Here at King Arthur, the season has prompted a lot of discussion around “back-to-school” recipes. “We should be sharing them!” is a common refrain floating around meetings and brainstorms. Except, what exactly is a back-to-school recipe? Is it an allergen-friendly snack that can be shared with the class? A sliceable sandwich loaf to make simple lunches? A quick and easy breakfast for frantic mornings? I think that, in actuality, “back-to-school” may be more of a mindset than a literal list of criteria. To me, it signals a return to routine, more time spent at home and less at the lake, and a dependable arsenal of recipes that can carry you from one Sunday to the next. You don’t have to be buying textbooks and pencil cases to embrace that style of baking.

So yes, we’ve got the easy breakfast recipes and the best everyday sandwich loaf. But I like the idea of leaning into the September school spirit in a different way. Maybe it’s committing to a weekly sourdough practice, now that you’re home for an extended period of time. Or challenging yourself to learn something new by taking an On-Demand baking class or tackling an advanced recipe that stretches your skills, like croissants or baguettes. It may even mean stopping by the bookstore to pick up a cookbook about a new-to-you style of baking (a personal fave: Fany Gerson’s My Sweet Mexico). The pumpkin and the apples will be here soon enough, but it’s nice to lean into this little micro-season of baking while we can. It’s a chance to restock, reset, and revamp the routines that ground us while the world spins madly.

As I wrote this, a timer went off; it’s time to shape the dough for a new-to-me bread recipe, this French-Style Country Bread. It’s a basic hearth loaf: no sourdough, no overnight preferment, just a big, crusty, artisan-style loaf. I’ve been missing bread baking during a big summer of change, and this is my entry point back into my regular bread practice. I may be far away from spelling bees and math problems, but by baking something new, I still feel like I’m headed back to school.

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• I recently stopped by Long Beach’s Gusto Bread, one of my favorite bakeries in the country, for their signature sourdough concha. Just a beautiful rendition of a perfect baked good.

• I’ve been spending a lot of time on Facebook Marketplace, and the amount of baked goods being sold there prompted me to dive into this investigation from TASTE.

• Obsessed with these Blueberry Corn Frangipane Bars from King Arthur contributor .

• I’m reviving a long-dormant starter, which is a good reminder to myself (and perhaps you too?) to beware the sourdough starter fake out.

• The news of Dolly Parton’s passing is absolutely devastating, but what a legacy she left behind, including her passionate love for baking.

A less-clumpy granola does have some advantages: It distributes more evenly over yogurt, and, speaking broadly, you can get by with less sugar if you want to. (Honey, maple syrup, and brown sugar can all help make a granola sticky enough to form clusters.) But there’s a major disadvantage to a cluster-free granola: It’s hard to eat out of hand, as a snack. Turns out, eating granola out of hand is a priority for me.

So I’m back on the clusterwheel. I’ve tried all the ways to get there. Egg whites can help, but there are other things I’d like to do with my eggs (especially in this economy). Another route: Pack your granola into a tight, even layer before you put it in the oven, and don’t stir it too much while it bakes, even if the recipe tells you to — it’s okay, rebel! There are so many clustering tactics that last year, we commissioned food writer to test a bunch of them. She found that regular all-purpose flour is the best clustering agent. Good to know!

But you know what contains a lot of all-purpose flour and is often destined for my compost bin? Sourdough starter. So now, I use that. Charlotte Rutledge’s recipe is a near-perfect formula (you can’t really taste the sourdough tang), though of course all granola recipes are merely suggestions. For example, I never put the flax seeds in (they get stuck in my teeth), or the chia seeds (ditto), and if I don’t have pecans I use almonds (not quite as good), or I just leave the nuts out. I do love a chocolate granola, but adding cocoa is tricky, as it requires a lot of hydration, so I stick to recipes that specifically call for it. Otherwise, it’s a free-for-all. The only thing that matters to me now is that my granola is all clumps, no crumbs. Clumps the size of peanuts (in the shell). Or walnuts (in the shell). A golf-ball-sized clump would not be too big for me, but more demure clumps will also suffice. I’m not so picky. If the granola clusters, it passes muster.

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• Our boy has a new recipe for ginger-rye shortbread:

  The Sassafras Curio

  Malted Rye and Ginger Shortbread

  Summer is just too short. Like oversleeping on a Saturday morning and missing half the day, the arrival of August always brings a feeling of who ate my ice cream cone…

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  15 days ago · 54 likes · 11 comments · Martin Philip

• F.O.T.B.K. (Friend of Things Bakers Know) made stunningly cute and tiny cakes and put them on top of ice cream cones. Must see to really believe:

  Happy Baking Newsletter

  Tiered Cake Cones

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  19 days ago · 45 likes · 4 comments · Erin Jeanne McDowell

• It’s the time of year when everybody keeps talking about back-to-school. This was a traumatic time for me when I was a kid. Like, I knew I had to go back to school — why did everybody have to remind me? So I apologize to the children of America, because we, too, have a back-to-school list. At least it’s a list of treats.

Weeks ago, I made my own bam chic berry-picking contraption: a plastic bucket suspended from my neck with a shoelace. While less ingenious than the one my fellow inventor created, it fulfills the same goal of keeping both hands free for picking.

Because as my family can attest, when there are ripe berries to be had, on blueberry barrens, on raspberry canes, in blackberry thickets, I cannot, will not rest until I have picked enough to gorge myself, make painterly yogurt bowls topped with lavish handfuls, and stock my freezer with bag after bag that I’ll stir into oatmeal during the Very Long Winter in my home state of Maine. I’m like a dog with a bone, asking anyone who comes near, “Should we just go pick a quick quart?”

Late summer is a magical, bittersweet time. There on the horizon we see the lowering of the academic boom, the shortening of days, the inevitable return of rhythm and routine. But right in front of us — or me, at least — are a lot of berries I need to deal with. One great resource is ’s terrific first cookbook, Jam Bake; it teaches not only the basics of great jam making but also provides lots of recipes for what to do with all that jam (beyond my clear favorite, which is slathering it on a thick slice of toasted, buttered Sesame Wheat bread). I also have learned so much from Christine Ferber’s 1997 book, Mes Confitures; her blueberry-Pinot Noir jam is legend in our house. (And if you ever find yourself in the Alsatian village of Niedermorschwihr, her patisserie is a must-visit.)

