One of the highlights of my food journalism career thus far is my 2015 interview with Alice Medrich, the Queen of Chocolate and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and baking instructor.
What’s stuck with my from that interview the most – more than the idea of hydrating flours and the nuttiness of toasted oatmeal – is the fact that she hates when people don’t follow her recipes properly. After the days and days of testing she and her co-author Maya Klein put into each one, do you really think you can just wing it and be better than the Queen of Chocolate? And how will you even know if your version is better if you don’t try theirs first?
The most wonderful thing about her recipes, for me, is that they work. If you follow them properly, you will have an incredible chiffon cake or Boston cream cake or chocolate brownie. Which is why I reached for her cookbook Flavor Flours when I wanted to make biscotti, which is what these cinnamon sticks resemble. And while I can’t give you the recipe here (go buy her book!), I can tell you that the secret to this recipe’s success is toasting the flour in a skillet of melted butter first (Earth Balance margarine in my case – sorry, Alice, but lactose intolerant me didn’t have a choice!) to give it a nutty flavour.
These crunchy cookies are huge winners, and the icing on the cake is (literally or figuratively?) the sprinkle of cinnamon-spiced cane sugar dusted on the cooling, twice-baked cookies.
To give you a little more background on why you should buy this cookbook (whether you’re gluten intolerant or not), here’s a full transcription of my interview with her, since the article I wrote about it for FineDiningLovers.com was condensed. And here’s a link to more about that corn flour chiffon cake she mentions below. It’s a winner.
Interview with Alice Medrich, 2015
Why did you want to work with different gluten free flours?
There’s a limit to any ingredient that you use and for us it was figuring out what these flours will do and won’t do. And figuring work-arounds or just exploring it. So far nobody has done exactly what we did in this book. Usually these flours are used as substitues for wheat and that’s kind of a mindset that limits what you can do. And it asks these ingredients to do things that they don’t necessarily want to do.
I’m being cryptic. The whole idea was to celebrate these flours – the tastes and the textures that they bring to the table instead of asking them to be wheat. So it was the opposite of thinking of substitution. We wanted to take these flours with a blank slate, use all of the pastry skills that I have and my co-author has and see what we could do with them that was different from other people were doing and take them where they hadn’t been.
Your book organizes recipes by type of flour used rather than blending them together to give a wheat-like dessert result. Does a gluten-free flour blend give a more traditional cake-like texture?
That’s probably the purpose of those flour blends and I understand that for people can’t eat any wheat at all, the idea of missing all the favourite baked goods is a big issue and people want to enjoy the things they used to enjoy, hence the gluten-free flour blend. I’m not at all interested in gluten-free flour blend. I’m not at all interested in trying to duplicate wheat-flour baking.
what I am interested in, is seeing what can be done with corn flour, what can be done with oat flour, where those things want to go and can go to create things that aren’t duplicates of wheat flour but something new altoghether and interesting and delicious, regardless of whether you can eat wheat or not.
Chiffon cake reappears in many of the chapters with different flours. Why does chiffon cake get special treatment?
Yeah it does, because many of these flours make a really delicious chiffon cake. And I’ll tell you that my early interest in traditional chiffon cake was almost nil. I don’t think it’s a very interesting cake. But when you use these flours that have these other flavours, suddenly it’s a very interesting cake. The corn flour chiffon cake is better than any chiffon cake I’ve eaten and it has this beautiful taste of corn and it has this beautiful golden colour. It’s a whole other animal.
And the roulade?
There’s a lemon roulade that’s made with a rice flour genoise. There’s a bûche de noël, I suppose that’s a roulade.
Do you generally prefer baking with wheat flour?
It’s not a preference issue that way at all. I just look at these flours as brand new ingredients to explore. And the purpose of the book was to treat them the way any chef would treat an exciting and new flavourful ingredient. And that is explore what they’ll do and what’s new and exciting about them. So it’s not a question of do I prefer wheat or do I prefer not wheat. I eat everything and I enjoy everything. So what I’m trying to do is explain this point of view. It’s not either wheat or not wheat. You can use some of these flour with wheat too to create some new and interesting things. It’s just that what motivates me as a writer and a chef, is taking ingredients to places maybe they haven’t been before. I love the problem solving, the tasting, and I love using the skills that I have to work on these things in new ways, and that was true with the low fat book many years ago too. I approached low-fat in a way that was completely different than anybody had before. So for me this just seems consistent in the arc of my career, to take on these flours I this way.
