Climate change is already affecting our food systems. But have you ever considered how rising temperatures might impact access to the pastries you love? What if you could no longer enjoy a croissant with your coffee in the morning? Or indulge in a slice of cake on special occasions?
Caroline Saunders is the host of the Sustainable Baker podcast, coauthor of Craft Beef, former chief-of-staff at Grist and soon-to-be student in the pastry track at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Caroline joins Ross to share her interest in developing sustainable recipes and explain how her career path reflects her passions for climate and dessert.
Caroline describes her concerns around climate change and the future of dessert, discussing what spices are at risk and how we can help grains adapt to rising temperatures. Listen in for Caroline’s insight on what it looks like to bake without dairy and find out how to make your favorite desserts more sustainably!
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Resources
The Sustainable Baker on Instagram
Craft Beef: A Revolution of Small Farms and Big Flavors by Joe Heitzeberg, Ethan Lowry and Caroline Saunders
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on Instagram
Nancy Silverton on Chef’s Table
The Land Institute on Reversing Climate Change EP062
Lennox Hastie on Chef’s Table BBQ
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: 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.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Caroline Saunders, author of Craft Beef, former chief of staff at Grist, soon to be pastry student at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and host of the new podcast, The Sustainable Baker. Thanks for being here, Caroline.
Caroline Saunders: So glad to be here. Thanks, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: So happy to have you here at long last. As a personal friend of yours and someone who has eaten quite a lot of your big goods. It has been a lot, hasn’t it? It’s been a good friendship, yeah. How’d you get to this point in your career? I think someone listening could look at the list of things that you’ve done and say there’s themes here about food, environmental sustainability. What are you doing now? How did you get here?
Caroline Saunders: Great questions. I love talking about career, especially with people my age and younger, because it all looks like it has come together for people always. And the reality is, of course, that things just sort of happen and you make leaps and you They try to do things. And then one day it sort of assembles into something like a career and then it kind of, you know, regresses and it’s sinusoidal and all that. I studied environmental studies and English in undergrad, and I was really interested in food and, you know, tried to study abroad and learn about food stuff as much as I could in as many places as I could.
I got extraordinarily lucky and got a wonderful job at Grist right out of college. And that has been this incredible education in climate and environmental news and climate issues. I’ve been there for several IPCC reports, if you want to mark time that way. And along the way, I did some writing about food and sustainable meat. And over the course of the pandemic, like everyone else, I was stress baking to deal with everything that was going on in the world. And I started wondering kind of about how my two passions, climate change and dessert might be related.
And I remember having this moment where I wondered, Is dessert going to survive climate change and all the other various crises outside our windows right now? And I really hope that it will because it’s getting me through all these crises. And so that was sort of the impetus for a couple of things. One being this podcast, The Sustainable Baker, and the other being my decision to finally do something I’d wanted to do for a long time, which is go to pastry school in Paris to finally, you know, Learn everything I want to learn about how to be a baker.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, when’s the screenplay going to come out? I feel like there’s a lot of people who go through a professional career and then they go back for the Chef Whites.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, I will say my preferred reading genre this month slash summer has been exclusively food memoirs about American women who move to Paris and go to culinary school.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my God, are there that many? I love chef memoirs.
Caroline Saunders: There’s like at least seven and I’ve now read them all.
Ross Kenyon: Do you feel like you’re going to be in your head now and be like, oh, my experience is different or, oh, I should do this or was it?
Caroline Saunders: Oh, completely. Well, I mean, not to go on too much of an insane tangent here, but there are multiple memoirs about American women who have gone to Le Cordon Bleu doing exactly what I’m about to do. But they were all written pre-2016, which is when Le Cordon Bleu got a fancy new campus and kitchens. So already I have one leg up, which is that I’ll be in the newer kitchens.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s nice. Do you have your eye on a memoir too? Is it too soon to say?
Caroline Saunders: No, I do not. I have my eye on, I want to like develop recipes. That’s kind of one of my creative things I’m trying to get out of this and I’m really excited for. And I want to develop sustainable recipes. And that’s how this all for me sort of comes together. I’m interested in climate change. I’m interested in food. I’m interested in how we eat sustainably and how we eat delicious desserts sustainably.