But that’s not the only source for a treasure-trove of berry-forward recipes; the King Arthur archives are loaded, too. There’s ’s Hot Summer Spoon Cake (a great recipe name and a great recipe, you love to see it); there’s this Sourdough Discard Blueberry Cobbler topped with sugar-dusted biscuits. Or maybe we should all just make this Late Summer Berry Cake, a very simple, buttery one-bowl cake that can be made with any (or all) of the berries we’re hoarding. In the words of poet Mary Oliver, “But berries are berries. They don’t speak any language I can’t understand.”

Follow These Crumbs

• While it’s still iced coffee season, I recommend a bottle of this horchata syrup from fellow Vermont-based company Abracadabra, made with pure Vermont maple syrup.

• Queen will be our guest on a holiday episode of Things Bakers Know! Send in all your holiday baking questions!

• Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should: The Crumbl/Flamin’ Hot Cheetos collab.

• A wild story about pink pineapples.

But what the summer squash lacks in main character energy, it makes up for in abundance and versatility. Not everything revolves around tomatoes and peaches; people need utilitarian summer produce too! Use its mild flavor to your advantage: Give it the kimchi treatment, shave it to make scarpaccia, or dice it up for an intriguing apple crisp dupe (It’s the courgette equivalent to mock apple pie).

For something that really speaks to how I want to bake in the summer, I’m going for a recipe that’s easy and snackable. A quick bread isn’t an ambitious bake, but that doesn’t mean it’s uninspired. This Double Chocolate Zucchini Bread is a straightforward, one-bowl recipe that won’t require a trip to the grocery store. (Yes, chocolate chips and cocoa count as pantry staples!)

Zucchini gives it a moist, tender crumb, but its flavor isn’t strong or assertive — and that’s an advantage. The double dose of chocolate and cocoa means that this eats more like snacking cake instead of a quick bread, so you can slowly chisel away at it any time of day. It’s exactly the kind of recipe zucchini deserves: something better than anyone expects.

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• The only fall-related content I’m consuming right now is upcoming cookbooks, and I can’t wait for Lucas Sin’s Cha Chaan Teng, a love letter to Hong Kong’s diners.

• Adding this coconut-pandan bun from Tall Poppy to my running list of pastries to try.

• My nephew requested an ice cream cake for his birthday, so I’m using our Baked Alaska recipe as a starting point. Now I just need to figure out how to make it Paw Patrol0themed … Advice welcomed!

• These adorable Funny Face Cookies are my favorite discovery from our King Arthur Editorial team chat.

Except he’s lying. Because last summer I made him this Fresh Blueberry Pie instead, and he loved it even more than that hallowed apple pie that has defined three decades of our relationship.

Developed by longtime King Arthur employee-owner (and current Substack reader) PJ Hamel, this perfect summer recipe ingeniously uses both fresh and cooked blueberries in its filling. That means you get both the intense, concentrated flavor of stewed fruit and the sharp, acidic bite of fresh berries, so that each slice has double the berry flavor. It also makes the texture of the filling more dynamic: Embedded in the sticky, jammy cooked fruit filling are pops of whole fresh blueberries that burst with each bite. And there’s an additional benefit to this unorthodox filling: It’s prepared on the stovetop. Which means that once you prebake your crust, you can turn off your oven rather than letting it heat your entire house for over an hour, like most fruit pies require.

This pie is for the blueberry lovers in your life, which is why my dad is such a fan. (He claims blueberries prevent gray hair, a little unfounded beauty tip for you.) But we also have a strawberry version, if that better fits your tastes (or your current access to fresh summer produce). Either way, I recommend a big, billowing cloud of just-barely whipped cream to top things off: It’s the perfect cooling counterpoint for these sticky days of summer.

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• I have been daydreaming about homemade ice cream (I wonder why …) and after I finally take the plunge on an ice cream maker, I’m turning to ’s deep dive into how to achieve the creamiest consistency

• Spoiler alert: Helen Goh will be on the next season of the Things Bakers Know podcast, so I’m revisiting her fabulous cookbook Baking and the Meaning of Life. Up next: this bright green spinach (!) cake!

• The only thing my dad loves more than pie is olive oil, so I think this Olive Oil Panna Cotta that recently shared will be on the menu the next time he’s in town

• Following up last week’s tomato cookie link with yet another tomato cookie. It’s that time of year!

Krista opened her scoop shop in 2013, two weeks after closing her James Beard-nominated Portland restaurant, Bresca. Her ice cream is not just cold, creamy, and sweet; it’s a master class in how to push the boundaries on something beloved and familiar. Yes, there is strawberry (in season, made with local berries) but also an artichoke ice cream (hearts simmered in simple syrup, then folded into the custard base) inspired by a French recipe from the 1800s, a Key lime crème fraîche ice cream that I dream about all winter, and salted black licorice ice cream, which is admittedly an acquired taste I have acquired.

Though frozen desserts date back centuries, ice cream as we know it, made with dairy and sugar, is credited to Antonio Latini, who worked for a Spanish Viceroy in Naples in the 17th century. (Naples, home of great pizza and the birthplace of ice cream?! It hardly seems fair.) Ice cream made its way to America in the 1700s with the colonists, who used hand-cranked machines and molds to shape the frozen treat into the shape of fruits, vegetables, and animals.

At home, I have an aging but functional Cuisinart ice cream maker, a very worn copy of David Lebovitz’s seminal book, The Perfect Scoop, my eye on Marie Frank’s More Than Sweet (having already purchased, via eBay, the silver coupes to make my scoops look like hers), several cartons of heavy cream, and lots of enthusiasm. Now, all I need to do is decide what flavor to make. I have a few cans of homemade dulce de leche in my pantry, tempting me with possibility, and two quarts of raspberries I picked from the patch in my neighbor’s back yard. My kids agitate for something with sprinkles, so maybe this Birthday Cake Ice Cream is the move? (It’s no-churn, so you don’t even need an ice cream maker.) In these troubled times, maybe we all need to comfort ourselves with hot fudge, with toasted marshmallow whipped cream? Maybe we all do, actually, scream for ice cream.

