I’m Pastry Chef Stella Parks and This Is How I Eat

Stella Parks, also known as “BraveTart”, knows more about cake than most people do. She is CIA trained and has experience in restaurants, but it is her attention to detail and infectious enthusiasm for American desserts that make her recipes not only technically great, but downright joyful. And while cooking and eating sweets is a real dream job, it’s impossible to live off a cake, so we were thrilled when we spoke to Stella about her favorite savory foods, the horror of chocolate covered strawberries, and why she should try checking the whole cookie. …

Location: Lexington, Kentucky

Current Place of Work: Senior Editor at Serious Eats , Cookbook Author , Pastry Chef.

One word to describe how you eat: intentionally

It’s hard for me to imagine that you are eating anything other than cakes and pastries. Do you eat cake for breakfast?

This is amazing. You know, oddly enough, I don’t like breakfast. When I wake up, I’m still kind of out of my mind after lunch and not very ready for food. So, I kind of drink tea and coffee in the morning until I end up feeling hungry.

How do you make coffee?

I usually drink black coffee. If I drink espresso – and this usually only happens when I am in New York for work, and I am not at home and cannot do anything on my own – I will drink a latte or something with milk, simply because I the espresso seems to turn a little sour, and consuming a little dairy or non-dairy products similar to milk helps soften the blow. It can also complement the facets of a bad espresso if I’m not staying next to a good coffee shop. At home we mostly drink tea, so coffee is something like my drink “when I travel and I have no one to take care of but myself.”

Do you prefer to have lunch once a day?

Yes, I’m kind of like a dining person. Dinner is my romance of the day. I eat lunch regularly when I’m at Serious Eats – it’s kind of a must for the office culture if I’m ever going to fit in and be accepted because they take lunch so damn seriously.

But at home, which is a big part of my life, when I’m in Kentucky, lunch is not what I usually do at this moment of the day. I just bake so much and test so many different things. A few small bites of various sugary foods really ruin your appetite. So I try not to starve, although my husband also works from home, so if he cooks dinner for himself – because he is a normal person who eats regular food – he can cook an omelet or cook something that just smells really great and it tempts me sometimes. And then I’m one of those awful people who slowly get closer and closer to him until I’m right at his elbow, and he is like, “Oh! Do you want to take a bite? “To be persuaded if something smells really piquant.

If I try to taste six different batches of Tate-style thin and crunchy chocolate chip cookies, it can get really difficult if you try a slice of pepperoni pizza in the middle, because the cookie slices will taste sweeter after that. with the salinity you just drank. It will really screw you up. This year I tried to balance the situation by including more savory baked goods in my repertoire. I just baked a whole wheat bread and it was really great.

I feel like people think that, as a culinary artist, you have complete control over what you eat and your diet, and if anything, it’s the other way around.

Yes, this is it. And that in itself can be a little stressful. Two weeks ago, right before my last trip to New York, I tried Levaenne’s chocolate chip cookie, it’s a big, thick, monstrous cookie; Tate-style chocolate chip cookies, thin and crunchy; and homemade pancake mix. And I just kind of wanted to die, because all these things are so sweet and so hard, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You’re like, “I need to do another batch to see what it looks like, and I also need to eat this to see what it looks like.” And even when you’re done with something, you think, “Okay, I think I get it, we’re done,” you still need to do it again and eat it whole. Because if you make a cookie that is perfectly aged in one bite, but you’ve never actually eaten all of the cookies, then that cookie might actually be too sweet if you don’t know how the bites fit together.

It’s the same with pumpkin pie. You can’t say, “I’m only trying one spoonful of the filling,” because it might seem perfectly flavored, but by the time you get to the end of a whole slice, you’re saying, “Oh my god, there’s too much ginger.” you have to eat it whole, but if you try to eat it whole on the same day that you are still testing recipes, you will just get very sick. So you have to kind of decompose it. This is very cool. Everything about my diet is very unpleasant and I am not an example of good health.

When you finally get to dinner, what do you usually eat?