Ross Kenyon: Being a recipe developer, that’s one of those things that recipes almost feel like manna from heaven. They just sort of fall. But then I was reading about like all of Seattle, Kenji Lopez-Alt from Sirius Eats and other things. He moved here recently. So his Instagram is really fantastic. If you’re a Seattleite and like to eat good food, he had a former career doing recipe development and testing. Yeah. How does one fall into that? It just strikes me as one of those astronaut type jobs.
Caroline Saunders: Right. I’ve been trying to figure that out. I’m actually reading Ruth Reichel’s memoir right now, which I had not yet continuing in my food memoirs. I ran out of the Paris-based one, so I had to go back to it.
Ross Kenyon: Now you’re in Tuscany or what?
Caroline Saunders: People in America. But she was the editor of Gourmet for years before that shuttered. It talks about the recipe developers at Gourmet. And it sounds like, I guess the short answer is I don’t know exactly how you get into it, but it... It sounds like in yesteryear of this industry, it was easier. You could kind of fall into it. I may be getting this totally wrong. The food writers will be like, this is not at all correct. It’s become more competitive over time. It seems like everyone wants to be in food media because it sounds fun and it is fun.
But yeah, so I guess I’ll try to figure out how you become one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, maybe we’ll have to catch up. It’s too soon to probably ask about that.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, I’ll tell you later.
Ross Kenyon: And then... Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. We’ll have to do a refresher there. And then Le Cordon Bleu, which as I understand it, it’s a normal culinary school, but it’s stuffed with Swiss cheese. Do you get that joke? Oh, is that like the chicken cordon?
Caroline Saunders: Okay. I mean, yes, I get it.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So here’s my own tangent though. I have an acquaintance and he was telling me that his kid goes to a Waldorf school. I said, oh, it’s a normal school, but there’s grapes and celery in it. And like a Waldorf salad. Oh, I was going to say, look at all these food references I’m not getting. I got to stop with these jokes. No, this is honestly a wake-up call for me.
Caroline Saunders: I’m going to culinary school. I need to brush up here.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. But Le Cordon Bleu is the most prestigious or one of the most in the entire world for what you’re trying to do? Is that correct?
Caroline Saunders: Well, I mean, I will say. One really cool claim to fame that it has. And one of the reasons I wanted to go is that Julia Child went there. She was, I believe their first female student kind of muscled her way in, in the late forties, I believe. But it’s bloomed to become this pretty international institution. One statistic I have gotten excited about is that apparently there are 120 different countries represented in their student body of aspiring and soon to be chefs, which is pretty neat.
Ross Kenyon: Why go there instead of CIA in New York? I’m sure you considered that.
Caroline Saunders: I looked at a lot of the major ones and the honest answer is I’m killing two birds with one stone here. I have always wanted to live in Paris and coming out of the pandemic, or at least what we thought was coming out of the pandemic when I applied to culinary school, I was like, this is a great time to go do all those dreams. And so I’m just going to try to do it all at once.
Ross Kenyon: The cordon bleu is the same thing as the thin blue line, right? Like those, those stickers you see. Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: When I was driving across the country a few weeks ago, I actually, I stopped it at some of the thin blue line flag bedecked homes and they came out with chicken cordon bleu on a plate with a Waldorf salad on the side.
Ross Kenyon: This is too many. I’m just trying to catch up. Yeah. Sorry. I’m not sure how many of these are going to make it to the final episode. I’m enjoying listening back. How’s this work? I think you’re there for a solid chunk of time too. This is not a weekend deal. This is like your postgraduate education.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. The diploma takes between six to nine months to do. And that depends on whether you’re trying to do it at crazy lightning speed or a gentler pace. And I’m doing the gentler one. And so I’m, I’m starting in the fall and wrapping up sometime next summer.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Is it all pastry or do they make you do like julienne carrots for a million years and like turn radishes? Oh, man.
Caroline Saunders: No, I wanted to avoid that, to be honest. So there’s a culinary track and then there’s a pastry track and I’m doing all sweet stuff. So that’s going to be my jam for the next. You know what I’m really concerned about that I will tell anyone considering this is that you get to take home all of the food that you make. And before you say, hey, doesn’t that sound great? It sounds great to me if you’re in the culinary side. If you’re in the pastry side, you are a student, so you have very little money slash income.
And the free food that you do get is just vast quantities of dessert. And I’m concerned about my sugar intake over the coming year. Basically, I need to make friends and give them away.
Ross Kenyon: Why pastry and not savory?
Caroline Saunders: Simply because it’s what I have the most fun with. And I just want to make big life decisions that are guided by what’s going to be fun. So I’m trying a new thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think when people think about high cookery, I think they probably think of... No, I think you’re right. I think from the...