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• I am mesmerized by this “embroidered” tomato cookie.

• Shilpa’s mochi corn cake, yes please.

• How is it that I only just learned that comedy director Nick Stoller is also a passionate baker?

• According to the New York Times, it’s bananas’ time to shine. Yes, we have recipes for that.

It’s only July, but I’m doing everything I can to hold on to the season. I come home from trips with edible souvenirs (most recently, a bottle of mirto, a popular Sardinian myrtle berry liqueur) and squirrel away jars of frozen pesto that I can use to brighten up the doldrums of winter.

I love an ingredient that lets summer linger. A jar of jam, a handful of frozen berries, or a bag of freeze-dried fruit can capture a fleeting moment at its peak.

Now, there’s nothing I’d change about a classic strawberry shortcake. Its charm comes in part from how ephemeral it is: ripe berries at their sweetest, tender biscuits, and billowy whipped cream, best consumed the moment after it’s assembled. But the strawberry shortcake window is brief; at the farmers market strawberries have already given way to blueberries (those make a good shortcake too).

But when strawberry season is gone, there’s a consolation prize: these Strawberry Shortcake Cookies from recipe developer Sarah Carey. These sandwich cookies capture almost everything I love about traditional strawberry shortcake. Freeze-dried strawberries addsupercharged, sweet-tart berry flavor to a luscious filling, while heavy cream gives the cookies a tender crumb reminiscent of a biscuit.

I may not be able to bottle up summer, but these cookies capture the season even when it’s long gone. Make them now for your picnics and beach days, then again in winter when the dog days of July seem a long way off.

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• ’s Iced Strawberry Matcha recipe is the best I’ve tried. (And also calls for freeze-dried strawberries!)

• Cold noodles will always be the answer in 90+ degree weather.

• Still thinking about this adorable mini layer cake.

• More ways to bake with freeze-dried fruit.

• We knew it: There’s sugar in space.

You can get a BLT any time of year; many a diner has taught me that. But a BLT is truly only great in the summer, when the T in the equation is at its juiciest, most flavorful, most abundant. Because the best part of the sandwich — aside from the plush, fine-crumbed, lightly toasted white bread, the thickly sliced bacon, the crisp stack of iceberg, and the slabs of tomato — is the alchemical sauce that forms when mayonnaise (essential to a BLT, not open for debate) mixes with the juices from the tomato, creating an ambrosial sauce that I like to call billion island dressing.

So when my colleague Molly Marzalek-Kelly asked me, as she started developing a recipe for BLT pizza (using our Recipe of the Year Flaky Puff Crust base), whether the pizza should have a mayonnaise drizzle as a finishing touch, my answer was an emphatic yes. And I was doubly excited when she suggested first salting the tomatoes (to expel excess liquid that would make the pizza soggy), then mixing those extracted tomato juices with mayonnaise. The result is a genius pizza that tastes very much like the sandwich that inspired it.

And, my kindred spirits, should you be looking for yet more ways to combine mayonnaise and tomatoes, please try my recipe for tomato pie, which I published in my 2018 cookbook, Repertoire. The custard, a mixture of mayo, buttermilk, eggs, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, is a tangy foil for a rainbow of ripe tomatoes, baked in a flaky butter crust. Like a BLT, a slice of this pie is all I need to convince me that summer has well and truly arrived.

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• This pretty painted poppy loaf is extra in the best way.

• Our guy Martin Philip is taking The Book of Pizza to the West Coast! Come see him at San Francisco’s Omnivore Books on 7/17, and at Book Larder in Seattle on 7/18.

• Summer travels mean summer snacks: Our colleague, just back from Chicago, raved about the tteokbokki croissant at Daeji Dough Co.

Traveling light ultimately led to tragedy when I stumbled across a gorgeous vintage copper gugelhupf pan at a flea market in Vienna. Even though it had been in my life for all of five minutes, I clung to it like a precious heirloom. “Just buy it,” my friend suggested. “But I don’t have room,” I sighed, and placed it back on the table.

Even over a decade later, I still wish I’d just carted that beautiful cake pan around in my arms for the rest of the trip rather than leave it behind.

Such is the magic of ringed cake pans like that one, or its American descendent, the Bundt pan. You could just make a regular cake. But where’s the fun in that? These pans and their many swirls, shapes, and spirals have a certain whimsy, all while still being rooted deeply in tradition. To me, a Bundt cake always evokes the weekly post-church coffee hours I attended growing up in the South, but its roots stretch across regions and even oceans. The tradition of ring-shaped cakes dates back to that same European gugelhupf, a yeasted, brioche-like cake that is particularly popular in Austria. In Germany, the cake is called bundkuchen. (The name combines the German words “bund,” which can mean bunch, and “kachen,” which means cake. Sound familiar?) The modern American Bundt came about in the late 1940s when two Jewish American bakers in Minneapolis asked the Minnesota cookware brand Nordic Ware to make a modern version of the iconic gugelhupf pan. The Bundt pan was born; in order to trademark their creation, the inventors added a “t” to “bund,” leading to the now-universal “Bundt cake” and, by extension, this iconic movie scene:

(It only took me two Substack sends to shoehorn in a My Big Fat Greek Wedding reference, which must be some kind of record, even for someone with the last name “Anastopoulo.”)

We’re currently celebrating the Bundt with a very special berry version: this Glazed Berry Bundt Cake, which highlights the stunning cake design with a colorful glaze that flows in charming drips down the sides. That recipe is based on our beloved Glazed Lemon Bundt Cake, one of the very first Recipes of the Year ever at King Arthur (dating all the way back to 2017!). The enduring popularity of that recipe — and the Bundt cake itself, over 75 years after the original Bundt pan made its debut — proves these cakes continue to capture our imagination in their many forms and flavors.

