An update on August orders

As well as thoughts on mess, an ode to sorghum, and a sweet potato galette

August orders open this Thursday at noon!

In case you missed it - I recently shifted my operation from the Southern Food and Beverage Museum to join my friends at Bar Pomona in a “cake residency”. What does this mean? I’ll be using part of their kitchen space as my regular production bakery, offering whole cakes for pick up as always. August orders will open this coming Thursday at noon - you’ll be able to find the menu here at that point (the menu won’t be live until Thursday!). 

Last week we hosted an introductory party with cake by the slice - thanks so much to everyone who made it out and ate cake in the heat wave! I’ll be hosting more cake-by-the-slice events in the space, as well as the occasional in-person class when it gets a bit cooler out (no one wants to learn to work with buttercream in this weather, I promise). 

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Where have I been the last few weeks? 

This past month, I moved from a large working space to a smaller working space, and had to confront the reality of a year and a half of thoughtlessly accumulating stuff with no concern of where I would eventually put it. As much as I would like to be a fastidious person, the truth is that I’m constantly on the verge of being subsumed in odds and ends (to be clear, I mean cluttered, not unclean!). There’s a stereotype of the professional pastry chef as the precise, haughty engineer of the kitchen. This is at odds with the reality of myself and most the folks I know in the field, who keep recipes on scraps of paper, hoard bits of ingredients and nearly-empty spice jars, and alter recipes on the fly with all the flair of the savory chef. Though I work really hard to present recipes to the public with careful instructions, the process is less about transcribing my actual work style and more about funneling this chaotic energy into a readable form that can accurately be reproduced by others. This is, frankly, not an easy task for me (and one reason why I still have not presented my long-promised recipe for fig leaf oatmeal cream pies). I’m reminded of my undergraduate study of printmaking. Printmaking, like baking, requires you to reproduce the same results over and over again, but printmaking without any creative energy reads as soulless and flat as a brochure - you’ve got to be a bit messy at the beginning.

My new workstation, in progress.

The past few weeks have taken on a similar trajectory for me, as I winnowed down my large, anarchic collection of shelf-stable pantry items and little-used baking tools into a much smaller, more tightly controlled sphere. I then immediately threw a party to celebrate my residency at Bar Pomona, made and sold out scads of cake, and fell into a three-day fugue state as I recovered from the whole shebang. As exhausted as I am by rest discourse, even I can admit that it was necessary. 

A no recipe-recipe

Today I thought I’d do something a little different, and walk you through how I improvised a savory galette for dinner the other evening. Learning where and how to riff in a recipe is a great way to liven up your baking, and a galette is a great place to start since, no matter, what, we’re all just chucking a temperamental range of ingredients in a flaky crust and hoping for the best. In my opinion, even a galette you’ve made a million times will always come out a little bit different depending on the vagrancies of the oven, the ripeness of the fruit or veg, the phase of the moon. The control here, where we’ll typically need to be precise, is the crust - find a recipe you like that isn’t too annoying to make (I will not be engaging in any fraisage on a weeknight, thank you very much). I used Carla Lalli Music’s extra-flaky pastry dough recipe from Bon Appetit, ignoring her method (which called upon elements of fraisage, where the dough is worked by hand on a flat surface to create thin sheets of lamination between the butter and flour), and threw the ingredients in a stand mixer instead. The brilliant Nicole Rucker told me recently that she no longer makes her pie dough by hand, and this knowledge has freed me forever. I then rest the dough for an hour while assembling the rest of the ingredients. 

I’m called to make a savory galette because of a stunning one featured in Natasha Pickowicz’ More than Cake, but I don’t have most of the ingredients she uses so I’m forging my own path. Hers features kabocha squash “lacquered” in barley tea, vinegar, and honey (“lacquer” may be my favorite word choice in a book full of sumptuous turns of phrase). I’ve got a bag of sweet potatoes that are maybe days away from turning, a single sad red onion, and a crystallized chunk of sorghum syrup found in a jar I unearthed while moving kitchens. Sorghum is molasses’ lesser known cousin: a thick, caramel colored sweetener derived from sorghum grass, with a slightly feral flavor that’s hard to pin down. One small-batch sorghum I tasted ages ago was nearly as sour as fermented honey. The remnant I’m using here is the remainder of a few jars I bought from a roadside stand in Arkansas in 2020, though you can also find it online with a quick google search. (An aside- if you came to my cake party, my zucchini cake was topped with a barrel aged sorghum buttercream). 

Sorghum does not normally look like the picture on the right- this stuff, like honey, occasionally crystallizes in the jar but its fine to use.

I sliced the sweet potatoes a little under an eighth of an inch thick on a mandolin, and cut the red onion into thinnish ribbons. The chunk of sorghum goes into a pot with some water (to dissolve it), a spoonful of miso, and a drizzle of rice vinegar - I brought this mix up to a simmer, whisking to dissolve the miso, and reduce it until its slightly syrupy. I know from past experience that sweet potato and miso are friends, and the rice vinegar is a nod to Natasha Pickowicz’ recipe. When the dough is sufficiently chilled, I rolled it into a circle, placed it on a parchment-paper lined pan, topped it with the onions, and shingled the sweet potatoes on top. I sprinkled the edge of the crust with sesame seeds and season the whole thing with salt, black pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil. 

Salt and black pepper not pictured on the right because truthfully I forgot to add it until I’d already put the galette in the oven, and had to pull it out and correct my mistake on the fly.

Long ago I worked with the pasty chef Michelle Polzine, and my galette-baking follows her lead still - preheat the oven as hot as it can go (for me, that's 550 degrees). If you have a pizza stone, place it in the bottom of the oven where (in my gas oven at least) its hottest. Our pizza stone broke so I skip this step, and adjust the rack to be as low as possible. Place the galette in the oven (on top of your pizza stone if you have it) and drop the temp (I picked 400 since my oven runs a little cool, and that places the internal temp closer to 375). After 20 minutes, I rotate the galette a quarter turn every ten minutes or so until the crust is a deep, burnished brown. Your total bake time will hover around 50 minutes (though I don’t typically pay much attention to total bake times when making galettes at home, preferring the tart itself to tell me when it’s done).  At this point my sweet potatoes are fully cooked and starting to curl up a bit around the edges. I doused them with my sorghum-miso-vinegar glaze and on a whim sprinkle the whole thing with some blue cheese. The galette goes back in the oven so everything can meld, removed once again, and then, in the unskippable final step, the galette must be slid onto a wire rack, sans parchment, to cool. I use the parchment to slide the galette on to the rack from the sheet tray, and then lift an edge up with an offset spatula and shuffle the parchment carefully out from the bottom. This way the bottom of the galette stays crispy and flaky. Here, you can also (carefully!) lift the wire rack up and marvel at the bottom of your galette, which is ideally a rich dark golden color dappled with patches of deeply caramelized brown. 

Reader, it was delicious and also, somehow, reminiscent of a buffalo blue cheese pizza.

See you soon,

Bronwen