Was there a flour in particular that surprised you the most?
I think they were all surprising in…okay lets just talk about flavours that we think we know. Everybody knows what oatmeal tastes like, right? Or thinks they know what oatmeal tastes like, but when you go from oatmeal to a really fine flour, you can do something different with that flour than you can with the oatmeal. So when you taste these flours in different applications, like different kinds of cakes or cookies, with textures you’re not used to, the flavours become a kind of revelation. You taste aspects of the flavour that you might not have noticed when you were eating your bowl of oatmeal. So if you’re eating a really light, wonderful sponge cake, plain sponge cake make out of oat flour, it has so much flavour, a kind of toffee caramel kind of notes that you may not have noticed in that bowl of oatmeal, the cake is so good that it may not need any frosting. You maybe want to eat it with fruit and cream or maybe you just want to eat it, a lovely little piece of cake. And that was true of a lot of the flours, like corn. We know corn, we know cornmeal and cornbread, but when you take that ingredient and make it really, really fine, you can do some things that you can’t do with the coarser meal. And the way we taste things is often driven by the texture of them, so if you can eat a really light, fluffy cake made out of corn, it’s a whole other animal than cornbread. And I find it really delightful and wonderful and surprising.
A lot of people do like that fluffiness and you’re dealing with things like buckwheat and teff that are not fluffy…
But wait a minute. You just said it – are they not fluffy?
How do you make them fluffy?
Buckwheat can be made into a light and lovely soufflé. Buckwheat can be made into a spongecake that will change your idea of what buckwheat can taste like. Buckwheat can be made into a lovely butter cake, that’s soft and delicious to eat and has sort of floral flavour notes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. If you take these flours, these flavours that you think you know and transform them into textures that you’re not used to, then it’s a whole different world for that ingredient.
Are there different kinds of buckwheat flour? Lighter buckwheat flours?
It’s not about lightness of the flour. It’s about what you do with the flour.
So what is it in your recipes that makes them lighter? Is it the mixing process? The hydration of the flour?
Sometimes it’s the mixing process. Sometimes it’s just using that flour in a way that nobody has used it before, like in a chiffon cake or a genoise or another type of sponge cake or in a cookie. Usually when we’re talking about buckwheat flour, we’re talking about either soba noodles or kasha. People are familiar with kasha or buckwheat groats. Or maybe soba noodles, which are kind of dense and have a kind of earthy flavour. Or buckwheat pancakes, maybe buckwheat crepes if you’ve been to France and eaten those. But when you take buckwheat flour and try doing some things that people haven’t bothered to do before, you taste that flavour in an entirely different way.
So you mentioned buckwheat noodles. If you go into other cultures, you find a lot of these flours used in different ways – not like you use them in the book – but why didn’t you turn to things like Japanese rice and sweet red bean daifuku, or Thai coconut and sticky rice desserts?
That sort of exists already and my interest was in taking these ingredients in the form of a fine flour, and going somewhere else with them. We used teff flour. Teff is the grain of Ethiopia, in the injera and in the porridge that they make. We completely ignored what’s done traditionally, just to innovate with this very flavourful flour.
Do you think teff needs to be fermented like it is for injera? For digestibility?
No not at all. It makes a really lovely sponge cake. It makes great fruit and nut loaf. It makes a beautiful chocolate genoise, possibly better than a normal chocolate genoise. It makes great brownies.
You know people are going to substitutions with the book. Is that a bad idea?
Well, we spent hundreds and hundreds of hours testing these recipes to get them to be as delicious as they are and if people are going to make substitutions they may or may not get something delicious. Or they may or may not enjoy the kind of experimentation that leads to arriving at a good recipe. It’s kind of difficult to learn to bake with a flour ingredient that doesn’t have gluten. We’re so used to gluten and the way it behaves. So substitutions aren’t always straightforward and they don’t necessarily end up successful without a lot of trials. So I feel like unless somebody is dedicated and just really enjoys endless testing, which I do of course, that probably the best results you can get a from a book like this, is to try the recipe first. And figure out what you like or don’t like about it and substitute from there or experiment from there. Because if you go in and do all these substitutions off the bat, you’ll never know what they recipe was supposed to be in the first place.
I preach that to so many people about recipe books in general.
It drives me crazy.
So with so many desserts in your repertoire and only so many birthdays and holidays in the year, what recipe will you keep making from this book?
I like the corn flour chiffon cake and it has variations. Maya’s chocolate fudge cake is a cake that you can bring to any party. That’s an American-style layer cake and it’s superb. I like the fruit and nut cake with teff flour. I mean, there’s no recipe in this book that I don’t think is worthy. The cookies are quite wonderful. The oat flour sponge cake. The idea was if you were baking in a situation where there was somebody was can’t eat gluten, that you should never have to be apologetic or you should never have to make a second cake to feed the people who eat wheat. In other words, the recipes have to taste good enough that everybody will be pleased. I taught a class last night where only one person in the class was gluten sensitive and everybody agreed that they would serve any of those recipes to anybody. So it’s just a way of expanding your ideas of what can be done with an ingredient and expanding your ideas of what baking really is. Most of western baking, most of the techniques are all geared to working with or against gluten. Either developing the gluten for breads or somehow outsmarting it for tender cakes or cookies. So all of our techniques are derived from the fact that there’s this substance in there that can get tough unless you treat it right.
A lot of the recipes tell the reader to set the batter aside once some of the dry and liquid ingredients are combined. Can you explain how you came across the idea of hydrating the flour, what it does and why it’s important.
A lot of these are whole grains, and if they’re not well-enough hydrated they don’t get fully baked. So they don’t taste good or they’re mushy or they’re gritty. Actually hydration is important in a lot of baking, even with wheat, but people don’t notice it or talk about it very much. But with these recipes we found that making sure that the flour got enough hydration, either by resting it sometimes or by knowing that there’s enough liquid in the recipe to start with and enough baking time in the oven to get that hydration to happen, it was just important to texture and flavour.
Is that why oil would work better than butter in some recipes?
No, there’s a big diversity of recipes in this book and I think for anybody who bakes a lot, the techniques are all the techniques we often use, but sometimes rearranged and sometimes used for different reasons. There are plenty of cakes in the world that use oil instead of butter, so a few of ours do. There’s one sponge cake in there where the flour has a bit of a grain to it. In order to soften the perception of that in your mouth, I used a little bit of oil instead of butter, or oil with butter, I can’t remember, so to modify the texture a little bit. And there’s no one technique in here.
What does the oil do for the Boston cream pie recipe?
That’s a type of chiffon cake and that’s just the definition of a chiffon cake. A chiffon cake has oil in it. It makes it soft and tender and seemingly moist.
Is there a reason you avoid xanthan gum?
Some people don’t…it doesn’t agree with them and I think it’s very possible that so much gluten-free baking has so much xanthan gum in it and if you eat a lot of stuff with a lot of xanthan gum in it, I can imagine that’s going to tie up your insides in a very unpleasant way, because that’s partly what the gum does. We set out to use as little as possible, and to only use it in recipes where it really seemed necessary to hold everything together. So when you see the book, you’ll notice that probably 60% of the recipes in it, do not contain any xanthan gum.
Would guar gum do the same?
Same. We don’t use guar. The gum that we used when we used it was xanthan. The point of view was that the techniques for gluten-free baking had sort of become codified before anybody explored different ways of doing things. So if you look up the recipe for gluten-free chiffon cake, you’re going to find a recipe that has nine or ten ingredients and gum. As a pastry chef and a baker, I knew that recipes get their structure from eggs in the first place, like all the sponge cakes, I knew that there might be enough structure just in the recipe alone, to be able to make a cake with a gluten-free flour without the gum. So I tried it and I was right. So what I’m saying is people aren’t questioning what is being handed down as how you bake gluten-free. And I think it’s because a lot of the people who created the gluten-free baking were never bakers or pastry chefs in the first place.
Or they’re not explorers. They don’t delve into the why.
Well maybe, but I think earlier on when there weren’t a lot of recipes out there, and people were desperate to eat something, they just didn’t have the baking and pastry skills to realize that you could get structure without adding the gums. So everything has a gum in it, but it doesn’t have to.
You have a chestnut flour chapter in this book. And you had a chestnut cake in your book Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts that worked really well. What are the differences in texture and flavour in the two kind of mindsets of chestnut cakes?
There’s a whole chapter. So in that chapter, there’s a chestnut genoise, which I made into a chestnut buche de Noel. And a genoise is a sponge. So that’s one kind of chestnut cake. There’s a chestnut fallen chestnut torte in the new book, which is probably somewhat similar to the one in Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts – a little bit gooey and soft and rich and chocolatey. I did an Italian jam tart with chestnut flour and I did a ricotta cheesecake with a chestnut crust. So in each of the chapters, the flours are used in a variety of ways.
