In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, we are joined once again by Caroline Saunders, a skilled pastry chef and dedicated recipe tester, who channels her passion into crafting delectable treats using climate-friendly ingredients.
Ross Kenyon and Radhika Moolgavkar enthusiastically embraced the challenge of trying Caroline’s climate-friendly baking recipes. Discover who fared better in their quest to bake the perfect key lime pie!
Discover how Caroline’s journey towards becoming a climate-conscious baker was ignited in her personal life but then involved a radical career change out of environmental media and into studying abroad at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and interning at a Michelin-starred restaurant. The ingenuity and precision of the pastry chefs she encountered inspired her to harness her culinary skills for a greater environmental cause.
Explore how Caroline is developing best practices, creating a gateway for at-home bakers into regenerative foods.
Currently, Caroline tests recipes for a cookbook author who shares her passion for climate-friendly baking. She experiments with Kernza flour, spelt flour, and non-dairy milks, sharing her innovations on her blog and social media.
Caroline encourages culinary exploration with novel elements and the generous sharing of discoveries. She underscores the importance of supporting businesses that embrace climate-friendly ingredient choices. Discover the perspectives of other bakers on seed-saving and recipes that prioritize the climate's welfare. Envision the future of global sustenance in the decades and centuries ahead.
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. I’m just regretting not having the tape I already turned on to catch that.
Caroline Saunders: I was going to say — that was, like, that was the important bit. We’re going to have to rewind. I can always repeat myself. I love to repeat myself.
Ross Kenyon: It’s okay, that’s part of the ephemerality of it. It’s gone forever, listener. You’ll never know what we were just talking about. It was fantastic. I guess you have no way of independently verifying this statement. But hi, I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori. This is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. We talk about carbon removal and things adjacent to it, like climate baking. We have an alumna back on the show: Caroline Saunders.
Caroline Saunders: Hello.
Ross Kenyon: Hey. You actually have one of the most popular episodes ever, because you were the final episode before season break. And people, I think, just listen to the most — like, the last episode. So you just cashed in here like windfall, or we have, like, die-hard dessert fans. It’s one of the two, and nothing in between. And I’ve got Radhika Moolgavkar here, a host of Carbon Removal Newsroom, Nori’s head of supply and methodology, and also a baker. You like to bake, you’ve said yourself before.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I do love to. I love to bake. In fact, I spent many of my stay-at-home-mom days baking. And now I’ve passed it on to my two daughters, who also love to bake. And hopefully my son, who’s the youngest of my three, will join in soon as well. So I don’t bake as much anymore, Ross, because my kids always want to bake. So the only time I’m allowed to bake is at Christmas, when they are like — when it’s mom’s time to bake. Because I can only make those desserts the way they like them.
Ross Kenyon: Well, he’s too busy being corrupted by me, passing him World War II histories and then—
Radhika Moolgavkar: He read that trilogy, by the way. Yeah, the whole trilogy. Now he’s moving on to some Civil War history.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I gotta — we gotta hang out. I think that’s all there is to it. Yeah. But yeah, Caroline, we had you on because so much of your life has happened since you were last here. I think you were just about to go to pastry school, right?
Caroline Saunders: That was — yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You were like, this is like your last stop before Paris.
Caroline Saunders: It really was, yeah. Since we last talked, I’ve hopped continents. I’ve unhopped continents. Yeah. I went to pastry school in Paris, which was super, super fun. I had been living in Seattle. Now I live in New York as of last summer, working different jobs, doing more baking. The world has shifted in very fun ways.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s pretty exciting, because you were just exploring this intersection of climate and baking. Because those were — I’m sure you have many other passions, but those are, like, two quite prominent ones in your life, because you were at Grist for a long time.
Caroline Saunders: It was, yeah, yeah. I’d already been in — I was in the climate media space, I was working at Grist as chief of staff. And then my, like, pandemic thing that happened was I decided to put my climate stuff and baking stuff, which I had always been doing just at a home level, together, and explore them in the form of a podcast. And it was just a total appetite-wetter. I didn’t really know what would be there, but I was curious about, like, what’s going to happen to vanilla, how could we be baking more sustainably, etcetera, etcetera. And so then I went to pastry school in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu, and I had climate change on the mind the whole time, and it has all just sort of exploded from there.
Ross Kenyon: The sad thing is, I used my thin blue line joke the first time you were on, and now I don’t get to use it again.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Guys, in like the police thing? Thin blue line?
Ross Kenyon: We also like — like, cordon bleu is just like the blue line.
Caroline Saunders: No, no, you just say we and then no. Is that what it means? I think it means blue—
Ross Kenyon: In the what? The cordon bleu? Doesn’t it mean the blue ribbon?
Caroline Saunders: Is it the ribbon? Because I also think of, like, cordon sanitaire, like, people — like a line around something, like a quarantine. I guess it could be. Your French may be better than mine. I have no idea.
Ross Kenyon: Zero chance of that. Don’t you also speak — speak like Bhutanese or Nepalese or something too?
Caroline Saunders: Nepali. But I thought — there you go. For a while. I would say it’s now completely gone due to my terrible memory, and like a—
Ross Kenyon: —chance I have any linguistic leg up on you. But okay, you studied pastry in France, in French.
