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012: Maria Siriano: How To Have Fun Baking and Her Top Baking Tip

March 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted on what she's up to.
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Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast on How to Have Fun Baking and Her Top Baking Tip

Sift and Whisk

Today we’re chatting about baking and for me the best part of any dinner, dessert.

Maria is a self-taught baker and dessert maker whose love of baking and sweet things shine through on her blog and in her photography.

I am so pumped to have Maria Siriano from Sift and Whisk here on the show.

On Starting Her Blog:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talking about starting her blog

I used to work in textbook publishing and I actually started off as an intern, literally the day after I graduated college. So I was doing that for about a year and a half and they brought me on from intern to being a temp. The company went on a hiring freeze right before I was about to interview for a permanent job so that kind of sucked. I then was able to go freelance doing publishing stuff.

So I was at home doing textbook editing and I was baking all time because it’s stress relief for me.

In Ohio, which is where I live, we have cottage bakery laws so you can have a home-based bakery, sell stuff at farmers’ markets and that’s what I started doing. I did that for a year and half while I was editing.

Because I was selling stuff I had a website that I created for my bakery and I was doing a blog. So I would put some recipes on there of the stuff that I didn’t sell because I really only sold cookies and occasionally cupcakes but I really enjoyed the blog process and the photography process more than actually going to farmers’ markets and selling.

I was making the same thing every single day which didn’t really appeal to me.  So I was like I want to experiment and try new stuff and take more pictures. I was really into photography in high school so then I kind of gradually shut down the home-based bakery and picked up full-time with the blogging.

It has been a little over two years now, it was two years in November and I love it. It is the best job anybody could ask for. Now that’s what I do entirely.

I want to share things with people.

I find that I get a lot more joy out of sharing with a broader audience than I do in a really niche market of just my hometown. So it’s a great way for me to connect with people.

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talking about the process of her blog and what comes most naturally.

I still don’t think that it comes naturally to me and whenever somebody compliments me on any of those things I’m like OK what do you want.

But it takes a lot of work and I can see improvement in myself. I’m still trying to improve everything I do because I have my own style of writing. I am an English major. I was really good at writing essays about literature, but I’m not a fiction type person and I always say I’m just such a narcissist and that’s why I can do a blog because I can just write about myself all day.

It’s like journaling.  For me it is really cathartic, and I like to have a sense of humor about it and I hope that people appreciate that sense of humor. I hope that I don’t offend anybody ever. I am always worried about that.

Then the photography, I am obsessed with looking at other people’s photography. I always feel like I am almost there, and then somedays I’m just like this is just crap. I still struggle with it, and feeling like it’s good, but if somebody else looks at it and thinks it’s good, I’m over the moon.

But basically my blog is exactly how I talk but with less cursing because I try to keep it clean because maybe a fourteen year old will want a cookie recipe, and then I’ll feel really bad if their parents are like, “Oh, stop cursing.”

On Her Connection to Baking:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talks about her connection with baking.

In my family growing up, we almost never cooked homemade meals. We did a lot of the frozen. We were like Stouffers‘ people. We did the lasagna. My mom made a couple different meals that she would do like homemade meatloaf, but homemade is in quotations because she would do the Hungry Man or whatever that is in the can.

Both my parents worked, and she was going to college when I was a kid so it was all very take out and boxed food and all that. Whereas my husband grew up in house where they cooked dinner every single night, they rarely went out to eat.  So when we moved in together, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he is cooking me dinner every night. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” But it took some getting used to.  Because we never cooked in my family.

The one thing that we did was bake. For a while we did a lot of boxed mix stuff like cakes like that. We weren’t really fancy about it or precise about it, but we did a lot of cookies, which is my first from scratch baking experience. We did molasses cookies which is a recipe I did on my blog and is still one of my favorite recipes because it is my family’s recipe.

I always want to learn how to cook so what I started doing a couple months ago up until the Holiday craziness set in, I was saying “I am cooking dinner every Wednesday night because I need to learn to cook.”

