I love polenta, especially in the winter. It goes well with grilled or roasted meats, vegetables, fish, and poultry. It can be served for breakfast with butter. If made in advance and left to firm up overnight, it can be cut in slabs and grilled. And if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind firing up the deep-fryer, you can make polenta fries. (Which I love to eat, but not clean up after. Option B is to cut the polenta into batons and fry them in olive oil a skillet )

I keep a bag of polenta at home, and used to make it by stirring it on the stovetop, which took nearly an hour of constant vigilance, not to mention cleaning up the stovetop afterwards, and nursing a few burns on my arm from getting splattered by hot polenta.

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When I arrived in France, I was surprised at the prevalence of instant polenta, which is polenta that’s finely ground so it absorbs liquid quickly. (There’s also precooked polenta grains, and precooked sliced polenta, which were new to me, too.) Admittedly, it’s very easy to make and is ready in about five minutes. People don’t seem to mind it, but I like the texture of traditional polenta, so stick with that.

If you want to take your polenta to the next level, seek out stone-ground polenta. Stone-ground polenta (like stone-ground cornmeal) includes the whole grain, and contains the germ and the bran. It also has retains more of its flavor during grinding since the stones grinding the corn don’t heat it up, which can diminish its flavor. But I also like the irregularity of it. It looks like real corn, not like powder.

I’ve been cooking polenta for years, stirring it on the stovetop, but recently I remembered this technique, which was introduced in the pre-internet days by the great Paula Wolfert. The recipe was in her book, Mediterranean Grains & Greens, a treatise I sadly had to leave behind in the States, but she attributed to a recipe on the back of a package of Golden Pheasant polenta, although the California-based company no longer seems to be in business. 😔

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I’d made it way-back-when, but for whatever reason, I continued making polenta the traditional way. It reminds me of a quote from Judy Rodgers in the Zuni Café Cookbook, something along the lines of finding, and sticking to, a harder way of doing something. For better or for worse, that’s sometimes as I operate. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

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I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard of vin jaune, the primary ingredient in this cocktail. For years, the wine wasn’t available in the U.S. due to the size of the bottle: 62cl. Called a clavelin, its particular shape references the amount of wine that was historically left in the standard 70cl bottle after its 6+ years of aging. The wine that evaporates is called the part des anges, the angel’s share.

Winemakers in the Jura region, between Switzerland and Burgundy, where vin jaune is made, refused to change the size of the bottle to conform to U.S. standards, but it’s finally been cleared for legal sale in the U.S.

Even though it’s been cleared for export to the States, vin jaune remains an outlier in the wine world. In the Jura, some wines are intentionally oxidized, called sous voile. Unlike conventional wines, during aging, the oak casks for sous voile wines aren’t topped up, leaving room for a veil (voile) of yeast to form on the surface of the wine. That yeast is called the flor. Sous voile wines aren’t to everybody’s taste, and it’s easy to confuse their flavor with flawed wine. I like their more complex tastes, but for those who aren’t expecting it, they might think the wine is spoiled.

Other wines from the Jura are topped off with additional wine as they age, keeping the barrel full, called ouillé, and those wines tend to taste more like conventional wines. Because wine production in the Jura is low, the wines tend to be harder to get outside of France, and are more expensive. So I nudge visitors to France to give them a try while they’re here.* Why not?

Vin jaune means “yellow wine,” which refers to its rich golden color. It has a very distinctive nuttiness with notes of dry wood, green apples, lemon, burnt sugar, and maybe even spices. Because it’s made in the same region as Comté cheese, there is no better cheese pairing than Comté and vin jaune. It’s perfect.

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Better known than vin jaune is elderflower liqueur, which is now everywhere, prompting it to be dubbed the ketchup of bartenders. The sweet liqueur is a popular addition to spritzes and glasses of bubbly. And while people tell me they don’t like sweet cocktails (neither do I), cocktails often need a touch of sweetness to balance the other ingredients, such as lemon juice and stronger spirits.

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When I was writing my book Drinking French, bartender and bar owner Joseph Boley gave me a bottle of another French-made elderflower liqueur, which was featured in his cocktail in the book, and told me it’s the same thing but half the price. I’ve been using it (as you can see) and no one’s pointed out any difference.

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Every year, there is a vin jaune festival in the Jura called La Percée du Vin Jaune. I’ve always wanted to go but a friend who worked in the region told me it’s a lot of drinking and there are a lot of people; their website said 33,000 attended last year. The festival takes place in February, when it’s pretty cold in the Jura. However, I found a recipe that they published (above), the Fl’or du Jura, that I can enjoy in the crowd-free, cozy comfort of home.

Like one of my favorite cocktails from Drinking French, the Yellow cocktail, the Fl’or du Jura combines a few seemingly disparate ingredients that come together in one cohesive cocktail. You may have to track down a bottle of vin jaune to make it, although I tested it with sherry and it was just as delicious. It’s also lower in alcohol than other cocktails since the wine and elderflower liqueur are less than half the ABV as gin, whiskey, and rum, but it’s filled with flavor. À santé…!

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*Some restaurants in France offer vin jaune by the glass, often listed on the menu under after-dinner drinks since it’s drunk with dessert. In his excellent book, The Food & Wine of France, , in the chapter on vin jaune (subtitled The Virtue of Rancidity), he notes about vin jaune: ”On first trying it, many people dislike it.”

Vin jaune is delicious in this cocktail and may not be what you expect when you first try it, on its own, but it does grow on you. If you get a bottle, it’s remarkable with Comté cheese or a similar nutty-tasting mountain cheese, such as Gruyère or Beaufort. Once opened, the bottle will keep in the refrigerator at least a month.

The Meaning of Life, these days, it’s a pretty loaded topic. Watching life unfold, it’s hard not to wonder why people do things to each other. Unless I’m missing something, we’re all in this together and it seems in everybody’s best interest to try to make things work, which is how recipes are: You take a bunch of disparate ingredients, mix them all together, and the result is better than the sum of its parts.

Most baking books follow a familiar pattern—a mix of baking tips, recipes, and in some cases, headnotes before the recipes, and chapter openings that explain the recipes and give some background about them. (Except in France, where recipes don’t have headnotes, which may be true elsewhere?)

Helen Goh is a trained psychologist who became a baker and pastry chef, and in addition to being one of the principal recipe developers for Yotam Ottolenghi, co-authored the books Sweet and Comfort with him. Helen has talked about the way baking has helped her manage her anxiety - and unlike other anti-anxiety prescriptions, baking has no unpleasant side effects. Others know her as the creator of what’s been dubbed the World’s Best Chocolate Cake…

That, and over a hundred other recipes, are in Baking & the Meaning of Life: How to find joy in 100 recipes, a book about sharing, giving, and receiving. I’ve got my eye on the Favorite Orange Cake (page 159) made with whole oranges and topped with a dreamy-looking, zesty orange icing, an airy Pandan & Coconut Chiffon Cake (page 185), and Crisp & Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies (page 70).

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The book also prompted me to make Helen’s Anzac Cake, which appeared in a newspaper a number of years ago, and I never got around to making it. Topped with the flavors of Anzac Biscuits—coconut, oatmeal, and golden syrup—how could one not?

As readers may have read in a recent newsletter (Feb 2026), I’ve been on a tear, cleaning out my freezers and kitchen cabinets…

I’m pretty sure that’s another anti-anxiety activity that doesn’t have any bad side effects, except maybe some guilt that you’ve let so many things get ignored or pushed back to the rear of your cabinets.

Back there, I found all sorts of odds and ends that I’d amassed over the last few years, including this smoked sugar I bought in Scotland. At the time, I wrote about it - “How could I not?” Then it languished in my kitchen cabinet for a couple of years before I finally found a place to use it.

In addition to everything from Sicilian pistachio paste to salsa negra in my cabinets, I’ve also got a problem with preserving things. I just can’t let anything go to waste. (If anyone knows what I can make with a quart jar of pickled samphire, let me know!)

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Often in the summer we’ll head to the south of France and this year, the woman who runs the farm stand in the village had a wooden crate filled with chile peppers. Almost everything else was sold out by the time we got there. Her produce is beautiful and it’s popular, but you need to have patience because once it’s someone’s turn, they need to spend some quality time catching up with her :) So you can’t be in a hurry.

While most of the other crates were empty when we got there a bit too late one morning, it looked like no one had touched the chiles. When I expressed interest, she put them all in a paper bag and gave them to me.

Score!

There were so many that I ended up pickling them, using my pickled jalapeño recipe, minus the carrots, red onions, and dried oregano.

Pickled Jalapeños recipe

The jar of pickled peppers has been in my refrigerator for a few months, and when I spotted a recipe in Helen’s book for Pickled Jalapeño & Cheddar Scones, I realize that this was their destiny. The recipe called for a generous amount of pickled chiles, and her recipe had come to the right place. (I also used that smoked sugar here, too.)

Living in France, I often have to modify recipes for what we can get here. I was emailing with a friend who wrote a Thai cookbook and mentioned how important substitutions are, when possible, because you want your recipes to be accessible to as many people as possible (or at least I do), while still preserving the basic integrity of them.

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The original recipe called for cheddar, but I decided to keep it French, since I was using French-grown chiles, and grated some mimolette, a cheese that was briefly banned in the U.S. but is now available.

Making Mimolette in France

As Helen notes, these scones are close to American biscuits, and let me tell you, they were soooo good. Even before baking, when I was mixing and rolling the dough, they already smelled amazing.

And after I baked them, the taste blew me away. They were spicy and cheesy and crispy and flaky. It was hard to resist breaking into one right when they came out of the oven because my kitchen smelled so good. Letting them cool slightly allows the cheese to firm up a bit, but they are absolutely heavenly eaten warm.

I’m sure there’s a snappier way of ending this post, but you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got some biscuits to eat…

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Chile-Cheese Scones

Adapted from Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh

1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon (220g) all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

2 teaspoons baking powder, preferably aluminum-free

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/4 teaspoons smoked paprika

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon flaky sea salt or 3/4 teaspoon fine salt

1 clove garlic, grated or finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

6 tablespoons (85g/3oz) cold unsalted butter

5 tablespoons (70ml) whole milk

1/3 cup (75g) plain full-fat yogurt, plus 1 additional tablespoon for brushing the tops

4 ounces (115g) grated cheddar or mimolette cheese, divided

1 1/2 ounces (50g) drained weight, pickled jalapeños, blotted dry with a paper towel and finely chopped (you’ll have about 3 tablespoons of chopped chiles), plus 10 slices of pickled chiles

1. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, paprika, sugar, salt, garlic, and oregano in a medium bowl. Put the cold butter between two pieces of parchment paper (or plastic wrap) and whack it with a rolling pin until it’s about as thick as your thumb. Unwrap it and rip the butter into pieces, tossing them in the flour mixture. Using your fingers, smoosh the butter into rough 1/2-inch (2cm) flakes.

2. Refrigerate the bowl of ingredients for 30 minutes.

3. To assemble and bake the scones, preheat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Remove the flour mixture from the refrigerator. Add the milk and yogurt, stir a few times with a flexible spatula, then add three-quarters of the cheese and the chopped chiles. Sprinkle the countertop lightly with flour.

4. Stir everything together until the dough starts coming together, then use your hands to gather the dough into a more-or-less cohesive mass. Transfer the dough to the countertop and shape it into a rough rectangle. Note: The dough will smell really good at this point.

5. Using a pastry scraper or chef’s knife, cut the dough into three rectangles (see the photos in the post). Pile the rectangles on top of each other, then press them down, forming a rectangle. Repeat the process, patting the dough into a rectangle, cutting it into thirds, piling them on top of each other, and pressing them down again into a rectangle.

6. With a rolling pin, roll the dough into a long rectangle measuring 10 x 4 inches (24 x 10cm). Cut the dough lengthwise in half, then cut it vertically, creating ten individual rectangular scones. (You could trim the outside edges of the rectangle to straighten them out before cutting the dough, if you want the scones neater. If you do that, gather the scraps together into a small mound and bake that alongside the scones, which’ll be a baker’s snack.) Place the unbaked scones evenly spaced apart on the baking sheet. Brush the top of each with a little yogurt, then top each with grated cheese and a thin slice of chile pepper.

7. Bake until deep golden brown, 18 to 20 minutes, but start checking them a few minutes before.* They’re done when they’re browned across the top and up the sides, and feel almost fully baked when you press the tops.

Serving: The scones are delicious on their own, or split in half and buttered. They would also be great for breakfast, served with scrambled eggs. You could cut them smaller (and reduce the baking time) to serve as appetizers.

Storage: The scones are best the day they’re made. They can be stored in an airtight container overnight at room temperature.

Chile Cheddar Scones

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*My oven has a silly (and annoying) feature: When you open the door to check something, the oven turns itself off unless you remember to press the "Start” button again. Whoever came up with that idea never developed or tested recipes. I’m now hyper-vigilant about it, since I’ve had to redo recipes while testing them.

I forgot to turn it back on while baking these but luckily I remembered less than a minute after I checked on them. Helen’s book says to bake the scones for 20 minutes, but you can check them a few minutes before. (And if you have the same oven that I do, don’t forget to turn it back on!)

I feel like so much is going on in the world that it’s just too much to take everything in. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and feel like I’m in a whole new world, as I did today.

In the arc of my life, I went from washing dishes, to working as a line cook, then to rolling dough and peeling apples in restaurants, to where I am now. I never felt like I had imposter syndrome because I feel like I’m just continuing to do what I’ve always done: peel apples, bake cookies and cakes, and yes, I still wash dishes. While there’s no word for “home baker” in French, that’s who I am now. Being at home has its advantages, but I do miss working in restaurants with other people, some from vastly different cultures, and others with backgrounds similar to mine.

I’ve worked alongside people who’ve shared with me how, in their country, everything got taken away from her family — their house, their money and savings, and their business — and they came to the United States to make a new life for themselves. Another fellow had crossed the Pacific Ocean on an overcrowded boat, a voyage that took several months, and many people didn’t make it. It’s incredible what humans can do and overcome. It was so different than my life and I couldn’t imagine doing what they did. But they did it.

Recently I opened up my copy of The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. The granddaughter of a freed slave, she and her seven siblings grew up in Freetown, a Virginia community founded by other freed slaves that was composed of eleven families. The book reflects on a different time and a seemingly gentler place, and she bucolically recounts her childhood, skimming cream from crocks of milk to churn into butter, making jelly from wild grapes, and wine from dandelion blossoms, as well as beer, from persimmons. There was also the weeding of corn fields, gathering hickory nuts to make cookies, pickling wild mushrooms, hand-churning ice cream, and enjoying her mother’s homemade liver pudding, made after the hogs were butchered.

I’m not sure how many kids today would enjoy liver pudding, or doing chores, but her writing is so evocative that I could imagine them.

Miss Lewis, as she was later called, grew up and eventually moved to New York City where she was hired as a chef, a rarity for a Black woman in those days. She began as the chef at Cafe Nicholson in 1948, then later in life, in 1988, became the chef at Gage & Tollner when she was 72 years old.

In between, she did everything from pheasant farming and catering to teaching cooking classes. She was prodded by editor Judith Jones, who edited Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and Jacques Pépin, to write her now-classic book, The Taste of Country Cooking. It’s so beloved that there was a 30th anniversary edition of the book, and coming soon is a 50th anniversary edition. (For a more complete picture of Edna Lewis, there are some in-depth biographies of her here, here, and here.)