Caroline Saunders: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Wow. But there’s just — there’s so much to unpack there, and so much to haunt me forever.
Caroline Saunders: But yes, I did. And no, it was totally doable for a couple of reasons. The Le Cordon Bleu program — sorry, Brooklyn background noise, I live next to a hospital — so the Cordon Bleu program is taught in French but simultaneously translated into English by translators that are there. There are two types of classes: demonstrations in the morning, where you jot down like four or five recipes as the chefs are demoing them, and then you immediately go to practicals. The demos are translated into English, the practicals are not. So you need to have, like, really prepped and asked any questions, but in theory you can get by without French. I say “in theory” pretty firmly.
I spoke decent French and it got better as I was there, in part because, you know, just immersion of life, but also because one of my partners that I was assigned to for a lot of the year spoke only French. So that’ll do it. Learned a lot of vocabulary about kitchens. Quite, quite technical vocabulary.
Ross Kenyon: I can only imagine, so many words for spatulas. Tell us some of the words for spatula.
Caroline Saunders: Well, of course now none come to mind, so I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: I was hoping you could just rattle off, like, 15 of them real fast.
Caroline Saunders: That’s — I’ll pepper them in.
Ross Kenyon: You finished there? I don’t know — did you, did you stage some places? Did you end up working, or did you just come back home afterwards? What happened?
Caroline Saunders: Came straight back. I had — in part because, well, I’ll just say that you could, like, pay more to get the privilege of doing an unpaid internship, and that wasn’t totally appealing to my savings account. But I did have friends in the program who stayed and staged or worked in Paris and London. I have a very close friend who’s now working in the pastry team at Ottolenghi in London. And so I have classmates who took much more legit routes than I did, and I feel so lucky to, like, know them and be even tangentially in that company now.
Ross Kenyon: God, their displays are some of the most beautiful. I’m just — ridiculous. Like, so cool.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What would I look up to find it? I mean, I have a couple of these cookbooks, but—
Radhika Moolgavkar: You just gotta go to London, Ross, and go just go hang out at one of his shops.
Caroline Saunders: You’re so right, Radhika. Like, their window-scapes. I don’t know, maybe just Google, like—
Ross Kenyon: I’m looking at this. Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: Just — oh wow. Yeah, like big trays of food. And oh, it’s like unshakable, the memories of these, like, big round meringues speckled with, like, big raspberry striping. Just, like, crazy stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Yeah, that’s pretty neat. That’s cool. So you went a different route, though. You said, no thanks, I don’t want to go for that Michelin-star intense pastry chef life.
Caroline Saunders: No, I’m truly not strong enough. I did physically — when I got to New York, I wondered — I was a little — I thought I wanted to kind of go into more of a food-media direction, cookbook-y stuff, writing stuff, recipe testing stuff. But I wanted to be sure. And so I did one stage here at a very cool restaurant in Brooklyn in pastry, and it just confirmed I’m weak of body and mind, and decided—
Ross Kenyon: What does that mean? What happened to you? Is it just brutal grind, or what?
Caroline Saunders: It’s, you know, like, restaurant work is just physically demanding. You hear it and it’s real. And I was just like, this is so, so cool, and I have so much respect for this, but turns out I do want to be on a laptop part of the day.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a crazy combination that you’d have to be like, I love to bake. And then it’s like, would you like baking when everyone’s yelling in a formal sort of brigade environment too? ’Cause that’s the only way to do it. Great. Yeah. Does that also sound appealing, in the same breath, I hope?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, it’s weird. Those things get paired, and they’re sort of tightly linked, at least culturally. It’s like one of the dominant forms that expresses itself in, right?
Ross Kenyon: We can probably thank the French for that. They exported the brigade system and all its attendant yellings to most of the world.
Caroline Saunders: Attendant Yellings of Escoffier. That’s the name of the book it came from.
Ross Kenyon: That is the name of the book. Yeah. Yeah, that’s the bible, right? Of him, anyway. Okay, so you’re back in the States, you start — you don’t really want to live that life. You want something a little bit nicer, a little softer, maybe. So what’s next? What did you do? I’ve seen some of the — I already know kind of what you did, but I’m, like, playing dumb, so just tell everyone what you did.
Caroline Saunders: That was so subtle and gentle. Great. So I did a mix of things in the fall while I was figuring out what I wanted to do. And as of a few months ago now, with my feet under me in New York, I started a role as a writer in residence with a really interesting climate and culture philanthropy that’s trying to essentially support the creation of more, like, climate and cultural works, and that’s helping me kickstart this newsletter project. And then I’m also just beginning to do a little bit of freelancing for different publications on food and climate, and I’m also working as a recipe tester on a baking cookbook. So I’m doing all the things I love. It’s really fun.
Ross Kenyon: That seems like a dream job. I feel like — do we have this conversation and I asked someone else? Becoming a recipe tester, it seems like a dream job for many people. And how does this just, like, fall out of the sky into your lap?
Caroline Saunders: The answer is you slide into people’s DMs. That’s exactly what I did.
Ross Kenyon: Is that what you did?
