1A Presents: Milk Street's Holiday Lollapalooza: The Best of 2024
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You're listening to the 1A Podcast. I'm Jen White. Now, it's no surprise we love talking about food here at 1A, from the latest cookbooks to answering your questions about your favorite foods. Today, as a holiday treat, we're bringing you highlights from the latest episode of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio podcast. For the complete episode and to learn more about Milk Street, be sure to visit MilkStreetRadio.com. We'll let our friends at Milk Street Radio take it from here. ♪

This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Today we're embracing holiday baking with Dominique Ancel, a French baker who had to travel all the way to America just to taste a good cookie. I remember the cookies when I was a kid, they were just a few in a pastry case. They were dry, they were flat, they were not good at all. French people don't eat cookies.

Later in the show, it's my conversation with Dominique Ancel, the creator of The Cronut. But first, we're tackling your holiday questions with my special guest host, Cheryl Day. Cheryl is, of course, the author of Cheryl Day's Treasury of Southern Baking. Cheryl, are you suited up and ready to take a call? Yeah, let's do it. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, my name is Ashley. Hi.

Hi, Ashley. Where are you calling from? I'm in Los Angeles. How can we help you today? My question is every year around the holidays, I start making cookies as one does. Every year I keep thinking, okay, there's got to be a way to get more on top of this. And my question is,

What doughs can I freeze when? So I know some doughs you can freeze like just the whole mass of dough. But should I like form the cookies and then freeze them and bake them off? Or should I bake them and freeze a baked cookie? And if I have the ones that you shape like in the cookie gun,

Can I shape them and then freeze them in shape? Yes, you can do all of those things. But I'll tell you, I am on team bake then freeze.

And I'll tell you why. I had a baker that used to bring me, and I owned a bakery for, gosh, over 22 years. But she, one of our bakers would bring me a holiday cookie box for Christmas. And it was the best thing ever. And I could never figure out with our schedule how she had time to do this. So I asked her and what she did was she baked all of her cookies and then she froze them.

And then some cookies, you know, she would need to fill or decorate. So she'd thaw those and then she would fill them and decorate them as needed. And then they were great. But when she baked and froze them, she just put them in, you know, nice containers that you could put parchment in between the layers. And they tasted, I mean, I just could not believe it. So I've been on

team bake than freeze ever since. But yes, you can also, you know, have your doughs, but why not just get it out of the way? You know, then they're done. You definitely can, if it starts with creaming butter and sugar, you can definitely bake them off later, but then you'd have to thaw them out. Some you can, you know, bake straight from freezing and

It gets complicated. The only cookies that I don't do that to is like a meringue cookie. But otherwise, yeah, that's my answer. I'm sticking to it. What about you, Chris? Yeah, I would agree. You've done more of that than I have. The exceptions would be...

Like something you have in the freezer when someone comes over unexpectedly. Right. And you want something to be fresh out of the oven, something like that, which you can freeze shaped and then just put them on a baking sheet and bake them. Then you have the smell coming out of the oven. They're warm. But for Christmas cookies, I agree. Yeah, you could do it ahead of time.

Well, it just saves you so much time and it's not as daunting to have to bake them all at once. Yes. And to have five different doughs going. Right. Well, this is blowing my mind. I mean...

This means I can start earlier and go slower, and this is amazing news for me. And enjoy your holiday, right? Yeah, absolutely. Please report back. I absolutely will. Cheryl, I think this was life-changing.

I mean, I always keep some cookie dough, like Chris said, in the freezer, you know, when you just have a hankering for cookie. But I just think baking the cookie box with all the variety, you definitely need a hands up for sure. Yeah, one of my kids, there was a cookie swap last Christmas weekend.

And I think she spent three or four days baking cookies. I think she needed to go into a rest home for a week after that. That's how you feel. Yes. I mean, she was totally done in after that. I agree. You got to shift some of the work out of time. Well, thanks for your question. Thanks for calling. That's amazing news. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.