Caroline Saunders: Perspective of like enthusiastic eaters, you think more of chefdom as like the cool stuff. But if you’re kind of a nerdy home cook or a nerdy home baker, you also know that there’s a lot of technique in pastry. And that’s part of what is appealing to me is that it’s challenging and you have to work to get good at it. And I think once you’re within kind of the, which I’m not yet, once you’re within the chefy world, I think there’s a certain amount of respect for pastry chefs because of it, or at least I guess I’ll see one way or another, but that’s what I’m assuming.
Ross Kenyon: I think the fastest way to learn this lesson, if you haven’t already, is to watch that chef’s table with Nancy Silverton, where she talks about perfecting a loaf of bread for like a decade. And apparently it’s one of the most perfect in the world.
Caroline Saunders: I forgot about that. Wow. Wow.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like, okay, you have to really love what you do to nerd out that hard that long.
Caroline Saunders: And back to recipe testing. I was reading last night in this memoir about food magazines that it’s really common to spend 20 or 30 attempts on a chocolate cake before you’re shipping that recipe to your readers of your magazine, which I love. I love that pursuit of like the perfect chocolate cake, the perfect whatever. Yeah. And I’m happy to eat the first 19 or 29 that don’t make the cut. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. No, that seems really detail oriented where I think most of us are used to satisficing like, okay, maybe, maybe I can add a little acid here. I can salt this. We’re going to eat it for dinner tonight. Not a lot of people cook with the eye to all right, 20 times and it needs to get incrementally better every time or we failed. That’s a lot of pressure.
Caroline Saunders: I think there’s like a definite streak of perfectionism within pastry because, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like exact measurements and you’re weighing out grams. You’re not just saying a dash of salt, right? Exactly.
Caroline Saunders: Like when I’m cooking, I’m never using a kitchen scale. But if I’m baking and doing like today, I was making Oreo croissants as one does. And you totally have to use a scale because everything matters down to the gram.
Ross Kenyon: Otherwise, does it just get too flaky, not flaky enough? Any and all of the above.
Caroline Saunders: Basically, little alterations in any of your ingredient volumes or weights can really throw off the texture or the flavor. And yeah, it’s that precision that’s both so insane and in the right mindset. So fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I like that attention to detail too. And I love watching people, especially someone like Paul Hollywood taste things. And just being able to pull things out and be like, you didn’t use enough baking soda. It’s just like a smidge less. And the butter wasn’t cold enough.
Caroline Saunders: I know. I always have that same reaction. And part of me during the pandemic and even before is always staring at the TV with wide eyes going, I want to be able to do that.
Ross Kenyon: I could be what’s his name from the Mighty Boosh wearing the sweaters and the long hair. What’s his name again?
Caroline Saunders: Who is that?
Ross Kenyon: From British Bake Off, you know, the ringer they have that just tells jokes. Oh, that guy.
Caroline Saunders: The one who is old Greg.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, old Greg. I said that quietly. I’m so glad you went there. I’m old Greg. I don’t think a lot of people who watch British Bake Off make that connection. Growing up, this is a huge sketch.
Caroline Saunders: It took me two seasons to realize where he was from. And then my whole frame of reference for Great British Bake Off was destroyed.
Ross Kenyon: I still think about old Greg a lot, especially the, do you love me? Could you learn to love me?
Caroline Saunders: Those are real questions. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Those are real questions indeed. Okay, we’ve covered sort of your background here and we’re getting into the sustainable baker. Were you really worried that dessert is not going to have a future? That sounds like a little bit overly freaked out, but maybe you discovered that it is a reasonable concern.
Caroline Saunders: It was more one of those like unbelievable rock bottom pandemic boredom thoughts is my honest answer. Mixed with a little bit of concern. Really, I’ve been thinking about climate change and food for a long time. It’s really my driving interest. And I think a lot, as many people do, about some of the food security implications that climate change will have. And I’ve read a lot of books and Works of great authors who I really admire about how our dinner is going to be affected, how our daily food is going to be affected.
Will we have enough calories? Will we have to consume protein different ways to get enough nutrition? And I started being interested in these topics. Other reasons that we eat and how those would be affected. Because I love the quote from somewhere that’s like, one of the things that makes humans unique is that we eat for more reasons than survival. We eat for... We eat because of boredom. We eat due to stress. We eat to celebrate. We eat for joy and for love. And so I had been thinking about these other aspects of food and our eating experience and how some of those separate from survival and nutrition and basic dietary needs will be affected by climate change.