Caroline Saunders: It’s just — and I got the idea from another young baker in New York City who just post — like, I follow all these young people trying to get inspiration from them. And God, I say that like I’m an 80-year-old — “all these young people.” And she had said she did the same thing. She was like, yeah, I got my start recipe testing just by sliding into people’s DMs and, like, aggressively marketing myself for work. And so I tried it too, with the same person that she did, and it works.
Ross Kenyon: What does that look like? Do you have to do just incredibly small variations of the same general recipe, or—
Caroline Saunders: It is. It is as cool as you could possibly picture it being. I can’t believe I get to do this as part of my work week. The woman I’m working with, her name is Jessie Sheehan, and she’s a really talented baker. Last year she had a book called Snackable Bakes. It was a really great bestseller, and she is writing the book now on a relatively tight time frame. And so sometimes the recipes I’m handed to test — I’m trying not to say too much, ’cause it’s all still under wraps — but sometimes the recipes I’m testing are like, just bake it, it’s already good, but I just want somebody else to confirm. And sometimes it’s more like, there’s a specific thing we’re troubleshooting here.
Like, this week we are working on a recipe over and over and over and over again. And so in that instance, it’s really cool to see how bakers of this kind of caliber, that are developing recipes for home cooks, are so committed to the craft and, like, getting it right. And it’s given me a whole new level of appreciation for what happens behind the scenes of a cookbook, because it’s just wild. And I’m not the only one — there’s multiple recipe testers, people [unclear] back and forth in Google Docs, we’re texting late last night, like, calling in all these experts to fix things and making a ton of baked goods that I then either consume myself or force onto my roommates.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have enough of Radhika and I? So we cooked the recipes that you sent us, most of them between us. We cooked all of them between us, but we split them up. It’s not that interesting probably to talk about the exact distribution. Probably I’m really going to trim that down a little bit. But we were wondering, especially on the perennial tart that we bake with some kinds of flour, how do you even know how to substitute something like that in? Like, how much of this is chemistry, or how much of this is that, you know, this is the amount of protein content, it’s going to change the crumb like this? Like, to me it’s just magic. Obviously there’s some conceptual linkage between these things. For you that’s probably relatively simple, but for me it’s just like, how could you possibly sub these things out for one another?
Caroline Saunders: Totally, yeah. And I think, yeah, it’s all chaos, it’s all magic, and pastry will help to demystify parts of it. But, like, in the case of something like Kernza, it’s that much more interesting because it’s literally a new crop that hasn’t existed before for human consumption. And so there is information about things like protein levels, etcetera, etcetera. But I’m not even that deep into it, and so part of it is working with intuition. But what I’ll say about, like, that recipe, the perennial tart, is that I know with something like Kernza that the gluten levels and gluten structure are weaker than in a normal bread flour or AP flour that we might get from the store. And so one of the things that means is that it’s not going to rise very well. So, cool, I’m going to rule out making anything with it that should be fluffy or really tall. I’m going to go for lower stuff: cookies, bars, tart crusts.
And Kernza has, as I’ve worked with it over the past couple years, a very, like, cinnamony, sweet, extremely distinctive flavor. Like, anyone who bakes with it — I just actually interviewed a much more talented baker than me, who has developed a lot of recipes with it, about this. She was like, I really think if people adopt Kernza, it’s going to be because this flavor is wild, it’s so different. But because it has that cinnamony, spicy, nutty flavor, I immediately thought of this particular type of French shortbread, a Brittany shortbread, that has a higher fat content, that always uses a nut flour because it’s a richer flavor. It has a little bit more moisture than other tart crusts, and it has a nuttiness that others don’t. And it just felt like a match made in heaven for a Kernza.
So I was like, okay, we’re going to do that. And so then, once I had the, like, general idea, it just took a lot of tinkering, like playing with the moisture. I went through, like, several recipes of, like, how much egg yolk should there be if I’m going to add a little bit of almond butter? How much is that going to mess with the moisture? I’ve been working on that one for a couple years and it still could probably be tweaked.
Ross Kenyon: Is it, like, moisture and protein, and are those, like, the main variables that you’re really getting down to?
Caroline Saunders: Protein. And another thing that comes up with any whole grain flour is the fiber content. So if you’re leaving — like, a normal store-bought flour is mostly endosperm of the kernel, so it’s a lot of starch, good amount of protein, but it’s typically had the germ and the bran removed, for largely shelf life, but also because it’s what, like, American bakers have been conditioned to expect, is a fluffier, whiter flour. And so when you’re working with the whole grain flour of any kind and it has the bran in it, you’re dealing with, shall I say, in a total sales pitch, roughage. And so you have to either, like, pick a recipe that that’s going to be okay in, or sift some of it out, or just, like, be aware of it and calibrate accordingly.
Ross Kenyon: One thing I liked about your key lime pie — I did such a terrible job. My crust ended up so gummy, and I think it was because it didn’t seem wet enough to cohere when I was putting it into the tray. And then I second-guessed myself, like, I should — I clearly know better than Caroline, who did the Cordon Bleu, actually. And I just, like, ruined it. I had to make, like, a second crust, and I turned it into, like, some sort of crumble disaster. And then I froze it and made it into, like, a mediocre ice cream. It’s just like every step of it just got stupider, and I just kept going.