By the time I met Edna Lewis, her hair had turned a ravishing grey color and she wore it tightly pulled back, which emphasized her striking features. She was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, and I was fortunate enough to meet her and have her sign a copy of her book to me. After she passed, her likeness was featured on a U.S. postage stamp.

I recently decided to clean out my freezers. Yes, freezers, plural, and I’m hoping to tackle my kitchen cabinets next. In one cabinet I have a little jug of sorghum molasses from who-knows-when. Maybe when I made Sorghum ice cream with sorghum peanut brittle? Every time I come across it, I think, “I need to use this.” It gets brought to the front of the cabinet, waiting for its turn, then eventually gets pushed towards the back again.

But when I saw that Edna Lewis had a recipe for Warm Gingerbread with Sweetened Whipped Cream in the book that called for “1 1/2 cups sorghum molasses”* — finally, I’d found just the right place, and time, to use it.

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The molasses that many of us know is made from sugar cane or sugar beets. Sorghum is a grass that arrived in America from Africa. It became widely grown and used in the American South, although sorghum syrup (as it’s also called) is not as widely known, or as available, as cane sugar molasses, which is a shame because it’s really tasty stuff.

Sorghum molasses has a tangier, more complex flavor than standard baking molasses, which is called light or mild molasses. It falls between those and blackstrap molasses; the latter is very intense and too assertive for most baked goods.

When I was revising Ready for Dessert, I noticed the most prominent molasses brands in the U.S. have changed how they labeled molasses, which gave me a bit of anxiety, trying to explain them to my dear readers, so I asked a friend coming over from the States to bring them all to me so I could taste them myself. Because that’s who I am.

Get Ready for Dessert!

Brer Rabbit, one of the major brands, sells three types of molasses: Blackstrap, Mild Flavor, and Full Flavor. The blackstrap was very strong and bitter. I didn’t taste a big difference between the Mild and Full Flavor molasses, but they recommend the Full Flavor for baking and the Mild as a sweetener. Grandma’s sells Original and Robust molasses. The latter isn’t called blackstrap but tastes like it.

Molasses isn’t used much here in France, but mélasse is available in natural food stores and is very strong, similar to blackstrap molasses. So if I have to use it, I’ll cut it with honey. In the UK, there’s treacle, and here is how it compares to molasses.

American Baking Ingredients in France

The first gingerbread that I made from the book turned out quite dense, as you can see above. It tasted great (Romain loved it…), but the texture wasn’t what I was expecting. So I made it again without the 1/4 cup of oil, which I used in place of the lard** that the recipe called for, and it came out beautifully. And we’ve been snacking on it all week.

Edna Lewis’s final book, published in 1988, was titled In Pursuit of Flavor, which echoed something my grandmother, who was from the same generation as Miss Lewis, complained about. She couldn’t tell if it was because she was getting older, but to them, food had less flavor than it did when they were growing up. However, there’s no denying that this gingerbread is packed with flavor. And like Miss Lewis’s words, the warm spices and flavor of the rich, bittersweet molasses hark back to a different time, one of civility and grace — and getting a taste of both of those can’t be beat.

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Edna Lewis’s Gingerbread

One 8-inch (20cm) cake; ten to twelve servings

Adapted from The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis

Like many snack cakes, this one is made in a square cake pan. If you don’t have an 8-inch (20cm) square cake pan, according to this (calculated by someone better at math than me), you can use an 8-inch (20cm) round cake pan with a little math. I haven’t tried it but I’m fairly certain you could bake it in a 9-inch/23cm round cake pan if that’s all you have. It may come out thinner and you might have to adjust the baking time up or down. Just go by the toothpick test to test for doneness, which is invariably accurate. You may find the texture of this cake to be denser than other gingerbreads. (If you’re looking for a lighter gingerbread, my ginger cake recipe is lighter, and made with fresh ginger.)

Do make sure to give the batter a good whisking if you see any little lumps in it. They won’t dissolve during baking, so you want to make sure there aren’t any before you pour the batter into the pan.

2 cups (280g) all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder, preferably aluminum-free

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon ground (dried) ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup (250ml) water

8 tablespoons (4 ounces/115g) unsalted butter, room temperature, cubed

2 large eggs, at room temperature

1 1/2 cups (480g) molasses (see notes in post)

Butter an 8-inch (20cm) square cake pan. Dust the inside with flour and tap out the excess. Cut a piece of parchment paper into a square to line the bottom.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC).

In a large bowl, whisk or sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and salt.

Heat the water until it’s very hot in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and add the cubes of butter. Stir until the butter is melted, then stir the water and butter mixture into the dry ingredients. Mix in the eggs one at a time, stirring until smooth, then mix in the molasses. If the batter is lumpy, whisk the batter briskly until it’s completely smooth and lump-free.

Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan. Bake the cake until it feels set in the center and a toothpick inserted into the middle of it comes out clean, 35 to 45 minutes.

Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack. The cake can be served warm or at room temperature. To remove the cake from the pan, run a knife around the outside of the cake to separate it from the cake pan, then tilt the cake out of the pan. Peel off the parchment paper, then place the cake on a serving platter.

Serving: Edna Lewis served this cake warm with whipped cream, which she made by whipping 1 cup (250ml) of heavy cream with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. Modern tastes might reduce the amount of sugar in half.

Edna Lewis's Gingerbread Recipe

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*Although I see some websites refer to it as sorghum molasses, it’s often called sorghum syrup.

**Lard isn’t commonly used in baking in France. It’s available in supermarkets, called saindoux, and is mostly used for greasing the griddles when making crêpes.

If I told you that today’s recipe is for dried-out brownies, I wouldn’t blame you if your finger was hovering over the keyboard, ready to click away. Look, I like soft, moist, chocolatey brownies as much as the next guy. (Perhaps even more.) But this is one of the most surprising recipes I’ve come across, and one that I wasn’t expecting to like as much as I did.

It’s from a new book, 108 Asian Cookies by whose subtitle will likely resonate with quite a few of you: Not-Too-Sweet Treats from a Third-Culture Kitchen, and I was intrigued by the idea of Asian cookies.

Flipping through the book, I found that quite a few of the recipes are variations of Western favorites, which is where the third culture comes in. There are Linzer cookies accented with yuzu, Lace cookies get drizzled with miso caramel, Thai basil perfumes Chocolate sandwich cookies, and Red velvet brownies are spiced up with doubanjiang, Chinese fermented bean paste.

I’d bookmarked a few recipes but the Chocolate brownie brittle with candied walnuts stood out, partially because I had all the ingredients on hand, and partially because I’m drawn to crispy foods, even when the moniker is applied to brownies. I couldn’t imagine how a crackly, uber-thin brownie could satisfy my chocolate cravings. I like very dark chocolate desserts yet wasn’t sure something as thin as a coin could give me the same pleasure as a dense, chewy brownie. But I was proved wrong.

My first reaction to them, coming out of the oven was, “Um…okay…” The brittle looked like dried-out shards of chocolate batter.

Then I took a taste and wow — was that good!

Like a number of recipes in the book, this one called for a tablespoon of Japanese whisky in the brownie batter and a tablespoon of miso in the glazed walnuts. I’m not sure if I could discern a difference if I omitted that small amount, or maybe my palate isn’t as acute as other people’s. But you can take matters into your own hands and Kat offers up bourbon as an alternative to the Japanese whisky, which I didn’t have on hand (but I’ve got plenty of other whiskys), and I do have white miso, which I swapped for the red miso called for in the walnuts. But I also tried the candied walnuts with soy sauce in place of the miso, which works, too.

I tend to use dark cocoa powder (Valrhona or Cacao Barry extra brute) when I bake because I don’t believe you can have too much chocolate flavor. But when you use it, things’ll come out darker, and you risk people seeing your pictures and saying, “Hey, that’s burnt.” I’m not sure if comments like that are meant to be helpful, or what. But if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s probably best not to say anything.

For the first try (shown farther above), the brownie brittle came out quite dark due to the cocoa powder and looks almost burnt, but wasn’t. 😅

Get Ready for Dessert

The next time I gave it a go with regular Dutch-process cocoa powder (Bensdorp), below, and they came out a little lighter. (Note: I took the pictures on different days and the light here changes almost by the hour. So there are some differences due to that, too.)

In addition to the rich chocolate color, the chocolate flavor came through loud and clear. The chocolate chips scattered about gave it an extra boost of chocolate, and the lightly savory nuts were just as delicious on their own as they were on the brittle…and thankfully the recipe makes extra, so you can toss them into a winter salad. Baker’s Bonus: A few of the nuts may fall off the brittle when you break it up, with the caramel fused to the batter, which are especially tasty to snack on.

Bravo to Kat for introducing me to this brittle. Not only that, but friends who came by and grabbed a bite loved it too. I’m not a fan of the word “addictive,” but I’m going to use it here because in this case, I know what I’m talking about and won’t shut up about it.

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Chocolate Brownie Brittle with Candied Walnuts

Adapted from 108 Asian Cookies: Not-Too-Sweet Treats from a Third-Culture Kitchen by Kat Lieu

This chocolate brownie brittle has lots of chocolate flavor, even though the batter has only 2 tablespoons (12g) of cocoa powder. The chocolate chips on top also dial up the chocolate flavor, but I’m a sucker for anything with candied nuts on it as well, and this brownie brittle ended up checking lots of boxes for me.

Cocoa powder FAQs

In her book, Kat calls for Japanese whisky in the brownie batter, and red miso with the candied nuts. I tinkered and tested it with various ingredients and substitutions, and if you don’t have red miso, you could use white miso or soy sauce, or leave it out and just stir in a good pinch of salt when mixing in the nuts with butter and sugar. For the Japanese whisky (or bourbon) in the brownie batter, I made it with a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract, and it came out very well, but a tablespoon of rum or brandy would work too.

I also gave the recipe a go with pecans in place of the walnuts, which work just as well. Whichever you use, you’ll end up with more candied nuts than you’ll need for the brittle; leftovers can be tossed in a winter salad or enjoyed as a snack.

Candied walnuts

2 cups (220g) whole shelled walnuts

1/4 cup (50g) sugar

2 tablespoons (30g) unsalted butter, cut into small cubes, at room temperature (very soft)

1 tablespoon red or white miso (optional, see headnote)

1/3 cup (40g) toasted white sesame seeds

Brownie brittle

1/2 cup (60g) all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons (12g) unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Pinch of salt

2 large egg whites (1/4 cup), at room temperature

1/2 cup (100g) sugar

4 tablespoons (60g) melted unsalted butter

1 tablespoon whisky or 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (see headnote)

1/2 cup (85g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips

Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel

To make the candied walnuts, preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

Put the walnuts in a medium saucepan, cover them with water, and bring the water to a boil (this reduces their bitterness). Drain the walnuts very well in a strainer, shaking off as much excess water as you can. Put the walnuts in a medium mixing bowl and add the sugar, cubed butter, miso (if using), and sesame seeds. Stir vigorously until the butter and sugar are melted and the nuts are well coated.

Spread the nuts and any liquid on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for a total of 18-20 minutes, stirring the nuts every 5 minutes, making sure that you mix in the nuts from the edges of the pan, which will start browning first, toward the center, so they all toast evenly. When done, the nuts should be lightly browned. There may be some syrup on the pan when the nuts are finished. If so, stir the syrup into the nuts as they cool so it coats the nuts, which’ll firm up as the nuts cool.

(The nuts can be made a few days in advance and kept in an airtight container at room temperature.)

To make the brownie brittle, reduce the heat of the oven to 325ºF (160ºC). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a small bowl, whisk or sift together (if the cocoa powder is lumpy) the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. In a separate medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they just start to hold their shape when you lift the whisk, but are still a little sloshy; don’t beat them until stiff.

Whisk the sugar into the egg whites in four additions, then stir in the melted butter and whisky or vanilla. Fold in the dry ingredients with a flexible spatula. Spread the batter on the prepared baking sheet so it’s in a thin, even layer (a small, offset metal spatula works best for this). You want to end up with a rectangle that measures about 14 x 10 inches (35 x 25 cm). Top the batter with about 1 1/4 cups (115g) of the walnuts (or more, if you want) evenly spaced over the top, then the chocolate chips.

Bake the brittle until it’s baked through and crispy, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool on the baking sheet, then sprinkle with flaky sea salt and break into shards.

Storage: The brittle will keep for 3-4 days in an airtight container at room temperature.

Chocolate Brownie Brittle With Candied Walnuts

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108 Asian Cookies

I don’t think I’ve ever had a Thanksgiving dinner in Paris that was the same from year to year. One year a friend hired a chef and dinner was served all plated up, in the kitchen. Another year I volunteered to make Thanksgiving dinner and ended up cutting the turkey into small pieces and braising it. Since I was cooking for twenty+ people, that was the only way a turkey would fit in my French oven, which at the time was so small that I could barely squeeze a chicken into it.

Another year I was staying with friends in Provence and we were shocked when the bird that we pre-ordered from the local butcher came already stuffed, by the butcher. I was tempted to scoop his out and cook the bird with the stuffing mix we’d already prepared, but he’d done such a beautiful job of sewing it up with butcher’s twine that we cooked the turkey as is, and it was incredible.

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Thanksgiving is a holiday that’s traditional, of course, for Americans (Canadians have their own Thanksgiving), but French people don’t really “get” it. And to make the meal, you have to go on a scavenger hunt, tracking down all the fixings, like cranberries (nope, the airelles at Picard aren’t the same thing…let’s not pretend that they are), sweet potatoes (hold the marshmallows, at least for European guests), Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, and whole turkeys, which you often have to pre-order, and if you live in an upscale neighborhood, they can cost a small fortune.

It’s a holiday about gathering around the table with familiar foods and turkey is not high on most French people’s list of things they prefer to eat. That said, the dinde fermière, heritage free-range turkeys, in France are delicious. But once Romain discovered stuffing (la farce), he was hooked.

This year I was invited to a dinner and was tasked with making an American dessert by my French-American hosts. Since the theme was américain, I decided I should use American ingredients and dug into my stash of King Arthur flour, Guittard cocoa powder, aluminum-free Whole Foods baking powder, and Arm & Hammer baking soda to make my dessert.

American Baking in France (Ingredients)

At the top of the stack of books that came out this fall is ’s new one, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes. I had bookmarked her recipe for portokalopita, a Greek orange cake that I fell in love with in Tinos, but a cake made with filo dough didn’t seem like a T-Day dessert. So I’m saving that for when someone invites me over for a Greek dinner. Hint hint…

I have a few devil’s food cakes in my repertoire but was intrigued by Dorie’s because it’s baked in a bundt pan, which is also très américain (although there are kugelhopf pans in France). I have a few bundt pans I brought back from the States and decided to use the one with the deep and intricate design.

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Devil’s food cake is historically made with natural cocoa powder, which hasn’t been Dutch-processed with an alkaline ingredient, so is generally used along with baking soda as a leavening agent. The reaction of the two can give the cake a reddish hue,* hence the name of the cake. Dorie recommends using Dutch-process cocoa powder in her recipe, so I stuck with that. To stay in the rouge vein, I used Guittard cocoa rouge cocoa powder, which has a reddish hue, but feel free to use your favorite cocoa powder here, Dutch-process or natural.