This is Milk Street Radio. Cheryl and I are here to better your baking. Call us anytime. Our number, 855-426-9843. One more time, 855-426-9843 or email us at questions at milkstreetradio.com. Hi, welcome to Milk Street is calling. Hi, this is Jennifer Joes calling from Peoria, Illinois. How are you?

Great. How are you, Jennifer? I am great. I'm so excited. I went to Bradley University. I teach biology there. Wow. That's amazing. I am actually teaching a class this semester where we talk about the science of baking in this class. So what is baking soda? What is baking powder? Why do we brown our food? Oh, I love that. Well, how can we help you today?

So one of my questions is about brown sugar. We have a lot of family in Maine, so we love that kind of dark molasses-y flavor in our food. And so I prefer the flavor of dark brown sugar. But most baking recipes call for light brown sugar. Can I usually substitute them one for one? You really can. I mean, there is a slight difference. And since we're talking about the science of baking, there's more acid in...

And dark brown sugar, which when you add for a cookie, you're going to be adding baking soda and that's going to activate that. But it's just going to make your cookies rise just a little bit more.

than the light brown sugar and that's not a bad thing but yeah it's slight and if you were weighing it it would be exactly the same fantastic chris do you think yeah i think light brown sugar is three percent molasses and dark brown six percent or whatever but yeah i don't think it's going to make a big difference no and if you prefer the flavor of dark brown sugar i say go for it jennifer

And, you know, very often, Cheryl's probably did this too, you reach for the dark brown sugar and all you have is light. Right. You're still making cookies. You're still making, yeah, you're still in business. So, yeah, it's fun. I always have both in the cabinet and I never really know if it actually matters or not. Well, it's fun.

Funny, a lot of recipes don't even, you know, say, which they just say brown sugar, some recipes. How do you keep your sugar nice and soft and loose? Do you put a little sugar bear in it or do you keep in the fridge or what?

I do. I have them in, are they called like Cambro plastic containers, like the food prep? And then I do have the little clay, I think mine's shaped like a gingerbread man, but yes. I find they work pretty well. And then I keep it in the fridge and you don't get that solid block of sugar. I find that works really well is to just use it really quickly. Well, that's true. There you go. It's like, what do I do with all the bourbon in my house? We'll just drink it.

That's the best thing. All right. Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks for your question. Thank you. Appreciate it. Bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Right now, author Julia Georgalis is here with a tip for how to eat your Christmas tree.

Hi, I'm Julia Georgalis, and here are three ways that I really like to use my Christmas tree in my cooking. The first is a recipe based on a traditional Italian cake called Torta di Pinoli e Cioccolato. Pine nuts are something that people don't usually associate with Christmas trees, but they do actually come from pine trees. And so the way I like to use these is to toast the pine nuts in with the butter and incorporate them in a really chocolatey, gooey brownie.

The second way is hands down one of my favourite recipes, Christmas tree ice cream. I really love to use blue spruce as weirdly spruce tastes quite a lot like vanilla. And so the way that you make this ice cream is you take a big bunch of Christmas tree needles...

Clean them really, really well, chop them up and steep those needles in a custard. So cream, milk, sugar, egg yolks. And then you end up with this beautiful Christmas tree flavoured ice cream, which is really exciting and quite surprising, I think.

And then the third way is really, really fun. You can make a Christmas tree booze. So you can use your older, drier Christmas tree. You could also use the bark. And what you would do is you take two large handfuls of spruce, fir or pine, put them in a sterilised glass bottle full of good quality gin or vodka and let the alcohol infuse for about four days. And after you've got yourself a really beautiful kind of alpine flavoured alcohol, which you can gift or you can drink well into the new year.

Happy holidays. That was Julia George-Allis, author of How to Eat Your Christmas Tree. You can get her recipe for Christmas tree ice cream at MilkStreetRadio.com. This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

It's no surprise people go nuts for Cronuts, the $5 croissanty donut confection that's gone viral. People lining up as early as 5 a.m., even overnight sometimes, just to snag a maximum of two of these elite treats. That was a clip from an ABC News segment in 2013 when baker Dominique Ancel went viral for his invention of the Cronut.

