I have never had a relaxing baking experience.
It’s not like those TikToks where a mastermind pastry chef elegantly pours chocolate into a mold, whips together a gorgeous batter of nuts and fruit and stacks idyllic layer after layer to reverbs of some wildly overused TikTok audio.
These diabolical masters of patisser-ology (not a word, but should be) almost always conclude their videos by brandishing their concoctions with the same prepared pose. Usually there’s an uncomfortable bite, a thumbs up and a nod in 1.25x speed so they look like a Sims character.
It provides a moment of wondering if we are, in fact, living in a simulation. Which I’m fine with, for the record.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
This chef in particular, Amaury Guichon, is disturbingly talented. It’s unnerving. Like, he’s too good at this. There is some deeper, sinister, chocolate-based plot looming behind those eyes.
The only thing that gives me solace in watching his videos is a curmudgeonly chef going through the same thing as the rest of us.
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This is not a TikTok recommendation. I only follow baking accounts, the angry chef and an even angrier old French woman who lives in LA and reminds me of my great aunt.
I’m not sure why I subject myself to a stream of videos highlighting perfect pastries and flawless breads. My own baking experience is one of failure and frustration.
The second post I was going to write for Smorgasbord was going to be about botched croissants.
I wanted to spend a morning in a bakery to observe real croissants being made before I wrote about my shitty ones, but that didn’t happen. The 49ers’ season started and I ran out of time.
I will try to have a follow up at some point in the next year. But I’ve been baking again, to various levels of success and failure, so this feels like as a good a time as any to tell you about the crois-scones.
Croisscones
My attempt at croissants epitomizes the tempestuous relationship I have with pastries.
“Attempt” is the operative term there.
My problem is that once I decide to make something, I have to follow through. Time constraints, logistical concerns, technical ability, they are all ignored. I become dead set on whatever it is, especially if I’m baking for family, friends or my girlfriend.
I was inspired to make croissants by falling down a YouTube baking rabbit hole.
I blame Claire Saffitz, a talented chef who specializes in baking and was a longtime part of Bon Appetit. She has a video and recipe that make croissants seem like a delightfully challenging weekend activity. Lean into spontaneity! Make croissants!
Do not make croissants.
(That’s a reminder for me.)
(I will be ignoring this reminder.)
Foolishly, I let her recipe inspire me.
To say I ran into one core issue would be underselling how badly I botched each stage.
But my main problem was that my dough was dry and difficult to work. Much of that can be owed to the fact that I was making this dough in the middle of a Tuesday morning at my mom’s apartment.
She has a fantastic stand mixer which I have since stolen. But on that Tuesday morning, she was on a slate of multiple back-to-back calls, leaving me to relocate the mixer to her bedroom on the other side of the apartment so as not to terrorize her work day.
In trying to relocate everything, I forgot to get the yeast up to the proper temperature and couldn’t make adjustments with the dough because I wasn’t operating out of the kitchen and didn’t want to sling flour around her room.
As such, my dough came dry and unwieldy.
When you’re making croissants, you need a sturdy, but flexible foundation so that when you lay out the square of butter inside, you can fold the dough over it. You repeat that process multiple times while beating it with a rolling pin, putting it back in the freezer from time to time.
But in my case, because the dough was innately flawed, the butter seeped through. You’re supposed to have very distinct layers of butter and dough in a croissant. It is absolutely crucial to maintain the right temperature and texture so the layers remain distinct and even.
That’s what makes it a croissant.
Instead, my mom laughed at me, correctly, as I swatted at a square monstrosity of butter seeping through the dough, muttering profanities at varying volumes for most of the day.
It stuck to the counter, the rolling pin, the parchment paper. My hands smelled like butter for a day and a half.
When I finally got done with my woeful attempt at lamination, I had no distinct layers.
What I ended up with was a harrowing mix between a scone and a croissant. Which, if you’re a glass half-full sort of person, you could argue I just took a step towards a new frontier of horrible baking, creating… the crois-scone.
Mistakes were made.
Now, the bright side is, it was still butter and dough. The taste was fine. But those aren’t croissants.
One day. One day — not anytime soon — I will solve the croissant problem.
My problem with baking
It’s like this almost every single time I bake. I never learn my lesson.