Are you going to do another book with amaranth and quinoa and keep going?
I don’t know. If I do another book it’s likely we might use some of these same flours and maybe some new ones and do some more savoury stuff. I don’t know, that’s not at all settled. And there’s also a lot of non-grain flours, too. Cricket flour and apple flour, which are kind of interesting to me too. I keep saying we because I wrote this book with a co-author, Maya Klein, and we love the problem solving part of it and the figuring out. Kind of the new thinking. It’s really hard but we love it. So it’s the idea of exploring new ingredients is just very fun and very challenging. And I think…so you’re asking about amaranth and…I’m still a little bit curious about these flours without gluten because we learned so much doing this one project that it seems a shame to abandon what we learned quite yet, because I think that even though we did a huge amount of work for this book, it’s almost just scratching the surface, tip of the iceberg of what there is more to do and to learn.
Are there any flours you’re not excited to work with? Millet for example?
I love millet. I love the taste of millet. I’ve had some weird interesting problems with millet being bitter and I’m not sure if that’s a problem with the quality of the ingredient or something else, but I love the taste of millet. Millet was going to be in this book but we ended up having too much to do and we ended up arbitrarily not working with millet.
Are you as passionate about chocolate as when you wrote your first book, Cocolat?
Always. Cocolat was my first book and Flavor Flours is my tenth. And chocolate’s changed a lot and I’m still very much interested in it. And maybe just because this just came out, this is where most of my attention is at the moment.
You don’t have anything against vanilla?
Love vanilla. Vanilla is wonderful. Vanilla is not the opposite of chocolate.
Exactly. Do you have a favourite type of chocolate in the world right now?
There are so many good chocolates now that I don’t feel married to one these days. I’m doing a lot of classes lately with Guittard chocolate, which is an old, it is the oldest remaining family-owned chocolate company in California. So I’m doing some courses with their chocolate. They’re introducing a new line of retail bars, so I’m working a lot with them lately, and that’s pretty exciting.
If you were stranded on a desert island and you could have one chocolate dessert what would it be?
I’d like to have a little stash of chocolate bars to nibble on. For chocolate desserts, that’s hard.
Do you have a weakness for a particular bakery or item, as in when you’re in a city you have to have x?
You’re killing me! I’ve been baking at home for so long lately and so intensely I don’t think about anything that’s out there. You know I really like that…Oh I just ate a couple things at the B Patisserie in San Francisco the other day that just knocked my socks off. She makes an astonishing good Kouign-amann and she makes this banana chocolate croissant that’s gooey inside and warm and flaky on the outside. That’s unbelievably good.
Your Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat desserts cookbook wasn’t a granola-style cookbook, but it was lighter. You were keeping fat to a minimum.Why is that?
Well I have a problem with that as a definition. I understand that lighter might be good sometimes. I’m not saying that this is a healthy cookbook either but there’s a whole lot of whole grains in here. But there’s sugar and butter. It’s not written from a health conscious standpoint, but good ingredients and delicious. Very similar to this cookbook, it was relevant with what was going on at the time. Low-fat was a big idea. It had been done so badly and in such a bogus way often and with all kinds of substitute ingredients that weren’t very good and often those ingredients didn’t taste very good so you’d eat three times as much to get satisfaction. And I just felt that it could be better with real ingredients, real chocolate, real butter, but still moderate in fat. It was a challenge and I loved it. I sort of like viewing this as the new baking in the sense that baking becomes more diverse and used different kinds of ingredients than we’re used to, as opposed to this this is just for gluten-free. I really want anybody who’s a passionate baker or a curious eater to be intrigued and interested and find these things delicious, and I think they will. Yeah, just pushing the boundaries of what we think baking is. Getting away from the idea that flour is wheat. I just don’t like the idea that we’re always trying to make these other flours into the substitution for wheat instead of a whole new kind of cake.
What does a gluten-free person do when they want a croissant?
I haven’t cracked that one yet. I don’t know if anyone is making a really good croissant. I think that’s the other area that I’d like Maya and I to look at is the sort of yeast and laminated doughs and things like that. I think that’d be really fun. I’d like to do a Flavour Flour croissant that tastes like the flour in a really good croissant. And has all that flakiness. That would be fantastic and wonderfully challenging.