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While Romain watched me gather the ingredients for making the cake, he wondered why I was putting the dry ingredients in a sieve. I told him it was to disperse them, especially the lumpy cocoa powder.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was a member of the Bakers Dozen group, an informal association of bakers and people who like to bake at home.

At one of our get-togethers (which were heaven, being in the company of a hundred other bakers who loved to talk about things like sifting for an hour), the late baker Marion Cunningham, who was never shy about offering her opinion, chimed in with: “Well, do you have to sift is like asking: ‘Do you have to wear shoes?’”

Which is a good question.

A few years ago I ran into an acquaintance at a local bakery. When we took out our phones to exchange contact info, I looked down and noticed that he wasn’t wearing shoes. Kinda perplexed, I asked him about it and he said that he stopped wearing shoes a few years ago. I wondered aloud if he was concerned about all the grit and glass, not to mention the 💩 on the sidewalks, and he said it didn’t bother him.

And as for shoes, I’m going to continue wearing mine in Paris. And here, I did sift.

I baked the cake in my stylish bundt pan, which, woe was me, didn’t want to let go of the cake. (I can’t say I blame it…) That’s the trouble with some of the more intricate bundt pans; they look cool but don’t work for every cake.

Get Ready for Dessert!

So I remade the cake in a less-complicated bundt pan and it released just fine. I happened to be texting my friend George that day, who was one of the food stylists for my book Ready for Dessert, and he told me that he uses Bak-Klene on intricate bundt pans and nothing ever sticks. He graciously had left me a can of it, but I forgot about it in my cupboard. Next time.

(Some bakers make a baker’s goo, mixing together flour, vegetable shortening, and vegetable oil, and use that to grease cake pans. I haven’t tried it but apparently it’s a game-changer.)

Dorie’s book lives up to its name and is filled with recipes that you’ll want to make anytime. The cake was a hit, and you don’t need to wait until Thanksgiving to enjoy it. You can be an angel and make it for your friends or family whenever the mood for an all-American chocolate cake hits.

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Devil’s Chocolate Cake

10-12 servings

Adapted from Dorie’s Anytime Cakes by

When you assemble the cake, you might think that the cake pan doesn’t seem filled with enough batter when you put it in the oven. But it will rise considerably while it bakes. Like most chocolate desserts, err on the side of underbaking rather than overbaking. Check the cake before the recommended baking time.

If you don’t have a bundt pan, a tube pan with smooth sides and a hollow tube in the middle will work. As mentioned in the post (thanks George!), the best pan coating is baker’s nonstick spray, the kind that has flour in it, such as Baker’s Joy or Bak-Klene, which is available at Webstaurant, Amazon, and Williams-Sonoma. Nordic Ware recommends not using regular nonstick spray on their bundt pans, which causes buildup and degrades the coating.

Dorie recommends topping the cake, after it’s glazed, with rosettes of whipped cream and either maraschino or amarena cherries, or chocolate sprinkles or shaved chocolate. I kept it squarely in the chocolate direction but if I wasn’t bringing the cake to a party, I’d serve it with ice cream.

For the cake

1 1/3 cups (180g) all-purpose flour

1/2 cup (45g) unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-process

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder, preferably aluminum-free

1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt

10 tablespoons (140g, 5oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar

1/2 cup (100g) packed light brown sugar

3 large eggs, at room temperature

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 ounces (60g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped and melted, but kept warm and fluid

1/2 cup (125ml) whole milk, at room temperature

1/2 cup (125ml) very hot dark coffee (you can use instant coffee mixed with boiling water)

4 ounces (115g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped (or use mini-chips)

For the glaze

4 tablespoons (60g, 2 ounces) unsalted butter, cut in small pieces

4 ounces (115g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped

1 1/2 tablespoons light corn syrup

To make the cake, spray the inside of a 10-cup bundt pan with baker’s spray (see the headnote), or grease it with butter or shortening, making sure to get it into all the crevasses, then dust the pan with flour, tapping out the excess.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC).

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand, beat the butter and sugars on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Stop the mixer midway and scrape down the sides to make sure the ingredients are mixing evenly.

Turn the mixer down to medium speed and add the eggs one at a time, stopping the mixer to scrape down the sides. Once the eggs are incorporated, mix in the vanilla and melted chocolate.

With the mixer on its lowest speed, add one-third of the dry ingredients, then half of the milk. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients, mix in the rest of the milk, then mix in the last of the dry ingredients. With the mixer still on low speed, mix in the very hot coffee. Remove the bowl from the mixer and stir in the chopped chocolate by hand with a flexible spatula.

Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan. Rap the pan gently on the counter a few times and smooth the top. Bake the cake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out almost clean, with moist crumbs attached, about 35 minutes, but check it at the 30-minute mark, or before.

Let the cake cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Unmold the cake on the wire rack and let cool completely before glazing.

To make the glaze, place the butter, chocolate, and corn syrup in a medium bowl. Place the bowl over a small saucepan of barely simmering water, stirring it occasionally until the butter and chocolate are melted and the mixture is smooth. Remove from the heat and let cool for a minute or two to thicken slightly, enough so that it can be spooned over the top of the cake, but not too runny that it will all run down the sides and off the cake.

Pour or spoon the glaze over the top of the cake, using a butter knife or offset metal spatula to encourage it to flow down the sides.

Storage: The cake can be stored for up to two days at room temperature, if well-wrapped.

Devil's Chocolate Cake Recipe

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*When I was in pastry school here in France, one of the chef-instructors said to add a little red food coloring to chocolate batters to enhance the color of the chocolate. Just an FYI.

Addendum

Just a footnote here on bundt pans. These are the two that I own:

The one on the left is an oldie, but goodie that I bought at a stall at the market in Paris. The one on the right is a newer on from Nordic Ware. I had trouble getting it out of the one on the right, and used the one on the left for the cake in this post.

As mentioned above, my esteemed food stylist friend says that he always uses a baking spray with flour in it on bundt pans, and they pop out easily. That was echoed a few days ago when I was talking to baking expert Brian Hart Hoffman, founder and editor-in-chief of Bake from Scratch magazine, who shared that sentiment and said to always use baking spray with flour in bundt and fluted pans, not regular non-stick spray.

Confession: I may have used non-stick spray on the pan on the above right a few times, as well as run it through the dishwasher - another no no, which may be why cakes stick in it sometimes. Nordic Ware has a video about how to wash a bundt pan.

As a treat, Brian brought me two of the cake pans he designed for Williams-Sonoma, below, so I can start afresh with my shiny new fluted tube pans. And this time, I’ll treat them right!

Perhaps you aren’t coming to Paris to have a chocolate chip cookie. But hear me out.

The first time I walked by Mokonuts, I was curious. I’d heard rumblings about a new, very small restaurant not far from the Marché d’Aligre, which I frequent, but I didn’t think about walking over there. All I knew was that it was owned by a couple, Moko and Omar, and the food was supposed to be very good. I was having dinner in the neighborhood one night and happened to walk by. I noticed someone inside and poked my head in.

“David!!!!” the woman behind the counter screamed.

So (of course) I screamed back, “Moko!!!!!”

Since then we’ve become friends and I daresay, almost family. I’ve seen their kids grow up, their restaurant flourish, their sandwich shop transform into the pop-up venue, and the opening of their bento box lunch place just down the street, called Mokochaya, serving breakfast and lunch items, and doesn’t take reservations. Which is great news since their original restaurant, which is tiny, books up quickly.

Even if you can’t make it there, Moko and Omar have come out with their own cookbook, Mokonuts, and it’s a beauty. I was honored to be asked to write the introduction to the book with , who’s also in the “friends and family” camp of the restaurant. I went to the friends and family book launch party and their circle of friends and family has widened quite a bit, but they thought enough of Dorie and me to ask us to write the intro to their book.

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And the book captures everything that makes Mokonuts special, including Omar’s savory recipes that rely on ultra-fresh ingredients and are often accented by his Lebanese heritage and Levant cooking, which doesn’t relegate vegetables to the side of the plate. I recently had a bowl of the most amazing mushrooms I’ve had in a while. When I asked Omar what he did to make them taste so good, he shrugged and replied, “I just sautéed them.”

The tagline of Mokonuts is “café & bakery” and Moko is still turning out her famous cookies, which you can get to-go at their other place, Mokochaya, up the street. And since the recipe for the various cookies she makes are in the book, I decided to bake two different batches of cookies.

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Fortunately, I had all the ingredients for both the multigrain and the sesame-miso cookies (the recipes are side by side in the book) on hand. (Don’t you love that?) So I made them both.

It also gave me the chance to open the jar of miso from My miso that’s made in Paris from Jerusalem artichokes.

When I arrived in Paris, circa 2003, the idea of a shop dedicated to fermentations and making miso was unheard of. But the city continues to add more delicious things to make it the melting pot that it is, every year. There are even cookie shops with lines out the door here now. Most of their cookies are oversized (I don’t like cookies with blobs of ganache and all sorts of other stuff piled on top) and underwhelming; the ones at Mokonuts are just right. And now, you can prepare them at home.

American Baking in Paris

Both cookies were a big hit around here, but when offered the choice, I’ll always choose cookies that have chocolate in them. Add with seeds and grains? I’m all in. The sesame-miso ones have also been on rotation here. With Moko and Omar’s book, I’m in Mokonuts cookie heaven.

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Mokonuts Multigrain Cookies

Makes 15 cookies

Adapted from Mokonuts by Moko Hirayama and Omar Koreitem

This is one version of the famous cookies Moko bakes up at Mokonuts. Others in the book include sesame-miso, tahini-black sesame, and chocochunk. But I love anything with lots of grains and chunks of melting chocolate in them, so they were first on my docket.

The original recipe calls for baking the cookies on cold baking sheets. I couldn’t fit a nickel into my freezer, let alone a baking sheet, so I lowered the temperature to 375ºF (190ºC). When baking cookies, rely on the look and feel of the cookies to test when they’re done, rather than adhering strictly to the baking time. When in doubt, go for slightly underbaked cookies rather than overbaked.

Moko has a few tricks, such as baking the cookies on a cold baking sheet, which may explain the higher baking temperature, but I didn’t do that, with my packed freezer. And mine came out fine.

Note that Moko advises that the dough for these cookies should rest at least 4 hours, or overnight, before baking. So plan accordingly.

1 cup (125g) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder (preferably aluminum-free)

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon kosher or sea salt, or 1/2 teaspoon table salt

4 1/2 ounces (130g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar

1/3 cup (65g) packed dark brown sugar

1 large egg, at room temperature

1 cup (100g) old-fashioned rolled oats

1/3 cup (50g) sunflower seeds

1/4 cup (30g) pumpkin seeds

2 tablespoons flax or sesame seeds

5 ounces (140g) coarsely chopped dark chocolate, preferably 70% cocoa solids

Flaky sea salt, for finishing the cookies

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and kosher or sea salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand, beat the butter with the granulated and brown sugar for 1 minute on medium speed. Stop the mixer, scrape down the sides of the bowl, then add the egg and mix on medium speed until combined. With the mixer on low speed, stir in the dry ingredients, then the oats and seeds until they’re almost completely incorporated, then add the chocolate chunks and mix until well combined, but don’t overmix. Cover the dough and refrigerate at least 4 hours, or overnight.

Before baking the cookies, remove the dough from the refrigerator 20-30 minutes before shaping the cookies to give it time to soften.

Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC).

Line one or two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. (I prefer to bake one sheet at a time, but you can do two if you wish. If you do two, be sure to rotate the baking sheets in the oven, and switch the racks they are on, midway during baking so they bake evenly.)

Roll the dough into fifteen 1 3/4-inch (45-50g) rounds and place them 2 inches (5cm) apart on the prepared baking sheets. Sprinkle each cookie with a tiny bit of flaky sea salt. Bake the cookies until they’re medium brown across the top, about 10 minutes, but check them a minute or so before. They should feel slightly set around the edges but still soft in the center when they’re done.

Remove the cookies from the oven and tap the center of each cookie with the bottom of the bowl of a soupspoon once or twice to compress the dough and make a slight crater in the center. Let the cookies cool for 3 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Tip: If your cookies come out a little lopsided, you can neaten them up by placing a round cookie cutter around them, one that’s a bit bigger than the cookie, and rotating the cutter around and around the cookies shortly after they come out of the oven, to make them rounder. You can do this to most cookies, including these.

Storage: The cookies are best the day they are made but can be kept in an airtight container at room temperature for 2-3 days. You can also chill the unbaked rounds of dough for up to 5 days or freeze them for 2-3 months, letting them come to room temperature before baking.

Mokonuts Multigrain Cookies

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Hello readers of David’s Newsletter! I’m thrilled to be here filling in for David while he’s traveling! You may not know me, but I am a friend of David’s and a fellow Substack writer. My newsletter is called Susanality. David and I have a few things in common.

One, we are both kind of OG (i.e., old). We’ve both been doing what we do for quite a long time. Like David, I started out in restaurants and foodservice, including the pastry kitchen. After that, I transitioned into a career in traditional media, as the food editor (I actually had a fancier title than that, but basically I ran the test kitchen and food department) of Martha Stewart Living magazine from the day it launched in 1991 until 2003. That’s 12 years. The same length of time we all go to school, and what an education it was!

I will never forget the day David called me himself to tell me about his new (first) cookbook, Room for Dessert, back in 1999, when people still made phone calls, and I had a Rolodex on my desk. I remember chatting with him for a while and probably told him that the magazine didn’t really cover books. All of the content was kind of self-generated, so I always felt bad telling people like David that we couldn’t really cover them. It was memorable because for all the books that came across my desk, I think David was the first author to call me, and I’m sure he was funny too.

Many years later, when I was visiting Paris, I got in touch with David to see if he’d like to meet me for coffee. I should have realized that everyone got in touch with David to meet for coffee, but I’m glad he made an exception and said yes! We met in a little cafe close to his apartment and had a very nice chat.

A few years ago, when I was accompanying Zoë François on a pastry crawl around NYC, we ended up picking Claudia Fleming up along the way and then meeting up with David at Frenchette Bakery. I really don’t remember how that all came together, but I’m glad it did, and it was the best kaffeeklatsch in the arcade of an old office building ever, especially when Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, the chefs and proprietors, along with their pastry chef Michelle Palazzo, joined us.

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Anyway, I’m glad to say David and I are friends now, and I bug him endlessly for recommendations whenever I am coming to France, and he always happily obliges. When people ask me for my Paris recommendations, I always point them to his roundups. I’m going there in a few weeks, and our WhatsApp chat is overflowing with links, many of which I am using.

Two summers ago, my husband, Steve, and I went to Paris right before the Olympics, but we wanted to take a side trip. We had never been to Brittany, but it seemed like a good place to explore, though at the time I didn’t realize how big and spread out it was. Cool and cloudy sounded great in July. Of course I asked David for any recommendations, and he gave me one that was once removed, in that he had not personally been to Ferme du Vent (the farm of the wind), but his friends had, and they said it was “magic.” That was all I needed to hear, and I immediately booked our reservation. It was near Cancale but not in Cancale, which can be a bit touristy, so the location was perfect for us. I wrote about it at the time in my newsletter if you want all the details.