We’ve been in awe of Japanese food lately, partly because of the time of year – it’s kind of like Japanese Le Crueset. It’s just a heavy clay pot that you cook in, so it’s a slower heating method compared to stainless steel or whatever. It’s a bit like cooking in a heavy Dutch oven, although it’s a very different material. These are all stews, stews and a little more soulful cuisine. There are quite a few vegetables in the evenings because by the time I got there I had a lot of snacks like rolls, pancakes, cookies, cakes and all. I’m like, “I don’t even want pasta or bread.” I usually need tons of greens, tons of vegetables, and just endless amounts of salt. I usually don’t have enough dairy products. I mean, I really really love cheese, but if you try a lot of milk based desserts, at the end of the day you ask, “Do I want more dairy in my body?” So I really love tofu, especially really good tofu.

What kind of tofu do you eat? Do you have a favorite brand?

I will do it! I am the worst. I don’t have soy milk but I make my own soy milk and then I have nigari to turn it into tofu and I have a little box of tofu and then I just strain it and make tofu in a mold or something- then something like that.

Do you find unsweetened cooking relaxing, or is it just something you have to do to feed yourself?

This is more I have to do to feed myself. I don’t find it stressful; I find all kitchen designs relaxing. I really enjoy doing things with my hands. I don’t know how to cook, how I intuitively understand the baking process, which is really ironic because it makes me really follow the rules of the recipe because I don’t quite understand what to expect. But cooking is so carefree, you know?

Even with Daniel Gritzer, Culinary Director of Serious Eats, I ask, “How many grams do you think are in a large clove of garlic?” He’s like, “Oh my God, Stella, stop. Take a clove of garlic. ” I’m like, “I know, but these are those tiny little heads of garlic in winter, and they are really small, and I’m not really sure what a regular clove of garlic should be …” I want to know! I don’t have the level of intuition to draw inspiration from cooking.

You mentioned that you love adding a ton of salt to your lunch. How many types of salt do you have?

I’m not super salty trash. I have a diamond crystal for all my baked goods. I have Maldon as table salt. I have some sea salt that we bought when we were on vacation to season our food on the way. So I still have what I’m polishing. It’s not salt per se, but I have a gorgeous bottle of Japanese soy sauce. It is an important form of sodium.

In addition to this fancy soy sauce, do you have any seasoning or seasoning with which you apply everything?

The answer is homemade chili chips . I’m fucking obsessed with this. I ate it today on my husband’s stolen omelette.

In your BraveTart book, you’ll find many recipes for things people usually buy in packaged form, like Girl Scout and Oreos cookies. Are there any prepackaged baked goods you buy?

There are things I buy for love, like Pocky sticks. It is difficult to do it properly. But baked goods? No. I’m not going to give up one in someone else’s house. But usually, if I have one of these, I probably want to do it.

What about savory? Does Trader Joe’s have frozen convenience foods or snacks that you really enjoy?

I’ve never been inside Trader Joe’s. I walked up to him, looked out the windows and as far as I can tell, these are a bunch of things other people have done, so I’m fine! I can do everything! I know they have frozen dumplings or something, but we have so many cool restaurants in Lexington that if I really want dumplings, I’d better support the local business. In a family shop, they are not that expensive. But this is more of a philosophical approach to food; If you have to spend every moment of your day thinking about food, you tend to come up with some strange rules associated with it.

Can we take a look inside your refrigerator?

Yes. Usually there are a lot of baking projects there, but since I just got back it has been fruitless.

Do you have an order at the diner?

My formative diner experience is the Eveready Diner in Hyde Park, NY , which means my diner order is a disco fries, kind of awesome chili cheese and gravy mash.

If not roast at the disco, what’s your favorite style of fries?

I love the classic fries, although there is a special place for waffles in my heart. I love good fried waffles – so much good texture. Emmy Squared in Brooklyn serves okonomie fries, so it’s fries with bonito flakes and cupee mayonnaise and it’s really funny and delicious.

Here in Lexington, a good friend of mine has a restaurant very close to our house and there isn’t a ton to be really close to our home, so this is our favorite place to dine and its chips are fantastic. It’s kind of like my platonic fries ideal, just a classic hand-cut potato situation, reddish brown, normal length – nothing extra long, normal size. They are perfect.

Do you have snacks at the cinema?

I’m kind of like the popcorn butter girl. I want all the fake oil. I want it all.

Do you make popcorn at home?

I don’t do this as often as I would like, because this is usually exactly what I don’t need in my life, namely extra carbs. But I love popcorn deeply and unswervingly. This is such a clean and delicious food. I like several varieties of popcorn and cannot enjoy them as much as I would like.

I usually add it to refined coconut oil and then salt the shit out of it, and that’s usually about it. I want to add ghee, but I usually don’t because I’m consuming too much fat in a day. I’m in butter.

