WHY THIS BOOK NOW

I remember once hearing that cookbooks are the novels of choice for working parents. That they are bedside reading, blueprints for a fantasy time when afternoons would be free enough to bake a cake or when flavor could be considered an equal to convenience in the morning.

Before becoming a parent and business owner, I found this utterly depressing. Of course, I understood indulging in a cookbook’s pleasurable writing, but to only read and not cook from a cookbook? One café, two restaurants, and one nine-year-old daughter later, and I understand that limitations on time can reduce the family meal to a slapdash event on most days. I know that it’s often easy to forget to pause to really taste the food, and this is despite the fact that I know how to cook well.

You see, there’s no way around it: cooking is work. Work in that it requires forethought, a modicum of skill, and time. Work in that you must use your hands, stand on your feet, wash the dishes. (And, full disclosure: for my husband, Chad, and me, cooking is work. It is how we earn our living.) Your simple hope is that while sitting around the table to share the fruits of your labors, the effort fades to memory. Or better yet, the effort becomes part of a meal’s pleasure, and that the experience of transforming ingredients into a sum greater than their parts connects you to the food in a far more profound way than any recipe lets on. That is the ideal, and to fess up to my own biases, I believe wholeheartedly that it’s attainable.

Chad and I first met at culinary school in Hyde Park, New York, but we really started to come into our own as cooks when we studied with innovative bakers and pastry chefs, from Massachusetts to France to California. After more than a decade of baking, Chad began to make the bread he was after: a loaf with an “old soul.” That is, bread with a caramel-colored crust, a moist crumb, and the slightly sour aroma of the natural leaven. I combined classic French pastry techniques with a California aesthetic, drawing upon seasonal fruit and flowers as inspiration. And though this may come as a surprise, I created all of my pastry recipes that would later become favorites at our bakery while tending to a gluten intolerance.

I realize now, after several years of abstaining entirely from gluten (except for naturally leavened breads, like Chad’s), how physically uncomfortable I truly was. But I discovered this intolerance years before autoimmune disorders were understood, and long before a gluten-free diet was in fashion. Had my intolerance been identified today, I may very well have abandoned wheat early on. But I found an imperfect way to cope with it—mastering pastry recipes one minuscule bite at a time. It’s said that limitations often become the best teachers. And it’s true. I was forced to cultivate an acute awareness of how the slightest shift in technique or ingredient altered a pastry’s outcome.

I’ve brought this same attention to detail and experimentation to working with nongluten flours. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is infinite potential in new recipes and techniques by the very fact that we now have access to such high-quality and diverse flours. I consider myself fortunate that today I can reference my classical training while also abandoning it freely to experiment. Wheat-based recipes, I should say, will always serve as my original reference point. They are what I learned to make first. But a young cook today could happily achieve similarly light textures, crisp crusts, and friable cookies without ever knowing how wheat itself behaves. And that’s an exciting development.

However, it’s certainly worthwhile to know how wheat works, so that we can confidently use ingredients and techniques that do not incorporate it. After all, wheat in all of its forms—from varietals to types of flour—thrives in a bakery setting for a reason. When wheat flour is kneaded, or worked at all, gluten, a substance found in wheat, creates an elastic network between its constituent proteins. This in turn solidifies when heated, giving structure to the baked good. The desired texture and structure are quite different for a loaf of bread than for a piecrust, for example, so the baker works to either develop or minimize the gluten, which helps to achieve the intended form. The baker can also choose from different wheat flours with either low- or high-protein content, which will further aid in this highly manipulative process. While there is no one exact replacement for wheat, its effects can be replicated. For this, we look to an incredible array of nongluten flours to work with, made from grains, legumes, roots, nuts, and in the case of coconut flour, a fruit. Each has unique properties that translate well to particular recipes and often work successfully when combined.

Working with new ingredients is like learning a new language. The basic grammar is the same whether baking with wheat flour or nongluten flours, but the vocabulary is wildly different. And just like the moment when, while learning a new language, you discover a word that has no exact English translation but that opens a world unto itself, baking with nongluten flours has opened my palate to exciting possibilities that I couldn’t have thought of when baking only with wheat.

In facing my intolerance, I’ve learned one final lesson: it’s not just ingredients that matter; it’s also technique. A few years ago, our friend and renowned journalist Michael Pollan was in the midst of writing his book, Cooked. He was studying naturally leavened breads, like Chad’s, and was coming upon research that suggested that such breads, made with heirloom grains and natural leaven, might be suitable for a person like me: gluten-sensitive but without celiac disease. Chad and I recalled how years ago during our stay in the Savoie region of France, I could eat the bread he was baking with his mentor without issue. Any other wheat-based food in France, and in the States when I returned, caused too much discomfort to be worth eating. Michael’s research highlighted the link between enhanced digestibility and the fermentation enacted by a natural leaven, suggesting that such breads might actually work for me. Miraculously, it is true. I can eat Chad’s bread, and any other made in the same way. Science is finally answering our decades-old question, and it turns out it has everything to do with both ingredient and technique. For example, our friend, producer/director J.D. McLelland, is working on a project (and film) known as Ingrained. The project is focused on grain breeding, growing, and processing, as new insights and science emerge to reveal just how much more there is to know about the subject.

In this book, I want to share the many small and large discoveries I’ve made as a professional chef in the role of a home cook. I want a book that inspires experimentation and delivers gratifying moments of success, a cookbook that is as useful to you as Joy of Cooking felt to me, decades ago. I cannot claim it is anywhere as comprehensive as that tome, but I’ve selected favorite recipes from across the seasons, using eggplants, quince, blood oranges, and spring peas. I’ve included my current preferred ways of cooking staple ingredients, like a whole chicken or a piece of salmon, while also including approachable methods for tackling more intimidating projects: a leg of lamb, or that impossible holiday bird, a turkey. In a time when recipes are infinite, I’ve selected ones that will ensure that your efforts are met with success. When I’ve come upon practical tips that feel indispensable to the recipe, or just fascinating for the curious cook, I’ve shared them right after I introduce the recipe. And, inspired by two classic books, Joy of Cooking and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I’ve written the recipes so that the ingredients are alongside the instructions, appearing next to the text right when needed. I have always preferred this way of reading a recipe. I find it easier to track. If I leave the page to juice a lemon or slice an onion, it’s easier to find my place upon return. I have a theory, too, that I tend to learn the ins and outs of a recipe faster in this format because it reads as a continuous narrative. Ultimately, internalizing the general concept of any recipe is a worthwhile goal, for when you know it, the recipe can be altered on a whim. I decided to write the recipes in this way because this book is meant to be a steadfast guide. This style may feel new at first, but I promise, its advantages will soon become clear.

While the recipes, ingredients, and techniques shared here are intended for the modern home cook, I’d be remiss to not credit my time at our bakery. I came into my own as a chef at Tartine, where I witnessed firsthand the seasonal flavors that speak to people every day. When we first opened Tartine in San Francisco, we were swept up in the city’s creative spirit, hanging local art on our walls as we became a part of a dynamic burgeoning food scene. We had no way of anticipating how well our bakery would be received. Even today, lines continue to snake out the door and around the corner of Tartine’s modest space. As our work has matured, so too has the food world. People have come to expect quality ingredients innovatively prepared, drawing upon an ever-widening source of inspiration. The home kitchen, too, has become a different place. The divide that separated health from deliciousness has nearly disappeared. Fat is no longer the demon, salt no longer a dirty word. There’s an understanding that food can be both healthful and flavorful and that a crucial step to cultivating wellness is creating a sense of richness out of elemental foods prepared with intention. Home cooking at its best seeks to strike a balance between everyday sustenance and celebratory foods, while spice, acid, and fermentation have become accessible tools for amping up taste. By wonderful coincidence, these very elements happen to make a food’s nutritious qualities more available.

But it is not only the food world that has changed. In Tartine’s tenure, San Francisco has become the hub of an international tech culture. The very role of technology looms larger than ever in our lives. And, while it has its many advantages, Chad and I are faced with the same quandary as all parents. We want to show our daughter, Archer, that the skills of generations gone by are still relevant today, and that in its own way, there can be as much collective knowledge in a loaf of bread as there is in a smartphone. By using our hands to prepare food for our family and friends, a cultural knowledge is transmitted that no technology can replicate.

Cultural knowledge—family history, where we live, and the influence of friends and others—informs and distinguishes every cookbook. In my case, I lean toward Middle Eastern cooking (having spent my childhood near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where my parents often browsed the spice-filled shops buying spinach and meat pies, baklava, and halvah). My grandmother was from Sweden and was a prolific baker. The flavors and foods I remember from her are cardamom, pickled herring, gravlax, and roasts. My father, being from Kentucky, brought fried chicken, preserves, and pickles to the culinary legacy that has been passed on to me.

That is where this book comes in. When I look at my bookshelves, what I want is an up-to-date, all-purpose cookbook that reflects this new landscape, an inspiring guide to integrating new ingredients and old techniques into the daily tempos of our busy lives. Between us, Chad and I have written three cookbooks. Tartine All Day marks a new kind of book for us: it is a collection of recipes that we like to cook every day. This book, an accumulation of the lessons learned by a working parent with decades of culinary experience, is a companion for every kind of cook. Years from now, I hope that it will be stained and dog-eared, appreciated most for the good food it helps to get on the table night after night. Let other books stack up on the bedside stand—this one belongs in the kitchen.