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One of the things I featured was a pair of delicious pastries from Grain de Vanille, the pastry shop in Cancale owned by the Roellinger family. One was the platonic ideal of the kouign amann, which is the pastry Brittany is most famous for; the other was a somewhat untraditional version of gâteau breton that was topped with crunchy toasted buckwheat and had a layer of stewed rhubarb in the center. I’ve been using toasted buckwheat in my cooking and baking for a few years now, so I really felt like I had found my people when I saw how popular it was there. We even had it on top of oysters on our first night. Later I found out that it was a special spice blend sold at Épices Roellinger, which is a twist on Japanese gomasio but made with buckwheat groats instead of the traditional sesame seeds. You can bet I brought some of that home with me — it’s good on just about everything.

Anyway, back to the cake. When David invited me to fill in for him today, I decided to reverse engineer that delicious, buttery cake that’s been lingering in my memory but with an apple filling for fall. I hate to brag, but I think I nailed it. The cake was exactly what I was going for. I decided to use some buckwheat flour in the cake batter too, along with that irresistible crunchy topping and a filling of caramelized apples in the center. It’s everything I want an apple cake to be, including easy to make. It’s the sort of cake you can leave on the counter for a couple of days, slicing off a bit whenever you have the urge. It will keep even longer in the fridge and freezes just fine too, if it lasts that long!

Can we have a second date? I would love to see you again over on Susanality, and I am having the biggest subscription sale I’ve ever had to celebrate this collaboration. All new yearly subscriptions for the paid version of my newsletter will be 25% off. This discount will be forever! If you subscribe now, renewals will be locked in at that price for as long as you continue to subscribe.

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Apple Gâteau Breton

Serves 8

Whole buckwheat groats are sold raw and untoasted in the U.S. Except for bulk bins, I always find them in the tiny kosher section of the supermarket where it’s sold as kasha, by Wolff’s. They recently switched from boxes to bags, and it comes in three granulations. You want the whole granulation. You toast the groats just as you would nuts. You can pop them in the oven along with the cake for 8 to 10 minutes, shaking once or twice, until a shade darker. Here, I toasted the groats in a pan in some butter to more closely approximate what I had in Cancale.

Of course, this cake was originally created to showcase the incredible salted butter you find in Brittany, but if unsalted butter is all you have, just add the flaky sea salt in the recipe; if you have salted butter, then omit the sea salt.

For the apples:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

4 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and cut into ½-inch (2cm) cubes

¼ cup (50g) granulated sugar

For the cake:

½ cup (70g) buckwheat flour

1¾ cups (225g) all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon flaky sea salt

1 cup (226g) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for the pan

1 cup (200g) granulated sugar

5 large egg yolks

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 tablespoon brandy

To finish:

2 teaspoons unsalted butter

⅓ cup (60g) whole buckwheat groats (kasha), to be toasted (see headnote)

½ cup (145g) apricot preserves

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C.) Make the apples: Heat a medium (10-inch, 25cm) skillet over medium-high heat. Add the butter, apples, and sugar and stir well until the apples are well coated. Cook, stirring or tossing occasionally, for 10 to 12 minutes, or until soft and caramelized on all sides. If the apples start browning too much, reduce the heat to medium. Set aside on a plate to cool while you make the batter.

2. Make the cake: In a medium bowl, combine the buckwheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, and sea salt. Whisk to combine thoroughly. Set aside.

3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle, cream the butter and sugar for 2 to 3 minutes, or until pale and fluffy, scraping once or twice. Add the egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping as needed. Add the vanilla and brandy and beat again until mixed.

4. With the mixer off, add the dry ingredients, then mix on low until the flour is moistened. Turn up to medium and beat until well mixed.

5. Butter a 9-inch (23cm) springform pan. Spread half the batter in the bottom of the pan, using a small offset spatula to smooth it. Add the apples in an even layer. Add the remaining batter and use damp hands to spread it out over the apples. Do a final smoothing with the spatula, but it’s ok if it’s a little lumpy.

6. Place on a rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment and bake for 45 to 50 minutes, or until the cake is golden brown on top and feels firm in the center. Let cool on a wire rack for about 15 minutes before removing the ring.

7. Finish the cake: Melt the butter in a small skillet and add the buckwheat groats. Cook, stirring, over medium-high heat for 5 to 7 minutes, or until a shade darker. Transfer to a small plate to cool.

8. Warm the apricot preserves in a small pan or the microwave until loose. Push it through a small sieve. Discard the solids. Spread the strained preserves evenly over the top of the cake and sprinkle with the buckwheat groats. Let cool completely, or enjoy it slightly warm.

Apple Gateau Breton

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One DIY project that I always take on is making my own granola. I know you can buy it, but the store-bought stuff isn’t that great. The only exception I make is the granola at b. patisserie in San Francisco. Disclosure: When the owner, Belinda Leong, sees me in line, she invariably gives me a bag of pastries and adds a few bags of granola. When I tried to coax the recipe out of her, she told me she gave it to Food & Wine. I haven’t made the recipe but I wonder if it’s the same one that she uses at the bakery. Whatever she puts in that granola is magic, and I didn’t see unicorn dust listed as an ingredient in that recipe.

But I digress. (However, if anyone has made that recipe, let me know if it’s the same thing they sell at the bakery.) Another wonderful person in my life, in addition to Belinda, is Rachel Simons, the co-owner of Seed+Mill in New York City. Rachel recently wrote a cookbook titled Sesame: Global Recipes & Stories of an Ancient Seed and was a guest on my podcast.

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It’s truly one of my most bookmarked cookbooks, but between doing recipes for my own books and putting two to three meals on the table every day (and also, the person who works at home is in charge of the laundry as well), I haven’t been able to make them all. I love Rachel. Well, not in that way. (Actually, I kinda sorta do…)

I had planned to make the Furikake on page 57 (since I always buy it) and the Vegan tahini Caesar salad dressing (page 62) because it sounds really good, but I was also leaning heavily toward the Pistachio and whipped feta spread (page 79), which comes from one of my very favorite chefs and another great person, Ayesha Nurdjaja. Then there’s a Salted tahini caramel sauce (page 158), as well as Tahini caramel corn (page 163) and the Salted honey snacking cake (page 198).

But when I ran out of my usual granola, it gave me a chance to make the Tahini granola in Rachel’s book.

I have several jars of tahini on hand and an abundance of maple syrup. The syrup was for testing and developing a recipe for home bakers for the amazing Maple tarts at Tapisserie bakery in Paris, which I wanted to have in my new edition of Ready for Dessert.

I’d picked up a few liters/quarts of maple syrup, figuring I’d have to do a lot of testing to get the tarts from the bakery just right. But I got ‘em right the third time, and Romain thought mine were even better than theirs. (He’s perhaps a bit biased. On the other hand, French people don’t mess around with telling you the truth about whether they like something, or not.) The tarts at the bakery are a little different and have a thin pâte sucrée crust because they’re baked in pastry rings, and I didn’t want to ask you to buy a set of pastry rings.

Fortunately, I had everything on hand to make what’s called “Loaded granola” in Rachel’s book. In addition to tahini and maple syrup, it also has coffee in it. Say what? Coffee, in granola? Well, many of us eat granola with coffee in the morning, so that’s not too much of a stretch. But Rachel said in the headnote of the recipe that it was a “must add” ingredient to granola, so I added it, too.

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I’m going to buck the trend of people who say they don’t like granola that’s “too sweet.” I actually have a bit of a sweet tooth when it comes to granola. Exhibit A: This Peanut butter and chocolate chip granola, which I could eat a whole batch of in one sitting.

But I may be an outlier because if it was up to me, I’d eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. However, Rachel’s granola isn’t very sweet at all. It’s only got 1/2 cup (125ml) of maple syrup, so if you like your granola on the less-sweet side, you’ll like this one. And yes, even a sweet-lover like me likes it too.

Tahini Granola

Makes about 6 cups

Adapted from Sesame: Global Recipes & Stories of an Ancient Seed by Rachel Simons

The addition of coffee to this recipe was rather intriguing. Rachel mentioned a friend of hers said it was a “must add” to his granola, so she tried it, and liked it. It does add somewhat of a je ne sais quoi to the granola, but you can leave it out.

The original recipe called for using two baking sheets, but the entire batch of granola fit on just one of mine, which is about 18 x 13 inches (46 x 33cm). If your baking sheet is smaller, you may want to use two, and rotate them on the racks in the oven while cooking so they bake evenly.

2 1/2 cups (260g) old-fashioned rolled oats

1 cup (110g) pecans or walnuts, or a mix (untoasted), coarsely chopped

3/4 cup (60g) unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut

1/2 cup (70g) pumpkin seeds

1/4 cup (35g) sunflower seeds

1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup (125ml) maple syrup

1/3 cup (80ml) olive oil

1/4 cup (65g) tahini

3 tablespoons espresso or strong black coffee (optional)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, stir together the oats, nuts, coconut, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, salt, cardamom, and cinnamon.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, olive oil, tahini, espresso (if using), and vanilla.

4. Stir the maple syrup mixture into the dry ingredients until they’re thoroughly coated, then spread the mixture on the prepared baking sheet.

5. Bake the granola for 12 minutes, stirring it midway during baking.

6. Reduce the heat of the oven to 325ºF (165ºC) and bake until golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes more. (Mine took the full 15 minutes, but check before.) While it’s baking, stir the mixture once or twice to make sure the edges aren’t burning or getting too dark.

7. Remove from the oven and let cool completely. Once cool, transfer the granola to an airtight container. (Or eat it right away off the baking sheet, which I couldn’t resist doing!)

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Tahini Granola

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I can’t help tinkering with recipes. I’ve made this pie quite a few times over the years, and so have others. A few noted they had a bit of extra filling left over, but I didn’t have that experience. However, I know there are variations in pie plates; I don’t think any two are exactly alike. (Springform pans also fall into that category.)

And then, there was a famous (or infamous) baking experiment Marion Cunningham did, asking thirty-five professional bakers in the San Francisco Bay Area to bake the same angel food cake recipe and bring it to a meeting. “You would not believe how different they all were,” she told food writer Ruth Reichl. I was there, and remember it well.

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So after my book came out, I decided to revise the pie recipe, toggling to get it to a place where it’s just right for everybody.

It’s a great holiday pie, and the recipe in the book is the one I’ve made for years and works fine if you make it; you just may have some filling left over. If you do, it can be baked alongside the pie in a custard cup or ramekin and enjoyed as a baker’s treat.

I also tried it with a few variations here, including using sweet potatoes and canned pumpkin, which makes the recipe accessible to more people who may not be able to get butternut squash, or just want to skip the step of cooking the squash. I’ve softened my stance over the years on DIY projects and know that not everyone has the time, space, or inclination, to make everything from scratch. That’s why I Ioved revising my recipes for the book, and streamlined a number of them.

Fall in Paris means there’s lots of squash showing up at the markets. The idea of a pie made from squash isn’t quite French; when you see a recette for tarte à la citrouille, it’s generally for pumpkin pie, not a tart — if you’re a stickler about that kind of thing.

When I moved here, we’d often have a Thanksgiving meal somewhere, either at my place, or at a friend’s apartment. Over the years, that tradition has waned as friends moved, drifted, or became more French, not to mention that Thursday is a school night in France, and a lot of people have to go to work the next day. Not to mention gathering all the ingredients, especially preparing a whole turkey in a cramped oven, and finding fresh cranberries, can be a scavenger hunt here. I’m still mourning the loss of my stash of frozen cranberries when my freezer accidentally got unplugged.

This kind of pie is a holiday tradition for those of us from the U.S., but sails over the heads of the French, although when Romain discovered stuffing, he became a convert. (How could he not?) And now that I know he likes this pie as well; he devoured a third of the pie, as you can see, above, he’s looking forward to having it again this year. So you might consider adding it to your holiday table, too.

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Butternut Squash Pie

Adapted from Ready for Dessert, revised

Eight servings

Here are a few additional notes about this recipe:

- You can use one can of pumpkin puree in place of the butternut squash puree if you wish. (Canned pumpkin is usually Dickinson squash, which are sometimes referred to as pumpkins. One can of pumpkin is slightly less than this recipe calls for, but it’s okay just to use one can.)

- In the book, I bake the butternut squash in the oven since it’s easier than peeling it. To prepare the squash that way, preheat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC). Split a 2-pound (1kg) butternut squash in half lengthwise and remove the seeds.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and butter the area where you’ll be placing the squash halves. Place the squash cut side down on the baking sheet and bake the squash until the flesh is completely tender, about 45 minutes. If you poke the flesh with a paring knife, it should meet no resistance. Remove from the oven and when cool enough to handle, scrape out the pulp. You’ll end up with about 2 cups (450-480g) of squash pulp.

- Instead of baking the squash, you can steam it by peeling it, removing the seeds, and cutting the flesh into large chunks. Steam the pieces of squash in a vegetable steamer basket in a saucepan with some simmering water. You can also use sweet potatoes instead of the squash. It’ll take about 1 ½ pounds (675g) of sweet potatoes to make a similar amount of puree. (Butternut squash has thicker skin, which is why the recipe calls for 2 pounds of butternut squash.)

- To make pie dough, there’s a recipe in the book and you’ll also find recipes on my website here and here, or use your favorite recipe.

- If you want to omit the Cognac or rum, increase the vanilla extract to 1 1/2 teaspoons, total, in the recipe.

- Feel free to vary the spices to your liking. Ground cardamom, star anise, and/or allspice are possible additions to the mix.

Filling

1 cup (250ml) heavy cream

3 large eggs, at room temperature

3/4 cup (135g) packed light brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground dried ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 tablespoon Cognac or rum

2 cups (450-480ml) baked (or steamed) butternut squash pulp, or sweet potatoes, or 1 can of pumpkin puree (see headnote)

One prebaked 9- to 9 1/2-inch (23cm) pie crust

Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or aluminum foil, if you wish. (It’s not necessary but is insurance against spilling any of the filling in your oven.)

In a food processor or blender, process or blend all the ingredients together until the mixture is very smooth. Pour the filling into the baked pie crust and bake until the filling is barely set in the center (it should be slightly jiggly), 30-35 minutes. Don’t overbake the pie. Let the pie cool on a wire rack until ready to serve.

Serving and storage: The pie is good warm, at room temperature, or chilled. Whipped cream is a natural accompaniment. The pie will keep up to two days in the refrigerator.

Butternut Squash Pie Recipe

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More holiday pie recipes

Cranberry-raisin pie

Bourbon-ginger pecan pie

French apple pie

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Don’t hate me, but I picked so many figs this summer while in Provence that my freezer is jam-packed with figs, and I need to figure out what to do with them. (Well, you can dislike me for the puns.)

The upside is that I have a lot of figs. I made a lot of jam and roasted several batches of figs, but still, I ended packing away a lot of them in my freezer. The best way to freeze figs is to cut them in half, place them cut side down on baking sheets lined with parchment paper, and slide them in the freezer. Once frozen, gently peel the figs off the paper paper and separate them, then double-wrap the fruit in bags before putting them back in the freezer.