Do you have a habitual “sad meal” or “can’t even eat”?

So, just recently, someone tweeted this to me: What’s my sad dessert or what do I bake when I’m sad? These are two different questions for me. If I’m sad and about to bake something, it’s usually a harder or harder project because I want to be distracted. I’m not one of those people who say, “I’ll just sit with my sadness, really feel it and survive,” I’m like, “Take me away from this. I can’t even think about it. “

If I was sad and dining out, I would probably order a putin at my friend’s restaurant and just eat a bunch of gravy and fries, maybe a hamburger or something. But if I’m sad at home and want to take a break from it with food, I’ll probably do something more challenging, like lasagna or something that takes an entire day.

How do you eat during all your travels?

I usually have something like banana and coffee at the airport. I don’t like to eat food when I’m excited, and when I’m at the airport, I’m usually anxious, so I’m kind of internally disconnected. The food does not calm me down. I think about it too much. I’ll say “this shit” or “this is badly seasoned.” It’s unsatisfactory when this part of your brain criticizes.

So I’m going to be aiming for something that looks more like God did it, so I can’t argue with that. It’s just a banana. It is what it is.

Also, I don’t want everything I touch with my hands – you know, a banana has a peel to hold it in – because I’m so paranoid that I’ll get sick from just touching the arm of my seat on an airplane and picking up someone else. germs, and got the flu or whatever. But also! It reminded me of my only perfect finished product, which of course is the Biscoff cookie. They are perfect. I wouldn’t change anything.

If you could only choose one source of salt, one source of fat, and one source of acid, what would you choose for each category?

I think I would go for the Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt. I’m sure I would choose cheap unsalted American butter for my fat. One source of acid, huh? It’s a difficult question. I love all kinds of acidic foods. Oh my God. Do I choose professionally or personally?

I will let you do both because I am very benevolent.

Benevolent goddess! Okay. Okay, this is a brand new breakdown. So it’s okay – Diamond Crystal kosher salt and cheap unsalted American butter are my salt and fat professionally. My professional acid would probably be lemon juice. I would definitely eat my Maldone salt and my fat would probably be some fancy olive oil. It would be in my salad for dipping, watering and cooking on it. And my acid will probably be really good apple cider vinegar. Actually, I didn’t know there was such a thing as good apple cider vinegar. I thought it was like “this is it,” but Michael Harlan Turkell, who wrote the book Acid Trip – he did some guest posts for us on Serious Eats, and he introduced me – I think the brand is called O -Med is apple cider vinegar and it amazed me. It is so wonderful and delicious. He’s really good at salad dressing, really good with fried chicken, and he’s just great everywhere.

I want to talk about how much you hate sous vide cooking.

[Laughs] The most!

I understand why you hate this in your work. It looks like it could be completely useless.

It’s not obligatory. It’s quite difficult because I have this fragmented psyche. So there is a part of me that has worked in the restaurant environment for years, and I can fully see the charm of sous video in many restaurant settings. At the Table Three Ten restaurant where I worked, and it was there that Food & Wine named me America’s best new pastry chef – where basically my whole career was built – I literally had one pan and one burner for 100 percent of all the tasks that I had to be done in the kitchen.

I get sous-vide; this is useful. If you’re thinking, “I need to lure a bunch of sous vide pears,” great! Do it! Go! Or if I need to add some cream and herbs, this is a really great way to warm things up and keep them there without using the stove. It definitely has its uses. You can temper chocolate with it if necessary. There are absolutely correct and good ways to use it. I really appreciate it from a restaurant point of view, but from a home cook’s point of view – I mean maybe if you have tiny kitchen and few burners.

Allison Roman has often posted pictures of her incredibly tiny kitchen and tiny little four-burner stove, but she still has a four-burner stove and I have a four-burner stove. If you have a very small home kitchen, you probably have two burners, but for the most part, home cooks have a stove, and heck you can do so much with a stove. So for me the benefit of sous vide is the extent to which it allows you to do things that you otherwise would not be able to do. So if you don’t have the resources to lure pears away, sous vide is perfect for that. Or, if you don’t have a reliable oven and really want to just enjoy crème brulee, be my guest. I also appreciate the evaporation that occurs in many recipes. I would prefer to cook creme brulee in the oven, but I know that not everyone agrees.

