The Craft Of Baking

In the ten years that have passed since Regan Daley’s award-winning baking book In The Sweet Kitchen first appeared on store shelves, there’s been a notable shift in the way we perceive food and cooking.

The idea of using local, seasonal ingredients existed, but it’s become more of a movement in recent years, Daley remarks in an interview with CityLine.ca. Popular Leslieville brunch spot Bonjour Brioche seems the perfect venue for a sit-down chat about all things baking, between the display of lovingly crafted tarts and cakes at the counter and the smell of buttery croissants wafting through the establishment.

“Ten years ago, there was a burgeoning awareness about ingredients in savoury food and people becoming a little bit more savvy about eating locally, seasonally, (and) organically, the affable Daley says. That was pretty new, and even new, more regional cooking, exotic ingredients, the importance of quality and freshness in ingredients — that was being talked about but it certainly wasn’t taken for granted, and it was still being talked about in cooking as opposed to baking.”

The time seemed right to introduce In The Sweet Kitchen to a new generation of cooks and bakers, which is the reason it has just been put out in a soft-cover edition. Replacing the long, spindly vanilla beans that adorn the hard-cover version? A cracked egg, the yolk vibrantly yellow against a backdrop of powdery white flour. Daley hopes cooks and bakers will apply those same concepts of seasonality and sustainability to their sweet concoctions.

“I think there’s still a divide between what people perceive as the world of food, and all that that encompasses, and baking, she says. One is very cultural, and very global, and at the same time there’s a sensitivity to sustainability, and organics, and local, and seasonal. And yet when a lot of those same people or same conversations happen about baking, it’s pretty retro. As far retro as to be pretty backwards. People still pulling out stale flour to bake the once a year they do it, not getting an understanding of the very few things there are to understand about baking and therefore feeling they have their hands tied behind their back when they go to bake something because they’re not sure how to do it.”

Daley, who grew up baking with her grandmothers, as well as her parents, didn’t decide she wanted to be a professional baker until her mid-twenties. Her experience as a pastry chef in professional kitchens such as Avalon both educated her about the importance of quality ingredients and allowed her to get creative with her desserts. She stresses though that her recipes aren’t overwrought, structural sweets, but comforting delights: Valrhona Molten Chocolate Cakes, Double-Crust Deep Red Raspberry Pie, Wild Blueberry Buttermilk Cinnamon Muffins, and Caramel Apple and Sweet Cream Cheesecake.

None of them are pastry chef recipes. I was never a fancy, creative sugar work, wedding cake-y kind of baker. I’m a baker as opposed to a pastry chef and I’m crazy for home baking and what I can do with my kids and what I can do for dinner parties. It’s not highfalutin’ food. So I think the recipes are very approachable, she says.

Though the recipes themselves look delectable, they only comprise about half the book. The other half is a reference guide crammed with useful information for the home baker, including ingredient definitions and uses, essential baking tools, a lengthy substitution chart, and a flavour-pairing chart. It’s this section of the book Daley hopes readers find particular value in.

My intent with that first half was to make a reference, a go-to book, that can be used in a hundred different ways from just pulling it off the shelf and referencing it very quickly, to doing a mini-course in a very accessible way, she says.

The flavour-pairing chart is where bakers can really go outside the lines, Daley enthuses.

“If you’ve got a recipe that calls for pears in a tart, and it’s the middle of the summer and you’d really like to use apricots or raspberries, instead of using the accent flavourings that you might have with the pears, let’s say hazelnut and vanilla which are those warm, autumnal flavours, you might want to get something a bit fresher, a bit zestier, you might want to try pistachio and lemon, something a little brighter, she says. So this flavour-pairing chart is certainly not a bible, but it’s inspiring, hopefully, so that it’ll give readers more confidence to be able to say, ‘Wait a second. This is just a frame. The recipe’s just a frame, the same as it is in cooking.’ So the same way you can vary a stir-fry, you can vary any tart, any pie, any cake, any cookie recipe, depending on what you’ve got at hand.”

It’s time to get back to the craft of baking, Daley says, and stop thinking of it as a daunting, rigid exercise.

If you think back to people in your life who were the best bakers, I guarantee you they were not the astrophysicists, they were your grandma, maybe your creative uncle. People who were very intuitive, very hands-on, it’s as much an art, a craft, as it is science, she says. The science part of it exists, but it’s really simple. If you learn a few specific things, then all of a sudden you’re liberated and you can go off and experiment and explore, and take it in lots of different directions.

In The Sweet Kitchen, the 2010 edition, is currently on bookshelves.

Originally published on CityLine