For awhile right after I got laid off at my publishing job, my parents were trying to kick me back some money so they were like, “Hey, come cook for us. Make freezer meals and we will pay you.” So I would cook everything for them and freeze it, and they’d give me a hundred bucks a week or something and I was like, “Thanks mom and dad.”

Everything I make always turns out really good if I follow the recipe but I can’t do what my husband does which is open the fridge and be like, “Oh, I will just throw all this stuff together and we have dinner.” I can’t do it.

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talks about baking being a science.

Whenever people are like I want to get into more baking, I am always like buy a scale. That is my number one advice is buy a kitchen scale. It’ll set you back 30 bucks and it’ll change everything.

My husband has had relative success baking with his kind of free-form method. There are certain things I think that you can do if you like dessert and want to make dessert but don’t want to do all the complicated stuff, and it gets a little what I call “semi-homemade with Sandra Lee.”

You can go to the store and you can buy pre-made pound cake. You can dice that and put some strawberries in it and some whipped cream and that’s really easy.  You can just pour sugar or whatever and just toss everything together and that’s really easy to do. You don’t have to do a lot of measuring and things like that.

Even pie, if you don’t make your own crust, the filling you can guesstimate and if it’s not thick enough you add a little more corn starch or you bake it a little longer and it’s not so daunting, but there are certain things that I would stay away from.

Cookies can flop miserably if they aren’t very accurate and cakes, so I think that it just depends upon how desperately you want something.

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talks about things not going as planned in the kitchen.

I did a black forest pie for my husband and I got the wrong type of liqueur for the filling and I just ran all over town. I actually literally have the bowl of the first filling sitting on my counter top just sitting out right now because I’m like, “Maybe I can put this on French toast tomorrow morning.” I don’t know what to do with it.

There was one time I made, a couple years ago, and this didn’t even make it to the blog because I was so over it, but it was a lemon zucchini bread. It tasted like rubber. I don’t know what happened. It was so disgusting. I made two of them because I am always really hopeful that it’s going to turn out. Instead of paring back a recipe, I just go all in. So I had two of these loaves of rubber, and I just threw them in the trashcan because I will rage eat the bad stuff.  I eat it because I am like, “I hate you so much.”  I don’t understand it but that’s what I do.

I had that with macaroons. I made those literally ten times before I finally got one that was blog-worthy.

I was like, “I will go to the bakery down the street.” We have a really good French bakery down the street and they make amazing ones. I’m like, “Why do we even bother.”

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast on getting an idea onto the blog.

What I usually do is I start off with a seasonal ingredient and I do a lot research on that. If there is nothing seasonal then I go with chocolate, caramel, peanut butter, things like that, but I try to stick to seasonal because I am a big fruit person, and I know people are always like, “Make more chocolate.” And I’m like, “No.”

So I start off with finding something seasonal that I want to work with and then I have the book called The Flavor Bible. I will go through there and there’s a list of complementary ingredients and flavors and I will go through there and kind of get inspired by that.

Then I will just think of all the formats and I try to flesh out the categories equally so like pies, cakes, cookies, whatever, but I will say I tend to skew toward pie. I like pie. I will end up with so many pies and tarts that I am like, “Oh my gosh, I have to tone it down,” but I love making them. And then summer, ice cream, I’ll just do ice cream until my ears bleed.

And honestly, a lot of what I do is built off other people’s work because that is what’s great about making recipes is you can. A lot of the testing is done by other people for you so you can find a base or find something similar. Like the roasted plum, I knew somebody had done a roasted peach ice cream, so I said, “Okay, if she did it like this and used this method for peaches, I can do the same thing with plums,” and kind of build from there.

I always try my best to list my source because I’m not a genius. I can’t just make up scientific baking things in my mind.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

So this is embarrassing but I don’t have cable so I don’t watch a ton, but what I do have is some Alton Brown, Good Eats.