Do you think tempering chocolate is an easier or maybe less dangerous way to do it because you have precise temperature control?

I think it really depends on what you want to do with the chocolate, because its viscosity is very different. You will end up with chocolate that is very thick, making it a little more difficult to dip. But sous vide is a really great way to melt chocolate without going over the threshold. You know, that’s why you can’t just throw chocolate in the microwave. You will overheat him and he will lose his temper. With sous vide, you can throw it on very low fire – like 80? 90? – and melt the chocolate without losing patience. You can then use it for things like the coating, to break it up and make a side dish for dessert, or spread on cookies, or other things where you are physically manipulating it rather than trying to dip something. That’s all I need to get my job done.

So don’t you think this is a good way to dip strawberries?

If you like chocolate covered strawberries, I think that will be fine. I think people don’t mind a thicker layer of chocolate. I cannot make chocolate covered strawberries, so I cannot speak to her in person. It looks like a phobia. It is a juicy moist strawberry texture and a crunchy creamy chocolate texture. I am very worried that I keep them in my mouth at the same time. It’s just awful for me. The strawberries are so cold and then the chocolate doesn’t melt in your mouth. It’s all waxy, and then you have this waxy lump of fat that slowly melts on your tongue with the cold juiciness of strawberries that just kind of mix. Not into this.

I mean, when you say that, I don’t know I’m doing this anymore.

[Laughs] I’m sorry that my horror completely disrupted our conversation. If you’re going to dip truffles or something where you want a really thin, tender shell, I feel like my results with sous vide weren’t smooth enough. And there may well be ways to get around it, it’s just that I never had circumstances that motivated me enough to explore the possibilities.

What would you like all home bakers to know?

I want everyone to understand that not all universal flours are created equal. This is not a regulated term. There is a universal flour that is made with 100 percent chlorinated soft white wheat flour, which has a completely different behavior than other brands, and can be made with 100 percent red durum wheat flour that is completely unprocessed. And then there is the flour made from a mixture of white and red wheat, and they are all over the place. Some are high in protein and some are high in starch and vice versa.

Therefore, I always try to indicate in my recipes what kind of flour I use. And I think some people are getting a little salty. They’re like, “Well, if you’re making a recipe that only works with one type of flour, you’re not a very good baker.” In fact, all bakers make a recipe that only works with one type of flour, unless that baker is also cross-testing their recipe on multiple brands of flour – honestly, I don’t think most recipe makers are wasting such time. So the best thing any baker can do is find a brand that they like and stick with it, and as a courtesy tell which brand it is. People don’t understand this, and they just say, “Well, I made it out of this agony, and it doesn’t work. The recipe is bad. Well, this flour has comparatively less starch, or it has a lot more protein, or it has a lot more starch, and that will affect everything. So if you have persistent problems because their biscuits are not spreading enough, or their cake is too coarse or has a cornbread-like texture, try a different flour.

This is one of the reasons why I do not envy your work at all. There is so much chemistry going on that many people are simply unaware of. You deal with so many factors with just flour, and then you go to butter, and that’s a whole host of other factors …

Exactly. Every ingredient! Is each ingredient like this – heavy cream or light cream? Is it homogenized or not homogenized? There is an incredible matrix of variables interacting, and even though you can control every variable, including the type of pots, pans, bakeware and all the equipment, because that’s another huge variable. We are partly to blame for this at Serious Eats – we love to focus on science and things that can be controlled and variables that we can identify, name, and research.

But in the end, baking requires a lot of skill. People say, “I followed the recipe to T, I measured it to the gram, I used all the brands you recommended, and it still flopped.” It still takes some practice and some experience. Baking is inextricably linked to special occasions. People want to do something nice for someone – make them a birthday cake or a cookie for the office – and they go out of their way to do everything the recipe says, and I can understand how frustrating it would really be to feel as if you went the extra mile and then the results were bad. It sucks.

It’s like knitting your first scarf. It takes a couple of tries to get the hang of it, and get a good rhythm, and get those smooth, even loops. I’m sure I would know that word if I were a knitter.

Baking is like a laboratory experiment or a laboratory procedure, right? Scientists will conduct an experiment, and then it should be reproducible. And someone else in the laboratory must be able to confirm that this is possible. And it’s kind of crazy to think that there is someone who is, “Yes, that’s confirmed. It’s absolutely possible. ” This does not mean that you are good at it or that you are going to do it on the first try.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.