I read this essay about this very phenomenon recently that was like — I’m basically Tamar Adler, right? Or is that not — this is basically the point of An Everlasting Meal. I turned one dessert into three bad [unclear] desserts, right? There’s some kind of — we’ll call it a cycle. Is it virtuous? We don’t know, but it’s a cycle of some kind. Sorry, what were you gonna say, though, before I had to say that thing?
Caroline Saunders: God only knows. Maybe just that that is one of the harder ones, because it’s like, there’s multiple elements to it. Like, working with agar agar is kind of a pain, and a new thing, to cook a filling on the stovetop for a key lime pie. Or so — just mixing something together cold, we can get away with that, and that’s why I chose that recipe, but acknowledging that in future versions it would be nice if it were simpler.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve only ever seen it on Top Chef, basically. And so that was my first time buying it. I had to figure out where in the grocery store I could even find this, and I asked two different people. I didn’t know. Oh, agar agar — I thought you meant key lime pie. I was like, I just bought a key lime pie and ate it, and now I’m here to talk about it on the [unclear]. And then I really didn’t get into that ice cream. Yeah, my key lime pie religion has been deeply affected.
Caroline Saunders: It’s my — that’s, like, my familial favorite, though. Growing up, my dad, huge key lime pie fan. I still request it on special days; it’s like my baked good of choice.
Ross Kenyon: I also like that you identified that, because a lot of your work strikes me as finding familiar things and trying to, like, remake them in, like, a 21st-century, climate-focused kind of way. And I see a lot of trends towards that, like Beast & Cleaver here in Seattle. You know, there are a lot of butcheries bringing back aspic, bringing back head cheese, bringing back terrine. And I just saw a book come out from B. Dylan Hollis, the book Baking Yesteryear — a lot of these, the best recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s. And there’s, like, a desire to, like, what have we lost, or what are some of these old, like, used-to-be-hokey — but wouldn’t it be fun to make some sort of carrots-and-Jell-O kind of deal, just for fun, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Like a chance to interject, and — I don’t even know where to go with carrots and Jell-O.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, the only topic you’re allowed to comment on now. Sorry.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That is disgusting. Actually, I was just, like, curious how you think about convincing people to change their minds around this. Because, like, my husband and I tried the — had the perennial tart this morning. We tried it out, and, you know, it was, like, a different mindset actually, because the crust is different from what we were expecting. Like, calling it one thing wasn’t really representative of what it really was. It was very tasty, but it just wasn’t what was in our head. So how do you think about, like, shifting people’s mindset around that?
Caroline Saunders: So it’s such a good question.
Radhika Moolgavkar: See, I ask you questions, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I invited you here to do that. Okay. Yeah, go ahead, Caroline.
Caroline Saunders: It’s like — it’s actually a very good big question that I think about a lot in the project I’m trying to do, of which I would say this newsletter is really just a stepping stone toward. I’m really interested in, like, regenerative and climate-friendly baking, and helping to tease that out in the US. I say tease it out because I think a lot of it’s already happening. This is just me personally, but I think about it in two ways. Like, if we’re going to — it’s kind of a different thing for cooking, but let’s talk about baking — if we’re going to shift the, like, sweet corner of our cuisine towards something that is more reflective of a better, good, great, wonderful food system, and that hopefully could even be so tasty that it, like, helps inspire us toward that, I think of, like, two main things that we need.
I think of all the baked goods and foods out there in all sorts of different cuisines all over the world that are already sustainable because they, let’s say, unlike French cuisine, are already comfortable using plant-based ingredients to get jiggle in a pudding, into something else. So I think a lot about, like, what might we be eating that is not actually new, just might be new to certain eaters among us? But in that way there’s not exactly a change-flavor threshold that you have to cross. It might in some cases just be an introduction to something new, and might be very familiar to others. And then I also think, like you were saying earlier, Ross, a lot about, like, updating Americana classics to use more climate-friendly components. But I think there, the real rub is making versions that are just as tasty or tastier, and that in some cases can be a tall order.
It’s just something I’m, like, very personally interested in. I’m really curious about what, like, a whole gamut of the delicious Southern desserts that I grew up with might taste like if some of them were made with more plant-rich ingredients, if others of them somehow captured, like, foods that are commonly wasted, if they used a palette of more biodiverse or climate-proof ingredients. And I see a little bit of that work — I don’t see a ton of it. And so when I think about the recipes that I feel like I would like to develop, it’s those. But there’s a really high bar there to, like, sell the people that are used to the original. And so that’s why I’m—
Ross Kenyon: Interested in a pursuit like trying to get a plant-based key lime pie that tastes just as good? I’ll give you my evaluation of that key lime pie. I think it’s 90% of the way there.
Caroline Saunders: I’ve tested it, like, 17 times. It’s a fully plant-based key lime pie, which usually gets its squidge, its fat, its flavor, its yumminess from sweetened condensed milk, but in this recipe gets it from a mix of coconut cream, tofu, agar agar — ideas I borrowed from different cuisines that already do that. But the reason I think it’s not 100% of the way there — and I would love for a baker listening to help figure out how to do this — is to add that little bit of richness that is missing from the sweetened condensed milk. And so anyway, that’s all just to say, I think there are different ways of, like, approaching how you make this part of our cuisine more sustainable and regenerative, and some are going to be harder than others. The reinventions are going to be really challenging, but that’s the fun.