Time after time I think, “ooh what if I made… oh whoops, looks like I— oh god, oh GOD, no, no, NOOOOO” and in one fell swoop I’ve ruined it.
“Oh, bollocks,” I think, imagining myself as the last place performer on the Great British Bake Off.
“So… what happened here?” the imaginary judges ask as I shake my head, batter in my hair, visibly shaken.
I understand why I have such trouble with baking.
The major element is rigidness. It’s precision, preparation, patience, measurement. It’s all very scientific, exacting. I’m not interested in that.
I prefer the chaos and interpretative nature of cooking where you can fuck up a little bit and it’s not always a death sentence.
If you’re making bread and your yeast isn’t the right temperature, it’s already over. Yet you’ll go through the entire process hoping and praying that some gluten-based deity will leaven your bread. It never happens.
I found out recently that I’ve been using old yeast for multiple months, which may explain some of my less than stellar results.
That, in tandem with rushed preparation and a general lack of baking mastery tends to yield mixed results.
But my frustration with baking also keeps bringing me back. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand yeast, or baking terms like “mallard reaction,” and I sure as hell will continue to ruin recipes by having yeast too hot or too cold instead of lukewarm.
I could buy a cheap, instant-read thermometer and solve that problem. I won’t.
But then I go and get sincerely inspired watching someone like this, who has experimented and failed countless times, fine-tuning their process to perfection:
This man figured out the science of bread and yeast and he pulled hard enough on that curious thread that he made the decision to make house-milled flour. He is absolutely convinced he makes a healthy pizza, and I’m inclined to believe him.
He’s a beautiful New York soul making excellent pizza.
And the bagel equivalent? Also in New York:
These people have an inimitable East Coast sincerity. There’s no air of pretension, just an earnest, eye-glowing care for their craft.
And their craft is where my heart lies. In bagels and pizza.
Bagels and pizza
The only two things I’ve felt consistently positive about baking are pizza and bagels. I made pita once and it was functional, but pretty damn dry.
I understand these things. They hold special parts of my spirit. I know what they’re supposed to look like, how the process is supposed to work, even when it doesn’t. I’ve researched and experimented and will keep doing so into my old age, hopefully by a wood-fired oven.
When I lived with my aunt, I took advantage of her having a stone oven pretty often. This is one of the few usable photos I have of that.
I generally know now what a healthy dough is supposed to feel like. Once you get comfortable with it, shaping and baking is actually enjoyable. I only recently acquired a rolling pin, so I’ve been accustomed to rolling out dough with a bottle of red wine, which is more fun anyway.
You don’t need an outdoor oven. I’ve long used a $40 pizza stone. You place it in your oven for an hour on max heat before cooking and it’s ready to go.
The tricky part is that dough can be finicky. And it sticks. On a stone, you’ve got less room for error.
The amount of times I’ve shouted profanities into my oven as I’ve tried and failed to shovel pizza onto the stone is innumerable.
I’ll get the dough onto the pizza peel just fine, but even if I flour it well or put cornmeal on the bottom, sometimes the pizza sticks or snags anyway.
The key, I’ve found, is to make sure the pizza is contained fully, or mostly on the peel, and that it’s able to move around with a healthy amount of flour or cornmeal underneath.
Then, put only olive oil and sauce (make it homemade or not at all) on the pizza while it’s on the peel, otherwise you run the risk of overloading it and leaving it too heavy to get onto the stone.
What I’ve done is prep my toppings next to the oven. Then I slide the stone out of the oven slightly on a rack, and in a panicked, 30-second maneuver, launch everything onto the pie as rapidly as possible and shove it back in the oven.
My favorite homemade pizzas are as follows:
The go-to is a simple tomato sauce (olive oil, salt, garlic, red pepper flakes optional), with fresh heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella, caramelized red onions, serrano pepper and fresh basil. You can obviously add meat or any other toppings, but this is great on its own.
The best alternative is sort of a white alfredo pizza. You make a cheesy white sauce by starting with a little bit of a roux with butter, garlic, salt, pepper, then flour, then add milk slowly, and finally, an unhealthy dose of parmesan. It’s a thick sauce, and you have to make sure it cools a bit before putting it on the pie, but it’s rich, cheesy, and pairs well with sausage or pancetta.
