh, Ladycakes. She is a vegan baker and she travels a lot so she’s always got great posts. On Pinterest, Local Milk. She blows me away, she’s got amazing taste.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

Olive oil, absolutely. I couldn’t live without it.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without.

Olive oil, for everything; your sautéing, dressing your salad.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

One of my favorite books which you might not hear a lot of people talk about is The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook. I feel like there’s a lot of techniques in there. If I want a basic vegetable broth, they just have some really solid techniques. I’m constantly referring to it which I feel is a little bit unusual.

The Silver Spoon is another one that I think is a little out of the box that has great basic recipes and techniques and stuff and you can find there’s thousands of recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I feel like I play this over and over again. It’s John Coltrane’s album.

I feel like when I’m really getting in the mood, I always put that on. I’ve been doing that for years and years and I never get sick of it. I love it.

Keep Posted on Jodi:

Definitely Instagram. I post all my new recipes on there, and then I feed it through all the other social media sites; Facebook, Twitter. So I guess it depends on which one you like to use most, but I’m on all of them.

Have Jodi’s Best Ever Tomato Sauce Recipe Sent to You Now:

029: Kristan Raines: Tips for Greater Baking Success

April 22, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Broken Bread

The Broken Bread is where Kristan explores her creativity through cooking. It’s also where she shares her stories and the tales behind the dishes she makes. The Broken Bread was a 2014 finalist in Saveur’s Food Blog Awards for Best Baking and Desserts blog, and in 2015 is a finalist for Best-Designed Blog.

I’m so happy to have Kristan Raines of The Broken Bread, here on the show.

On Her Blog:

I was eight or nine years old when I got my first Easy-Bake Oven. I just fell in love with baking. Even though it was just a little microwave, but it popped out a cake and I got to decorate it and I thought it was so much fun.

And then photography has always been my life. So I would say with those two components, it actually came together.

Three and a half years ago when my husband and I got married, we moved to Seattle. We didn’t really know anybody. It was this new environment for me to explore things I’ve always wanted to.

I made a few friends and they actually showed me for the first time cooking blogs. I really wasn’t familiar with them until about three and a half years ago. On these blogs, I would just see gorgeous pictures and recipes. Thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is what I want to do. I love baking. I love photography.” And then some of these stories would be so captivating and I could identify so much with that particular blog.

I would identify with what they were saying and I just thought, “John, this is what I want to do. Some of these women have cookbooks and they have these blogs that are actually generating some sort of income so that would be a dream.” So with that said, it was in Seattle when I first got there that I’m like, “Okay, I want to just explore this as a hobby.” It started as just a hobby.

I didn’t realize how much work would need to go into all this. I just thought food and pictures, this is great. But there are so many components that I was unaware of.

I would say baking of course comes the most natural to me because that is instinctively what I know and love to do. I would say that writing is probably the most difficult. My personality is very all over the place. I love activity and like going to the farmers’ market and cooking in the kitchen and making a mess. Sitting down and actually getting my words down collectively and organizing them, that probably takes the most time.

I think I’m also a very instant gratification type person so if I take a picture, I can see the image and I can correct it there. But writing takes a little more time and trying to get the emotion I want across is always and interesting struggle for me sometimes.

On Her Process for Getting Her Ideas onto Her Blog:

Each recipe, I would test probably between two or three times, depends how many times it takes me to get it right. I also do a lot of research beforehand. I study the type of technique. I try to understand all components each time I make something. There is a lot of pre-prep and practice and research beforehand.

I wish I had an organized way of putting it all together. It’s just whatever I’m inspired by. My blog is seasonally based. I go to the farmers’ market and I see all these persimmons are in season and I just thought, “Okay, how can I use this in some kind of meal or baked good.” From there, something comes out. I wish I had a formula because I would pump out a lot more. But it just sort of feels right at the moment what comes to the blog.

Tips for People Wanting to Start Baking:

Baking can definitely be overwhelming at times but I think pick something that you are really excited to make. I feel like from that point it will give you the motivation to nail it. But other than that, read the recipe. Read it four or five times, over and over so you have an idea of what’s going on because sometimes I’ve done this where I just start making it right away and I’m like, “Oh gosh, I forgot! This needs to be in room temperature,” or I kind of scramble.

I would say to make sure that you have all of your ingredients pre-measured, laid out on the table and maybe have an environment that’s not super distracting.

If you put too much of this and too much of that, that can sometimes end it something that doesn’t work out. Maybe it will taste great which is fine. As long as it tastes good, that’s the point. But just have everything organized and just take it slow. And if there is something in the recipe that you don’t know exactly what that means, just research it. It’s great with the Internet, you can actually pull up images to see what the texture will look like. So you feel like if you’re confident with that then it will lead to a successful baking adventure.

On Recipes Not Working Out:

So yeah, that happens. It can happen two ways for me.