Ross Kenyon: I’m with you, Radhika, too, that having a common cultural point of reference can be a risk too, because if you eat it and it’s not what you expect, you’re like — the worst thing about vegan food is definitely when it tries to be something it’s not, and then you’re like, this is way worse. Just go, just be, like, intentionally different and diverge from me as the standard center of the plate, and it’s fine. But, like, did you ever go to Frankie & Jo’s when you were here in Seattle? It’s all, like, coconut cream base, or coconut base, ice cream. I took my parents there. My parents, not vegans, liable to make fun of vegans, wouldn’t have known if I didn’t tell them, and they were very happy, and then it was fun to spring it on them, be like, surprise.
Caroline Saunders: That’s the opposite of what I thought you were going to say. Okay, good. Honestly, I think it can go toe to toe with, like, really great milk-based ice cream, and that’s really the dream, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Totally. And they have some wacky ones too, the [unclear], the, like, pine— You like to focus on plant-based ingredients, but is it just — that’s a different kind of project than saying, what if I baked with regenerative ingredients that were animal-based? ’Cause I think in general it’s probably more the — it’s the how, not the cow, as the line goes. Like, if you were using, like, nice, like, pasture-raised dairy cow milk, is that a project that’s valuable to you, or are you trying to — that’s just not a big enough statement, maybe?
Caroline Saunders: No, I know, that’s a very valid point. Part of what — I’ll answer that by saying, like, part of what I’m interested in doing, as I keep, like, going deeper into this newsletter project, is building out a rubric in my mind, scientifically, of what regenerative and climate-friendly baking means. And I’ll tell you my work-in-progress rubric, but I’m, like, actively trying to talk to scientists every single week to, like, make it stronger. I’m interested in, like, a set of pointers you could give home bakers that provide different types of entry points into baking regeneratively, because I’m not an all-or-nothing person. I just think it’s more useful from a social change perspective to give people toeholds. Like, that’s what works for me, so how can I ask differently of other people?
And so I think about things like using more plant-rich ingredients. I think about, yeah, reducing waste as much as we can, because those two are the biggest climate mitigation things you hear, of course. But then also really interested in a palette of ingredients that, like I mentioned, is climate-proof, leaning into biodiversity, but then also better sourcing, like you’re saying. And so, totally, totally valid to be using better-sourced dairy, eggs, etcetera, of course. And I like the sort of mantra that’s commonly talked about in food circles, that’s like, we probably just should be thinking of animal products more as a treat, and sourcing them better when we use them, on a more sparing basis. That’s in theory what I try to do.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So how do you think about, like, accessibility? You know, I think one of the hardest things is sort of sometimes getting to the ingredients — some of the more, like, agar agar and other types of ingredients that maybe we are lucky enough to have in Seattle and New York, but not so much in the middle of the country. And so, you know, as you build out a fan base, what’s your advice going to be to them to get, like, some of these maybe harder-to-access ingredients?
Caroline Saunders: Totally. I think what I’d like to build toward is striking a balance of having a bunch of approachable recipes that use simpler ingredients that are really readily available. The cool thing is that there’s so much plant-based baking already happening in the US that does just that, that makes really simple plant-based cookies and all that stuff. I would really like to highlight — and then moving toward a proportion of more, like, sprinkling in the harder-to-source stuff. But I think, as I’ve started this in the past two months, I’ve probably erred on the side of the more specific, outlandish stuff that I already knew about or was trained on in pastry school, like agar agar. So I’m trying to, like, chill out.
Ross Kenyon: I think you’ve even named the newsletter here, the project. Did you even tell people what it is?
Caroline Saunders: Maybe I didn’t. It’s called Pale Blue Tart, which is a riff — for those who don’t get it — on Pale Blue Dot, which is how Carl Sagan described tiny little Earth as seen from space. And the tagline is “documenting and dreaming up a dessert menu for the climate era.” Emphasis on documenting, intentional, because I want to be like — I’m hoping that what it becomes over time is a split of, like, telling stories about this more sustainable baking that’s already unfolding, and a fair amount of instruction and how-to on how to participate, whether that’s ingredient guides or actual recipes, sourced from chefs or occasionally from me.
Ross Kenyon: You’re saying you were just at a conference where many of the quite prominent presenters and bakers were talking about climate, and that was almost, like, the first thing that they were talking about?
Caroline Saunders: I sat down at one workshop on rye breads on the second day of this really cool conference called the Kneading Conference. I’m wearing their pretzel T-shirt right now. I sat down at this workshop that Nora Allen, who is a James Beard-nominated baker behind the bakery Mel the Bakery in New York — she was teaching a workshop on rye breads, and she opened this workshop by saying, we have to start by talking about the climate. And I was like, wow, that is on the nose for what I was hoping to find here.