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I know that “storage” questions about recipes are a big deal to some people, some say fruit can be frozen for a few months, or indefinitely (which is essentially true; anything can be stored in the freezer forever, unless your freezer konks out.) But when I wrote Drinking French, I was getting a lot of questions about how long bottles of liquor last. I mentioned that to a well-regarded distiller, and asked him what he thought. He looked at me, and replied, “They last as long as they taste good.”

While there are still some fresh figs at the market in Paris, we recently took advantage of the dwindling warm weather and invited some friends for lunch on Sunday afternoon. Since I was tasked with making dessert, I thought about making a fig cake and remembered one by , and decided to make that with my bounty of frozen figs.

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When I lived in San Francisco, I never in a gazillion years imagined myself using or buying frozen fruit. But in Paris, fresh raspberries, sour cherries, and blueberries are super expensive, and raspberries and blueberries are often sold in plastic clamshell containers, so they’re not the best of the bunch.

When I need a lot of them, I go to Picard, the frozen food store. In addition to berries (which are popular these days for using in les smoothies), they also sell frozen pineapple, mangoes, mirabelle plums, sour cherries, apricots, avocados, strawberries, white peaches, passion fruit, rhubarb, and figs. Obviously they have more freezer space than I do!

I don’t have the same allegiance to Picard that many people in France do, but when I want a pound (450g) of raspberries or a kilo (2.2 pounds) of pitted sour cherries, that’s where I go. So if you need to rely on frozen fruit to make this cake, I won’t judge. And if anyone does, just tell them that it’s très Parisian.

I went a bit rogue with Yotam’s recipe, and used five-spice powder in lieu of star anise. I also had a bit of pistachio flour left over from another baking project so mixed that with almond flour. Nut flour gives this cake an extra-moist richness, while adding flavor. The texture is denser than loftier cakes, so I added some baking powder to the mix to lighten things up a tad.

The cake came out beautifully and while the weather got a little iffy while we were having lunch*, no one left the table when dessert came out. I served the cake with fig leaf ice cream and a few pieces of roasted figs alongside with some of their juice, but you could pair it with berries if they’re in season, or even sabayon.

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If you can get your hands on some figs, give this cake a try. If you can’t get them fresh, or frozen, right now there are quetsches (prune plums) at the market, and you could use those, cut into quarters if they’re large, or cut in half if they’re small.

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Fig-Yogurt Cake

8 servings

Adapted from the Fig, Yogurt and Almond Cake by Yotam Ottolenghi

The original recipe called for only almond flour, but I had some pistachio flour on hand so used a mix. If you use all almond flour, your cake will be lighter in color than mine. I also swapped in five-spice powder for the ground star anise called for in the original recipe.

It’s a pretty versatile cake so you could add ground cardamom seeds instead of the five-spice powder. Since cardamom can be pretty strong, perhaps use only 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon. Or slightly crushed anise seeds would be nice; they pair very well with figs. If figs aren’t available, this cake would be tasty with sliced plums or apricots in their place. You could probably use poached pears, although I haven’t tried them. If you do, you should probably cut them into very thick slices after poaching so they stay moist due to the long-ish baking time.

How to Poach Pears

Due to the nut flour, this cake is quite hearty, not airy. Thanks to the oil in the nuts, it’ll keep nicely for 3 or 4 days at room temperature under a cake dome or well wrapped. The cake is just fine to serve on its own, but since I had guests and had some fig leaf ice cream in the freezer, I served it with that. Vanilla ice cream would work as well, or just a dollop of tangy Greek yogurt, whipped cream, or sabayon. A few poached or roasted figs with some of their liquid also pairs nicely with the cake.

200g (7 ounces) unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature

200g (1 cup) granulated sugar, plus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar or 1 tablespoon turbinado (coarse) sugar crystals, for sprinkling over the finished cake

3 large eggs, at room temperature

100g (7 tablespoons) Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract or a scant 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

180g (1 3/4 cups) almond flour

100g (scant 3/4 cup) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder, preferably aluminum-free

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon five-spice powder

10-12 fresh or frozen figs (if using frozen figs, don’t defrost them first)

1. Line the bottom of a 9-inch (24cm) cake pan with a round of parchment paper. Butter the sides of the pan or coat with nonstick spray.

2. Preheat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC).

3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand, beat the butter and 200g (1 cup) of granulated sugar together on high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.

4. Stop the mixer, then add the eggs one at a time, mixing them in on low speed, stopping the mixer after each addition to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Mix in the yogurt and extract.

5. Whisk together the almond flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and five-spice powder in a medium bowl. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture just until combined. Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth the top.

6. Quarter the figs and place the figs in concentric circles, cut side up, around the top of the cake.

7. Bake the cake for 15 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 325ºF (170ºC) and bake the cake until it just feels set in the center, about 40 minutes longer.

8. Remove from the oven and place the cake pan on a cooling rack. Let cool a few minutes, then run a sharp knife around the outside of the cake to loosen the sides of the cake from the pan. Sprinkle the remaining sugar over the top of the cake.

9. To remove the cake from the pan, it’s easier to do while the cake is still slightly warm. Run a knife again around the outside of the cake, and place a dinner plate upside down on top of the cake pan. Holding the cake pan and the plate firmly in place with both hands, turn both over simultaneously and the cake will release. (If it’s a bit stubborn and doesn’t come out easily, you can place the cake in a warm oven for a few minutes or set it over the low flame of a gas burner for a few seconds.)

10. Remove the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake, invert a serving platter over the bottom of the cake, then turn the cake and the platter over simultaneously.

Fig Yogurt Cake

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One of the easiest French pastry doughs to master is pâte à choux, which translates to “cabbage dough” since once baked, the puffs resemble little cabbages. (If you have a creative imagination!)

Unlike other pastry doughs, this dough is made in a saucepan on the stovetop, then piped or spooned onto baking sheets. These versatile puffs can be sprinkled with pearl sugar before baking, which turns them into one of the great French snacks, chouquettes. Cheese can be added to the dough, which turns them into gougères. And if you like gougères a lot (which I do), you can make giant gougères. That’s how they’re sold in bakeries in Burgundy, the region of France where they were invented.

But one of my favorite ways to use them is to make profiteroles, which I enjoy so much that I put them on the cover of my new book, Ready for Dessert. Yes, that smile on my face while dousing them with warm chocolat sauce is the real deal.

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When my friend Cécilia Jourdan of Hello French was in Paris recently (she was a guest on my podcast), I invited her back into my kitchen to make a video with me preparing profiteroles with her. Because Cécilia is a French teacher, we had some fun with French vocabulary, too. Here are a few words we used in the video:

Sauteuse: A high-sided, wide saucepan.

Douille: Pastry piping tip.

Poche à douille: Pastry piping bag.

Au pif: “By the nose,” meaning you cook or add an ingredient by instinct, rather than using a precise measurement.

Excité/excitée: Technically means “excited,” but some say it’s a sexual term, similar to “aroused,” but Cécilia clarified that more in the video.

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I hope you enjoy the video as well as the recipe (below), which is from my book Ready for Dessert.

Bon Appétit!

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Pâte à choux

Adapted from Ready for Dessert, revised edition

Makes about 20 puffs

1 cup (250ml) water

8 tablespoons (4 ounces/115g) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch (~2cm) pieces

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup (140g) all-purpose flour

4 large eggs, at room temperature

Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a medium saucepan, bring the water, butter, sugar, and salt to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring gently to encourage the butter to melt. As soon as the mixture begins to boil, add the flour all at once and stir rapidly with a spatula until the mixture forms a smooth ball and easily pulls away from the sides of the pan.

Remove from the heat. Wait for 2 minutes, stirring the paste a couple of times to cool it slightly, then vigorously beat in the eggs one at a time, making sure each one is completely incorporated before adding the next. (I do this by hand, but some folks prefer to use a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.)

Using a pastry bag fitted with a plain 1/2-inch (1.5 to 2cm) tip, pipe the choux paste into mounds about 1 1/2 inches (4cm) high on the prepared baking sheet, spacing them about 3 inches (8cm) apart. Conversely, you can also use a spring-loaded ice cream scoop or two soupspoons to drop the paste into mounds.

Bake for 5 minutes, then turn the oven down to 375ºF (190º) and bake until the puffs are golden brown on the tops and sides, 25 to 30 minutes. (But check before those baking times as ovens can vary. Pay more attention to the color rather than strictly to the baking time. You want to remove the puffs from the oven when they’re deep golden brown.) Remove from the oven and poke each puff in the side with a paring knife so that it releases its steam. Let cool completely.

To make profiteroles, cut each two or three cream puffs in half horizontally, per serving, and place them on a plate. Put a scoop of ice cream between each and replace the top. Ladle warm chocolate sauce over the profiteroles, and top with toasted or candied sliced almonds, if desired.

Pate A Choux And Profiteroles

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t care what season it is; I’m always up for a slice of tarte Tatin, the famed French upside-down caramelized apple tart. And I’m also always up for someone coming over to make it for me. This summer, during one of our heat waves, that person was Jake Cohen.

I met Jake a number of years ago in New York City and within minutes of meeting him, he’d invited Romain and me over for dinner. That surprised Romain since it’s uncommon in France to get an invitation to someone’s house for dinner who you barely know. Jake is the kind of person you immediately want to be friends with, and since we were in the U.S., we were happy to go.

Jake is the author of three cookbooks, and his latest is Dinner Party Animal: Recipes to Make Every Day a Celebration, chock-full of recipes for entertaining with ease.

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He’s definitely a pro at entertaining, as evidenced by our arrival at his place for dinner. We were stunned to find a lengthy table loaded with food, and after we sat down, more kept coming and coming, all of it delicious. He seemingly pulled off dinner for nearly a dozen people with aplomb, as if it was nothing. I always feel like I’m a dud at entertaining because by the time my guests arrive, I’m zonked from shopping and cooking all day. How does he do it?

In Dinner Party Animal, Jake lets us in on his secrets and does a lot of the work for us, providing actual, useful information about each and every menu and recipe (and party) in the book. From a Bagel Bonanza and a That Was Tonight? dinner menu (recipes that can be put together at the last minute with ingredients you likely already have on hand — which could be a whole book), to a Pita Party of delicious Mediterranean appetizers like hot honey labneh, homemade pita bread, and spicy cauliflower and celery pickles. Incredibly, he seems to have thought of everything.

The last chapter is Gobble, Gobble, which Jake calls “the only Thanksgiving menu you’ll ever need.” Like all the chapters, it starts with a menu for the party, a list of every item you’ll need (and in what quantity), a grocery list, and a prep list that includes what you can do a week ahead, what you can do up to three days ahead, up to two days ahead, and up to a day ahead, as well as what you can do 4 hours, 2 hours, 1 hour, and right before the guests arrive. He’s done all that work so you can take a load off and have yourself a Happy Thanksgiving.

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Thanksgiving is a couple of months from now, but you can tuck this tarte Tatin recipe away until then or make it now.

Minutes after arriving in my kitchen, Jake got to work on his tarte Tatin. I have a few of tarte Tatin pans in my collection, which I pulled out for him…

One, on the left, is a gorgeous copper Mauviel pan I snagged up at a flea market for a whopping €2. The other is a specialty de Buyer tarte Tatin pan that I discovered 20+ years ago when I moved to France and found it at MORA, the pastry supply shop at Les Halles in Paris.

Cookware Shops in Paris

It’s nonstick and creates a beautifully domed tarte Tatin, although I think I paid one-third of the price that it currently costs. (Le Creuset just came out with a beautiful tarte Tatin pan, too.) But you don’t need a special pan to make this dessert. Jake grabbed a regular stainless-steel skillet off my kitchen shelf to use.

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Jake’s tarte Tatin is easy to prepare, and one thing he does is to precook the apples a little, which helps move the process along. He also adds cinnamon, which the French would say is “très américain,” but it works well and even Romain liked it. (And believe me, he would tell me if he didn’t.) When I’ve presented recipes like French Apple Cake, non-French commenters often inquire about adding cinnamon, which French people don’t habitually add when baking with apples. So I'd tell them, “Yes, you can add cinnamon if you want, but just call it Apple Cake because it won’t be French.”🇫🇷

There’s nothing wrong with a non-French apple cake, but I have to say, Jake convinced me —and Romain — that there’s a place for cinnamon in the famed French upside-down caramelized tart. And this tart is proof.

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Tarte Tatin

Serves 8

From Dinner Party Animal by Jake Cohen, reprinted with permission from Harvest/William Morrow

I’ve reprinted Jake’s recipe here from the book since he’s a whiz at writing recipes. For his recipe, you’ll make a dry caramel, which involves caramelizing sugar in a skillet with no water, just sugar, then stopping the caramelization with butter. (For tips on making caramel, check out my post, How to Make the Perfect Caramel.) Jake doesn’t like to use puff pastry for this, store-bought or otherwise, and prefers homemade dough. His technique of layering the dough eight times produces a dough similar to puff pastry, but is sturdier.

If you don’t have Honeycrisp apples, a firm, flavorful apple that keeps its shape while baking can be used. Golden Delicious reliably hold their shape. Braeburn, Jonagold, and Northern Spy are others.

Dough

2 cups (270g) all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

1 teaspoon kosher (or sea) salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

6 ounces (170g) cold unsalted butter, cubed

1/2 cup (125ml) ice water

Apples

3 pounds (1,3kg, about 8 medium) Honeycrisp apples, peeled, quartered, and cored

1/4 cup (50g) granulated sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon kosher (or sea) salt

Caramel

3/4 cup (150g) granulated sugar

4 tablespoons (2 ounces, 55g) cold unsalted butter, cubed

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon kosher (or sea) salt

Vanilla ice cream, for serving

1. Make the dough: In a large bowl, stir the flour, salt, and baking powder to combine. Add the butter and, using your fingers, pinch the butter into the flour mixture until pea-sized crumbles form. Using your hand, knead in the water until a shaggy dough forms. Transfer to a clean work surface.

   Using a bench scraper (or chef’s knife), cut the dough in half, then stack the two halves and press down with your hands to flatten into a round disk. Repeat this cut and press process, dusting with flour as needed to prevent sticking, for a total of 8 times. Cover in plastic wrap (or your favorite eco-friendly alternative) and refrigerate the dough for an hour.

2. Cook the apples: Preheat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC). Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

3. In the prepared sheet pan, toss the apples with the sugar, cinnamon, and salt to coat. Arrange the apples cut-side down. Roast for 25-30 minutes, until just tender. Let cool on the pan.

4. Make the caramel: In a 10-inch (25cm) ovenproof skillet, heat the sugar over medium-high heat. Cook, stirring often, until amber in color, 4-6 minutes. Working quickly, remove from the heat and stir in the butter, followed by the vanilla and salt. Arrange the roasted apples in concentric circles cut-side up over the caramel in the skillet, shingling to fit.

5. Transfer the chilled dough to a lightly dusted surface. Roll into a 12-inch (30cm) circle, dusting with more flour as needed. Drape over the apples, tucking the edges of the dough into the pan.

6. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until golden brown and bubbling. Remove from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. (If making in advance, see note below.)

7. Serve the tarte Tatin: Place a large plate over the top of the pan and use a kitchen towel or oven mitts to invert together. Carefully remove the pan to reveal the tarte Tatin, then slice and serve with vanilla ice cream.

Make Ahead: Dough (step 1) can be made up to 1 day in advance of baking, stored in the refrigerator. Apples (steps 2 and 3) can be made up to 1 day in advance of baking, stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Tarte Tatin (through step 6) can be made any time the day of serving, kept in the pan. Reheat in a 400ºF (200ºC) oven for 5 to 10 minutes, to warm through before serving (step 7).

Tarte Tatin

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If you watched the video of me and Jake making this tart on Instagram (above), the caramel ice cream we served with it is from my book, Ready for Dessert.

Get Ready for Dessert!

When I moved to Paris, I was living in a small rooftop apartment. I was quite naïve, and a number of times, someone who was dirty with soot would knock on my door and ask me if I wanted my fireplace cleaned. My apartment did, indeed, have a fireplace, but I never used it, so I declined. One chimney sweep was extremely persistent and told me it was the law that I had to have my fireplace cleaned, and tried to force his way into my apartment. So I pushed him out, shutting the door behind me, and went downstairs to talk to the gardienne of the building.

Gardiennes are forces to be reckoned with. When I arrived in my apartment building, my friends said I needed to tip her right away. She hadn’t done anything, and she wasn’t very friendly, so I was perplexed what I was tipping her for. A few days later, I learned: I asked her to let an electrician in when I wasn’t home and handed her a €20 bill for her trouble, which was the best twenty euros I’ve spent in France.

For the next few months, she always greeted me with a big smile, and I got my mail, which she delivered every day. (In those days, not all buildings had mailboxes, and I know more than one person who, for some reason, doesn’t always get all their mail.) Even better, I soon got my name included on the list of tenants posted in the lobby of the building, which usually takes a least a year, if you’re lucky.

I later learned that the gardienne,* in addition to taking care of the building, their other job is to be the conduit for any and all gossip in the building. Unlike doormen in New York who are known for their discretion, you will probably be talked about, and I always got an earful about several of the neighbors when I ran into her in the lobby.

Close to Christmas she became especially friendly and I tipped her generously…enough to last through March, until I had to find some other reason to hand her money. Gardiennes, I learned, are like vending machines: You needed to keep feeding them money to get the goods.

You don’t mess around with gardiennes either, and when I told ours about the chimney sweep who was trying to rip me off (I learned it’s one of the numerous door knocking scams in Paris), she ripped him a new one. He was an arnaquer, a word that’s important to know if you live in Paris. It was one of the various scams you need to look out for, like the “found” gold ring on the street, people asking you to sign petitions, and getting ridiculously overcharged by shady locksmiths when you get locked out, with people getting a reasonable quote to have the door unlocked, then being handed a bill for €2000 to €3000 when the job is finished.

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I was reminded of that chimney sweep incident recently, when I was looking at the 100+ bottles of liquor that I have on hand from writing Drinking French. I loved writing that book, and it was fun testing and developing the recipes, but unlike bartenders who have lots of bottles at their disposal, when I wanted to test a recipe with, say, 1/2 ounce of Dubonnet or Scotch whisky, I had to buy a bottle of Dubonnet or Scotch. (In case you’re wondering why I included Scotch in a book about what French people drink, French people are the biggest consumers of whisky in the world.) After writing the book, not only do I have a lot of bottles of alcohol, I started being gifted even more bottles. And my collection continues to grow, outpacing our ability to drink it all.

Get Drinking French!

In spite of the amount of whisky that’s consumed in France, French people aren’t as fond of cocktails as Americans. Part of the reason is that a glass of wine or a draft beer in a café hovers at around €5-€7 ($6-$8), whereas cocktails start at €12-€14 ($14-$16). In related news, beer has surpassed wine consumption at home in France.

When I was writing the book, a friend in the spirits business, who has a cocktail bar in Dijon, told me that another reason people in France prefer wine and beer is they drink longer, starting right after work and sometimes not finishing until midnight, even on weeknights. I’m always surprised to pass cafés at 11:45pm on a Tuesday night and seeing them packed with people. Don’t they have to be at work the next morning?

Looking at the bottles I have crammed on several shelves, there are a few bottles of Scotch tucked in there. I’m not a big Scotch drinker but hate to see them languishing. Then I remembered chimney sweep’s gelato (gelato spazzacamino, in Italian), which Marcella Hazan wrote about in her book The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Marcella is having a moment again, with a new documentary that recently came out:

It’s not available to watch here due to international rights, but Marcella and I shared an editor, and I did get to meet her a few times. The first time was when she came to Chez Panisse and the hostess hung her extravagant, ankle-length mink coat on the coat rack next to where I worked in the pastry station. (We always had to be careful not to get caramel or butter on the guests’ coats.) When she went out to the dining room to have dinner, of course, I had to try it on, although I have a feeling that she wouldn’t have minded.

And honestly, who wouldn’t want to be Marcella Hazan, if only for a few minutes?

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Another time we met was when we were invited to a dinner at Disney World in Florida with a group of other people in the food business. She sat next to me with her usual tumbler of Jack Daniel’s on ice in front of her and kept looking around for an ashtray. (There wasn’t one.) The over-animated server came to our table with a wedge of cheese and gave me, and the elderly woman sitting next to me, a lesson in Italian cooking: “You know, young lady,” he said, looking straight at Marcella, “Parmesan cheese is not that stuff in the green can!”

After his spiel, when he moved on to the next table, Marcella turned to me and in her husky voice said, “What the f*ck did he just say?” To this day, one of my all-time favorite moments in this business was watching someone trying to explain Parmesan cheese to Marcella Hazan.

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I am not sure who came up with chimney sweep gelato but since her book was one of the cookbooks that got lost in my Big Move** (or maybe I didn’t tip the gardienne enough that month?), I can’t say for sure.

The dessert is a bowl of gelato sprinkled generously with powdered espresso beans and doused in liquor. I did scoot around the internet to try and discover proper attribution, and found a comment that Marcella left about it:

When I am too lazy to make my own egg custard gelato, I make my Chimney Sweep’s with the best vanilla ice cream I can get. No, it is not ever remotely as good as my gelato di crema, but now that I am old I allow myself to be lazy sometimes, and the guests swoon over it. What do they know?
Commercial break: I use only Gentleman Jack on it.

There’s a gelato di crema recipe here, adapted from Marcella’s recipe, which has a tablespoon of Grand Marnier and orange zest added, but as Marcella said, good-quality, store-bought ice cream is fine. As for the liquor, Marcella famously drank Jack Daniel’s, hence the recommendation. But most mentions of the dessert call for Scotch whisky and that’s what I used; however, I’m not about to mansplain that to Marcella. Unlike the fur coat incident, that, I think, she would have minded.

Chimney Sweep’s Gelato

Gelato is the Italian word for frozen and is applied to the many varieties of ice cream made in Italy, from the egg-based gelati found in the north of Italy to starch-thickened ice creams enjoyed in the south. I followed Marcella’s lead and used good-quality vanilla ice cream that I made myself. But if you have a favorite recipe or brand that you like, use that.

I suppose you could get out your scale or measuring spoons to make this. But do you really need (or want) to? Here’s how to prepare it:

• For each serving, put one to two scoops of vanilla ice cream in each bowl. Here I used single-malt Scotch whisky that is tourbé (peated), which gives it a very strong, smoky flavor. I like smoky flavors but some peated, single-malt whiskies can be very strong. However, they work well here paired with vanilla ice cream.

  Good mid-level peated, single-malt whiskies include Laphroaig, Oban, and Lagavulin. Blended Scotch whiskies don’t have the peated flavor, but you can use one of them or another type of whisky, as Marcella did with Gentleman Jack.

• Douse each bowl with a tablespoon of whisky, then sprinkle between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon of very finely ground espresso over the ice cream. You can be a little more generous with the powdered espresso than you think since you’ll want enough on there to last until the final spoonful.

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*Gardienne often gets translated into English as “concierge,” which leads people to believe that perhaps they’ll help you plan trips and book spa services, but they don’t do any of those things. At least in my experience.

**When I moved to Paris twenty-plus years ago, I’d shipped two cases of my most cherished cookbooks to me from San Francisco. Many were personally signed to me by people such as Julia Child, Madeleine Kamman, Richard Olney, Maida Heatter, Marion Cunningham, and Jane Grigson when they came to eat at Chez Panisse. All of those books somehow, got lost, with neither the U.S. Postal Service nor La Poste taking responsibility for them. I still wonder where they went and who has them. If someone does have them, I hope they’re enjoying them…

Baking books are hard to write, which I know from experience. They’re a lot of fun, of course — you get to bake cakes and cookies, tarts and pies, and churn up ice creams and sorbets. But as the late, and legendary, cookbook author Flo Braker told me, “What I love most about writing cookbooks is how much I learn.”

Baking is fun and fascinating. Even after you’ve got something figured out, a few years later, you might change it. Or someone else comes along and adds something to it (a technique or ingredient) that you didn’t. That’s why I was thrilled to completely revise my book Ready for Dessert…

Get Ready for Dessert!

…which will be out September 30th and is now available for pre-order from your favorite local independent bookseller, or online at Bookshop, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

No pun intended, but one book that caused a stir this year was SIFT: The Elements of Great Baking, where baker does more teaching about baking than any other baking book that’s come out in years. The first 115 pages are solely devoted to explaining everything about baking—how ingredients work, what they do, and why. There’s a lot packed into this volume, and a lot to learn.

When people tell me they can’t bake, I never quite understand that because basically you’re following a set list of ingredients and their quantities. A half-cup or 100 grams of sugar is exactly that. Unlike, say, making scrambled eggs, where you have to figure out how many eggs to add and if you want to include any milk or cream. “Salt to taste” gives some people anxiety (about how much to use), and then there’s a question of how much heat to give them, and how often to stir…not to mention cooking times depend on if you like the eggs soft or firm.

As bakers and cookbook authors, we do that work for you. Add 8 ounces of chocolate chips, measure and sift the dry ingredients together, cream butter and sugar on medium speed for 3 minutes until light and fluffy. (Yes, we often give visual cues as well as preparation times.) It’s a lot, and Nicola managed to talk about most everything you want to know about baking, and a whole lot more.

Sift by Nicola Lamb

Flour, sugar, yeast, gelatin, the Maillard reaction, caramelization, eggs, emulsifications, as well as how things rise, and more, are discussed and explained.

The recipe portion of the book is helpfully divided into three sections: An afternoon, A day, and A weekend, so you can decide what level of commitment you want to make to a recipe. “An afternoon” recipe section includes an Apricot and Rosemary Polenta Cake, Brown Sugar Custard Tart, and Miso Walnut Double-Thick Chocolate-Chip Cookies, where you cook the walnuts in miso and rice wine first, which sounded intriguing, especially since someone recently gave me a jar of white miso made in Paris.

Under “A weekend,” I decided to tackle the 3-Day Focaccia. You might have to do some page turning in the book; the recipe called for “dry yeast,” and because I read the forematter, I remembered reading somewhere that she used instant yeast. (Which is also labeled fast-acting yeast.) It was in a sidebar on the Welcome page, page 7, with a clearly written list of “pointers and rules,” where she mentions using instant yeast. But I wouldn’t have minded if the word “instant” was also on the focaccia recipe page…although some say they’re interchangeable.

An “Americanizer” was also listed in the book since I think it was originally published in grams only (I have the U.S. version of the book). That may be why this recipe called for 12 1/4 ounces of cherry tomatoes in my book, which is more simply expressed as 350 grams. Doing measurement conversions and getting them all right, including deciding how picky to be, can be a challenge. I once saw a French-to-English translated cookbook that contained a measurement for “3/8 teaspoon” of cream. I’m not even sure how you’d measure that.

I’m a “round up” or “round down” kinda guy because I don’t know if you made two cakes side-by-side, one with 100 grams of butter and the other with 101 grams of butter, you’d be able to see or taste any difference.

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In a recent book by a notable British author, he basically wrote a disclaimer that the publisher was responsible for the conversions in the U.S. edition of his book, and any errors were their responsibility. Another friend of mine handed over her finished cookbook to someone else to do all the metric conversions, which I find tricky because copy editors have fits when the conversions don’t align. But sometimes you have to finagle things - like 1/4 ounce of cherry tomatoes, or 3/8 of a teaspoon of cream - to preserve the sanity of readers.

Pre-Order Ready for Dessert Here!

True to its name, this focaccia recipe does indeed take three days to make, although Days 1 and 3 are mostly hands-off, and Day 2 will require you to be around for about four hours. The design of the book and the clear instructions make it easy to follow.

I made the recipe twice. The first time I prepared it with the suggested slow-roasted tomato topping, which was good, but I may have roasted my tomatoes too much and they got a little dark. The recipe did say to poke them “quite deep into the dough,” and I wasn’t as aggressive with them as I should have been, as they tumbled off when I sliced it.

I was at a local bakery in Paris and saw the roasted tomatoes in their focaccia were deeply embedded in the squares. When I asked the baker about it, he said, “Yes, you really need to push them in deeply.”

My focaccia ended up being good, and the recipe made so much that I shared it with neighbors, who liked it a lot as well.

It also made pretty good sandwiches, too! However, I wanted to try making one that was a little more airy, with larger holes in it.

A notable bread baker once told me (in spite of what you see on social media), “Don’t judge a bread by looking at the holes. Look at what’s happening between the holes.”

I was pretty happy with how my first focaccia turned out and yes, I was impressed by the holes. The second time I made the recipe, I wanted to try making a wetter, higher hydration, looser dough to see how that would turn out. As it happened, baker Zoë Kanan of Elbow bakery was in Paris and gave me her specs (ratios) for focaccia.

Bakers are a tight-knit group and we love to help each other out, and we also like to add, acknowledge, and embellish other people’s recipes. I enjoyed reading about this Hawaiian take on my fresh ginger cake from baker Greg Patent, for example.

So I increased the amount of water in the recipe, which made for a fluffier dough. And my rosemary-flecked focaccia was a hit.

While there’s no shortage of bread bakeries, or bread, in Paris, this was a fun project to make during the summer when the warmer temperatures are more yeast friendly. I’m also eyeing the chocolate-filled 3pm Oat Cookies in the book, as well as the PBJ (peanut butter & jelly) Paris-Brest, which I’m sure would raise some eyebrows around here, as would the Feta Whipped Cheese Cake, but they sound intriguing enough to give them a go.

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3-Day Focaccia

Adapted from SIFT: The Elements of Great Baking by Nicola Lamb

I made this recipe twice. The first time I used the roasted tomatoes that Nicola called for in her original recipe, and the second time, with a higher hydration dough, I simply drizzled olive oil over the top of the focaccia, sprinkled it with flaky sea salt, and pressed some lightly oiled sprigs of fresh rosemary over the top before baking.

I used the metrics for this recipe, weighing everything, which makes it easier and more accurate. I also recommend lining the baking sheet with parchment paper, across the bottom and up the sides, to ensure the bread won’t stick to it. You may need to use two sheets of parchment to get full coverage.

Nicola recommends making bread in a ceramic bowl, which retains warmth better. If you have one, feel free to use it here.

Poolish (starter)

110g (3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons) bread flour

110g (7 tablespoons) water

Pinch of instant dry yeast

Dough, Part 1

550g (4 1/2 cups) bread flour

460g (about 2 cups) water

2g (2/3 teaspoon) instant dry yeast

Dough, Part 2

50g (3 tablespoons) water

13g (2 1/2 teaspoons) fine table salt, or 15g (1 tablespoon) grey sea salt

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus additional olive oil for handling the dough, preparing the bowl and baking pan, and baking the focaccia

Roasted Tomatoes (optional)

450g (1 pound) cherry tomatoes

1-2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary

Flaky sea salt, such as fleur de sel or Maldon

Part 1 (Day 1)

In a large bowl, make the poolish, a pre-ferment, by mixing together the bread flour, water, and pinch of yeast. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and let rest in a warm, draft-free place for 12 hours.

Part 2 (Day 2)

Add the flour, water, and yeast to the bowl and stir until it’s well incorporated. The dough will look a bit dry, which is fine. You may need to use your hands to get everything well mixed together. Cover and let rest 30 minutes.

Mix the water and salt until the salt is dissolved. Add the salted water to the dough and mix the dough with your hands, squeezing it to incorporate the salted water. The dough will be somewhat lumpy and clay-like. Cover and let rest another 30 minutes.

Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to the dough and incorporate it into the dough by lifting the edges of the dough up and folding it over the olive oil. Repeat, adding the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil, and lifting and folding the dough over the oil five or six times, until it’s mostly incorporated, although the dough will still be a bit lumpy. Cover and let rise 1 hour.

Again, lift and fold the dough over itself a few times, as in the previous step, until it’s smooth. Cover and let rise 1 hour.

After an hour, check the dough by pulling a wad (about the size of an unshelled walnut) from the top, stretching it. If it tears easily, let the dough rest another 30 minutes. If it’s nice and stretchy and doesn’t break, transfer the dough to a larger bowl, one that’s big enough for the dough to double in, and place it in the refrigerator, covered with an oiled sheet of plastic wrap or an eco-friendly alternative, oiled side down.

Check the dough after about an hour. If it’s really active and puffed up, punch it down. Cover and leave in the refrigerator 8 hours or overnight. (I left mine in the refrigerator about 24 hours, to fit my schedule.) Check the dough while it’s in the refrigerator to make sure it’s not coming out of the bowl. Okay to pat it down if it’s getting too high.

If using the roasted tomatoes, you can make them a day ahead or the day of baking. Preheat the oven to 325ºF (160ºC). Cut the cherry tomatoes in half. Place them on a small baking sheet and toss them with 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil, and salt and pepper. Bake them until they’re completely wilted and cooked through, but not browned, about 40-50 minutes.

Part 3 (Day 3)

Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Line a baking sheet (one that’s approximately 18 by 13 inches/46 by 33cm, but if you have one that’s smaller, okay to use that) across the bottom and up the sides with parchment paper (see headnote) and spread olive oil over the bottom and sides. With oiled hands, lift the dough from the bowl and place it in the center of the pan.

Spread the dough so it’s covering a little more than three-quarters of the pan, and use your fingers to coax and stretch the dough so it fits and fills the pan. You can gently slide your hands under the dough to help it fit into the pan. Let rise, uncovered, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Use your fingers to dimple the dough and let it rest another 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 475ºF (245ºC).

After 30 minutes, use your fingers to dimple the dough again. If using cherry tomatoes, press them very deeply into the dough, all the way to the bottom of the pan. Toss the rosemary sprigs in any oil left over from the cherry tomatoes, then press the rosemary sprigs lightly into the top of the dough and sprinkle with a not-stingy amount of flaky sea salt.

If you’re just using rosemary, toss some rosemary leaves in a little bit of olive oil. Drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil over the dough, filling in some of the dimples. Sprinkle the dough with a not-stingy amount of flaky sea salt and press the rosemary leaves and sprigs into the top of the dough.

Bake the focaccia for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 425ºF (220ºC) and bake until the top of the focaccia is golden brown, about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and set the baking sheet on a wire rack to cool. Once cool, peel off the parchment paper.

3 Day Focaccia

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Sorry, but I’m not going to tell you not to cook or bake during the summer, which it seems like everyone else is telling you to do. (Or is that not to do?) Every summer bring a new avalanche of recipes that tell you that you don’t need to spend any more time than necessary in the kitchen. That’s just not me.

I can’t not cook or bake. It’s in my DNA and it’s what I do every day, rain or shine, sun or sleet, hail or snow. I learned to make finicky, buttery puff pastry in a brutally hot kitchen in the summer, and I also worked the grill station as a line cook during heat waves and when I had to get anywhere near the flames, it felt like my face was searing off.

No matter how hot we are in our home kitchen, anyone who is working in a restaurant or bakery kitchen is working where the temperatures are at least 20 to 50% hotter than where we are. When I went to Sicily a few years ago, it felt like you were literally inside of an oven if you stepped outside. Last week temperatures in Paris reached 101ºF (38ºC), which has become the new norm here.

There are a lot of important things to be concerned about in today’s world, but for some reason, nothing seems to stir the pot more than an inauthentic Italian pasta. If I went around the internet calling out inauthentic French food, I wouldn’t have time to make dinner or write a newsletter. If people want to put a teaspoon of honey in their cornbread, drink a cappucino in the afternoon, or put green beans on a salade niçoise, I’ll allow it.

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This Sicilian pasta is inspired by the classic version of pasta alla Norma in Fabrizia Lanza’s latest book, The Food of Sicily: Recipes from a Sun-Drenched Culinary Crossroads. Fabrizia is a true Sicilian and an incredible cook. I’ve been to her cooking school and farm in Sicily, which was established by her late mother, Anna Tasca Lanza. (I wrote about it here and here.) While there, I was fortunate enough to cook with Fabrizia and her team of Sicilian women. We couldn’t really understand each other, but we all understood cooking, and we got along well. One day, one of the women pulled me aside, pointed a finger in my face, and said (in Italian), “You belong here.”

That, I understood. Sicily is perhaps a challenging place to live, but I’d love to give it a go for six months. I’ve always wanted to learn Italian but when I mentioned that to a few Italian friends, they all said, “David, you won’t learn Italian in Sicily. You’ll learn Sicilian.” (Which, interestingly, is a language with no future verb tense.)

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People in Sicily know a thing or two about cooking in a hot kitchen. Summer there can be ridiculously hot, although I’ve always wanted to go and make tomato paste with Fabrizia and her cooks, which happens in late August when all the tomatoes ripen. The tomato paste, called estratto, was one of the best things I ever put in my mouth. I think it was Alice Waters who called it, “Summer in a spoonful.”

The process takes a few days, and requires spreading the tomato sauce on tables and letting it bake in the full-on Sicilian sun all day. At night, the reduced paste is scraped off the tables to protect it from humidity, then spread out again over and over the next few days to let it concentrate further. Fabrizia offers workshops if you want to do it. (2025 is already sold out.)

I am one of those people who doesn’t necessarily follow recipes when I make pasta, so I toggled the recipe a bit. Ninety percent of the time I boil pasta, sauté ingredients (greens, bacon, etc.), drain the pasta, mix them all together, and serve it with grated or crumbled cheese. And while I like, and sometimes make, fresh pasta, I also like the structure and heft of dried pasta, which is traditionally used in this dish.

It’s worth seeking out good-quality dried pasta. The better ones are made with semolina from hard wheat and don’t contain any flour. (Brands like Barilla use wheat flour, which makes the pasta cook faster, but the result is softer and soggier pasta.) Bronze-cut pasta has a rougher surface, so sauce clings to it better.

One easy-to-find brand of good-quality pasta is Rummo, which I used here. But you can check the ingredient list of various brands where you live and find one that you like.

I’ve made Fabrizia’s caponata before, a Sicilian eggplant salad of sorts, which is markedly better with deep-fried eggplant, and she also recommends frying the eggplant in oil for this pasta recipe, which I adapted loosely from her book. If you want to do it that way, she heats up 2 inches (5cm) of vegetable oil and fries the eggplant in batches, letting the pieces drain on a cooling rack. Other people make this pasta by frying the eggplant in a thinner layer of oil in a skillet, which is another possibility.

I went a different route and baked the eggplant in a baking dish, which yields very good results and is less messy. Usually when I bake eggplant I do it on a sheet pan so it browns and gets a bit crisp, but crispy isn’t really what you’re after here. You want the pasta, the sauce, and the softened eggplant, to meld together. Fabrizia prefers to heap the eggplant on top of the pasta, rather than mixing it in, which is another option. Since she’s a native Sicilian, I think the authenticity police might leave her alone.

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The other benefit of baking the eggplant is if you get the timing right, you can take it directly out of the oven and stir it into the pasta. But don’t worry, in the recipe I note that you’ve got some wiggle room. This is a low-stress pasta and it’s hard to screw up.

I made this pasta on a very hot day, with no air-conditioning, so I know you can do it wherever you are. And while I don’t live in Sicily, cooking pasta during the height of summer might make me a little Sicilian after all. But I can’t really say what’ll happen if you prepare it, as I’m trying not to talk about the future, in preparation for my next trip (or longer stay?) to Sicily.

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Pasta alla Norma

Inspired by The Food of Sicily by Fabrizia Lanza

Makes six servings

The jarred tomato sauce I bought for this ended up being just okay (the one on the left, shown in the post), but a few tablespoons of tomato paste livened it up. If you have a favorite homemade tomato sauce recipe, feel free to use it here.

Ricotta salata, the cheese traditionally grated over the top, may not be easy to find where you are. I get mine at the Italian food shop Tolbiac L’Italien in the covered Marché Beauvau at the Aligré market in Paris. If you can’t find ricotta salata, pecorino cheese, which is made from sheep’s milk, is different, but a possible substitute.

Variations: You can’t call it Pasta alla Norma, but you could top it with crumbled feta cheese instead of the ricotta salata and call it Pasta alla _______ [fill in your name there, such as, pasta alla Gretchen or Bill]. I’ll sometimes sneak a spoonful of Calabrian chile paste (the Trader Joe’s one is excellent) into the tomato sauce, which is also an unauthorized addition, but adds a nice bit of zip to the pasta.

2 pounds (1kg) eggplant

1/3 cup (80ml) extra-virgin olive oil

1 1/4 teaspoons kosher or sea salt, or 3/4 teaspoon fine table salt

1/4 teaspoon dried chile flakes

3 cups (720ml) tomato sauce

Optional: 3 tablespoons tomato paste

1 pound (450g) dried tubular pasta, such as rigatoni or ziti

2 ounces (60g) ricotta salata cheese, grated, plus more for serving

1 bunch of fresh basil

Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Cut the eggplant into 1- to 1 1/4-inch (3cm) cubes. Toss the eggplant pieces in a baking dish that will hold them all in a fairly even layer, with the olive oil, salt and dried chile flakes.

Bake the eggplant until it’s completely cooked through (no one wants al dente eggplant…), stirring midway during baking, about 45 minutes. Poke a paring knife into a few chunks. They’re done when the knife meets no resistance.

[If your timing is a bit off, you can leave the eggplant in the turned-off oven. It’s hard to overcook eggplant, so you can keep it there and add it when you’re mixing the pasta with the sauce.]

While the eggplant is cooking, bring a big pot or Dutch oven of salted water to a boil.

Warm the tomato sauce with the tomato paste in a medium saucepan and set aside, keeping it warm.

Cook the pasta until just tender. Reserve 1/2 cup (125ml) of the pasta water, then drain the pasta. Return the pasta to the pot and add the warm sauce and the reserved pasta water. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently for a minute or so, until the sauce is thick and clinging to the pasta. Add the eggplant and stir gently until it’s incorporated.

Remove from the heat and stir in the 2 ounces (60g) grated ricotta salata as well as a generous handful of torn or coarsely chopped basil leaves. Taste, and add a bit more salt if desired.

Divide the pasta into bowls and grate additional cheese over the top along with a few torn basil leaves. Or, you can serve the pasta from the pot (or transfer it to a serving bowl), scatter torn fresh basil leaves over the top, and let people help themselves, adding their own grated cheese to their portions

Pasta Alla Norma

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For a long time, we’ve gone to a local Japanese restaurant, where Romain fell for their black sesame ice cream. Unfortunately, for him, the last few times we’ve gone, they’ve been out of stock. (How do you run out of ice cream? It freezes beautifully…) But rather than ask about those things, I now just accept them.

Another thing I recently accepted was a copy of La Glace de Nos Rêves, a new book of ice cream recipes by Henri Guittet. Henri credited my book, The Perfect Scoop, for launching his ice cream business, Glazed, in Paris, which I learned when we eventually met, and since then, we’ve become friends, as well as ice cream buddies.

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When I arrived in France, I tried to find a French publisher to publish my ice cream book in French, but the editors told me no one in France made their own ice cream. (I didn’t say, “Well…maybe if they had a book of recipes, they would?”) But it’s never up to authors which books of theirs get translated. It’s up to foreign publishers. So that’s another thing I’ve had to accept.

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Henri was educated as an architect in France, but his passion for ice cream took over, and now Glazed has several shops in Paris, a vintage food truck, and even an ice cream club that offers special-edition ice cream to members.

An education is referred to as a formation in France, and you’re “formed” into what you want to be by the system. But one thing that has changed over the years in France is people changing careers. In France, you take a test when you’re a teenager called the baccalaureate, and the results determine where you can go to college, and what you can study—and basically, your future.

I never opened my ice cream shop in Paris, so Henri is living my dream (minus the paperwork), with his own boutiques, and I’m glad to see he’s published his second book, La Glace de Nos Rêves, The Ice Cream of Our Dreams, where he shares his favorite recipes, including black sesame. So I decided to churn up a batch.

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I read up on black sesame paste and learned that some contain white sesame seeds (such as this French brand that’s sold in natural food stores, which is 50% white sesame seeds), which tempers the strong flavor of black sesame seeds. I didn’t want to temper the black sesame flavor, so I headed over to Kioko, a Japanese food store in Paris, to pick up a packet.

I was glad I did because the flavor was pretty delicious, although it’s important to mix up the package before using. Sesame seeds have a lot of natural oils, and those tend to rise to the top. So a good stir, or squeeze (if you buy it in a packet like I did), is in order, before using.

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Henri’s recipe also calls for low-fat powdered milk, which he says reduces the need to add too much cream to the ice cream. I didn’t know about that, but at this point, Henri'’s made more ice cream than I have, so I followed his instructions, and the ice cream did scoop beautifully. Which also might have something to do with the oil in the sesame seeds, but now that I have a box of powdered milk, I might start adding it to other ice cream bases. As the box says, it’s Génial en cuisine!, which translates to, “Brilliant in the kitchen!”…and who doesn’t want to be more brilliant in the kitchen?

Since it’s summer, I’ve been loading up on strawberries while they’re in season. Right now there are a lot of them, which is génial, because they pair especially well with this black sesame ice cream. This black sesame ice cream is quite dynamic in flavor, thanks to the quality, and quantity, of black sesame paste that I used. Romain was happy to have black sesame ice cream at home. And if he’s happy, I’m happy.

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Black Sesame Ice Cream

Makes about 1 quart (1L)

Adapted from La Glace de Nos Rêves by Henri Guittet (Amazon FR/Librarie Gourmande/Librarie Gourmande Canada)

It’s worth seeking out good-quality black sesame paste for this ice cream since that’s what gives the ice cream its great flavor. There’s a recipe here for making your own, although I’ve not made it, and you’d really need to have a good food processor or blender to get it the right consistency. I recommend buying a good-quality Japanese brand, one that’s 100% black sesame seeds.

Henri’s recipe said to use low-fat powdered milk, but I used whole-milk powdered milk, and my ice cream came out fine. So you could use whichever you want. If you can’t find powdered milk, you can make the ice cream without it without any adjustments. My recipe has an additional egg yolk, and the black sesame paste is rich enough to keep the ice cream scoopable.

1/3 cup (70g) black sesame paste, well mixed

2 cups (500ml) whole milk

5 tablespoons (25g) powdered milk (any type)

2/3 cup (130g) sugar

Pinch of salt

4 large egg yolks

3/4 cup (150g) heavy cream

A few drops of lemon juice

Optional: 2 tablespoons (18g) black sesame seeds

1. Put the black sesame paste in a medium bowl. Have a mesh strainer handy as well as a larger bowl partially filled with ice and a little water for an ice bath to cool the finished custard. Set aside.

2. Warm the milk, powdered milk, sugar, and salt in a medium saucepan over moderate heat. Whisk together the egg yolks in a small bowl. When the milk is warm, gradually add some to the yolks while whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed eggs into the saucepan.

3. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a flexible heatproof spatula, scraping the bottom of the pan with the spatula, until the custard starts to thicken. If using an instant-read thermometer, the temperature should read 185ºF (85ºC).

4. Immediately strain the custard into the black sesame paste, then use a whisk to stir the mixture until the sesame paste is incorporated, then whisk in the cream. Set the bowl of custard in the bowl of ice and stir with a spatula until cool.

5. Refrigerate the custard overnight, add a few drops of lemon juice, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Once churned, fold in black sesame seeds, if desired.

Black Sesame Ice Cream

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I’d been baking well before things got public, that is, before the internet. In the “old days,” if you had a book out, you’d do a book tour, usually at a store that had a kitchen, and would do a baking demo that lasted a few hours. They were really fun, and I met a lot of great people, but sometimes you’d arrive and be in for a surprise or two.

Sometimes the organizers couldn’t find a main ingredient; who knew they couldn’t find dulce de leche in Texas? And a friend who taught Italian cooking had put Parmesan cheese on the shopping list, and when he arrived, there was a green can of grated Kraft waiting for him. Another time someone pre-baked me individual warm chocolate cakes, then stacked them in a plastic container. When I opened the box a few hours later, they were as flat as chocolate pancakes. But often those people were volunteers, and they were so nice and earnest, that I’d just say something like, “Oh, wow…that’s a clever presentation that I’ve not seen before”…before scrambling around the unfamiliar kitchen to remake them before the guests arrived.

Other times, the bookstore might not have your book for sale. When I went on the book tour for The Perfect Scoop, one bookstore didn’t have a single copy of my book…but had a stack of someone else’s ice cream book for sale, piled up on the table where I was supposed to be signing my books. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We’re all in this world together, and I’m especially happy to be part of the baking cookbook clan and support other authors, but I had to explain to sixty people that I couldn’t sign someone else’s book.

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Baking authors are a friendly bunch, and I like reading what other bakers are writing about (although I’m not signing their books, and I don’t expect them to sign mine), but even better, I like meeting them in person.

So it was fun to spend a morning a while back with Claudia Fleming, , and Zoë François at Frenchette bakery in New York, where they pulled out all the stops, and we did what bakers do best: Eat!

I didn’t know any of those wonderful women very well at the time, but now, we are bonded together for life. I’m not sure they feel the same way. But they’re stuck with me.

Some of us bakers can be a little, um…peculiar, but Zoë is one of those people who doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. And I think if she did have something bad to say about someone, it would come out sounding like a compliment.

Zoë grew up in Vermont, in a hippie-ish, sugar-free household, and told me that when she wanted something sweet, she was given a (as in, one) raisin. So she’s making up for lost time by writing baking books and sharing recipes in her website and in her newsletter.

I can be nice, too, but not like Zoë. When I had my blog, the comments started to devolve into people talking about how much they changed the recipe, namely, reducing the sugar. Nowadays, the young‘uns call it virtue signaling. One commenter finally replied to a string of those messages, saying something along the lines of: Maybe worrying so much about what you eat is worse than actually eating what you’re so worried about.

I was thinking about having t-shirts made with that on them*, so if you’d like to pre-order one, let me know.

When I develop a recipe, I test it with all different quantities of sugar, as well as cream (which I often test to see if whole milk works in its place) and butter—until I get those quantities right to where I can use the minimum amount of those things, but get the best results. So when someone asks me about reducing the sugar, it sounds snarky to say, “Sure you can…if you want a cookie that’s less good than the one I spent three days working on.”

But I get it. Everyone has different reasons for changing a recipe, and I like hearing how people make my recipes gluten-free or dairy-free. I love when people toggle something so more people can enjoy it. And I generally tell people that if they want low-sugar recipes (here are three cookbooks), to give one of those a try, such as this one from Zoë.

These Morning Cookies are lightly sweet, relying on maple syrup and fruit puree instead of white death, as people used to call it. You can also make them with whole grains, and the coconut oil makes them dairy-free.

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They’re from the latest book by Zoë, filled with recipes for cookies and bars. I am someone who can’t resist eating a cookie before breakfast, if I have any around, so I have been happy to have a batch of these on hand all week. Not that I feel guilty having a double chocolate cookie first thing in the morning, but I do love cookies packed with dried fruits and a little bit of chocolate, no matter what time of the day it is. They’re truly feel-good cookies.

Her original recipe called for the option of carob chips, but I’m not going there. I was part of the generation traumatized by carob, although it’s making a bit of a comeback. I’ve tried some of the chocolate alternatives, including one made from carob, but I’ll stick with chocolate chips.

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Morning Cookies

Adapted from Zoë Bakes Cookies by Zoë François

I followed Zoë’s recipe pretty closely. You could swap out dried fruits for other dried fruit (such as pears, prunes, etc.), cutting them into raisin-sized pieces. I used all-purpose flour rather than whole-wheat flour since I didn’t have any on hand, so either works. If you’re gluten-free, I’m sure one of the gluten-free baking blends would work since there’s not a lot of flour in these cookies.

I used refined coconut oil, which doesn’t have any coconut flavor, but you can use whatever type you’d like; virgin coconut oil tends to have a strong coconut flavor.

The baking time ranges from 12 to 14 minutes. I baked the first batch for 12 minutes and they were fine, but the 14-minute batch had darker bottoms, but weren’t burnt, and I liked those better.

2 cups (200g) old-fashioned rolled oats

1/2 cup (70g) all-purpose or whole-wheat flour

1/3 cup (40g) unsweetened shredded coconut

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Pinch of salt

1/2 cup (80g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (or carob) chips

1/2 cup (60g) lightly toasted walnuts or pecans, coarsely chopped

1/4 cup (35g) pumpkin seeds

1/4 cup (35) dried fruit, such as cranberries, cherries, raisins, or diced dried apricots

2 tablespoons dried currants

3/4 cup (180g) well-mashed ripe banana puree

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1/3 cup (125g) maple syrup or mild-flavored honey

2/3 cup (150g) melted coconut oil

Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a medium bowl, stir together the oats, flour, coconut, baking soda, and salt. Stir in the chocolate chips, nuts, pumpkin seeds, dried fruit, currants, banana puree, vanilla, maple syrup, and coconut oil. Mix until the ingredients are well incorporated.

Scoop the cookie batter into mounds that are about 3 tablespoons (~55g) of batter each onto the prepared baking sheet, spacing them 2 inches (5cm) apart. You’ll get about 7 cookies on a standard baking sheet.

Flatten the tops slightly with your hand and bake the cookies, turning the baking sheet midway during baking so they bake evenly, until the tops are browned, as well as the bottoms. The recommended baking times were 12 to 14 minutes, and I found them best baked for the full 14 minutes, when the bottoms were dark brown (but not burnt).

Remove the cookies from the oven and let the cookies cool completely on the baking sheet—if you try to remove them too soon, they’ll fall apart. Once cool, remove the cookies to a wire rack and bake the remaining cookie batter the same way.

(Note that once cool, the cookies will remain a bit on the crumbly side, which didn’t bother me.) Makes about 14 cookies.

Storage: The cookies will keep at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Morning Cookies Recipe

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*I’m not really having t-shirts made.

I’ve known Casey Elsass for a number of years, but many in the food community already knew him as a prolific co-author of other cookbooks, including Dolci! with Renato Poliafito, Second Generation, and Let’s Eat. I’ve spent time with him in New York and in Paris, and now, I’m happy to share him with you.

Casey’s written a new book of his own, What Can I Bring?, which answers the eternal question hostesses and hosts are often asked by guests, with 75 recipes, ranging from Seven Onion Dip and Bagel Panzanella to Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce and these Subway Cookies. I asked Casey if he’d share some of his favorite tips on how to be a good guest, and what you should consider when you’re asked "What can I bring?”

These Subway Cookies have a special story attached to them (Spoiler: They’re not based on anything from the Subway chain) and are filled with all sorts of wonderful things, just like Casey, who wrote this guest post for the newsletter.

-David

Guest post by Casey Elsass

“What can I bring?”

It’s the first question everyone asks when you get the invite. And luckily, my new cookbook—this should be easy to remember, it’s called What Can I Bring?—has 75 delicious solutions to the very-stressful question, with dips, drinks, salads, desserts, and a chapter of homemade food gifts when you’re told to “just bring yourself.”

But it’s not only important to bring the right thing. It’s equally—if not more!—important to be the kind of guest everyone loves to have around. In the spirit of this guest post, here are a few simple rules that, in my opinion, will make you not just a good guest but a great one:

1. Be honest about what kind of guest you are. Remember this simple rubric: If you’re always on time, bring appetizers. If you’re reliably late, bring a drink. If you’re stopping by later, bring dessert. If you’re bringing nothing else, bring a present. Make sure you’re committing to a dish that matches your dillydallying or extremely punctual self.

2. Embrace room-temp food. The best guests show up with a dish that’s ready to go without needing a shelf in the fridge or a rack in the oven. Of course, some recipes are exceptions to this rule, so just clear it with your host ahead of time so they’re in on the plan. But never show up expecting to derail their careful game of culinary Tetris for something of your own.

3. Come prepared. Besides having your food ready to go, make sure you pack everything you need. Their home is not your Williams-Sonoma. Serving utensils, a big bowl, or special cups are your responsibility. For common things, like a knife to cut the cake, just ask ahead of time so you know you’re covered.

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4. Say thank you. I once had a new friend over for a group dinner, and two business days later, there was a card sitting in my mailbox simply saying thank you. It’s a small but impactful gesture. Don’t be awkward and send your besties an earnest card (mail them the most inappropriate Hallmark card you can find), but if you’re new friends with someone or it was a very important event, a thank-you card is an old-fashioned gesture that still lands in this century. Even if a card isn’t right for the occasion, a simple text goes a long way to making your host feel seen and appreciated.

Of course, sometimes the best way to say thanks is with something sweet. Dessert seems to be the most common guest assignment, and that’s why my book includes not one but two chapters devoted to treats. These Subway Cookies are my go-to, no-fail, perfect-for-any-occasion move when you want to end the night on a sweet note. Now go forth and live your guest life!

Subway Cookies

Recipe and text reprinted with permission from What Can I Bring? by Casey Elsass © 2025. Published by Union Square & Co., an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group.

Makes 12 cookies

From Casey:

I call these Subway Cookies because years ago when I was first developing this recipe, I packed a batch up and took them on the New York City subway with me. The deep black cocoa against the brown chocolate chips makes these oddly striking in person—really, you’ll be surprised—and the woman next to me was asking about them. After chatting for a minute, I asked, “. . . is this weird? Do you want one?” She quickly whipped out her empty meal prep container, and I gave her one. But when I cracked the lid open, the woman on my other side said, “Oh my god, those smell incredible. Can I buy one off you?” So I gave her one for free, and for a moment, three jaded New Yorkers were giggling over cookies on the subway.

From David:

Black cocoa is ultra-Dutch processed cocoa powder, and almost black in color, and has an especially intense flavor. You can find it at King Arthur Baking or at online retailers in the U.S. (Black cocoa is great to have on hand so you can make these Salty, Deep-Dark Chocolate Brownies.) Casey mentions in his “party tricks” at the end of the recipe that Hershey’s Special Dark is a good substitute, or you can use a European very dark cocoa powder, such as Valrhona or Cacao-Barry Extra Brute.

1⁄2 cup (115g, 4oz) unsalted butter, cubed

1⁄4 cup (65g) creamy peanut butter (see Party Tricks, below)

1⁄2 cup (100g) granulated sugar

1⁄2 cup packed (110g) light brown sugar

1 teaspoon kosher salt (Casey uses Diamond Crystal)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 large egg

1⁄4 cup (30 grams) black cocoa powder (see headnote, and Party Tricks, below)

1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup (140g) all-purpose flour

One (12-ounce, 340g) bag bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT

2-ounce (1⁄4-cup) cookie scoop (see Party Tricks, below)

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175ºC) and set a rack in the center. Line two rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large saucepan, combine the butter and peanut butter. Set over low heat and whisk occasionally as the butter and peanut butter melt together. When they’re about 50 percent melted, remove from the stove and let the residual heat finish the job. Add the granulated sugar, brown sugar, and salt; whisk into a thick, soft paste. Add the vanilla and egg and immediately whisk. The mixture will seize up, but keep whisking until it’s nice and light.

Add the black cocoa, baking soda, and baking powder. Switch to a silicone or flexible rubber spatula and fold until completely combined into a glossy mixture. Add the flour and chocolate chips and fold, really getting around the sides and bottom of the pan, until it’s just combined but not overly mixed.

Use a cookie scoop to portion five scoops of dough—scraping on the side of the bowl so it’s a packed scoop—onto one of the prepared baking sheets, leaving 2 inches (5cm) between each scoop. Slide the baking sheet into the oven and set a timer for 12 minutes, turning the sheet around at 6 minutes, until the cookies are puffy and slightly spread. While that first batch bakes, scoop the second batch on the other baking sheet and slide it in as soon as the first one comes out. (And remember to set your timer!)

As soon as a sheet comes out of the oven, lift it a few inches above the counter and let it drop. Repeat two more times to flatten and spread the cookies, then let them cool completely on the baking sheet, about 1 hour. Repeat this process when the second sheet is done.

Subway Cookies

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PARTY TRICKS FROM CASEY

• I’ve tried a lot of peanut butter brands in these cookies, and my favorite by far is the original Jif. (Skippy is a very close second!) You might be tempted to reach for natural peanut butter instead, but when it comes to baking, the oil in natural peanut butter is going to cause more spread, less lift, and an unreliable texture.

• Black cocoa powder is different from regular (natural) and even Dutch-processed cocoa powder. It has a deep black color (Oreos use it!) and a complex dark chocolate punch. It’s what really sets these cookies apart and can be easily purchased online. If it’s just not in the cards, Hershey’s Special Dark 100% cacao is a good substitute.

• King Arthur’s Measure for Measure or Bob’s Red Mill’s 1 to 1 work great here for a gluten-free version.

• If you don’t have a cookie scoop, just measure 1⁄4 cup into your palm and roll into a rough, imperfect ball.

• The cooled cookies can be stacked in large airtight containers or zip-top bags and stored at room temperature for up to 3 days.

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