Despite the frosted pink confection on the cover, Natasha Pickowicz's debut cookbook "More Than Cake: 100 Baking Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community" does indeed live up to its name, offering an exquisite array of savory and sweet tarts, breads and confections. But the title isn't meant to be solely taken literally. It's as much a promise about the cookies and sticky buns contained within as it is a passionate defense of the power of baking, both for personal satisfaction and social change. "I have always been drawn to pastry and to baking," Pickowicz said to me on "Salon Talks," "because they represent these greater moments where we're able to come together."
To that end, "More Than Cake" provides inventive recipes that draw upon her Asian-American and Californian background, as well as tips and tricks for rescuing your baking disasters and throwing a great bake sale. The "more" here is a way of looking at the world that extends far beyond the oven.
Watch Natasha Pickowicz's episode of "Salon Talks" here to hear about why you should think like a cook even when you're baking a cake and how baking is a potent means of telling the whole world "what our values are and making a change."
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tell me about this book. The phrase "more than cake" means something different.
It was really important for me that the title of the book work on several levels because it's more than cake. I'm mostly known for my layer cakes and my approach to aesthetics and decor and my sensibility around that. But within the realm of baking, there are so many other things that I'm passionate about, baking with fruit, with fresh vegetables, things like that.
On a symbolic level, I have always been drawn to pastry and to baking because they represent these greater moments where we're able to come together, where we can participate and show up for our communities. We can celebrate achievements little and big and everything in between.
"Every mistake that you could make, I have made. Even when I was running pastry kitchens and I had huge teams of cooks, my credo to them was always make every mistake once."
I wish I could take credit for the title of my book, but I had to start with this little story about where the title "More Than Cake" came from. I'm on the junior board at the Food Education Fund. They're a nonprofit based in Hell's Kitchen out of a high school that works with teens to guide them to a career in the culinary industry. I went there for a career day to speak with a class of ninth-graders, and they were super cute. It was really fun. Then a couple weeks later I got emails thanking me for coming in, and they were really great. One was from this young man, and he was like, "Dear Chef Natasha, thank you for coming in and telling me about what it is to be a pastry chef. I have learned that it is so much more than cake."
When I came in, I wasn't just talking about the technique of making pastry and things like that. I was talking about, how do we relate baking to commitment within our communities to how do we tie it to our values and how do we relate it to social justice? I was so moved that someone that young understood what I was trying to share with them in that moment. I was like, "This is what my book is about."
You're really passionate about defending baking.
Definitely, defending the kind of baking that isn't about the shortcut or shaving off a step or getting that result fast. We very much live in the kind of culture that rewards these hacks and shortcuts and easy ways into something, which are great. Every recipe developer is hoping for that magic formula where they're connecting with an audience through something that feels accessible. I love that. But I'm also here to be learning a skill.
Something that you're making with your hands is also something to appreciate and to build confidence around and to derive joy from. Whether it's woodworking or knitting or gardening, these skills where we're engaging our senses to make something, there is so much to learn and take away from that. I wanted to really share the strategies and tips that I learned working in fine dining restaurants to the home baker and kind of be like, "We can all do this."
There's a phrase you use, "The expectation of quick results." There's something to be said about this meditative, slow, trial and error, maybe failure sometimes process.
Every mistake that you could make, I have made. Even when I was running pastry kitchens and I had huge teams of cooks, my credo to them was always make every mistake once. The process of making mistakes and failures, if we are engaged with those moments and learning from them and paying attention, that's an incredible opportunity for growth. Even out of these moments of "failure," there's a way that we're revisiting the same topic later and making something different.
"I don't have a ton of fancy equipment. I wanted the book to reflect that."
I wanted to hopefully be a reassuring voice in all of that. I didn't go to culinary school. I forget about things in the oven. I make mistakes, but here is what I've learned that helps me mitigate those feelings of badness that helps me overcome them or circumvent them the next time, hopefully.
What are your ride or die pieces of equipment?
I live in a little apartment by myself in Brooklyn. I don't have a ton of fancy equipment. I wanted the book to reflect that. I don't have the fancy food processor and the blender, and I don't even own a stand mixer. This blows people's minds, but I have a little hand mixer. I just don't have the space for it.
I find it so fascinating when people are baking like, "Baking intimidates me, baking scares me, so many steps, numbers, math, science, da da, da, da, da." Maybe this is just something about my personality, but I find great comfort in the structure of baking. I feel more relaxed because there's a structure around what you're supposed to do.