And there were other bakers who were talking about the importance of seed saving and preserving old varieties of seeds in Maine to strengthen the resilience of the food system. There’s turning them into arepas at different restaurants. People talking about arid grains in Phoenix and what it might look like to feed Phoenix sustainably in 100 years — a complicated question that we were exploring through the lens of handmade pasta in that instance. But yeah, it was really cool. I think that there are just an increasing number of connections being made between climate and baking by the people that do baking and pastry, and probably in part because people who work in food are just close to the land and farming and what’s happening there, but also probably just because of the atmosphere that we’re in. Everyone’s talking about climate more and more. Heat — like, holy wow.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s just more everywhere than ever. I hear it’s pretty sweaty there right now.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, it’s better this week, but it was a sweat fest the last month.
Ross Kenyon: So did you see that same interest in France? Are they talking about—
Caroline Saunders: Smart. Thank you. No. And I was often the annoying student in these, like, 90 little bright-eyed slash sleepy 18-year-old French kids. I was the one always raising my hand and asking questions about linkages to sustainability and farming and yadda yadda yadda. I think — well, Cordon Bleu is a really cool and interesting program, and I think they teach the craft really well. But I get the sense that there is an industry-wide thing at culinary schools of not making a whole ton of linkages between sustainability and food, at least in France.
I can’t really speak to what’s happening at US culinary schools, but there wasn’t a single word about sustainability and climate change in a context where we were talking a lot, often, about things like biodiversity of lemons across the globe, or, you know, economic changes in the price of grain. Like, these — we were talking about lots of really interesting cultural and economic aspects of context for pastry and baking, but not climate. And I was just sometimes kind of seething, because there are people making the connections, and I was like, they should be teaching classes on it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But maybe it’s because the French are so protective of their culture, right? I mean, they have a different — it feels like a different viewpoint sometimes on changes to their language, changes to their culture. They’re much more regimented than maybe the UK or the US is around those perspectives. That’s both what I learned in my French class and observed when I was over there. You know, it was just — they’re protective and probably don’t like the change.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, I think that’s quite possible, is what I will say. Other aspects of the curriculum have surely changed in preceding decades.
Ross Kenyon: Or do you feel like it actually is intentionally a throwback? This is, like, classical French pastry, don’t mess with it.
Caroline Saunders: Well, there is an aspect of that, and I mean, I say that with, like, love and respect. To a certain extent it is a program that is all about the classics of French pastry, and that was really, really cool. I got serious foundations. I still have my textbooks with me on, like, dacquoise and Napoleons. We spent weeks and weeks on different types of tarts and the varieties.
Ross Kenyon: How’s your mille-feuille?
Caroline Saunders: Pretty good. My mille-feuille was okay.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, gotcha. Ever developed a mille-feuille recipe?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, it’s, you know, like — hope I don’t offend any French listeners, but it’s a culture, it seems like — certainly a food culture — that traditionally is a little bit more backward-looking and is about preserving, and there’s real cool value in that. But it’s also not really geared toward change and evolution so much. It’s not something they seem to do comfortably, particularly in culinary schools.
Ross Kenyon: Sometimes being protective and conservative of your food ways can be a good climate move too. I think of, like — you like Dan Saladino’s stuff, right? Did you read Eating to Extinction?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, like, preserving those, like, dying food ways is good for the climate, it’s good for culture, it’s kind of good for everything. But maybe if you locked in the, like, post-war conventional ag food system model, that’s probably being conservative in a not-so-good way.
Caroline Saunders: Well, I think that’s such an interesting point, because a lot of what’s now, like, just familiar and accepted in pastry across the world actually comes from a palette of ingredients that is pretty recent. So we’re dedicated to a system of food traditions that have only been that way for, what, 150 years, 100?
Ross Kenyon: Like, what? Explain that. That’s an interesting idea.
Caroline Saunders: White flour, sugar. I don’t know as much about sugar, but let’s talk white flour. Like, I’ve heard the stats that in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there were, like, tens of thousands of flour mills across the United States, across Europe too. And those have been consolidated down to way, way, way fewer. I don’t want to throw out a number because I can’t remember, but not many. And, you know, the refining of flour was this process that evolved for a bunch of reasons, primarily to extend shelf life, but also to create a finer, softer flour. And then the American consumer palate got really used to that. Vast traditions of fluffy loaf cakes sprung up — or fluffy layer cakes, I should say.
And we have gotten really used to those types of flavors and textures that lack a lot in terms of the nutrition that would have been inherent to those ingredients a century before that, and a lot of the flavor complexity. Like, with white flour, we’ve gotten used to serious neutrality. And I’m not really, like, hardcore 100% dissing it. I use it all the time. I use it many times a week. I love it. If I make a big birthday cake with it, of course I’m using white flour. But I’m really interested in how we start to just adjust those dials and ask those questions.
Like, there are really famous, interesting bakers right now, like Natasha Pickowicz, who just published a book called More Than Cake, asking questions about — and getting recipes for — how could we spike birthday cakes and layer cakes with whole grains in a way that adds flavor without messing with texture. And those are the, like, culinary questions that I’m really interested in: how makers of food drive forward in answer to these agricultural, environmental questions that farmers, policymakers, scientists, etcetera, are doing in their part of the equation.