We actually have them downloaded and when we travel, we will put episodes on our iPad and watch those because they’re fantastic and full of science.

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

Everything.

I have a thousand in my feed. I am a huge fan of Serious Eats because again they do a lot of science so I love listening to all of that, reading all that.

Blogs, I love Bakers Royale, her photography is just ridiculous and I’m jealous. Also Half Baked Harvest, and my friend Sarah who does the Sugar Hit and my friend Elizabeth who does Sugar Hero.

Elizabeth does candy and she’s amazing because I cannot do candy to save my life.

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

Bonnie Tsang. I think she is the one that has the little daughter, and she is so cute and every time, she just posts really fun and brightly colored things. Every time I see a picture, it just makes my heart happy.

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

All home cooks should have chocolate.

I can’t tell you how much you can make with chocolate but if you don’t have it, it kind of stinks.

So the great thing about chocolate is if you have it, you can just eat it.  If you don’t want to just eat chocolate, you can make all kinds of stuff with it like pudding, whip that up really fast, or just add it to any other thing and it makes it better.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter. It is very simple for me. I go through so much butter it is not even funny. Every time I do a vegan recipe, I am like, “Where is the butter?”

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Oh my god, everything. I collect cookbooks so I just love everything. My favorite cookbook is the Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook because it is just such a great reference. If you want to riff on something, they’ve got such a great base recipes.

I also really love, this isn’t baking but, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution book.  We cook a lot out of there, and since I’m not very good at cooking, it is really easy for me to follow. It’s got a revolutionary way of making rice that is just fantastic and lots of Indian food which I love.

I love all of the Baked cookbooks, Baked Bakery in New York. I get all of them as soon as they come out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

This is really embarrassing, from West Side Story, the song, I want to live in America.

I am a big proponent of singing show tunes while I’m baking, it has such an up beat, it’s just very upbeat so it really gets me going and on track, and the solid beat of it makes me do everything in a timely fashion.

Keep Posted on Maria:

Maria Siriano of Sift and Whisk on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted on what she

I’m best at updating Facebook. I’m terrible at Twitter, so yeah definitely follow me on Facebook because you will always see the new recipes. Any other things that are a little bit personal, and maybe kind of funny, is on Twitter, but I’m not regular about it.

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    Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Alton Brown, Baked Bakery, Baker, Bakers Royale, Baking, Bonnie Tsang, Cook's Illustrated, cottage bakery laws, Dessert, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food Revolution, Good Eats, Half Baked Harvest, Maria Siriano, Ohio, Serious Eats, Sift and Whisk, Stouffers, SugarHero, The Sugar Hit, West Side Story

    001: Claire Thomas: What To NEVER Bring To A Dinner Party

    February 20, 2015 by Gabriel

    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast
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    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on What to never bring to a dinner party.

    The Kitchy Kitchen

    I am super excited to have the amazing, the awesome Claire Thomas here as my special guest today.

    She is doing a lot of really cool stuff. Apart from her website The Kitchy Kitchen, Claire also has a cookbook called The Kitchy Kitchen. She has a television series called Food For Thought with Claire Thomas, and in my opinion, she is rockin’ it.

    She is truly on a mission to help us home cooks amp up our everyday dinner routines.

    On Her Interest in Food History:

    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast

    I fell across food history. I read this article. It’s in one of my favorite magazines called Gastronomica. It was an article about how Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is neither kosher nor Aramaic. It misses it on both accounts, and I thought that was so funny because the Passover meal is kind of a set script. Everyone knows what that is. It seemed sort of a weird place to take artistic license.

    As I read the article, it talked about how he actually just put his favorite food in the painting, which is eel with orange slices, which I thought does not sound Italian. He’s Florentinian, so I expected pasta or something like that.

    Then it occurred to me that he probably didn’t have pasta. They definitely didn’t have tomatoes. They did not have corn. They didn’t have so many of the things we think about as being integral to the Italian canon of cuisine.