The number one tool for me that I tell people to get if they don't have it already, is to get a kitchen scale. [In] America, we're so stubborn with our American volume measurements. We do everything in a cup. To my mind nothing is more efficient than having a scale. Everything is in factors of ten. You're cruising. This is how we're building confidence. It's through consistency, through this attention to detail. It's not through the subjective scoop of flour that is different for everyone. That's my case to make for having a scale. I have an Escali scale that goes up to five kilos. It's perfect for any baking project in the book. It's little, it's cute, mine is pink. I just want people to be like, the scale is a tool to make my life easier for me to work faster and better. It's not a piece of equipment that should feel intimidating to me.
You talk about ways of repurposing your mistakes. I always feel like if I've made an investment in making cookies and then something goes wrong, I've wasted my time and money and I've disappointed my family. Talk to me about what you can do to bring yourself back from the abyss when you have made those mistakes.
I'm learning from bulk production in restaurants where we're serving hundreds of people every day. We're not making twelve cookies; we're making 200 cookies. We're not making eight scones; we're making 80 scones. If you mess up a batch of that size, nothing feels worse. Everything is so expensive these days. You don't want to put not only your hard work, time and labor into something, but expensive, high-quality ingredients that you sourced and bought and are using.
If we're engaged with what's happening, then that's the moment where we can be like, "How can we turn this around or move forward?" Of course, there are some mistakes that maybe can't be rectified or turned into something else. But if you over-bake a cake, for example, don't throw it away. Let's bring it back to life with a flavorful soak that will rehydrate the crumb. If a cookie or cracker is under-baked and it doesn't have the right snap or texture, let's just flash it and put it back in the oven and bake it a little bit longer.
"A great pastry isn't just sweet."
A lot of the strategies that I learned around mistakes and failure are coming out of me in the moment, being like, "What can I do?" and then writing that down and holding onto it and using it as a future strategy. As long as we're engaged with what the ingredients are and where we are in the process, that's where we can be like, "Okay, we can use this for something else. We can freeze it and process this into something else. We can take it further."
You're also passionate about reducing food waste, which is a big concern and another big financial drain for a lot of us. When we're at home and looking at the leftovers in our refrigerator, what are some other ways that we can just change our mindset on using them?
I could talk about this forever. I see it as a fun puzzle or game that I'm trying to solve or examine. It's this idea of structure where when we actually are presented with less, that's when our mind, our imagination, our resourcefulness kicks into overdrive and we're able to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts. Often when you have everything available to you, that's when you lose the plot and maybe things lose their focus and they're not as good as it could be.
This is something coming out of my restaurant years where often it's the pastry side that's responsible for processing less-than-perfect scraps from garde manger, from saute. They're getting the perfect coin of carrot, but then there's all the scraps. They're getting the perfect half moon of onion, but then you get all the weird butts of onion and the next day boiled potatoes, and this and that. So I'm coming from a place of, I would have to look at this stuff and be like, "What am I going to do with all these things?" And then, "Okay, let's process these woody herb bits into salsa verde that can go on the bottom of a savory tart. Let's crumble this cooked potato into a focaccia dough. Let's use this lemon syrup into a buttercream."
That is such a fun exercise for me. There's no better feeling than when you're like, "Wow, I made something from that and it actually feels spectacular. It feels special. And I managed to clean up my fridge."
So much of what you do obviously comes from this foundation in the world of restaurants. Yet the pandemic changed you and changed your relationship with food and cooking and baking, and the people that you bake for. Tell me about how that came about.
Like everyone else in this world, it affected me deeply, but also on a day-to-day financial sense. I was the executive pastry chef for a restaurant group. I lost my job. I was devastated. Working in restaurants, especially in New York where the quality is so high, there's such an expectation to commit yourself wholly to that organization, to that institution that it really was completely inextricable with who I was and what I thought about.
When I lost that job, I was like, "What am I doing?" That's when I sold my cookbook. I had been thinking about writing a cookbook for a long time, and when I wrote the proposal for "More Than Cake," that was the summer of 2020. I sold it to Artisan Books in July. That was terrifying because I was like, "If my name is not associated with a cool restaurant, with clout, with an institution that has bigger names that people have heard of, who's going to want to read this book? Who's going to want to care what I have to say?" That was very scary.