Ross Kenyon: Do those questions interest you, Radhika, in your baking? Or are you taking your climate hat off at that time and you just want to enjoy your kitchen time?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I’m interested in them. I will say, like, I’m a little bit of a skeptic — not of the vision, but of, like, the unintended consequences. Because whenever I look at a historical record, I don’t think human choice was made with the intent of making things worse. And so as we, like, go down these different paths, I wonder where we’re going to end up. But I am curious. And, you know, I come — I mean, from an Indian background — so of course some of my taste buds are different. And when I was in Vietnam over our Christmas break, you know, it was an interesting conversation to have with the food people there, because they were talking about the Vietnamese palate and their ability to deal with other types of, like, crunch and texture that, like, an American palate just can’t get into. And so that kind of interests me as well. Like, it’s beyond just the flavor profile, but it’s also the textural areas of eating, and also the memories associated with them.
I mean, Caroline mentioned, like, her Southern roots, right? The Southern folks are very tied to, like, a certain way of making stuff. And, you know, I’m tied to certain things too. And so how do you again change the mindset around that? And, you know, when my kids grow up, they’re going to say, my mom made this and she always made it this way and you can’t change it, because that’s what my memories of childhood are associated with. So I think it’s a really interesting just social question. But honestly, yeah, I don’t have a ton of time to experiment, so I’m just looking for people to tell me how to do it well. Because, you know, if I’m going to make something, I want it to be a success, so I need good recipes.
Caroline Saunders: You’re right, it’s a really, really interesting social question. And, like, I think my bias in the way I think about answering it is, like, to just say flavor. Like, you know, people — I just feel like people are not going to eat all that differently, at least when it comes to dessert, which is just so much about, like, hedonism and enjoyment and comfort and connecting over something with others, and love. I feel like with dessert, you’re not going to make that many compromises for the sake of a sense of moral obligation or environmental civic duty or whatever the heck. And so that, to me, is like the complexity and fun of the project. And I’m not talking about my newsletter anymore, I’m talking about, like, the work of chefs and bakers.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. I mean, I was just going to say, you know, another piece of this, which is sort of tangential, but the food history kind of aspect too is really interesting to me. And, like, Stella Parks, right, wrote a cookbook a few years ago which, like, was a historical — had a categorization. So I’m going to be curious to see, as we evolve in this space, what the historic — how the historical plays out and what it looks like, and how we do combine kind of this moment of environmental need with the past that brings in it, right? Like, there’s always so much to learn from the past, and to forget that is just, like, folly and a waste of time. And also hubris and all the things.
Caroline Saunders: I love Stella Parks. I talked to another cake historian [unclear] a couple years ago for my podcast, and we talked about things like, you know, depression cakes and reducing food waste and turning vegetables that have sweetness into a cake ingredient. Sauerkraut chocolate cakes. You know, there’s this whole, like, panoply and, like, rich menus of cakes made with leftovers, cakes made with the barest of pantry ingredients. And all of those, to me, just, like, assemble themselves in a happy little baking [unclear] of, like, low-waste recipes that are stuff we should be pulling on from our wise ancestors and the people around us that are doing stuff like that in the now.
I would love to see a, like, baking cookbook one day that is about climate and regenerative stuff — perhaps not surprisingly — that does that sort of representative pulling of, like, some stuff that exists today, some stuff from yesteryear, and that assembles itself into a happy thing. That’s not so hard to create, because we have a lot of it.
Ross Kenyon: Obviously angling for that with this new project of yours. I’m sure you can shop that around town. Like, how — why wouldn’t you? It should be you.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. I mean, I see the—
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Ross will be your recipe tester, because he wants to try all these things.
Ross Kenyon: I will, I will follow your instructions and I will interpret them in the most Amelia Bedelia way, so that I ruin everything. And then I’ll be like — I have to send you this Guardian article I was reading that excerpted an essay that was talking about the hilariousness of, like, this tendency to not follow recipes, and how it just, like, everything one cooks and bakes tends towards sameness and disaster. Like, the same mistakes we always make, including me. I’m like, I surely know better than this, like, cook who has developed this thing. And then I make a terrible dinner, which is what happens every night of the week. You know, I am the character in The Menu who knows a lot about food but is not really that good at making it. And so he has to make that, like, horrible—
Caroline Saunders: Does he make that, like, horrible braise that Ralph Fiennes is like, this is shit? I couldn’t watch that. My roommate was watching it and I just saw the really upsetting stuff of the dude plopping into the water, and I was like, I’m good.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Ross, you haven’t learned from aunties and stuff — that is the problem. Like, you need that. My husband wanted to learn how to cook Indian food when we were first married, and so he’d go to all my different aunties and be like, can you cook this for me? And they would. And he’d literally stick a tablespoon or a teaspoon under as they’re, like, just dumping salt and, you know, spices in. But there’s something inherent in the way they — you just learn it when you live with them and you’re interested in it. And I was like, who needs to measure? Apparently you need to measure. But no, you don’t.
Caroline Saunders: Jealous.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We need some aunties to teach you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, round me up some aunties. That’s your new assignment. I have kind of an intense question for you, Caroline. You ready?