My favorite option uses a thin layer of the first sauce, with added red pepper, then thinly sliced and lightly caramelized garlic, ginger, red onions and serrano pepper with fresh tomatoes on top. It’s spicy, bright, herbaceous, and you can top it with basil and most other herbs you like.
My pizzas generally tend to come out like this; oblong and with odd folds, but they do the trick.
Now, the other part of the equation: bagels.
I didn’t make bagels for weeks after I got the urge to make them.
I waited until I had barley malt syrup because I wasn’t going to waste two days on phony bagels. They had to be authentic. And barley malt syrup is necessary to offer the correct right profile of a bagel.
Yes, “flavor profile,” is a pretentious term. But bagels are sacrosanct.
(That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed shitty bagels if they’re for a sandwich; but to really appreciate a bagel, you’ve got to do it right.)
Breakfast sandwich diatribe/The Church of the Holy Bagel
At some point, I genuinely hope to have a bagel and breakfast sandwich pop-up in San Francisco.
The city of San Francisco, for all its culinary glory, hasn’t a fucking clue about bagels and has even less of a clue about breakfast sandwiches; at least the East Coast-style breakfast sandwiches I crave.
Try and find a real, stellar, sausage egg and cheese in this city.
Some of my friends, none of whom are from the East Coast, laugh at this. They don’t understand the innate anger and abrasion that comes with living there and how that necessitates an exemplary breakfast sandwich to begin the day.
You need to be able to stumble into a haggard-looking bagel shop on a dreary winter day when half the population is donning sweatshirt chic.
My hometown’s example of this is Alfa Bagel. It is one of the greatest bagel shops on this planet. While I’m obviously sentimental, I’m not exaggerating in that assessment.
You go in there and they give you an attitude like they’re pissed you had the gall to enter the establishment. Even when you order efficiently, there’s a decided unfriendly energy. There’s no eye contact and a palpable exasperation. It’s directed at everyone, and you all share a universal state of internal groaning.
The only thing that lifts you out of that state is bitter coffee and a goddamned excellent breakfast sandwich. My personal preference is a Taylor ham, egg and cheese on an everything bagel the size of a casaba melon.
I cannot express the lengths to which I went to find Taylor ham on the West Coast. My mom, somehow, found it at a deli in Denver, and brought it back to me.
There was a moment there where I genuinely considered paying $80-100 for one of those services like GoldBelly to send me a pound of it. Your boy was down bad.
I eventually found some at a market out here and got my fix in. You can only have so much because it will actually kill you, but there is no craving I get more aggressively than for that sandwich.
I’ve been sidetracked. This is what happens when I think of a Taylor ham, egg and cheese on an everything bagel and why I will continue to sing its praises while people not from the East Coast look at me crazy.
Sorry, folks, but the Church of the Holy Bagel will continue to proselytize in the gospel of breakfast sandwiches whether you’re ready to hear it or not.
Back to bagels
Bagels.
They are a pain in the ass. It’s quite a bit of kneading and resting, shaping and proofing, boiling then baking.
The first time I made them, they were far too small and a bit overcooked. They tasted right. The bite was off, though.
So I persisted, emboldened by the fact that they tasted roughly correct, and that I was more familiar with the process.
The main issue was with the size. Bagels on the West Coast are reasonably sized.
That’s a major problem, both practically and philosophically. Bagels should be monstrous both to leave you over-satisfied and because the larger they are, the more it allows for a crisp outer crust to lead to a fluffy inner layer.
When you’ve got a small bagel, there’s not much interior complexity.
My solution was to take the 12-bagel recipe and simply make eight bagels. There is more experimenting to be done, for sure, but the results were pretty encouraging for a second try.
And then I went and made a Taylor ham, egg and cheese with them.
(For logistical purposes, the cheese goes in the middle. But only a sociopath would call it a Taylor ham, cheese and egg.)
The joy I get from making my own bagels is something that won’t be understood from people who didn’t grow up with a strong bagel culture. That’s why I have to keep baking them, and forcing people to eat them until San Francisco has a respectable bagel culture.
Chocolate Babka
This was the inspiration for this whole thing.
Here’s the thing about Babka. I saw a bunch of Jewish girls posting about it during the pandemic, making it look like this calming experience vis-a-vis a heavy dose of melted chocolate and beautifully braided bread.
It had a real jois de vivre, life is beautiful and full of dough, tenor to it.
I had to bake for a special occasion, and I thought, “hey, why not babka?”
When you bake for people, it’s an extension of you, the season, what you’re trying to convey. And it’s hard to go wrong with chocolate bread.
So I scoped out some baking recipes online and stumbled upon chocolate babka. I kept looking because it’s a labor-intensive recipe that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to knock out in a two-day window, but I was set on it.
Then I well and truly botched it. Nuclear reactor explosion type failure.
The recipe called for the use of a food processor — which I had — or a stand mixer, which was at my mom’s apartment, but not available in the timeframe I needed it.
The issue, though, was that my food processor, as reliable as it has been for the past couple of years, was a $40 one that barely works for small pizza doughs.
Asking it to deal with more than 4 cups of flour, 10-plus tablespoons of butter, and various other quantities of eggs, sugar and salt proved too much for the lil guy.
My food processor churned until it could no longer, giving a final, strained whir before nuking itself. The power cut out and smoke started rising, accompanied by a not-so-enjoyable electrical burn scent.
I tossed the processor and tried to finish the babka dough by hand, failing miserably. It, too, perished. I checked its status pessimistically in the morning to find it dry and and un-risen. It joined its fallen comrade in the bin.
(This is starting to feel like one of those Revolutionary War letters they read on a Ken Burns-directed PBS documentary on VHS)
I adjusted on the fly, and made a recipe for “brookies,” given that I already had all the ingredients for the babka. It’s supposed to be a layer of chocolate brownies and chocolate chip cookies. I over-swirled, but hey, no one complains about brownies.
They went over well.
But I was still determined to make babka. So, sans food processor, and unwilling to do this by hand, I stole my mom’s stand mixer and gave it another try, this time with brand-new yeast.
(I do sincerely apologize for writing the term “brand-new yeast”)
It was labor intensive, given that the recipe — at least Melissa Clark’s NYTimes recipe — has a filling, streusel and syrup to make in addition to the dough.
It took me three days, making the dough on the first night, the streusel and filling the next day, then braiding the dough with the filling and setting it overnight, and baking and topping it on day three.
Despite the literal catastrophe I had on my first try and the laborious requirements to make it right, it really is an outstanding bread. I mean, mine certainly wasn’t braided to perfection, and a lahar of chocolate can look a little rough, but it was damn good.
PIES… and everything else
This, as usual, has already gone on too long.
But I have to mention my love for pies in a baking article. Cakes are grossly, sickeningly overrated. Pies are vastly superior in every way.
Growing up, you were either a frosting kid, or you had a palate. I was the asshole who brought in watermelon for my birthdays. Kids would complain. And I’d reap the rewards of cupcake kids leaving behind leftover watermelon.
Fruit will always be better than layers of sponge and icing. I can’t tell you one time I’ve had a cake that rivaled a piece of fresh Huckleberry pie in Seattle with vanilla ice cream.
The same goes for strawberry rhubarb pie (and most other mixed berry pies). That’s my go-to:
And as a kid I used to be picky, only going for the standard apple pie.
I will admit, though, that cake is safe. Low risk, low reward. When you have a bad pie, it’s devastating.
Blueberry pie is outrageously overrated. Far too sweet. Great pies have a tart element. And I don’t understand the canned cherry pies everyone brings to family gatherings. They are visibly upsetting.
Anyway, pies > cakes.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with using pre-made pie crust, though it’s not nearly as good as homemade.)
My point in all this is that baking is a pain in the ass. I don’t love it like I do cooking, but it feels far more rewarding when you get it right because the margins are so much finer.
That’s why it keeps drawing me back in. It’s why I’ve tried profiteroles, souffles, even something called a flamiche — basically a gruyere potato pizza — and why I’ll keep trying and mostly failing at other things I’ve never heard of.
Failure means you’re getting better, even if your failures are inedible. At least, the great bakers and chefs who inspire me seem to have failed a lot, and it feels worthwhile to follow their lead.