    So it sent me on this weird journey of, “What was Italian cuisine before the Age of Exploration?” Just really weird, nerdy side projects.

    So I ended up just falling in love with food history.

    I found it to be the closest thing to a time machine, because if you understand how people ate, you understand how they lived, their economy, their environment, the politics of the time. Some of the funniest and oldest laws on the book for major cities like Venice, for instance, are actually food-related, something people have seemed to be historically very persnickety about. So you get a great sense of, I guess, people’s personalities through history.

    What I love about it too is it’s something inescapable about the human condition. We have to eat.

    I love how it makes me feel connected to the past, and the people who lived in the past. Because a lot of times, we can think of them as figures in oil paintings with funny wigs, or that kind of thing. It’s cool to think of them as real people who had very strong opinions. Some of them like their food salty, some of them liked it spicy. That kind of thing.

    On Starting The Kitchy Kitchen Blog:

    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast talking about starting The Kitchy Kitchen blog

    It’s so funny thinking about where my blog started and where it is now.

    I started the blog as a little fun place to put my creativity. My job was kind of boring, and my mom saw I was struggling. At this point, I was really full-blown geeking out over food history and recipe testing. She said, “Why don’t you start a food blog?” Which wasn’t really a thing four years ago as much as it is now.

    Being a nerd who didn’t understand how the Internet worked, I thought, “Oh, then okay, I have to prep everything. I have to have really great recipes and learn how to shoot.” I put all this pressure on myself not realizing that the Internet is like you’re a tree falling in the middle of a forest. You can fail in anonymity for very long, so it was great.

    I learned how to shoot food photography by basically just picking up a camera and shooting it and staring at the picture and trying to figure out what was wrong with it. It was basically trial and error. My dad’s actually kind of an amateur photographer. He loves photography. It all came down to lighting. So we would have conversations about where the light was coming from and what exactly it was doing.

    Then I started noticing food styling. I was able to basically quit my job that I had and become a full-time food stylist.

    The blog was just pretty interesting. It started out very pretentious. If you go too far back, the food is kind of over-the-top. I think I was trying a little too hard. I was trying to appear very sophisticated, and it’s funny.

    On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

    s of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast talks about messing up in the kitchen

    The opening line of my cookbook is “Have you cried yet?”

    Literally. I’ve had my fair share of kitchen disasters, and still do. It’s funny. Like when I recipe test, most of the time, I’ve gotten it down to where I understand recipe structure really well at this point.

    The one place that I’ve seen the most kitchen disasters is with attempts at gluten-free and vegan baking, because it’s just chemistry. It’s straight-up chemistry.

    Do you guys have a BJ’s in Canada? It’s where I used to eat in middle school all the time. It’s like a pizza parlor.

    They have a thing on the menu called the Pizookie. It’s a chocolate chip cookie that’s cooked in a pizza plate, and it’s gooey in the middle. They serve it with a scoop of ice cream on top. It’s wonderful.

    I thought, “Oh, how cool would it be to do like a gluten-free, vegan version of that. Almost like a flourless chocolate cake, but a chocolate chip cookie.” I thought like, “Oh, this won’t be that hard.”

    I had soup.

    I had gluten-free, vegan, chocolate chip cookie soup the first three times I tried to make this thing. It just would not come together.

    On What to (not) Bring for a Dinner Party:

    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast talking about what not to bring to a dinner party.

    What I tell people whenever they come to a party I’m throwing, they asks, “Oh, how should I do my event?” or whatever. I always tell them, “Don’t ever try something the first time at a party. It’s just Murphy’s Law. It’s not going to work ever.”

    It’s this need to impress. We want to be fancy and cool in front of our friends. My aunt has this cookbook called Cooking For Compliments, which is amazing just because of the title. Because at least it’s open about it, cooking for those compliments.

    I mean, honestly, if you want to cook for compliments, if you want to impress people when you go to a party, just bring the dessert, because people will love a mediocre dessert and will not forgive a mediocre salad. So you will never get a high-five like, “Oh my gosh, amazing salad!” That never happens at a dinner party.