And so I wanted to understand, yeah, these more like What are some examples of things that you’ve investigated a result of this show? One that I have spent a lot of time on and learned a lot about and is really fascinating is vanilla. Vanilla, as I think of it, is like the humble, silent workhorse of so many of our favorite desserts. And people feel really strongly about vanilla. Some people love it and love the flavor of vanilla beans and really good ice cream. And other people, including me when I was a kid, are like, well, that’s boring.
You should mix stuff into it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like neutral or it is nothing. Exactly.
Caroline Saunders: But anyone who bakes and has accidentally left vanilla out of a cake or something else you’re trying to make, know that it matters. And so I was talking to this amazing climate journalist about foods that are at risk from climate change. And she said that spices are at real risk. And so I ended up talking to some spice experts and people researching the impacts that climate change is going to have on spices and it turns out that amongst all the spices, vanilla is at particular risk for a lot of reasons.
And if we aren’t making efforts both at the industry level and frankly, the consumer level to safeguard it, there’s a chance we could lose it or it could become close to inaccessible because of climate change.
Ross Kenyon: How bad is it if you left it out of something? Like what would ice cream taste like if it was vanilla ice cream without vanilla? Would it just be like sugary milk? Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: I mean, my experience when I recently did this and I do it more often than someone going to Le Cordon Bleu should is that anything basically just tastes kind of sickly sweet. If it’s supposed to have vanilla in it and you leave it out, it’s just like sugar and flour and whatever else.
Ross Kenyon: Like a biscuit. Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: Like I specifically made a chocolate cake without vanilla and it just tasted like flat and bad.
Ross Kenyon: You put vanilla in a chocolate cake?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, vanilla extract. That’s the thing.
Ross Kenyon: Is that normal for things that are chocolate?
Caroline Saunders: It is. I mean, for chocolate, you typically do a couple of things. Vanilla is pretty normal depending on what exactly it is. But like if you’re making a chocolate birthday cake, for sure, you’re probably going to have a little bit of vanilla in it. But another thing you do for chocolate that’s specific to chocolate is it’s great to add some coffee. Like if you’re making chocolate cake and instead of using a cup of water, use a cup of coffee. And it’s just this like classic way to add another little bitter note that underscores the chocolate flavor.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Okay. That’s pretty intriguing. Yeah. Nice little tip. We definitely take vanilla for granted. I know there’s synthetic versions because I’ve accidentally bought them. They’re in some sort of What do you even call it? Like they’re suspended in an alcohol and it tastes terrible. Is that just vanilla in general or is that the synthetics?
Caroline Saunders: Oh my gosh. So there’s so much to this that I didn’t realize. Okay. So I talked to this vanilla expert who was telling me that the vanilla flavoring market.
Ross Kenyon: Was it Milli Vanilli? No, Ross. I don’t even know who that is. The density of stupid jokes here is way too high.
Caroline Saunders: This is astounding. I learned that the, I’m using air quotes here, vanilla flavoring market, all the vanilla you can buy in the store of any kind, all the vanilla products you can buy, like ice cream or what have you. 98% of the vanilla flavors you can purchase out there are synthetically derived and they can be derived a couple of ways from lignin, which comes from plants or from petrochemical processing, interestingly. And when you derive it, what you’re getting is this compound called vanillin. Vanillin is appropriately the most common, the name for the most common flavor compound in vanilla beans.
To be clear, like synthetic vanilla, which is if you buy natural vanilla flavoring at the grocery store, you’re getting synthetic vanilla. That’s 100% vanillin. Whereas if you buy a real vanilla bean or an extract that’s labeled pure vanilla extract is I think what it’s normally called. You’re getting the essence of the vanilla bean. And a vanilla bean does have vanillin as its main flavoring component, yes, but it also has 250 to 500 other flavor compounds in it. And that is why real vanilla is this complex, delicious, beautiful flavor. And the synthetic stuff is a little flatter.
And the synthetic stuff is not a particular risk from anything I could find, but the real stuff, which only is 2% of the market, is vanilla.
Ross Kenyon: It’s surely it must be immensely better than the synthetic, right?
Caroline Saunders: In my opinion.
Ross Kenyon: Do you require a sophisticated palate to discern the difference or no?