Follow these crumbs:

• During what we’ve dubbed the “Summer of Pizza,” consider hosting a pizza party for Slice Out Hunger. Their Summer Slice-A-Thon encourages home bakers to host pizza parties, with proceeds raised going to Slice Out Hunger’s Pie it Forward program, which combats food insecurity by delivering pizzas to those in need.

• Speaking of pizza ... was on ’s podcast The Dinner Plan to chat all about it!

• I love passionfruit but I’m trying to wrap my head around passionfruit + chocolate as a flavor combo. Seems worth a shot?!

• I was in Paris earlier this month (yes, during the heat wave) and lost my mind over the ethereal brioche at Mamiche. If you’re in Paris anytime soon, make sure you visit!

Until next time,

Rossi

But then it was time to tackle the toppings. Over the course of several research trips to New York, Martin and I clocked several slice shop staples we wanted to include in the book. A classic cheese slice, of course. A pepperoni with jalapeños. A calzone (controversial, I know — but that’s another newsletter). And the ultimate summer slice: the caprese.

Caprese slices are typically some of the saddest in the case, with rounds of pale, waterlogged beefsteak tomatoes pressed into calcified cheese. Three of the five authors of this book live or have lived in New York, and none of us were ever excited to eat those pitiful slices. But we believed it could be a magnificient pizza, and after several tests we landed on a caprese nobody could ever pass up.

Here’s how we did it: Instead of sad beefsteak slices, we opted for cherry tomatoes, macerating them with salt to extract all the extra water that would otherwise make a pizza soggy. We sauced the pizza with pesto rather than simply throwing a few basil leaves on top, and we dotted the finished pie with creamed mozzarella. (This trick, which I first saw in a cookbook by , makes regular mozzarella as creamy and decadent as burrata.) And, of course, we sprinkled the finished pie with olive oil and fresh basil leaves.

The result is a pie that’s a celebration of summer; I really can’t imagine eating it indoors. It begs to be taken to the porch, the deck, the yard. Have an outdoor pizza oven? Perfect. But know that if you eat it indoors, standing at the kitchen counter, that also works. You can take this slice out of summer, but you can’t take the summer out of the slice.

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• recently developed two recipes for us. Here, he gives a peek behind the curtain of the development process:

Alexander Bakes

Lemon Blondies & Oatmeal Marshmallow Cream Pies

I’ve got two recipes to share today that I developed for King Arthur Baking! Working with them was a true pinch me moment, and the recipes that came out of it are excellent. Both were cross-tested by the King Arthur team and photographed in their studio. It feels so cool to have my recipes shot by another team, especially coming from a food styling background where I’m u…

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2 months ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · Alex Roberts

• Our blog editor went on vacation and we published a Dot Cake explainer behind her back. (Enjoy, !) Also: Here’s a Reel we published with ideas about what to do with all those scraps.

• Meanwhile, our friend saw Dot Cakes and raised it with Coupe Cakes:

The Boy Who Bakes

Coupe Cakes

🎉 Welcome to my newsletter, The Boy Who Bakes, a subscriber-supported newsletter dedicated to all things baked. For more bonus posts, filled with exclusive recipes just like this one, you can become a paid subscriber for the weekly newsletter, Second Helpings. It costs just £5 a month and, as well as the weekly recipes, it also unlocks access to the full archive of past recipes. To subscribe to either the paid or free newsletter, click the link below.🎉…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Edd Kimber

• Our Summer of Pizza is just beginning, and on July 1^st we’re going live on Substack with of !

• You’re hearing it here first (maybe): Over 4th of July weekend we’re having not one, but two big sales. 20% off On-Demand classes! 15% off $60! Make a note to visit kingarthurbaking.com on the 2nd.

• Lastly, the fried apple pies are back, which is making very, very happy. I have to say, though, that these are just as good, maybe better.

Seasons pass, years go by, one apartment is swapped for another (this one with a bigger kitchen), and I grew as a baker too. I graduated from quick crumbles and expanded my repertoire to more ambitious streusel-centric recipes, because you never forget your first love. I made homemade halva for this sesame-heavy coffee cake, which is topped with a nutty pecan and black sesame streusel, and labored over a flaky pie crust so I could make a streusel-topped fruit pie. I even started making big batches of streusel to keep in my freezer, sometimes just baking it right on a sheet pan to eat like granola.

So I’ll admit, it’s my love of streusel that drew me to this Emancipation Breakfast Cake from . At its heart, it’s everything I love about a great streusel bake: a tender cake studded with fresh fruit and generously topped with ginger-spiced walnut streusel crumbs. And, as its name suggests, the cake is tied to Juneteenth celebrations in Texas, where blueberries are at their peak, making this a fitting cake to bake this week.

One of the appeals of streusel is how you can make it your own: swap the all-purpose flour for rye and add cocoa powder, throw in a Sichuan peppercorn, or use brown butter ghee (!) in place of the butter. But I’ll always have a soft spot (and the ingredients on hand) for the first streusel I made, which is the simplest of streusels — and, to me, the most perfect.

Follow these crumbs:

• Next on my streusel list: ’s Apricot Cherry Crisp.

• I’m really enjoying watching all the World Cup tourists get excited about trying American food.

• During this Summer of Pizza, take a (virtual) pizza road trip across the country.

• My new favorite King Arthur mix just so happens to have streusel in it.

• Mark your calendars: Our next Substack Live will be on July 1 at 12:00 p.m. with ()!

But I knew what would happen if I chose one of those bags. The bun would disintegrate under the weight of crispy cod and spicy slaw. You know exactly what I mean; it’s happened to all of us. After digging, I found a bag of challah buns made by a nearby bakery.. And they were fine. Still, I wished I’d made my own.

When I expressed my regret to my friend that night, he seemed scandalized by the idea. “You want to bake your own buns??” Why bake burger buns, he wondered, when grocery store buns are plentiful and cheap? I sat my friend down and lectured him.

First of all (I admit I had a bit of a tone in my voice), bakers don’t need a reason to bake something. We are fully aware that most of the things we bake can be found in one form or another at the grocery store. We bake burger buns because we like the feeling of dough under our hands, because the process gives us joy. Also, we can usually turn out something as good as, or better than, what we can buy.

Furthermore (yup, still had that tone), the bun is a full 50% of the burger experience. If you settle for a subpar bun, you’re sacrificing half the burger to mediocrity. You want me to spend my summer weekends munching on mediocrity?

Life is too short for that. For the rest of summer, I’ll be making David “DT” Turner’s 100% Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns. DT’s goal was to make a whole wheat bun that has the texture of soft, puffy white buns. He smartly calls for a few key ingredients that make that possible: butter, egg, Baker’s Special Dry Milk to make the buns soft, and vital wheat gluten to make the buns high-rising. Crucially, the buns call for our Golden Wheat flour, which is light, sweet, but still 100% whole-grain. All of this makes for a dough that’s great for more than just burger buns. You can shape it into a small pan loaf, or save half of it to turn into cinnamon rolls for the morning after burger night.

Tell me, friend — can your squishy store-bought buns do that?

Follow these crumbs

• We’ve deemed this summer the Summer of Pizza. To kick it off, I wrote about my number one pizza rule.

• Writer visited our baking school in Vermont and was magically 100% cured of any and all perfectionist tendencies! Well, almost. Her lovely essay explains:

  Scratch

  “Better” and the Baguette

  When I told my husband that I was going to take “Beauty and the Baguette” for my first-ever class at King Arthur Baking School, he protested, “But you already make baguettes…

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  3 months ago · 11 likes · 13 comments · Kate Cohen

• Hey — we hate waste as much as you do, and applaud you releasing your perfect marshmallow recipe. Leave nothing on the cutting room floor!

  BA Bake Club

  The recipe my bosses deemed too simple for Bake Club

  In our latest Bake Club podcast episode, I shared a little secret: This month’s recipe, Whole Lemon Bars, actually started out as marshmallows. Yes, marshmallows. Let me explain…

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  3 months ago · 45 likes · 8 comments · Jesse Szewczyk

Back when baker Chad Robertson and I we were both living in San Francisco, we saw each other all the time, often around 5pm at the original Tartine location in the Mission District, where I’d hover waiting for the warm country loaves-that-launched-a-thousand-loaves to come out of the oven. (Later, we spent lots of time together working on Tartine Book 3.) But it had been several years since we talked, so we were due for a catch-up, most of which was included in our recent podcast episode, The Loaf That Changed American Bread.

During that chat, Chad shared the juiciest news: he’s opening a new bakery in Brooklyn soon. But he asked that we hold on to that information for a few weeks before sharing it broadly, which is why we waited until today to share part two of our interview.

Chad relocated to New York last year with the intention of opening a spot of his own. He and his investors found a building they loved in Williamsburg, but it was much bigger than they thought they wanted. They bought it anyway and renovated it from top to bottom, keeping the spirit of the original building intact. The building inspired the establishment’s name: Altbau, which is German for “old building.”

Altbau is an all-day cafe and bakery on the ground floor. Upstairs there’s a kitchen, grain mill, and a teaching space for bakers around the world to use as a classroom. There will be bread and pastries and salads, but Chad is clear about one thing: this isn’t Tartine. “I’m trying not to repeat anything I’ve done before,” he says. “Everything’s going to be new.”

Listen to our interview to hear more about Altbau’s history and future.

We’re in between podcast seasons, so these newsletters will look slightly different! My King Arthur colleague Tatiana Bautista and I will be showing up in your inbox alongside David and Jessica to bring you more baking intel and recipe inspiration.

I recently bought a new lipstick for the summer. It’s French. I spent entirely too much money on it, but that’s because I was looking for something very specific: a casual, breezy lip color that I could swipe on with a kind of effortless elegance, the sort of thing that makes it seem like you did not put in any work and yet are still somehow the most put-together person in the room. (Which is why, of course, it had to be French.)

That quest for easy elegance is exactly what keeps me (what keeps all of us!) baking uncomplicated cakes again and again and again. In an era of towering tiers, over-the-top decoration, and maximalist flavor combos, they prove simple can still be full of style, like Levi’s 501s (or a chic red lip). These casual cakes turn you into the sort of person who “just whipped something together,” someone who keeps a cake on the counter “in case unexpected guests stop by.” (Though the last time that happened to me was … never?) More practically, a simple cake is also the kind of bake that is easy to execute but punches above its weight.

What exactly do I mean here? I’m referring to single-layer cakes with minimal decoration (yes to casual swaths of frosting, a messy glaze, or quick dusting of confectioners’ sugar, no to piping and torching) that can be enjoyed just about any time of day. They’re often referred to as “snacking cakes,” a term popularized by ’s 2020 book, Snacking Cakes, which is packed with easy-yet-elegant cakes with simple adornments, like Swirled Jam Cake or Minty Chocolate Malt Cake. Aleksandra Crapanzano’s Gateau came a few years later, in 2022, and swept through the baking world with its casual, French-inspired recipes. (The French: makers of great cake and great lipstick.) These books proved that simple cakes can be just as compelling as elaborate ones, while being infinitely more accessible. And also, with their casual insouciance, very cool.

This style of cake is particularly suited to summer, a time of long afternoons and lazy baking. Which is why Yossy is here with this pink-hued Brown Sugar Strawberry Frosted Cake, our Bake of the Week. It’s reversed creamed, which means that the butter is beaten directly into all the dry ingredients instead of creamed with the sugar; this step coats the flour with fat, inhibiting gluten development and thus leading to a more tender cake. It also swaps out white sugar for brown, which adds a little more moisture and depth of flavor, and there’s oil and buttermilk for a plush crumb.

What really sets this cake apart, though, is the strawberry-flecked frosting. It’s made with freeze-dried strawberries, rather than fresh, so that you can make it even if peak season strawberries aren’t yet available for you. They add both flavor and color, all with minimal effort. Of course, if you want to take advantage of the season’s berry bounty, you can top the cake with fresh strawberries just before serving. Remember, though, that cakes like this should be effortless. Macerate sliced berries with sugar for half an hour, then pile them into a juicy mound in the center of your cake.

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• The best thing I ate recently was a black sesame cake slice from Heather Wong’s Flouring in LA

• I picked up a copy of ’s revised Ready for Dessert at a book signing and have already bookmarked 20+ recipes

• These tiramisu sea shells by are so adorable!

• Our Test Kitchen is too talented for their own good — just look at this cake they’re developing for a future cookbook:

• We’re kicking off the Summer of Pizza over here at King Arthur with the beginner’s guide to making homemade pizza

• Speaking of … thank you to for shouting out The Book of Pizza — that cauliflower pizza looked divine.

Until next time,
Rossi

There was a time, and not all that long ago, when you could find bagels in New York and Montreal, but few places in between. Now, you can find spectacular bagels at shops from New Orleans to Los Angeles — hand rolled, sourdough, wood oven-baked, you name it — and less spectacular ones pretty much everywhere, from hospital cafeterias to airports to office break rooms.

It’s these sorts of bagels — the oversized, bland, pale ones with no discernible flavor — that caused my podcast cohost and colleague David to remark, on video no less, that “most New York bagels are trash.” And before you go getting mad about it, let me reassure you that David qualified that statement by saying that, yes, it’s possible to get great bagels in his home city of New York (and many other places, too), but more common to get very mediocre ones, no matter where you may find yourself.

But perhaps it’s more offensive to eat a subpar bagel in New York than other places, because New York was where bagels first put down roots in America. Brought to this country by Jewish bakers from Eastern Europe, bagels came to define the city. At the turn of the 20^th century, there were 70 bagel bakeries operating in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 70! The powerful Beigel Bakers’ Union defined what a bagel was (and what it wasn’t, so: no blueberry or rainbow bagels) and protected a trade that was entirely manual. It’s possible bagels were better back then. But we’re seeing a resurgence of craft bagels that makes me think we’re (reentering) a golden age of bagels.

For a while last year, I was on a real bagel-making roll, mixing batch after batch until I swear I could hear my mixer sighing when I pulled it out of the cupboard. (A mixer is key; the dough is so stiff it needs a good long mechanical mix.) High-Gluten Flour gives them a distinctive chewy texture, and though it’s controversial, I add a little barley malt syrup to the boiling water bath for shine and color. I like to shape them in the evening and then refrigerate the bagels overnight before boiling and baking them the next morning, all so I can be one among 24 million.

(If you need a great recipe, here’s one from America’s sweetheart, my colleague Martin Philip.)

Things Bakers Know is sponsored by Brød & Taylor. Your best bread is within reach. Brød & Taylor builds tools that help you get there. See what’s possible at brodandtaylor.com.

Bake of the Week

There are no birthdays, graduations, or other celebrations on my calendar for the foreseeable future, but that will not stop me from making this Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake, this week’s Bake of the Week. The recipe is heavy on the brown sugar, which gives the cookie … er, cake … a caramelized flavor that I love. It can also be made with our Measure For Measure for the gluten-free among us, making it an ultra-inclusive, supremely delicious treat. And while a cookie cake doesn’t require frosting, piping some on (and adding sprinkles!) gives it a festive glow-up that makes it party ready, should you have one on the horizon.

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• Here are the full show notes for our bagel episode.

• This week, it’s all about cake: made this one, topped with cherry limeade jelly (!), created this jam patchwork number, and let’s just take a moment for this woven rhubarb darling.

• In Vermont, maple creemee season has begun. Here’s a list of where to find a good one. What’s a creemee, you ask? Soft serve ice cream flavored with pure Vermont maple syrup. The best!

• Apple pie … baked beans?

Her bread looked great — what was the problem? I asked and she sent me a photo she’d pulled from the internet. “I want my bread to look like this,” she said.

Of course. The photo was of a Tartine loaf.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a loaf from Tartine, the San Francisco bakery that Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt opened in 2002. But it was in that bakery’s iconic style, which has been calcified in so many people’s brains as not just what a great sourdough loaf could look like, but what a sourdough loaf is.

Not a Tartine loaf. But not NOT a Tartine loaf.

I can get a little defensive about this. I like to advocate for the sourdough sandwich loaves of the world. Are they not also naturally fermented? Can they not also be made into excellent toast?? But at the same time, I can’t blame my friend for wanting a Tartine-style loaf, which is characterized by a long, slow rise; a dark, snappy crust; and a custardy interior full of big, open holes. I love that style of bread. The entire world does.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Jessica and I dig into the impact of Tartine on the bread world. It really can’t be understated. The loaves that in 2002 came out of a single oven in the Mission are now emulated in thousands of bakeries across the planet every day. To talk about this, we bring on Chad, the baker who created that loaf. Jessica worked with him on his third bread book, and the conversation is warm and revealing in ways that only a talk between friends can be. My favorite part: hearing Chad talk about the bakers who mentored him. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that even though he created something indelible, it’s the product of the wisdom of many bakers before him.

Things Bakers Know is sponsored by Brød & Taylor. Your best bread is within reach. Brød & Taylor builds tools that help you get there. See what’s possible at brodandtaylor.com.

Bake of the Week

I’m always surprised by how seasonless cheesecake can be. It seems like a dessert that is basically just cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla would find its place in the colder months. And it does. But it also pops up at times like now, because it’s an incomparable foil to fruit. Our Easy Cheesecake is great garnished with berries. I’ll be topping mine with rhubarb jam.

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• A masterclass on flan in four easy lessons. (h/t and her new YouTube series Steal This Recipe).

• I’ve known for years, and one thing I appreciate about her is that she asks the big questions, like this one:

  About three million people sent that post to me. And while I could have just texted Carla my thoughts, I decided I’d rather bring the conversation to the podcast. Listen to the back half of the episode to see how it goes — it’s our first celebrity question! And subscribe to Carla’s Substack. It’s one of the greats.

• Malted. Peanut Butter. Chocolate Chip. COOKIES.

• Here are the full show notes from our sourdough episode.

It is not hard, if fact, to love a doughnut; fried dough in almost every form, cake-like or yeasted, glazed or plain, hits the pleasure center of our brains head-on. But it is hard — or, at least, harder — to make them at home. We address those pain points on this week’s episode of the podcast, including the elephant in the doughnut shop, the question of what to do with all that used oil. (Here’s a link to one of the greatest products I’ve found in the last decade, which I talk about in the episode, a powder that you sprinkle on cooled, used oil that turns it into a solid disk to make disposal easier.) Should you choose to make doughnuts at home (and really, you should), I’d start by watching the video we did with Claire Saffitz a few years ago, which is a master class in doughnuttery.

Doughnuts likely originated in the Netherlands (though I have a suspicion that wherever there has been dough and hot oil, people have been frying it), making their way to America at the turn of the century. Over the last 125 years or so, doughnuts have cemented their reputation as something iconically American, even though they owe their existence to immigration. The machine that automated doughnut making (first called the “Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Donut Machine”) was invented in 1920 by a Russian immigrant, Adolph Levitt, paving the way for the rise of chains like Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’. A century later, 80 percent of the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodian refugees and their descendents, who fled genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The doughnut story is an immigrant story is an American story.

Which brings us back to this week’s guest, Fany Gerson. An immigrant from Mexico City, Fany opened Fan Fan Doughnuts in Brooklyn in 2021. The doughnuts she makes are not like the ones I grew up eating: There’s a mango lassi doughnut, for example, and another topped with brown butter salted caramel. Fany often collaborates with other pastry chefs to create limited edition flavors, and much to our absolute delight she asked if we wanted to collaborate on a King Arthur doughnut. (Sometimes, dreams you didn’t even know you had come true!) And so, for a limited time only, we turn on the HOT NOW light and present the King Arthur doughnut: a yeasted number topped with whipped maple buttercream (because, Vermont), blueberries, and edible flowers. If you’re in New York, get on over there and try it. It’s available now through the end of the month at Fan Fan’s Brooklyn location.

Bake of the Week

Blueberry Bread is just the kind of thing I like to bake on a Sunday night and leave on the counter all week, whittling off skinny slices day after day. Can you optimize something as simple as Blueberry Bread? You can, and we did. It has a combination of butter and oil (butter for flavor, oil for tenderness and keeping quality), and we learned that by chopping the blueberries rather than leaving them whole they remain suspended in the loaf rather than sinking to the bottom third. Bake a loaf on my behalf!

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• Seen a lot of ube pastries? So have we. The purple tuber has become so popular that there are shortages. Got your hands on some? Here’s how to use it.

• This San Francisco bakery is so popular they’ve hired a ... line monitor?

• Here are the full show notes from our doughnut episode.

• Gold-plated earrings, made to look like the (exceptional) crullers at Daily Provisions. (Honorable cruller mention: Lil’s, in Kittery, Maine.)

• On the heels of our tortilla episode, here’s Helen Rosner, in the New Yorker, on burritos.

To put myself in the headspace to record the croissant episode of our podcast, I dug deep into the archives of the internet. I wanted to remind myself what croissants looked like 10, 20 years ago; I remembered them as different pastries than the ones we valorize now, but I needed proof. Surely somebody — some blogger — uploaded a dozen photos of croissants sometime in the early aughts?

Yup. And it was exactly what I needed to confirm my hunch. The croissants in the blog post I found (which features what were, allegedly, the best croissants in Paris in 2009) are golden, flaky, and very delicious-looking, but of an entirely different aesthetic than the one we judge croissants by today. They have thick, hard-to-distinguish layers; not one of them has the honeycomb structure that I think of as being the gold standard now.

Now this is honeycomb, honey.

Layers are the central concern of a croissant-maker. The process of laminating dough is essentially just a very precise layering of butter and détrempe (the yeasted dough that is the base of many laminated pastries). Layers are also bragging rights. A traditional croissant has 55 layers (or 163 layers, depending on how you count — it’s complicated), and getting all those layers right used to be a badge of honor for a pastry chef. And it still is. But it’s no longer the only way. Modern croissants are often made with less folds, resulting in a fraction of the layers that, somewhat surprisingly, lead to a more open structure. (Hello, honeycomb!)

This is good news for the home baker. Fewer folds means less manipulation of the dough, and less manipulation means less opportunity for things to go wrong when making croissants at home. As King Arthur baking school instructor Elisabeth Berthasavage, our guest on this week’s episode, explains, one of the trickiest parts of making croissants is keeping the butter block pliable and intact. Temperature is key — the butter must stay cool — and warm hands are the enemy. The less we touch the dough, the better.

Fear of folding is one of the reasons people avoid making their own croissants. But it’s only scary if you haven’t tried it. If you want to start (and spring is a good time, before we get into the butter-melting heat of summer), start by listening to my interview with Elisabeth — she has a lot of great tips for newbies. Then maybe check out her Intro to Laminated Doughs class. If you don’t get a honeycomb structure on your first try, don’t worry about it. They’re not wrong. They’re just vintage.

Things Bakers Know is sponsored by Brød & Taylor. Your best bread is within reach. Brød & Taylor builds tools that help you get there. See what’s possible at brodandtaylor.com.

Bake of the Week

Every fall at King Arthur the Editorial and Education team (of which Jessica and I are proud members) throws a party for the larger Marketing department. A few years ago it was a breakfast party, and of course, Jessica and I wanted to make freshly fried doughnuts to order. A huge kettle of oil over a camping stove outside one of our office buildings — what could go wrong? Needless to say, the safety department shut down our idea, so our colleague Molly made doughnut muffins instead. And let me tell you, nobody missed the real doughnuts (except Jessica). This is the newest version of that recipe, which adds maple to the mix.

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Am I being trolled? Everybody on Substack is talking about bananas right now:

• First there was this lovely essay by my friend

• Then wrote about a chocolate-banana tart

• And here’s a new Chocolate-Tahini Banana Bread from

My aversion to bananas runs so deep that I can’t be in the same room with somebody who is eating one. (This is sometimes a problem on the New York City subway, where people increasingly eat bananas in the cars. I am not so crazy that I will jump out of a moving train to get away from a banana. But I think about it!) Nevertheless, I ate up (sorry) Rumaan’s essay, and I would gladly eat Yossy’s banana bread (I just pretend banana bread contains no bananas). That chocolate tart, though, is probably the one thing on Earth Dorie could offer me that I wouldn’t take.

• Is there rhubarb out where you live? If so, can you send me some? I’m waiting patiently to make my yearly batch of these swirled rhubarb bars.

• Here are the full show notes from our croissant episode.

• And here’s a tiny croissant cookie that the test kitchen is working on. Recipe coming soon!

  

Last November, on a whistlestop tour of Austin, I managed to make a quick run to H-E-B, where I purchased several hundred tortillas, both flour and corn. I’m not the only one: a few months before my own trip there was a viral Tiktok video of a Nashville high school student making her way through the Austin airport security with 200 H-E-B tortillas in her backpack.

Like professor Steven Alvarez is quoted as saying in this 2018 New Yorker article about flour tortillas, written by Gustavo Arellano, “I freeze them,” he said. “But they never seem to last long enough.” We just finished the last package from my Austin haul. Now what?

Well, the obvious answer is to make them myself. I feel more confident in my flour tortilla making skills than my corn tortilla skills. (We talk on the episode about how to get your corn tortillas to puff, but mine often do not.) But the good news is that a homemade tortilla, even an imperfect one, is going to be 10 times better than most store-bought ones. And luckily for you, Pati Jinich shares her top tips for making them at home on the podcast. (I also really like Caramelo tortillas, which are made in Kansas; you can buy them online but I recently found a local stockist.)

My son, nearly 15, has no interest in learning to cook, but with my urging has dipped his toe into the water of self-feeding and has learned to make quesadillas. He is thrilled with this new skill, offering to make a quesadilla for anyone, anytime. Like the Singaporean street food vendors who spend a lifetime perfecting one dish, so it is with my son. Last week, I encouraged him to branch out and make the egg-in-a-(quesadilla) hole, a recipe from our adorable kids’ cookbook, Sweet & Salty!.

This week, my family is off to Arizona. We’ve been talking up the hiking and the slot canyons, the cacti and the lizards, but let’s be real: I’m just thinking about the tortillas.

Things Bakers Know is sponsored by Brød & Taylor. Your best bread is within reach. Brød & Taylor builds tools that help you get there. See what’s possible at brodandtaylor.com.

Bake of the Week

Shio Pan, also known as Salt Bread, is our bake this week. But really, it’s been our bake — and the entire internet’s bake — for six months, maybe a year. Never underestimate the joy of wrapping dough around a cube of cold butter!

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• on why runners love Nerds (the candy).

• Have you used your tortilla press to flatten dumpling rounds? What about tuna for carpaccio or chicken cutlets? Home cooks and chefs are getting (even more) creative.

• Another sneak peek from a future cookbook: date-caramel sandwich cookies. Who needs a stencil when you could just use a cooling rack?

  

• Here are the full show notes for our tortilla episode.

• Let’s have coffee together. We (Jessica and David, plus some very special guests) are hosting a Substack Live next Friday, May 8, from 9 to 10am EST. Come hang out!

What is the “right” way to make a brownie? I’d like to say there is no right way, but that’s not truly how I feel. The brownie was invented in 1893 in Chicago, at the Palmer House Hotel. In my 10 years as a restaurant critic in Chicago, I ate that original recipe several times. Apologies to history, but it’s not the right way to make a brownie (too many eggs; apricot glaze). At least it isn’t the right way anymore.

And that’s not the only brownie I object to. Just now, as I was crawling through Substack’s brownie offerings, I watched a video of somebody making a brownie to which milk was added. Milk! When I saw this, I sounded the alarm, exclaiming to an empty house: “He’s putting milk in it!” Thirty seconds later, when I saw even more milk go into the batter, I gasped.

The Small-Batch Brownies from our site. Not milky, not cakey, just right.

I haven’t had the milky brownies in question, but my feeling is that they are probably cake. And now that I think about it, I guess that’s okay. I forget sometimes, but cakey brownies are an actual thing (here’s our take). In fact, there was a time when cakey versus fudgy was the great brownie debate of our time. I think we’ve settled that one, though: Fudgy won. (Except for in France, as today’s podcast guest reports from Paris.)

Now, it feels like the primary textural debate is fudgy versus chewy. Which prompts me to ask a philosophical question: Do chewy brownies even exist?

Chewy is a tricky word when it comes to brownies. With something like candy, “chewy” is a dependable adjective; with brownies things get weird. What people call “chewy” are often, I think, just fudgy.

A few years ago I commissioned Eric Kim to dive deep into chewy brownie recipes. I didn’t necessarily want him to find the best one — I wanted him to find out if any of them actually work. He consulted Alice Medrich for that article, as well as pastry chef Melissa Weller. And he came to a groundbreaking conclusion: “The one thing Weller and I decided during our rigorous conversation was that, sure, there may be a clear divide between cakey and fudgy brownies, but chewiness — that wonderful, elusive texture — can be a feature of both types. Its presence in a brownie precludes neither cakiness nor fudginess.”

The trick: Eat the corner pieces, which, because of their location and the contact they have with the pan, are always the chewiest bites, whether the brownie is fudgy, cakey, or in-between.

So the chewy brownie exists after all. The “right” brownie, though? I’ll let you leave your thoughts on that in the comments below.

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• I don’t care about being first to anything … except, apparently, new independent cookbook shops. I checked out New York’s newest, Wild Sorrel, on their opening weekend. You know a bookstore is good when you leave with more books than you intended. (I left with three, including ’s new chocolate number.) has pictures here.

• Speaking of books news, The Book of Pizza is a New York Times Bestseller! Get your copy here.

• Breaking news: This morning we found out that Things Bakers Know won the Webby Award for Best Branded Podcast! This may sound like nonsense but I really, truly, sincerely think the podcast is better because of you, our audience. Never stop calling in with (winning) questions for Jessica and I.

• TFW a living legend loves your new cookbook:

• Here’s a photo of the best thing I ate in our test kitchen last week, a Peppermint Patty Baked Alaska. Coming to you soon(ish) in a future cookbook.

  

• And here are the full show notes from our brownie episode.

• Thank you to our sponsors for this week’s episode, Curio Spice Co and Supernatural Spinkles — both of which make excellent additions for brownies.