    You could bring boxed brownies. I’m not kidding. If you bring boxed brownies, people will be like, “Oh, I love boxed brownies. Thank you so much. This is fantastic.” No one would be mad at you. Everyone would be totally happy about it.

    The Pressure Cooker:

    Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

    No Reservations

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

    Joy the Baker, she’s a buddy of mine and she’s amazing.

    Then Whitney A. My girlfriend, Whitney, is a sommelier and is amazing at putting together events and pairing wine and food. Those are definitely two of my favorites.

    Also A Cozy Kitchen is another favorite. There are so many.

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

    On Pinterest, I follow Bonnie Tsang. She has like a million followers. But she’s a photographer and she has so many great little pics. Also, Jenni Kayne. She’s a designer here in L.A. who I love. She’s so chic. She just picks beautiful, minimalist items.

    Instagram, there are a few people I just followed that I thought were really, really special.

    Nectar and Stone was one that I follow. She’s a patisserie person. She makes these just ridiculous, ridiculous confections. Then, I guess, also my friend, Jonathan from Compartes. He’s a chocolatier, and he always posts photos from his chocolate-making process.

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

    I’d say for me, sriracha. Because, full disclosure, on weekday nights when I’m just lazy, my favorite dinner to make is scrambled eggs. I love eggs in general. I did scrambled eggs with a little bit of sweet soy sauce and whatever soft herbs I had. So basil, cilantro, green onion. Whatever I had, and then sriracha. That was it, and it was just the best thing. It was so good.

    Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

    Butter.

    Brown butter makes it much better.

    What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

    The Joy of Cooking is important in sort of an encyclopedic way. I mean, it doesn’t have that heart but it’s just such a great reference.

    I collect vintage cookbooks. I have a couple dozen now. They’re so fun to me. The one that I actually cook out of the most though is called A Shaker Cookbook Not By Bread Alone. You can actually find it all over eBay. It is not a difficult vintage cookbook to find.

    But vintage cookbooks have a habit of being poorly edited. A lot of times, the recipes haven’t been tested at all. A lot of times they’re presented in paragraph format, and they will actually say sometimes like, “You should know how to do this.” I was reading a recipe for a welsh rarebit, and they listed, “Cheese and toast. You should know how to make this.”

    The Shaker cookbook is filled with amazing pie recipes.

    It’s a great sort of anthropological look at the Shaker community and their approach to food. It has titles like Sister Amelia’s Strawberry Flummery, which I don’t know what that is, but it sounds magical.

    It’s ridiculous sounding. But it’s fun. I love it, and I cook from it all the time. The recipes are really well edited. They’ve been tested a million times, and I’ve been very impressed.

    If you’re going to start a vintage cookbook collection, that’s actually a pretty good one to start with.

    Keep Posted on Claire:

    Claire Thomas of The Kitchy Kitchen on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how to keep posted with what she

    Well, my YouTube channel. I post on my YouTube channel three times a week. If you guys are looking for things between showings of Food For Thought and between the blog, you can always find some fun, new content there. I do everything from quick little tips to full-blown recipes.

    Then otherwise, Instagram. If you @ mention me, or say hello, I’ll say hi back. I follow a lot of my own followers. I love reaching out to you guys. Please find me out there.

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      Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: A Cozy Kitchen, A Shaker Cookbook Not By Bread Alone, BJ's, Bonnie Tsang, Claire Thomas, Compartes, Cookbook Author, Cooking Show Host, Dinner Party, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food For Thought, Gastronomica, Jenni Kayne, Joy the Baker, Nectar and Stone, No Reservations, Pizookie, The Joy of Cooking, The Kitchy Kitchen, Whitney A.

      Hello! I'm Gabriel Soh, home cook, food enthusiast and your host of The Dinner Special podcast.
      Everything here on The Dinner Special is an experiment, just like with cooking. Thank you for listening and being part of the adventure.

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