What happens after a viral baking moment? Well, 10 years after the invention of that pastry, Dominique Ancel is here to tell us. Dominique, welcome to Milk Street. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I actually have used your recipes before.

And you actually have changed the way you bake. I've always loved to bake. But some of your ideas were, I thought, really innovative. And you're high on my list of experts on baking. It's so nice to hear. Thank you. So you're a serious guy. You're a serious baker. And then this phenomenon happens, which, you know, I'm sure you don't regret. Right.

But I guess you never thought when you got started, you'd at least briefly end up with a bouncer outside of your bakery. Absolutely not. I don't think anyone can think of this. If you had told me that like 20 years ago, I would have laughed at you. But I did. I did. And I remember it was like 2013, 2012.

I only had four employees at the bakery and we were trying to do something special. And I had made this pastry just for the weekend. And randomly, a friend of ours snapped a photo of it and put it on his blog. Still had blogs at the time. And he had to call me the same day and explain to me that his article went viral. So, of course, you know, putting things in perspective, it was just the beginning of social media.

Something going viral, I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, I'm happy for you. Your article went viral. It's like, no, no, no, you don't understand. We had an increase of traffic of 300% and over 140,000 links to the same article in just a couple hours. This thing is huge. Be ready. You're going to get busy this weekend. I was like, oh, sure. Yeah, you know, I made like 35 today. I'm going to make 45 tomorrow. Yeah.

And little did I know, by day three, we had over 150 people line up before we even opened the shop. People would come as early as two o'clock in the morning, lining up on the sidewalk. You know, the neighbors were calling the police because it was so loud. It was like madness. It was like so overwhelming.

So, what's so good about the cronut? I mean, first of all, explain to me how you make it. And secondly, why did it become such an obsession with so many people, do you think? Sure. So, how we make it, it's a similar process to croissant. It takes about three days to make. Why it went so big and barrel is still...

hard to pinpoint exactly. A lot of people ask me the same question. I think it was a time where people were looking for something exciting, something new. And we had this like, you know, cute, I would say cute idea to combine a croissant, a donut shape and to finish it like it was elegant. It was changing the flavor every month. And then, you know, things went viral because people relate to it. People like understood what it was.

And then picked it up from one news to another, from one country to another. And then, you know, before we knew it, it went across the world. Did you come up with a name or was the name, did someone else come up with it later? Yeah, we came up with a name. It was very interesting because at the time we had our friend who also was a lawyer. She was like, oh, listen, you know, this is a great idea. You should trademark the Cronut. I was like, no, no, no, I don't want to bother with that. She was like, no, no, no, you should do it.

I was like, no, no, there's no need. It's just a pastry. I don't want to do that. She's like, listen, I'm going to do it for you. Good for her. And we'll talk about it later. And she did it. And five days later, there were about 27 applications for the same name. And she explained to me that trolls will go after it if it goes viral. They will try to trademark it before you, and they will prevent you from using your own name.

Well, that's because very often the big difference between one thing and another is the name. Exactly, yeah. And the name sometimes is the mark that people recognize as a product. Are there different styles of being a pastry chef? You know, doing a perfect tartatin or coconut layer cake or just doing, you know, like in Japan, you do the same thing over and over again to get really good at it for years.

Then there's, you know, for the eye, right? The pastry chef where the plate is entertainment, lots of little dots of fruit puree, et cetera. So there's a lot of presentation. Where do you stand on that in terms of either just doing a great job with something familiar on the other end of the spectrum, you know, making dessert an experience? Or is it always just a combination of those things? Yeah, that's actually a great question. I think you need a little bit of both.

I always say like you only recognize a good pastry chef by a perfect croissant. A croissant is very telling. It sounds simple. It sounds silly. But it's very hard technically to master. No, hold on. Croissant does not sound simple. Croissant to me sounds like the hardest thing in the world you can possibly make.

And I've tried. But it's simple in the idea of it. You know, it's like hundreds of years old. It was in similar shape to French classic. You can find it like all around the world. There's a lot of bad croissants. So many bad croissants all over the world. Yes, there are. But it's hard to find a good one. So let's get into baking and recipes. Sure.