Caroline Saunders: I don’t think you do. That’s a really good question. And that would be an interesting test. I haven’t done a straight up side by side sniff test, but I kind of now want to pull together a bunch of people and make them do that.
Ross Kenyon: I know this is probably just advertising, but if an ice cream is vanilla versus vanilla bean, I’m going for the bean. And I think it tastes better, but I’m pretty sure it’s... Well, here’s what you should do.
Caroline Saunders: You should turn that carton around. You should look at the ingredient label and you should see whether it says natural vanilla extract, which I’m now remembering is the wording for the real bean stuff or vanilla flavoring, which is the fake stuff. Vanilla, this reminds me, is the most highly regulated spice in the United States. And it’s like a weird quirk of FDA history. An expert was telling me that in the 1920s, the FDA created these regulations because food manufacturers who were using real vanilla beans were getting really mad that those with synthetic vanilla were trying to hawk it as the same thing.
And so it’s actually the most tightly regulated spice in the United States. And I really like to imagine, I don’t know this history, but I hope someone out there does. I like to imagine like the ice cream bigwigs in their boardroom, like all fluster faced over vanilla beans.
Ross Kenyon: You went that way. I was thinking Elliot Ness and the untouchables and prohibition, but for vanilla. You went like the jungle. I went the other way. What are some other episodes that you’ve got working now?
Caroline Saunders: So there’s another really interesting story that I was exploring about how various plant breeders are trying to help make sure wheat and other grains will be adapted to the changing conditions climate change is going to bring. So I know you all have talked on this podcast to folks from the Land Institute and I talked to some of them about their project with Kernza, creating perennial grains at real scale for the first time ever, or working on it. And then I also talked to some really interesting people at the Bread Lab, which is based up in the Skagit Valley, north of Seattle, out of Washington State.
Ross Kenyon: I hear that place is amazing. I’d love to go to that.
Caroline Saunders: Up in like baking circles in Seattle, there’s a lot of buzz about and love for this particular strain of flour that the Bread Lab developed and is being sold through some regional mills called Skagit 1109. And if you go into any cool bakery in Seattle, I can almost guarantee you they talk about Skagit 1109 pretty often. And what’s really neat was that the Bread Lab created this grain, this seed that was adapted to the maritime climate of the Pacific Northwest. I mean, this is not a region where you think about growing wheat.
Eastern Washington is much more like the Great Plains and the West and more what you think of for wheat growing conditions. But Western Washington is so rainy. And so they developed a grain that can deal with that. And they are, I think, looking to the years of climate change ahead and thinking that the best way to ensure a good supply of this food that supplies 20% of global calories is to have tonnes of genetic diversity because that’s nature’s insurance policy. And that’s what you find in the wild.
Ross Kenyon: I’m pretty sure I gave you a bag of the Kernza flour.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, you were the one that started me on that. And I’ve been on a Kernza kick for like a straight year as a result. I actually a couple, maybe like last week, I did some side by sides trying to figure out exactly how much Kernza flour I could work into a loaf of bread and still have it rise. The answer is like 40% max, maybe 50%, which is pretty good.
Ross Kenyon: I made one loaf that I think was almost entirely Kernza and it came out almost like a flat Pocaccio looking kind of thing. I was like, something went horrible. I’m not a very good baker.
Caroline Saunders: I will spring to your defense because the reason is that it has lower gluten content than some other bread flours. And so that means it doesn’t have quite the structure to generate that rise. In the world of baking and pastry... There’s no judgment on how much gluten a flour has. It’s just that low gluten flours versus high gluten ones are used for totally different things. Biscuits, cookies, anything you want to be soft is low gluten. Whereas bread, you just need really high for the structure and the strength.
Ross Kenyon: If something is super crusty like a baguette, is that supposed to be made from high gluten flour or is that a result of the baking temperature? Great question.
Caroline Saunders: A baguette, because you kind of want the rise and some air bubbles in it, you do want a strong, high protein, high gluten flour. But the crustiness does come from both the baking temperature and importantly, having like a moist environment in the oven as it’s baking. If you ever see like those little bubbly, crackly things on the outside of a crust, like actual bubbles, that’s, you know, that there was like water and steam in that oven. All this science, it’s so fun.