"The beauty of the bake sale is that its power is not in how it's scaled, but rather in the thought and the feeling behind it."
It was very validating to sell this book to Artisan and have them be so excited and have them be like, "We want you to write the dream book that's in your head. We want you to write about your family and your bake sales and your backyard and your cats, and your friends." They understood what I was trying to communicate, coming out of this intense restaurant environment.
In tandem with that, as I was working on the book, I started doing my own popups. I started doing "Never Ending Taste," which is my popup that I do at different friends' restaurants in New York at places like Superiority Burger in the East Village, Té Company in Greenwich Village, Four Horseman in Williamsburg, all over. And also being like, I really want to get back into the fundraising grassroots work I was doing with bake sales.
When you're not working in a restaurant, you lose access to those facilities, to those resources, staffing, labor, everything. That was another big question mark, "How can I produce events at this scale with the expectations that I have, but on my own, literally with nothing, with no dollars and just some connections?" That's been a really incredible journey for me, to be like, okay, people still care about the food that I'm making, they want to read the book, they're showing up to the bake sales. And that really reaffirms that the work that I'm wanting to make and how it's tied to me is mine and will be moving forward.
The power of a humble grassroots bake sale is amazing. How can we all amplify and mobilize via bake sales?
I think people are used to the bigger events that I produce, where maybe there are 40 pastry chefs. We just completed a big bake sale at the Wythe Hotel for the Brigid Alliance, a nonprofit in New York that connects people who are traveling out of state to receive abortion care. We raised $30,000, which was incredible. We had 35 pastry chefs and bakers in New York participate. But I also want to emphasize, it doesn't have to be that. That's just what it was for me because I am a maximalist, and I really wanted to start off the book tour with a huge bang and just do something that felt really celebratory and big and fun.
When I'm writing this book, I'm like, "Maybe it's just you and a couple coworkers and girlfriends or your family. Maybe it's your stoop or a little patch of something, a community garden or your wine shop, a farmer's market." The beauty of the bake sale is that its power is not in how it's scaled, but rather in the thought and the feeling behind it. I think that there's so much that we can derive from that format. Let's not leave the philanthropy to the 1% and the kind of events that they're producing; let's create little moments in our communities, in our neighborhoods that are for the people we know, that are for organizations that are doing work actively in the communities that we live in.
That's what I'm trying to share. This is an incredibly inclusive way of pulling in anybody and there, anybody can do this no matter where you live at whatever scale that you want for your circumstances. I'm seeing that happen and people who are like, we raised $400 for this organization that addresses food insecurity in our neighborhood. I'm like, "That's awesome. That's amazing." Let's not diminish the efforts of what's happening on a smaller level just because there aren't more zeros at the end of what they raised. If we're mobilizing more people to participate and show up for their neighborhoods, that is one way that we're showing what our values are and making a change.
You pull so much from your Chinese heritage, from your California-ness, the flavors, the combinations, the way that almost every recipe has something that's savory in it or has something that's sour in it. I love that about that balance and that tension in the things that you make. Maybe all of us can get in that mindset a little more when we're thinking about how we bake. What are some things we can do to get our eyes and our taste buds trained in that way?
This is something when we think of savory side cooking that maybe we're already doing intuitively. If you're making a salad vinaigrette, you're adding sweet and salty and sour, and you're tasting as you go, so you're adding a crack of pepper and you're like, "Oh, does it need something? A little honey, whatever."
But with baking, people get thrown for a loop with the steps of the recipe and the ingredients. They feel like they don't know how to come in with their own palette and change something up. For me, baking needs to be seasoned just as much as savory food is. And when I'm talking about seasoning, I'm talking not just about sugar, but obviously salt and obviously sourness, bitterness.
I think that a great pastry isn't just sweet. Actually sweet isn't really a flavor, and something like sugar actually has the effect of dulling our perception of an ingredient. If a jam is too sweet, you're like, this tastes flat. It doesn't taste vibrant. It doesn't taste like juicy and full and bright. But you add a little lemon juice and you're like, oh, this tastes incredible now. If we're thinking about seasoning our pastries and our baked goods and thinking about salt as something to draw out flavor from sweet ingredients, acid is something again to draw out, build more flavor, then that's how we're going to get things that are irresistible and dynamic, and feel different than just sweet.
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