You like soufflés. You talk about a fruit soufflé. So a standard soufflé, usually some sort of a bechamel base. But the fruit soufflé, is that a cooked, thickened fruit base as the base for it? Or do you still use a bechamel? What's the base of a fruit soufflé?

So, a fruit soufflé usually is a puree of fruits that you mash up and strain. And then you make custard with pastry cream. One of my tricks actually is that I add a little bit of cornstarch. So, cornstarch kind of like stabilizes the egg whites and keeps it good right there. I remember my days at Daniel, working for Daniel Beaulieu, I had 10 desserts on the menu.

And there's always someone that wanted a classic souffle in the middle of service on a Saturday night. And of course, you know, it throws everything off and you have to stop everything, make a pastry cream and whip the egg whites and you have to time everything with a server. It's very, very challenging. So what I found out

But with the regular recipe, just special cream and egg whites will always collapse and will never rise up the right way or is cracked. There's always something wrong. So what I found out is that I added a little bit of cornstarch.

And with the egg whites and the cornstarch, that makes the perfect texture. So you're whipping the whites, adding sugar to the whites, and also adding some cornstarch to the whites as you whip them? Actually, no. I add the cornstarch in the pastry cream. I see. And when you put it in your dish, you can keep it in the fridge for a couple of hours, and then just pop it in the oven, and it rises up perfectly. It's just like the perfect recipe. Okay.

You say, I loosely wrapped a thin strip of paper around a ball of ice cream covered in petals made out of meringue.

The dish started out looking like a flower, but when the paper was lit on fire, the flames would slowly work themselves around in a circle, melt the flower petals one by one, and end up looking like an ashtray at the end. So what is this dish? So this dish is, we created this dish, the theme was the first time in life. And one of the dishes was first heartbreak. So I wanted to talk about the beauty of love.

and how it starts with a beautiful dish. So we had made this ice cream, this rocky road ice cream with a little marshmallow on top. And underneath the dish was hidden a little piece of rice paper that was sticking out with the love notes. And we'll give people matches and we'll tell them to light on fire the little love notes.

And they would like see the paper like burning and melting all the meringues around the little ice cream and turn these meringues into ashes. So that was the interpretation of love, starting with something beautiful and sometimes, you know, first heartbreak ending up into something like very sad. And what do we do when you have a heartbreak? You eat ice cream.

That's quite a story. I really like that. Something beautiful, complete disaster, and then you drown your sorrows in the ice cream. French rice pudding, Turgul, I've never heard of. It kind of looks like a bass cheesecake or something with a very dark top to it. I'm a big rice pudding fan. But this one seemed really interesting. It's from Normandy. You want to just explain it because I don't know why I never heard of it, but it sounds great.

Yeah, it's a French classic. Turgul is from Normandy. Traditionally, it was made in cast iron. It was rice that they were putting in a dish, covering with milk, and let it, like, just cook in the oven for a couple of hours until it gets dark. So Turgul is, like, a delicious dish. It's so good. It's creamy. This is, like, beautiful, almost like crème brûlée, like layer on top, almost like a past cheesecake, like you just described. Very dark.

And the bottom should be like creamy and soft. Just add sugar, milk, a little bit of rice, and put this in the oven. It's more simple and delicious, easy to do rice pudding. Another thing I love about what you do is you decide your wife really likes the chocolate pudding at the hospital. So you make your own version. So what was so good about that chocolate pudding and what did you do to sort of make it more interesting? Yeah.

I think in this new cookbook, Left Sweetest Moments, I think we talk a lot about why people bake and the reason why people buy pastries from us. You know, to say thank you, to say I'm sorry sometimes, to say congratulations, to say happy birthday. There's always a reason behind why people buy pastries.

The chocolate pudding, you know, it's a moment where my wife and I had our first baby at the hospital and she was eating that chocolate pudding. And

And it's such a simple dish. It's not the greatest one, but it's sweet, it's comforting, it's simple, and it reminds you of that moment in time where you leave something special. So the connection between the food and the memory is very important. Well, I would just point out for our listeners that you added the dollop of olive oil Chantilly cream. So, okay, you were sexing it up or however you want to describe it. A little bit, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

The ultimate cookie, I mean, I've discussed the ultimate cookie with many people over the years. So your ultimate cookie is what?