Ross Kenyon: I know there’s so many variables. I can imagine you tweak one thing and everything changes or God help you if you change more than one thing. Oh, it’s pure chaos. Yeah, it sounds like it. I wanted to ask you two, I read the script for the show about pastry chefs that are looking to stop using animal products and cook veganly. If that’s an adverb that’s acceptable. It should be. How did that work? It seems like something like Not using butter and biscuits or croissants seems like it might be illegal in France, frankly, and still be able to call it a croissant.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, it is. I think I should not bring that up with the chefs that I train under.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, their provenance laws, I think, are really strict, aren’t they?
Caroline Saunders: But yeah, it’s really interesting. There’s a decent size fringe movement in the pastry world in America doing vegan viennoiserie, which for a quick vocab explainer is basically anything flaky. So croissants, cruffins, danishes, I think maybe count. I might get yelled at for that. But anyway, all these super flaky, croissant-y type things. And yeah, there are a fair amount of bakers and pastry chefs doing them vegan for a variety of reasons. Among the folks I talked to, I heard wanting to accommodate people with dietary restrictions, wanting to go plant-based for the planet, wanting to do so for health.
But it’s really interesting because French pastry, Western traditions of pastry, but French pastry in particular has like a stranglehold on the Western baking imagination. I really got to be careful what I say since I’m going there. And in the French baking tradition, butter is king. And so it really is kind of this turning of the tables to try to do all these same things without it. But I will also say that I spoke with a We’re raised in different culinary traditions where butter is not central. I talked to this amazing French Camorian baker where back in the Comoros off of Madagascar and off of Africa.
Coconut and rice and vanilla, which grows there, are really key ingredients and butter is not. And so I think as we try to navigate some of these potential dietary changes that we need to make, whether on our dinner plates or dessert plates, for the sake of the climate, we should think beyond the obvious cuisines in front of us, like the French ones.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to think of a world that we’re less influenced by the French palate and that and Italian foods is seemingly everything. And I think Americans mostly look to the continent, right? I think it’s probably changed over the last couple of decades.
Caroline Saunders: I think that American kitchens have largely looked to French kitchens from everything to how staff structures work in a kitchen and hierarchically who’s at the top. How things flow from there right down to the ingredients and what we revere and what we think of as classic and what we think of as correct. And I’m about to go get exposed to a whole lot more of that.
Ross Kenyon: Is it like Northern Italian food is not olive oil? There’s a lot more dairy and Southern Italian food and Sicilian food. It’s just the idea of including milk in it, I think is super foreign to it. Are there baking traditions? Is it even possible to be baking though without having access to dairy or eggs? What does it even look like? How can you even do it? I have a hard time. I can see how you cook savory food without those ingredients. But baking seems to require it so heavily. Am I just path dependent at this point?
I’m just locked into the wrong way of seeing it.
Caroline Saunders: Well, I think we’re all path dependent in that way. Part of the real fun of this podcast and the research I’ve done for it and the people I’ve talked to is I’ve been exposed to more of these other cuisines that don’t rely as heavily on dairy products. And also I dug into my family history a little bit. For this podcast, because there was this cake in my family that we ate a lot growing up called crazy cake and people might’ve heard of it. It’s also called wacky cake, cockeyed cake and depression cake.
And it’s a simple one bowl of chocolate cake. And it came about, lore has it either during the great depression or during world war II, but it used instead of butter and eggs as leavening and fat, it used vinegar and oil. And the reason that it did that was that it was using these ingredients that were not what’s the word rationed because of the war or that weren’t too expensive because of economic hardship. And that is like the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had in my life. And so I think we can also look to these different points in American history where people got by with what they had and that often excluded those types of what we now think of as very traditional ingredients.
And there’s plenty of delicious things you can do without them. There are a variety of culinary schools offering like three month courses or addendum courses in various Asian cuisines, which is really cool. And if I had the magic wand, I would take a bunch of those too at Le Cordon Bleu.
Ross Kenyon: Some of the people go back to basics to like, what’s the guy in Australia who cooks only with fire? I saw that chef’s table barbecue too. You’re like- So like there’s, and I think he trained in the basket kitchen that did that. And that’s super cool. It goes back to basics, right? Like none of this like tweezer-y stuff. We’re going just the elemental, really, truly elemental. Are we going more tweezers? Are we going more back to basics? Is it just more of everything all at the same time?
Caroline Saunders: That’s a great question. So a lot of my best friends love shows like, I’m going to date myself here, but Cupcake Wars and then more recently Holiday Baking Championship. Just desserts, Zumbo or whatever the heck. I got to admit, I can’t stand all of that stuff. And it’s, I guess maybe I do belong in Europe. It’s too much color for me. It’s too much. It’s a little loud. It’s fun. But what I’m getting at is that I think there’s in like baking culture right now, especially like kind of pop baking culture, there’s just so much over the topness and it feels like A bubble to me.
It feels like surely that has to come back down. And I was actually talking to this dessert historian. Yes, there are dessert historians, which sounds like such a fun job.
Ross Kenyon: Also, another astronaut job.
Caroline Saunders: This wonderful cookbook author named Ann Byrne has written cookbooks with such titles as American Cake and American Cookie. And she really does trace recipes from like the mid 1700s or sometimes earlier up to the present. And so she’s this wealth of historical knowledge. And when I asked her this question, where do you think American dessert is going? She said that she thinks people are going to go back to basics and get simpler again, that people after decades of kind of fanciness and haute cuisine and overconsumption, everyone kind of wants to chill out and be simpler in many parts of their lives.
And it’s proving true in baking too. And I kind of like that.
Ross Kenyon: It makes sense for sure that there are cycles where you’ll go and you’ll get especially Rococo and ornate. And you’ll be like, we just need a simple folk song. We don’t need some ornate nine, nine different, like no, no verse, verse chorus, bridge chorus kind of deal. Sometimes you just got to go back to the 12 bar blues or something simple. I like that too. I like both of those things. Frankly, I don’t have enough money to eat at the tweezery places. Yeah. I was looking at some Michelin star restaurants.
I’m like, hmm, maybe in a few decades I would be able to justify this one.
Caroline Saunders: I was thinking about that for my move to Paris. I was like, I really got to get to know the cool hole in the wall places in my neighborhood because that’s going to be more my speed.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, you spent time in Provence, right? So you probably have some Provencal cooking in your experience. Yeah.
Caroline Saunders: A little. That was really fun. Yeah. I worked on a farm there one summer between college years, a little biodynamic closed system farm with an apiary to boot. So that was pretty fun. And it was definitely a good crash course in how the French eat. And one thing that Is both such a stereotype and so true is how often they’re doing food shopping. And that’s what’s so fun. Like they go get bread every day, at least from what I saw. And I’m excited to do that.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Sounds fun. Maybe exhausting, but I guess if it’s the good enough quality to compensate you for the trips, I guess also you’re able to walk.
Caroline Saunders: Granted in my village of 50 people that I was staying in at the time, the bread shop was next door. So that did help.
Ross Kenyon: No, but that’s nice too. That small, small batch kind of thinking. Yeah. So that’s other arc too, is that we used to go have, you know, I’m sure every block or every couple of blocks had their own bakery and then we all outsourced it to giant factories, mass producing it. And then we’re all bending backwards, right? Oh, artisanal. There was a reason we did this. It’s not just about saving a couple of dollars or shaving some pennies.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. I think that’s especially true coming out of the pandemic. Everyone’s focused on community and Re-establishing connection and getting to see the people that you couldn’t see. And I think that’s true in our eating establishments too. People just want to kind of like sit down and eat outside and know your baker and all that fun stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, I love the podcast. It’s been so fun to track it for the entire time that you’ve been working on it. I’m so happy it’s finally released. Obviously, if people want to support what you’re doing, they can look it up in their podcast app for the Sustainable Baker. Links are in the show notes. Are there other things that they can do to help you?
Caroline Saunders: Well, you can certainly follow along on Instagram. It’s at Sustainable Baker. I’ll be posting there throughout the year as I learn more about. It’s a good one.
Ross Kenyon: I like following that one a lot actually, yeah.
Caroline Saunders: And yeah, what else? Read the IPCC report, take climate action, follow Nori. Y’all know the drill.
Ross Kenyon: Y’all know the drill. Links to all those things are in the show notes. Caroline, thanks so much for being here. Good luck in Paris.
Caroline Saunders: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, keep you guys posted. Maybe send some baked goods. Net zero carbon baked goods.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that sounds great. Happy to have you back on in the future. Talk about what you’re working on, thinking about. Thank you. Thanks again. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. And if you’re listening and you like what we do here, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps a lot, helps us get this content out to more people. Thank you so much for listening. Have a lovely day. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher.
It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori. com where there is a newsletter that’s nori. com slash subscribe. There’s podcast, there’s a whole bunch else, or you can send us an email at podcast at nori. com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon. com slash Nori Podcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