Caroline Saunders: I guess. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to people in the functional medicine scene like Mark Hyman and people like that, but they don’t think we should be eating this stuff, like, at all. We shouldn’t be eating flour, we shouldn’t be eating sugar. Refined sugar — this is essentially poison, it’s all inflammatory. Or, yeah, like — so in some ways they would probably view your project, even if they were serious about climate change, as a rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic kind of deal.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. And with full logic, I get it. Should we be eating these things? No. I mean, this is the question I think about a lot, because I’ve essentially chosen to make a big part of my profession working with sugar and, like, sweet terrible stuff. And so it becomes a big part of my diet when I’m professionally working on it. So this is on my mind weekly. I’m very conscious, like, what I consume and how much of my baked goods I’m actually consuming. So should we be eating a ton of dessert? No, of course not. But will we? Will I? Yes.
I am much less interested in, like — how do I explain this? For me, like, when you ask why you would bother making a, like, regenerative or climate-friendly dessert menu, it’s less about, like, zeroing out emissions the way it is with, like, a dinner menu, because, right, like, the worst offenders are on our dinner menu. So I’m not over here fully trying to advocate for, like, a zero-emissions, zero-waste dessert menu. I’m much more interested in dessert’s power to inspire us toward a sustainable, interesting, regenerative food system, because dessert is attention-grabbing. So I’m kind of sideways answering your question by saying, like, I think dessert is here to stay. And for people that want to be healthier — cool, great, good for you, you should. I’m going to keep eating dessert, and I’m going to try to, like — I just think it has an interesting potential role to play as, like, a sort of a poster for what could be, because it’s such a meme, it’s such a source of joy. And yes, it should be enjoyed in moderation.
Ross Kenyon: Was that the meanest question you’ve ever been asked? That was kind of, like, a surprise, deal-with-this-conceptual-challenge.
Caroline Saunders: No, it’s a reasonable question. And like I said, yeah, it’s always on my mind. I was like — because of the baked goods I’m testing this week, my literal thought today, every hour on the hour, was, when, my God, will I eat a vegetable? And the answer is tomorrow.
Ross Kenyon: What do we do with recipes like — we both made the granita. I mean, come on, what’s better in summer? It’s so easy to prep. It’s just blended citrus, get some acid in there, some sugar.
Caroline Saunders: That was her recipe. Great cookbook.
Ross Kenyon: I was wondering, when I make stuff like that, how much of the sugar can I cut out before I’m really going to be sorry for it? Because I don’t want to add ever more than I need. So you’re rolling your head back. Are you thinking about this?
Caroline Saunders: It’s such a good question, and I wish I knew more about the sugar science. It’s different proportions for — I remember — here’s what I remember from a pastry lecture I probably slept through, because they started before 7 many times and I had to get up at 5 in Paris, dear God. I know that the sugar level required to, like, get the right texture and stuff is different in ice cream, is different in sorbet, is different in gelato, but I can’t remember what they are. I guess I’ll send out a newsletter on that eventually, once I ask them.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Don’t mess with the chemistry, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, that is the question. Like, am I just gonna ruin this thing? So I’m, like, trying to make it healthy, but I just, like — is that the wrong place to optimize for health? Should I just enjoy the thing?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, don’t make it green, is that — if you want it, optimize for health. Is it bad for the audio if I stand up and grab a book?
Ross Kenyon: Because it’s dynamic.
Caroline Saunders: There’s, like, a cookbook here that I’m holding called Good & Sweet by Brian Levy that is all about baking with natural sugars. There’s, I think there’s, like, date syrup in here. There’s various those types of sweeteners. But he also sweetens things with, like, freeze-dried fruits, he sweetens things with whole dates, he sweetens things with, in some cases, apples and chestnut flour alone. And he has a bunch of recipes for frozen things like ice creams, etcetera, etcetera. And so I’m really interested in that. Sugar, something I haven’t tackled yet, because when I write about it, I would like to write about its history, which is extraordinarily complicated and tied to the slave trade.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: And I would want to, like, do it justice. But I’m also really interested in, like — he’s, like, fairly singular in coming up with ways to bake without refined sugars that are really, really good. And I think that could be really interesting to talk about: how could that be part of the regenerative sweet foodscape we dream of, the one that is less health-harmful?
Ross Kenyon: So, Mark Hyman, we’re working on it. We have to wrap here soon. Tell people how to follow what you’re doing, give them a taste of what’s coming soon, and hopefully they can all go subscribe, start cooking Caroline’s great desserts. Start baking.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, would love that. So I’m on Substack with a newsletter called Pale Blue Tart, and you can follow me on Instagram at, also, Pale Blue Tart. Not complicated. And yeah, would love to have you guys subscribe and bake all the things.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here. Thanks for answering all of our questions. Radhika, thanks for hanging out too, as Nori’s chief baker.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Anytime, anytime, Ross. I love my new title. I get a C-suite for being a baker. I love it.
Ross Kenyon: I thought I had the silliest job of all here, doing creative things. But yeah, having a C-suite baker? Yeah, it’s extreme.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s the real dream.
Ross Kenyon: Yep. The real dream. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