My ultimate cookie is something warm out of the oven, like every American kid. And, you know, I can say that now I understand and I know what a good cookie is. I grew up in France where we had no clue what a good cookie is. I remember the cookies when I was a kid, there were just a few in a pastry case. They were dry. They were flat. They were not good at all. French people don't eat cookies. Well, I have this thing about cookies like a chocolate chip.

everybody overbakes them because they think the center should be set, but it's like a pie, custard pie. The center should be soft and it'll continue to bake when it comes out of the oven. So almost everybody overbakes their cookies. You're right. And once you overbake it, they're just not that good.

Yeah, for sure. And it's fascinating to me because, you know, again, bringing back to like the nostalgia of being a kid, I always ask people, what is the first thing you've ever done in the kitchen? 95% of people will answer me, it's something sweet. It's a pie. It's a cookie. It's a, you know, it's a pound cake that I made with my mom, my grandma. And it's amazing because people are always scared of baking. They're always thinking it's more complicated, more scientific, need more tools. But it's the first thing they've done as a kid.

And when you think about it, why did they think back as a kid it was so simple and so easy and so, like, comforting? Because they always had mom or grandma, like, baking with them, guiding them step by step. That's why when I think of cookbooks, I always make it, like, as simple as possible. I always make it as, like, approachable as possible so people feel like almost like they're baking with their mom or their grandma.

Dominique, just thank you so much. I love your work. I love your recipes. And all the best. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. That was Dominique Ancel. He's a pastry chef, also author of Life's Sweetest Moments. You can find his recipe for Turgul at MilkStreetRadio.com. I'm Christopher Kimball, and you're listening to Milk Street Radio. Right now, it's time to look back on the year with our very good friend, Adam Gopnik.

Adam, how are you? I am well, Chris. How are you? I feel it's that time of year where our literary muses come out and we reveal our favorite food-related books. And since you're an avid reader and avid cook, you should go first. The Gopnik Kimball Prize. Let's try. All right.

So my first book that I particularly enjoyed and learned from this year was The Editor, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America by Sarah B. Franklin. Now, the subject of this book, as you know, Chris, is the publishing legend Judith Jones, who was an

editor and shaped culture in America. Really, the subtitle should be Shaped Cooking in America because though it's true that she was an important literary editor, her central contribution to American letters and American culture was bringing Julia Child to the attention of the United States in the 1960s.

And what fascinated me about this book, which is extremely well done, is that she really invented, in a sense, the cookbook as we have it now. Because what was unique about Julia Child and the Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as it came to be called, was that it was both about an individual and a cuisine. And if you think about it, Chris, almost every successful cookbook now is...

almost always involves a single figure who's being offered as a prism into a larger culture. That seems self-evident to us now, but it wasn't self-evident in the mid-1960s when Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out. And then Judith went on to publish many other books, cookbooks of a similar kind, and genuinely transformed our understanding of what a cookbook is. She did.

Well, my first book and one of my favorite books of all time is called The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger. It's about whether or not vegetables have a soul. And the conclusion is they might, which is pretty amazing. But if you put a cabbage in boiling water, it releases a death sound.

Many plants, like pea plants, send their roots towards flowing water. They know where it is. Corn, when attacked by a caterpillar, sends out a gas to attract the right type of wasp, which will come, inject eggs into the caterpillars and kill them.

So this notion of plants being able to make decisions based on their environment is just absolutely fascinating. That is both fascinating and, quite frankly, a little frightening because now you're telling me that a carrot is capable of a motion that will soon be cordoned off into a corner drinking water and eating what exactly? Adam, corn on the cob? No. Can't do it. Can't do it.

Anyway, The Light Eaters, highly recommend it. I will get it right away. My next book is by Ariel Johnson, who I think should be Dr. Ariel Johnson or Ariel Johnson PhD. It's Flavorama, A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor. Have you read this one? Yes, I have. I thought it was fascinating. Normally, I'm a little skeptical or even allergic to books that take on the molecular level of our experience of taste.