Sometimes I won’t prepare ahead of time and I’ll forget something like sugar or the proper amount of lemon. It just doesn’t turn out right.

For a wedding for a friend last year, we were making pies and I made pastry cream a few times but I was in a kitchen at my mom’s house and two pies were baking and it’s like 98 degrees. I’m just stressed out making this. I’m like, “Okay, it’s done.” And I put it in the pie and I put all these berries on top of the pie and they just start sinking because it wasn’t set.

We walk outside because I’m like, “It will be fine.” Then the pie, you don’t even see any berries because they all sank to the bottom.

So I think it can be just bad preparation and just the process of experimenting, it’s not always going to be perfect.

On Baking for Beginners:

I would recommend quick breads. That would be like cakes, cupcakes, scones, biscuits. You can find a lot of simple methods that are two bowl methods.

If you don’t even want to bring out your handheld mixer or your standing mixer, you just need your oil, your eggs and then all of your dry ingredients. I think those are really great to start because they are just simpler. I would say a pumpkin bread would be great. On my blog, I had this recipe for apple yogurt cake that I really love. And I find those to be pretty easy to figure out in terms of simplicity and accessibility.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I have to admit I haven’t had cable for 10 years. So it’s whatever I come across really intentionally.

The cooking show I’ve seen is MasterChef and MasterChef Junior. I really enjoyed those shows. I think they are really fun.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

There are so, so many. I have a friend named Danielle she has Rustic. Joyful. Food. She is actually the first blogger I ever met face to face who had a food blog. So that was just an explosion of happiness for me. But she has a beautiful website that also is very much wholesome good meals, seasonally based, really beautiful pictures taken by her and her husband.

Another one would be Two Red Bowls. She, Cynthia, is really lovely. I actually got to meet her at the Saveur Awards and she is just lovely and her food photography is beautiful. Her food just always looks delicious. I think those are two fantastic blogs to visit absolutely.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

I can probably only speak to Instagram the most. Tiffany Mitchell. She is from Offbeat and Inspired and I don’t know how she does it but every picture is just pure beauty on her Instagram page. You just look at it like, “I want to be there. I need to know where this place is. I need to order this exactly.” She has a really beautiful feed.

Then Adventures in Cooking. That’s the blog but it’s run by Eva. She has just this very moody beautiful gallery of images that make you feel so at peace and comfortable and inspired.

I mean those two girls just kill it.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

So basics. I think flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda. Just at any moments notice you can whip something together.

And spices, if you can have a few spices on hand, those are fantastic because you can always mix and make something taste almost brand new if you throw in a few fresh spices.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without.

It would probably be a jar of chili peppers. I eat chilis with everything. Little yellow or bright green chilis that I probably eat with almost every meal.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

One of the first cookbooks I bought when I moved up to Seattle was by Sur La Table and it was called The Art & Soul of Baking. I feel like that was really a profound book for me to have at the time because it is a wide range of recipes from quick breads to custards to pie crust.

If you want to bake, this is the book to go to. It also teaches you so much about the scientific components of what you’re making and how sugar works, and how lavender works. So it was teaching me how to become more confident as a baker.

You can’t just go in and be like, “Okay, I’ll just dump all these things in here and hope for the best.” It taught me the science of how to learn to do it on my own. That was a fantastic book.

Then What Katie Ate, her first cookbook that she released. That book for me visually was a huge inspiration as well as the recipes themselves. I just could sit in the corner and just flip through every single page and just fall in love with it.

So those two books fed me on two different levels but I love them both. Still do.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Is it funny that I say anything by Phil Collins?

Yeah, he’s wonderful. I just hear him and I’m like, “All right. What do you guys want?”

Just his voice. I don’t know. Whatever he’s in is just pure gold to me. I listen to him and it really puts me in a good mood.

Keep Posted on Kristan:

I would say head to the-broken-bread.com. On Instagram, The Broken Bread. It’s the best way to keep updated.

On Starting The Woks of Life:

On Growing Up in a Family Where Food Played a Big Role:

On Learning About Chinese Cooking:

On What Authentic Chinese Food is to Her:

On Who in the Family is More Traditional and Who Likes to Experiment:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with The Woks of Life:

On Baking and Sweet Things:

On Finding Her Career in Food:

On Her Food Heroes and What She’d Make for Them:

On Her Blog:

On Simple Rules of Thumb for Baking for Greater Success:

On Her Cookbook, The New Sugar and Spice:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Sam:

On Starting Her Blog:

On Photography:

On Her Shift to More Wholesome Foods:

On Learning to Cook More Naturally:

On Starting to Cook More Healthfully:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Jodi:

Have Jodi’s Best Ever Tomato Sauce Recipe Sent to You Now:

On Her Blog:

On Her Process for Getting Her Ideas onto Her Blog:

Tips for People Wanting to Start Baking:

On Recipes Not Working Out:

On Baking for Beginners:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Kristan:

Have Kristan’s Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now: