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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
Summer can be the cruelest season in one crucial respect.
There is so much incredible fruit around.
But if you live with the windows open, you really, really don't want to turn on the oven to bake with it.
But we have a show today that might, I am sorry, cost you more money in your air conditioning bills because you're going to want to bake after this.
Later in the show, we talk with one of the most impressive bakers in America.
And no, she's not the pastry chef of a high-end restaurant.
She's not even a bakery owner. But Eileen Gannon has 60 blue ribbons to her name, most of them from the fierce baking grounds of the Iowa State Fair.
And we'll start with someone I think of as the queen of crusts, the president of pie, Nicole Rucker.
She is the owner of Fat and Flour Bakery in Los Angeles and is an absolute genius with, well, many things, both in her baking and in her hilarious social media.
But it's her pies that have me in her thrall.
And true story, last year I got stuck in Los Angeles for over a full day because I missed a flight.
But what cheered me up was a thought that I could go get two slices of her pie.
So hey, chef, it is so great to see you.
Hi. Nice to see you too. So you may not say this about yourself, but I will say it about you.
You, I think, are one of the greatest pie bakers on earth.
But how did you become such a great pie baker?
It's, you know, you didn't grow up baking pies at the knee of your grandma or whatever cliche like that.
No, I didn't. I often use that phrase too.
I didn't like grow up with grandma's hands making pie.
I was motivated by competition and I wanted to win the competition.
And so I practiced it. I did it. I started it for fun.
I also grew up eating pie. I like pie. And I grew up eating it as like a special dessert.
But because we didn't bake very much at all in my house, we didn't make it.
So we bought it from Marie Callender's, which was, you know, in the 80s and 90s, it was a worthy trip.
It was a special item. So I ate pie. And then I also loved this place in San Diego called the Chicken Pie Factory.
It was so good. The Chicken Pie Factory?
Yeah. Yeah, the original chicken pie shop is actually what it's called.
And they specialize in chicken pies. It's so good.
Very old school style. But, you know, I grew up eating those things, but I didn't.
Nobody made them. My family was Native American and Hispanic and nobody baked pies.
So once I became a cook and was working at a restaurant and heard about the KCRW Good Food Contest, I decided to start making pies as like a challenge.
And that's how I started. It was pure grit, determination, and desire for the medal.
Yeah. Desire for the ribbons. Yeah. I just wanted to win.
No, it's cool that it's like you don't get very many opportunities in your adult life to like do competitions.
So it was it definitely was a motivator like, oh, what are all these people gathering for and doing this thing?
And can we like is there something more to pie than Marie Callender's?
That pie competition was legendary. So KCRW, our dear friend Evan Kleinman is the host of Good Food on that station.
And I think they have thousands and thousands of pies every year.
So congratulations on that. But so, okay, now I want to get to what you have learned in the course of that grueling training and what you have come back to teach us.
Because one thing I think is so interesting is that I read in your book was that, you know, pie is certainly a year round food.
No one denies that, but you know, when you think pie, I think some people immediately go to like apple pie, pumpkin pie.
They think of like Thanksgiving fall vibes, but to you, summer is peak pie season, not Thanksgiving.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, of course it is because we have so much beautiful fruit.
And I think that why not use that? Also, I think that maybe just because of Thanksgiving, that's what people, I guess, fall back on as pie season.
But farm stands and tables all over the country have been serving pie during the summer this entire time because, again, it's a good way to use up A lot of fruit and make like a and make a dessert for a bunch of people because you could feed like eight to 10 people with a pie.
So, yeah, I think that that's really the that's the thing.
It's it's not like. Pie has to be only in the fall.
I think apple pie can do late summer and fall, but I think when we're thinking about fruit and using what's best, it's definitely spring and summer, and there's lots to explore.
We actually get all the holidays with pie.
You don't really bring a cake to 4th of July very often, but you do bring an apple pie, right?
Maybe bring an American flag cake. Well, part of what makes your pie so special, I mean, your technique is incredible.
Like your crust is super, super, you know, the texture of your crust is like so light, but still super buttery.
It's amazing. But you have these really lovely, this really lovely knack for fruit and flavor combination.
Tell us about some of your favorites and how you came to them.
I love to play around. I love to pair maybe unexpected things.
I love figs, but I rarely get figs at my house because I do have a fig tree, but we also have a lot of squirrels and birds get them first.
And it's really difficult to get more than a couple unless you're like really fighting and I don't fight.
Yeah. Love it, not a fighter. No, no, no.
We've tried putting a net over it, and then a bird got trapped in it, and I really don't like that.
Oh, that's horrible. It's okay. He lived until a cat got him.
Oh, God. Actually, I freed him from the net at night.
We found him in the net and then we freed him and cut the net off of him.
And then he flew up into the air where one of our outdoor cats jumped like 20 feet in the air and grabbed him out of the air because he had been watching me the entire time free his dinner from the net.
Oh, my God. It was so tragic. That's the wild right there.
Okay. So I love figs, but we rarely get figs.
But I love the taste and the smell of fig leaves.
And I think that that's a really good one.
And there's a recipe for that in the book that... you toast the fig leaves and it adds this like kind of coconutty flavor, um, green tea coconut.
And I mix that with some early, uh, apples and it makes this really delicious flavor combination.
That's very unexpected. Um, right now the peach pie we're doing has some salted caramel in it instead of just doing like lemon and sugar.
Um, And cinnamon is pretty overused, I think, at this point.
You don't have to default to cinnamon as like a flavor for fruit.
So I don't know. You can get fun with it and get more wild.
I love lemon verbena, especially with berries and with stone fruit.
I think that whiskey is highly underrated with fruit.
Whiskey? Yeah, I love bourbon and whiskey with cherries and a little bit of lemon.
And then you can add a tiny bit of cinnamon to that.
It makes a really magical combination. Oh, that's awesome.
Do you cook it off first or do you let just the baking cook off the alcohol?
Well, technically it cooks in the oven because if you're cooking your pie long enough, the fruit has to come to a boil.
So it's only like a tablespoon or two. You're not making like a cocktail.
But it does – I think it cooks off. You can taste it though.
Just a background note, a little whisper.
Yeah. I love that. I love the flavor of bourbon especially.
Those brown liquors can – they add such a –
A dark, sort of mysterious quality. I think if you're using a lot, then obviously it's going to punch you in the face.
Oh, I love the idea of that with cherry.
That sort of dark wood, sort of toasty vanilla flavor a little bit with cherries.
I want to go back to the fig leaves for a moment, though, because I also love fig leaves.
I mean, they're not a super popular ingredient.
They're not always the easiest thing to get.
But I was stunned at how much flavor like this leaf can have.
And I think, yeah, I was totally, right when you say coconut, I totally got it.
Because I've had like things like wrapped in fig leaves and baked.
And they do have this sort of like interesting like sweet tropical nutty aroma that totally is very coconutty.
If you don't have a tree in your backyard, is fig leaf something you can just buy?
Yeah. If you have a farmer's market near you, you can probably ask a farmer who's growing fruit.
I mean, ideally you would find one that's growing figs, but you might find that there are fig leaves on trees at parks because they're incredibly invasive plants.
They're everywhere. Yeah. Um, and sometimes the figs aren't even good.
Like when they grow in public spaces, the figs end up being kind of nasty, but the leaves are still delicious and smell good.
So, um, I would just look around in LA. We have them growing on the side of the 10 freeway.
They're in almost every park. Some bird dropped them long ago and they're just sprouting from the concrete basically.
So, um, And if you can't find them out in the wild, I mean, you have to wash them, obviously.
We're going to wash the leaves off. We're going to toast them.
But if you can't find it that way, I would definitely ask a farmer at a farm stand to see if they happen to have a fig tree on their property because likely they do have one and sacrifice it to the critters.
But they'd be happy to grab a couple leaves for you, most likely.
Okay. Oh, that's cool. Okay, so after you've washed it, you say toast it.
I mean, that's literally just lay the leaves out and then put them in a warm oven until they get aromatic, right?
Like a little crisp and aromatic. Yeah, I put them actually in my toaster oven.
It happens pretty quickly. So you lay the leaves out and then I would pat them dry with a paper towel.
And then I put them in the toaster oven and it goes like, I don't know, like five minutes and they get, you know, they get pretty dried out and crispy.
And then you have a beautiful, crunchy, dried leaf that you can like kind of pulverize with your fingers.
You could put it in a spice grinder and grind it up into a finer powder if you would like to.
Some people like to blanch them first and then they put them in an oil.
I have never made it that way. I just like to grind them.
It's pretty easy and doesn't take that long.
And just sprinkle it in like a dried herb.
It smells immediately. It smells so good immediately.
Amazing. We're talking to Nicole Rucker, star baker and author of the new cookbook, Fat and Flour, The Art of the Simple Bake.
More back with her in a minute. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking summer baking with the amazing baker Nicole Rucker of Fat and Flour.
Let's get back to it with her. Let me go a little bit to the other side on the classiness scale, but no less on the deliciousness scale.
Because you also have these pies that are instant pudding based.
So like on one hand, it's like, oh, Nicole's beautiful foraged fig leaf pie.
And here's how to do that. But hey, you want to get real.
Let's get some instant pudding in here. Talk to us about how you use instant pudding.
Well, the first thing is I'm a big proponent of like making dessert when you want it.
And sometimes you're not ready for making a crust and waiting and rolling it out and baking things for a long time.
And sometimes you just want to bring a dessert to a party to like eat, but also to do something fun and make something fun.
So I love instant pudding. I love instant pudding and I believe in it.
I think it's a magical thing. It's just a high-powered starch and basically it eliminates your need for eggs.
So that actually benefits you in a couple of ways because when you make like traditional pastry cream after a couple of days in the fridge, the eggs, the proteins start to weep with the sugar and so it kind of – Yes. it definitely causes like a looseness in the filling.
So you can eliminate that by using instant pudding because there's no eggs to break down.
But also it saves you money. And then I think what I like to do that I think is really powerful with the instant pudding is I always zhuzh it up with a little bit of something special like white chocolate or mascarpone or... dark chocolate or salted caramel, and then you make it into your own.
But you don't have to really cook very much.
You only have to cook enough to melt the white chocolate.
And you can do that in your microwave. And then you just whisk it all together and you mix in the instant pudding and follow the recipe.
And then you have a super delicious, thick, rich pudding that you can make strawberry cream pie or coconut cream pie or... banana cream pie or you could just eat it with a spoon.
It might actually be too accessible because then now you have the ability to make fancy instant pudding.
It takes no time at all. For us in the bakery to make like a massive batch of instant pudding, it takes five minutes.
Then we have instant pudding. Yeah, the thing with instant pudding that I find, like, often the flavor will feel, you know, a little listless, right?
But to your point, if you melt white chocolate and then, like, basically mix that in, then you have that sort of richness from the white.
I'm not the hugest white chocolate fan on its own, but I love how it adds flavor. richness and it adds a depth it doesn't have a ton yeah it has like a it just has like a sort of like a a sweet fat flavor on its own but then it does it in with other things it really enriches it right yeah it also adds body because cocoa butter has adds like a wonderful rich texture to things like it's really shiny and gorgeous um I think you've had our banana cream pie, but you might not have known that there was white chocolate in it.
It's not like a huge flavor. I think it's important to add nice things to instant pudding though, like add vanilla bean paste so that you can see the vanilla bean flex and add good quality chocolate and add nice fruit and then it doesn't taste flat.
Also, you always have to add a little bit of salt and then it kind of really amps it up.
I love that. All right, let's move into crust.
Mm-hmm. Crust is often something that I think people feel is intimidating.
It's a lot of reasons why, well, I don't want to really bake a crust.
I'm afraid of, you know, any number of ways you can screw it up.
I actually want to start with one of your cookie crust recipes.
Everyone knows a cookie crust recipe is great because it's easy.
You usually pulverize cookies with some butter and maybe a little sugar and you just kind of press it in the tin and bake it.
But I was so surprised to see that you have what you call upcycled broken cookies crust recipes.
Yeah. Why? That's so fun. Yeah, it's awesome.
Talk about that. Well, you know, if you own a bakery, you have a lot of extra cookies lying around sometimes.
We actually make too many cookie crusts to upcycle cookies all the time.
And ideally, we don't have a ton of waste at the end of the day.
But, you know, we're not just limited to only using graham crackers.
Graham crackers have ruled the cookie crust scene for far too long.
You can use a peanut butter cookie. You could use...
You could also mix some regular cookies in with graham crackers.
You could mix a kind of dried, kind of stale chocolate chip cookie in there, coconut cookies, ginger snaps.
There's all kinds of ways to spin it and use stuff that would add flavor and texture to you just have to pulverize them and then you make it the same way.
And it's, it's so good when you add like a, a little special bit.
And then it's really like you're making this delicious pie, but it's not just a graham cracker crust.
It has a little bit of something extra special.
Um, Yeah, you could get like some day old cookies from your favorite bakery or like, you know, something that's on sale at the grocery store.
We use all kinds of stuff during Thanksgiving when we experiment with like what pies we're going to sell.
One of my favorite things is to do ginger snaps mixed with like the hard ginger snaps that come in the bag mixed with graham crackers.
Oh, that's a great crust. It's so good with sweet potatoes, sweet potato pie.
Oh, that was one of my favorites. Um, but yeah, old chocolate chip cookies make a great cookie crust for like a custard pie that has like some, if you make like a chocolate cream pie with cookie crust, it's chocolate chip cookies.
Oh my God. It's so good. That sounds really delicious.
Yeah. But, but awesome. Like, you know, like sometimes you just have like too many cookies and they get stale.
I guess you would just let them stale even further and then you just grind them up in a food processor.
Yeah, you could dry them out a little bit, like leave it if your oven has a pilot light.
You could leave it in there with the oven off and let them get a little dried.
I think it's also a good way to use up some cookies.
Like if you made a batch of cookies and you maybe overbaked some of them or they didn't come out texturally exactly the way you want, I would put them in a bag and put them in the freezer.
And then when you're ready to make a cookie crumb crust, you have them ready to go.
I love it. Use up the undesirables. Rather than throwing them away.
The ugly duckling always comes out beautiful.
Stuff happens. Use it. Yeah. You just need a little glow up.
Yes. Okay, so let's go to the sort of the big thing.
We're really climbing the mountain now with a beautiful butter pie crust.
And so the pie crust, you used to use this method called the frissage method, which is amazing.
It's very hand labor intensive. It's basically chunks of butter and dough and you sort of like smear them together.
So you're making essentially flakes of pastry and you would do that by hand.
And then you changed and you started doing this thing called the cold butter method.
Yes. Tell us about that and how you came upon it and why you use that now instead.
Well, okay. So let's go back because actually the cold butter method is what we use to make cookies now.
It's basically reverse creaming. But it was inspired by and I recognized it as similar to the way that we would make paido, which is that you use cold fat in flour and then you add the liquids to it.
I used to make paido by hand and that process of frisage, you would smear the fat into the flour before adding the liquid.
And that... It creates these pieces of butter that then create flakes, but it also coats the flour in fat so that some of the liquid is not able to fully penetrate the grains of flour and you don't get as much gluten production.
So it's a good way to make a really flaky and tender crust if you can do it exactly right, basically.
Yeah. If it's really hot or you're hot, frisage happens at a different pace.
And then you could have some butter melty, which will change the texture of your pie dough in the end.
And it's really an obstacle for people. It's one thing that people are scared about making pie dough and they feel insecure about making it by hand.
I'm insecure that I didn't make it by hand myself.
And insecure that if I did make it by hand, it's not going to be perfect.
And that's a really hard thing to teach.
And it just seemed like a big obstacle, especially during the pandemic when you have less manpower and we're making this huge volume of paido.
It just became so exhausting and like my back was hurting and my arms were hurting because I was having to make 50 pounds of pie dough at a time to continue my business.
And I was making it all by hand, very stubbornly making it by hand.
And then one day I just said, well, why can't I just put it in the mixer with the paddle?
Because the paddle is kind of similar shape to your hand.
And it does a similar action. It moves it and against the side of the bowl, you kind of like, it kind of smears a little bit.
And I tried it out and it worked. And it just turns out that making pie dough in a stand mixer with a paddle is superior to the frisaj method in all of the ways that are traps for people to fall into.
It stays super nice and cold. It's super consistent.
It happens really fast. It happens way faster than a human could do it.
And it's just good insurance. And the Pido comes out so supple and nice.
And it only takes like four minutes. And that would take you so long to accomplish.
It takes so little time. You really got to time it.
It takes so little time. Pido, four minutes?
Yes. I mean, that's how long it takes you to cut that stuff up.
This is game-changing. I know. And you don't have to rest it as long because you don't have to worry about like building like bad gluten.
So you can rest it for an hour and then make pie dough.
I actually did that recently when I was doing a pop-up at Violet Bakery in London and we made pies the day before.
And then we had this pop-up and we opened at 9 and we were almost without by 11.
And we were like, oh, we didn't make enough.
And I said, let's just make some more pie dough, everybody.
And we made the pie dough in their big mixer and an hour later we were rolling it and they were like, wait, we can do this.
That's crazy. And we can. You can. You just roll it and then it's done.
Blowing people's minds. It's so freeing to not worry about whether your hands are hot or your kitchen is hot or you have a marble surface.
That's also another thing. Not everybody has a slab.
Not everyone has a wooden cutting board that hasn't had a billion onions cut on it to do frisage.
Just take it out of the equation. I like to eliminate... those little things that make people question or they're like, you know, there's those little things that come up later when you eat fruit salad and you're like, Oh, it's kind of tastes like onions.
You know, you're eating like a apple pie and you're like, is that a background of garlic?
Someone made this pie dough on a, on a wedding.
There are only wooden surfaces, a cutting board.
Just get rid of that. Just make it in a mixer.
And I do not advocate for ever making it in a in a food processor because the blade cutting is not the same action.
It's got to be the paddle. And it's so nice.
And once you do it, you're going to be like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is so easy.
All right. And then you'll question your grandma.
She got nothing on me. Well, this has been great.
I love that the lessons from the world's greatest pie maker are forage and toast your own fig leaves.
Also use instant pudding and throw the pie dough in the stand mixer.
Thank you so much. We keep it high-low. It's a high-low situation, you know?
Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure talking to you about pie.
Nicole Rucker is the author of Fat and Flour, The Art of a Simple Bake, and is the owner of Fat and Flour Bakery in Los Angeles.
You can find her recipe for strawberry white chocolate cream pie at splendidtable.org.
So obviously a culinary school can produce great bakers and a home kitchen can produce great bakers.
But you may not have thought about the most brutal, grueling, intense crucibles of baking where iron sharpens iron and true masters emerge.
I'm talking about State Fair baking contests.
And Eileen Gannon is a certified beast on the scene, having won over 60 blue ribbons in baking contests, most of them at the Iowa State Fair.
Now that we've talked about pie, we turn to Eileen for advice on summer cakes and more.
So hey, Eileen, it's so nice to meet you.
Well, thank you. It's a real delight to be here.
I've been a lifelong fan of The Splendid Table, so it's a real thrill for me to be on your show.
Oh, that's super nice of you to say. And, you know, well, thank you for saying that.
But I have to say, you know, I can't imagine how many fans you have, considering that the first thing that I learned about you, probably the first thing most people learn about you, is that you have won medals for your baking.
And, in fact, over 600 medals for your baking.
First question I have is, where do you keep them?
In a large plastic tub back in the back part of a closet.
It's so unceremonious there. Yeah, you would come into my kitchen and you wouldn't know.
It's my own secret. That is incredible.
I mean, I don't know. I'd be like – well, I guess you do like Michael Phelps thing where you wear them all except you probably wouldn't be able to stand up.
Like I don't know what it would be like to have 600 medals around your neck at once.
And so most of these are from the Iowa State Fair.
Many of them, yes. Mm-hmm. You don't have to tell me that the competition at the Iowa State Fair in baking is fierce.
So how did you get into baking? Well, let's just start there.
How did you get into baking at first before we talk about how you got into competitive baking?
Sure. Well, I grew up on a farm in central Iowa, the youngest of 14 children.
So you didn't learn to cook in my mother's kitchen because you wanted to.
You know, you learn to cook because you had to.
But the good news for me is that I happen to adore it.
And I've loved baking since I was a child.
I still have two round scars on each of my thumbs from a rusty potato peeler because I was so young cooking that I couldn't reach the sink faucet.
Someone had to either lift me up or turn the faucet on.
And I'm ambidextrous, so both thumbs are nicked to this day from peeling potatoes from poor kids.
It was probably too young to be doing it.
But so I learned to bake out of necessity, but also love because it means I got to be near my mother.
When you're one of a large family, you are sort of starred for attention.
And cooking and baking, you could get some attention for it.
I think that was probably... probably the real need.
The real reason why I loved it is I could get some notoriety.
But we were fortunate. We grew most of our food.
And so it was a really pretty great way to grow up.
Now, this had been the 70s. My family spanned the baby boomer generation.
So we're sort of just a little village, I guess.
So that's how I learned. And my mother was a great recipe curator.
Um, she, and many of my favorite recipes are still hers.
Um, and she really had a commitment to high quality food.
Um, and, uh, we learned how to bake and cook with what was in season and, and also to capture it when it was in season, whether it would freeze it or can it or stew it or, or preserve it or, you know, whatever else you would do, but, um, sort of specialized in super local, super fresh, not eating in season.
Yeah. Yeah, like you said, if you grow your own food, then like, you know, it's by nature, seasonal.
So how did you get into competitive baking?
I mean, if you're talking about baking as a way to really sort of like reaffirm bonds and create bonds in the home, how did you go and be like, okay, now I'm going to go crush the dreams of others?
Yeah. Well, again, 1 of 14 competition is sort of life, right?
Oh, my goodness. Just Darwin. Some basic level survival, I think, sticks around.
But... I got into competitive baking because the nature of rural communities was to go to the fair, right?
And so I grew up and we would race and show cattle at the fair, horses and things.
And it was sort of a celebration. People would get together in this long... tradition of doing so was always really special to my family and thousands of families still to this day.
So I always loved to bake. My mother first did it when I was 12, and I'm 60, so I'll give you that span.
And then I won three ribbons that year and then didn't do it again until I was in my 20s, but got the bug.
You know, again, I think when you win one, you want to win more.
And so you just get a And I really did learn to bake truly from pastry chefs' cookbooks.
I've always told people, if you want to learn to bake, find a pastry chef's cookbook because they really do know.
And they have taken the time to curate those recipes and test those recipes and teach you.
And so my success today is on the backs of beautiful pastry chefs who have taken the time to to write wonderful cookbooks.
Um, and so that was my inspiration and just use really fresh food and, and really, uh, unusual things.
Also never, I never use frosting in the middle of a cake.
I always make a filling. Um, and then that gives you a chance to have lots of more dimension, but also more flavor profiles.
So, um, I always use either Swiss or Italian buttercreams.
I never use American buttercream. And then a filling could be a mousse, a curd, a preserve, you know, sort of most anything you can think of.
That's Eileen Gannon, champion baker and founder of Sunday Night Dessert Sauces.
We'll be back with more with her in a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from American Public Media.
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I'm Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table.
We're talking to bakers so good this week, you'll want to turn on your oven no matter how hot it is outside.
Right now, it's Eileen Gannon, founder of Sunday Night Dessert Sauces and a 60-time Blue Ribbon winner in Iowa.
I want to definitely get to some of your baking tips in a bit and talk about those different types of meringues.
I think that not everyone necessarily knows the differences between them.
I want to get back to this idea of the pastry chefs because it's so interesting that I think, you know, you talk about you grew up baking with your mother on the farm.
Certainly your mother had amazing recipes of her own.
And, you know, you said she curated recipes in a really wonderful way.
And it's surprising and wonderful to learn that so much of your own baking was inspired and sort of self-taught through these pastry chef cookbooks.
Who are some of the chefs that you really learned from and you really felt like were inspirational to you?
Well, my ability to make a buttercream goes out to Rose Levy Baron Mom, who I hope to meet her someday because I think she is truly the pastry queen.
She took time to walk through someone like me.
And to this day, I still use some of her recipes.
A big shout out to Shirley Kaur, her on BakeWise.
I think she's a brilliant food scientist and a brilliant teacher.
I mean, I, you know, Thomas Keller. I mean, many of his recipes.
I have Alain Ducasse. Golly, those all come to mind, I think, would be my go-to because I knew I couldn't fail if I took the time to read what they took the time to write.
Yeah. okay so are there categories that you particularly love if you've won again okay so you said 600 medals you're 60 now first i was like okay that's 10 a year you know going back to when you were you know a newborn uh and then and that's it's it's ever more shocking now that you essentially really didn't start into your 20s so like 600 divided over 40 years is just yeah and and i haven't entered the fair since 2018
So it's been seven years since I entered the fair because part of it, well, I got very busy and I had children in my 40s.
But there's a rule at the Iowa State Fair that professionals can't compete.
It only has to be amateurs. So I started a food company in 2020 called Sunday Night Foods, and I've won lots of awards for that in chocolate and caramel sauces.
And since then, and since I derived income, From food, technically, I became a professional.
So I don't enter the fair any longer. The math is not mapping.
I could take 30 to 40 awards a year. One year, I took 13 cakes in one day.
It's a true story. I can't conceive of making 13 cakes a day.
I can't conceive of eating 13 slices of cake in a day, let alone –
And so I stopped in. I loved it, but then I moved on to other things, I guess.
But I can still tell you all my secrets, if you'd like.
Let's get to some of the secrets. You mentioned when you're making cakes, and I know you have a specialty in cakes.
I mean, you obviously love all forms of baking, but I think in particular cakes are really a signature of yours.
And now as we're in summer, I think a lot of times people – are maybe a little bit more intimidated to bake cakes in the summer, right?
Because if you're frosting it, is it going to melt?
Is it going to be a mess? Talk to us about some summer cake ideas.
Like I love this idea of using fillings rather than frosting in the middle.
And since you started the conversation about the meringues, talk to us about those different meringues and why you gravitate towards a particular style.
Well, baking in the summer is critical to have an air conditioner in the house because not necessarily the heat as much as the moisture, right?
Oh, interesting. So you have a lot of moisture in the air.
So a dense, say, dense, humid air that's not air conditioned. all that moisture will find its way into your buttercreams and they will react very differently.
You can't make peanut brittle, for instance, in a moist house, right?
The moisture will take something that's crisp and make it soft very quickly.
People know this who live along the shorelines of lakes or streams or oceans know the effect that moisture can have on baking or on ingredients.
So, Number one tip, turn your air conditioner on.
Okay. And then the freezer and refrigerator are your best friends.
I always freeze my cakes before I enter them or even eat them.
Something happens and our food scientists can tell us I wrap a cake tightly when it's cooled.
First of all, make sure it's completely cooled.
So you just mean the cake part? Just the cake part.
Yep. Wrap it in plastic wrap. Double wrap it and stick it in the freezer.
Not very long. I mean a week max if you really want high – highest quality, but it makes the cake moist.
It holds better together with a moist cake.
It just transforms it just a little bit.
And it makes all the difference for me, especially when I'm entering and everything counts.
I always measure exactly the amount of fillings.
So it's usually three quarters a cup to a cup per layer.
I never have the cake layers more than say inch and a half because I want a ratio of filling to cake.
You know, I don't want the cakes too tall because you want a nice ratio of that.
Yeah. Those are some tips and tricks, I guess.
Never overbake. I think that people overbake their cakes.
I see all these Instagrammers with brown edges and think cakes are really overbaked.
And so they tend to put a lot of sugar syrup on top of them, hoping that will recover, but it's not the same.
So just don't overbake your cake in the first place.
You know, it's so funny because when I went to culinary school, one of my best friends I was in school with, so the culinary school I went to, they separate the pastry students from what they call the culinary students, which is sort of a little oxymoronic, but the savory students, we'll say.
And so I would love to get together with my friend Emily, who's a terrific baker, and she would just kind of tell me what she was learning that day.
And one day she said, you know, cakes are dumb.
I was like, you're a pastry student. Cakes are dumb.
It's like half the thing you would deal with.
And she's like, yeah, but every cake they teach us to make, you make the cake and you have to soak it in syrup.
Why would you make something dry and then try to desperately try to make it not dry?
Someone needs to do better by this. So you just mentioned that, right? soaking it's not the same right like no it's like dry bits surrounded by wet stuff and when's the last time the sugar syrup was tasty by itself It's not.
I mean, you could do a lemon syrup. You could do a coffee syrup.
You can do different syrups, I suppose. But I did take one short course at pastry school for three days.
And I couldn't believe how over baking they do their things.
Like bread bakers tend to over bake cakes and they tend to over mix them because bread bakers are used to developing gluten, right?
And they want crusty brown bottoms and stuff.
So I find that bread bakers are the worst cake bakers.
They haven't figured out that it's a very different medium.
When I do a cake, I always, always set my timer for maybe five minutes shy of the recipe.
And then take a toothpick, a regular standard toothpick, not a cake tester.
I don't like cake testers. They don't work for me.
A regular standard wooden toothpick. about two inches from the center, not the center.
And if it's still a moist crumb, then it's done.
If it's dry, then you went too far. Wait, moist crumb meaning, okay, so I always thought it was like when the toothpick comes out clean.
You've over baked your cake. Oh, okay. Okay, so you don't want the toothpick to come out clean.
I don't. But you don't want it wet either.
And that's the fine line. Like I've been known to hover near the oven and check every two minutes.
Okay. So you take it out. Yeah. You know, it's so funny because like if you're roasting a chicken, you're roasting meat, they always say, well, there's going to be carryover cooking.
So you take it out when it's underdone and it will continue cooking for another, you know, 15 minutes even just sitting on the counter.
And I've never heard anyone say that about cake, but I'm gathering that that's sort of what you're saying.
That's why I win. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.
You try it for me, okay? You try it. I think the reason why, like if you look at the back of a cake box, cake mix box, and they, oh my heavens, their directions for baking are ridiculously long. very long.
And I think it must be some sort of covering them so they didn't tell people if you underbaked your cake and you got sick from it, it wasn't our fault.
It may have been more of a covering the liability.
It was written by the lawyers, not by the testers.
So I tell people if you do make boxed mix, which is certainly acceptable, take off five, seven minutes from what they tell you to do. and check it.
But there is definitely some carryover baking for sure, especially in bunt pants.
Think about bunt pants. Most of them are cast iron, right?
And you think about the heat that radiates from cast iron as it sits.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. The aluminum pans for like layer cakes, brownies, things like that, a little bit less.
But at 10 minute mark, I actually set a timer at 10 minutes and I will flip out the cake and it helps get it out.
It won't stick. Though the other trick for sticking is don't use butter to grease pans.
Use shortening and then flour or cooker, depending what you're doing.
But butter tends to burn. And it will make it stick more.
You know, the milk solids come out of butter.
You think of it, right? You warm butter and warm.
And if you brown butter, it's sticky, right?
And the bits of the brown butter stick to the bottom of your pan, right?
Well, think that's what's happening to your cake.
That you used a butter to grease the pan.
This is so great. All these little tips and tricks that just go against what I think the common wisdom is.
This is really great. People are going to come after me now, Francis, and tell me how wrong I am.
I don't know. Big butter might, but they have other things to worry about now.
I use a lot of butter in my Sunday night business, so I'm sure I'm still on the good side of the butter people.
I'm your friend, really. Yeah. But talk to us about the meringues, too, because you mentioned you never use an American meringue.
You go with Swiss or Italian or buttercream.
Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Talk to us about the difference between these and why you gravitate towards one.
And again, thanks to Rose Levy Birnbaum, who lightened my day in the last 30 years.
Just for the record, if Rose is listening, I have your original cookbook from 30 years ago.
So, love to you. She just celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Cake Bible, by the way.
And she just was inducted to the James Beard Hall of Fame.
Oh, really? Oh, wow. She so deserves it.
So I think I started winning at the fair because people here in the Midwest didn't know those, how much better they are.
And so what I'm talking about is a French buttercream, Italian buttercream, Italian For the most part, those two are the ones I use.
The French buttercream will rely on egg yolks, and the Italian buttercream will rely on egg whites.
That's basically the difference. You can go into all kinds of versions of it.
And they call it Italian meringue buttercream because you basically make a meringue.
You cook some sugar to about 160 degrees with sugar and the egg whites over a bain-marie, and then...
That way they're basically cooked. So it's not, you know, to worry about raw egg.
And then you whip it to a meringue and then in the end you put in more butter than you can possibly imagine.
And so it's basically flavored butter and it's spectacular.
And then you can add all kinds of things to it, right?
So... you know, your curds and flavors and things to make it better.
And then the French buttercream just starts with egg yolks and a hot sugar syrup to kind of slowly, gently cook those egg yolks and then same process.
Lots and lots of butter. Or if you look at American buttercreams, they rely on the structure of powdered sugar.
French and Italian buttercreams rely on the structure from eggs.
So if you just think about that fundamentally, the difference...
And I think American buttercream is so sweet, it makes my teeth hurt.
Yeah. It's very sweet, very firm, right?
Yeah. Because the sugar kind of really sets up.
It's almost like fondant. Yeah. Speaking of the wicked components of cakes, fondant.
Fondant should be outlawed. I think in this day and age, I think big fondant is really – you can't get on the bad side of big fondant because all everyone wants to do is make cakes that look like cars and sneakers and whatever and it's just covered in fondant.
I think it's fine if you want something to look like it.
But when you want to eat it, the first someone does is peels off the fondant.
I've never seen anybody eat it. And my opinion is if you're going to make something to eat, it all should be delicious, right?
Why would you cover it in something that's either not pleasurable to eat or just downright not tasty?
But it is fun to look at them. Yeah, sure.
Maybe one day you can get back in the fair and be like, you'll find a new challenge, the category of cakes that look like Rolex watches or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, that's not for me, but that's good.
I also love to bake – I'm very good at cookies.
I've won lots for cookies. I've won lots for pies, cheesecakes, all of that.
And I just – I love to bake. I bake almost every day.
I just – I don't know. People who love it, it's sort of – you're always infinitely interested in it, I think.
Like – People who are fishermen or, you know, they're into cars.
Like, there's always an infinite amount of information to learn and to follow, right?
Sports, your favorite basketball team. I find food that way.
Yeah, that's lovely. That's how we've managed to keep our show going for 30 years.
That's lovely, yeah. Thank you so much, Eileen.
It's been such a pleasure talking with you.
Of course. Eileen Gannon is founder of Sunday Night Foods.
You can find her dessert sauces online or at a store near you.
Well, that is our show for this week. We hope you enjoyed it.
We'll talk to you again next week and go make something delicious today.
Hey, and one more thing before I go. I know you hear this all the time, but The Splendid Table is supported by listeners like you.
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Head to the website to find out how to help.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Rosetta Casper, and it's made each week by technical producer Jennifer Lubke, producer Erica Romero, digital producer James Napoli, and managing producer Sally Swift.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM Studios.