But this book is so well done, I thought. It's so revealing in terms of what it is that creates flavor, the interaction of molecular chemistry and human receptivity, that not only did I learn something from it, but I felt that it gave me a sharper understanding of the palette of flavors that I'm playing with all the time. It actually helped me sharpen my own cooking. So I thought it was a book that made the connection between the scientific side

and the aesthetic layer lucid in a way that no similar book had for me before. Yeah, I really – those books are tough because sometimes they get into molecular biology. But I thought she made her case there.

clearly and in a conversant way, right? So you could really understand it. My next book is called Rintaro. You probably know the restaurant in the Bay Area by Sylvan Brackett, who came to California from Japan when he was a mere babe. But what I love about this book, besides the design with woodcuts, it just is a fabulously designed book. But he takes Japanese cooking and kind of makes it Tuesday night cooking and

Like chicken meatballs or frying breaded chicken breast with a slice of cheese in the middle, perfect for my young kids. Blanched vegetables with a cold seasoned dashi. So there's a lot of day-to-day useful stuff. It takes Japanese cooking to the American table in a way that was really charming and also talking about flavors and combinations and colors in Japanese cooking.

But it was a combination of the sublime and the everyday that made this, for me, probably one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. Wow, that's high praise. I have not read this book through. I leafed through it at the local cookbook store. And what struck me about it is it wasn't taking Japanese cooking so much up to the next level, but in the best sense, down to a more accessible level. Exactly. My final book, you know, I always love to bring a vintage classic to these conversations, but...

And this is one that's been a classic for a long time and that I had frankly been avoiding. It's Robert Farah Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, which is, you know, was first published in 1969. I was a little skeptical of it because I tend to be skeptical of overtly spiritualized books.

about food. But I discovered that this book is in fact an absolutely delightful meditation on not so much the spirituality of cooking, but if you like, the zen of cooking. Robert Capon, when he wrote it, was an Anglican minister and has a powerfully Christian content, but of a wonderfully idiosyncratic kind. There's a charming part where he talks about the pleasure he takes in an absolutely horrible bottle of bogus Kirsch.

that he keeps in the house, and he writes, I take a sip to remind myself what a paragon of awfulness it is, but partly to prove that for all its faults, it is not undrinkable.

In a real world, nothing is infinitely bad. My bottle of bogus kirsch bears witness that there is no bottomless pit in any subject. That to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all. That's a sentence I would have loved to have written. Yeah, that was a good one. And my last book, and this is for people who love waffles, split waffles, rolled up waffles, double cooked waffles, sweet potato waffles, and

Dark Rye and Honey Cake by Regula Iswin. She's from Belgium. This is about Belgium, Netherlands, the Low Countries, Luxembourg. It's about festival baking and has amazing recipes you just won't find anywhere else.

I am so drawn to this because I love waffles. And in fact, I have a tear in my eye as we speak because every Saturday morning throughout my kids growing up, I would make waffles. I do too. And it made for joyous mornings. And now I wake up on a Saturday morning, both of my kids are fruitfully employed elsewhere, and I have no one to make a waffle for. So I sometimes sadly end up making them exclusively for myself. Well, I was asked at a talk last week, what's my favorite recipe? And my answer was...

Saturday morning waffles. Once again, two minds with but a single recipe. Saturday morning waffles would be at the very summit of my list as well and for the same reason. Adam, thank you so much. Have a great 2025. Have a happy new year with your kids. Yeah, you too, Adam. Take care. That was Adam Gopnik, staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery.

That's it for today. You can find all of our episodes at MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

To know more about Milk Street and everything we have to offer during this holiday season, please go to 177milkstreet.com. There you can become a member and get full access to all of our recipes and free standard shipping from the Milk Street store and much more. You can also learn about our latest book, Milk Street Bakes. Plus, we have a complete collection of all of our favorite holiday recipes at milkstreetradio.com slash holidays.

You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, Instagram at 177milkstreet. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions. Happy holidays from all of us here at Milk Street. And thanks, as always, for listening.

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