Joanne Chang Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of four baking books, including “Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes.” On each episode, I hang out with the sweetest bakers around and take a deep dive into their signature.
I'm so excited to welcome back someone very special today, Joanne Chang. Joanne has been on the pod before, and her episode remains one of our top episodes. Folks just can't get enough of her sticky sticky buns, which we talked about last time. Joanne is an award-winning pastry chef and the founder of Flour Bakery + Cafe, which now has nine locations in Boston and Cambridge. I am originally from Boston, and I have been loving on Flour's baked goods for forever. Joanne is also the co-founder of Myers+Chang, an Asian fusion restaurant in Boston's South End. Joanne has also written cookbooks including “Flour,” “Flour, Too,” “Baking with Less Sugar,” and “Pastry Love,” and she has a new one in the works, all about cookies. Yum! Joanne and I talk about her incredible career and about her lifelong love of sweets, despite not really indulging in them all that much when she was growing up, except when at her friend's houses.
Then, she walks me through a few new menu items that are hitting some of the Flour locations soon, including a milk and honey pound cake inspired by honey butter toast, and The Embrace chai morning bun, an individual babka that honors Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. I loved chatting with Joanne again, and I cannot wait for you to hear our convo. So stay tuned.
Cherry Bombe's newest issue, the Power issue, is out now. We have four different covers for this issue, and you won't believe our cover stars: activist and author Gloria Steinem, Chef Mashama Bailey of The Grey in Savannah, chef/restaurateurs Jody Williams and Rita Sodi behind Via Carota and more in New York City, and chef and culinary creative Sophia Roe. If you're a subscriber to Cherry Bombe Magazine, you'll receive your issue very soon. If you're not a subscriber yet, head to cherrybombe.com and sign up today to receive this issue, or stop by your local culinary shop or bookstore to pick up a copy.
Let's chat with today's guest. Joanne, so excited to have you back on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk with you about your incredible career, your milk and honey pound cake, and so much more.
Joanne Chang:
I am thrilled to be back.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you were brought up in a traditional Taiwanese household and rarely indulged in sweets. Despite their absence, you have adored sweets since you were a little girl. Can you tell us about that, like your love of desserts and sweets despite really never being exposed to them at home?
Joanne Chang:
I think that's why I fell in love with sweets, because I was not allowed them. You know how when you tell somebody, "Don't do that," when you tell a little kid, "Don't touch the stove," the first thing they want to do is touch the stove. And I think my parents were like, "Don't eat sweets," and so then I was so curious like, "Really? How come? Why not?" As a young girl, I just became obsessed with sweets.
I wasn't allowed them. Every now and then, I would get a little taste of this or that. But I would go grocery shopping with my mom and she would go and get the groceries, and I would just go to the packaged cookie aisle and then I would go to the bakery section. And I would stand there and just salivate over all of the beautiful things that I saw that I would never be allowed to eat.
It was nursing this obsession that I had with sweets that when I finally became old enough to play around in the kitchen, that was the first thing I started to doing is I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies, the Toll House chocolate chip cookies from the yellow bag, and that became my signature at home was if mom was in a good mood, she would get that yellow bag and then I would whip up cookies for me and my family.
Jessie Sheehan:
Reading also that I think it's in your first book, but you say in the headnote to your chocolate chip cookie recipe, "Hey, this is still based on that yellow bag Toll House recipe because it's a classic for," I mean, of course, you tweaked it, but it's a classic for a reason.
Joanne Chang:
Right. Right. Why reinvent the wheel? No, we started with that for the Flour Bakery chocolate chip cookie. We improved it by adding better chocolate, and then there's three types of different chocolate. We also added a little bit more salt, and we added some high-gluten flour or bread flour instead of all-purpose, which gives it just a little bit more heft. So, some minor tweaks to make it even better than the original. But yeah, the original Toll House, I think most of us, many of us grew up with it. It's hard to beat.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, despite your longing for sweets that were absent in your childhood home, you have described your family as a food-centric Taiwanese family, thinking about lunch at breakfast and thinking about dinner at lunch. Tell us about some of the favorite things that you guys were all thinking about when you were thinking about the next meal.
Joanne Chang:
So my dad does not cook. My mom was a good cook. I think for us, she was a great cook because we grew up with her food, like me and my brother and then my dad. So I always think of her as having been a really, really awesome cook. But the funny thing is is the older I got and the more I talked to her sister and her brothers and our relatives, she was not known in the family as being really good in the kitchen.
And so it's funny, she came over from Taiwan for graduate school and learned how to cook so that she could make dinner for dad, and then eventually me and my brother. And she developed recipes that her sister taught her when she would go back to visit in Taiwan, but she didn't grow up cooking as a kid. She took a lot of recipes from my aunt, her sister, and then has passed those along to me.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you really, in some ways, besides when you were in the grocery store looking into the bakery case or the cookie aisle, you were also introduced to sweets at your friend's houses.
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
All these delicious store-bought yummy treats that you weren't allowed. And I love that some of those treats have actually made their way onto the Flour menu, like Oreos. And I don't know if you always have the Hostess Cupcakes or if that's just a recipe in one of the books, but just different yummy treats that you had when you were little, visiting friends that you were like, "This is nostalgic for me."
Joanne Chang:
Right, right. I mean, my first taste of an actual sweet, I still remember this so vividly. Linda was my best friend who lived next door to me, and I was seven or eight. She invited me to dinner. At the end of dinner, I was like, "Okay, we're done. We're going to go play." But Linda just kept sitting there and I was like, "What are we doing?" And then her mom came out with slices of chocolate cake and I thought, "What is this?"
I took a bite. I went home and I was like, "Mom, what is this thing that everybody else gets to eat? How come we don't get to eat this?" And so from Linda and then my other friends, I learned about Pop-Tarts. I remember Pop-Tarts. Oh my gosh! The little pouch and it was silver and you'd break into it and there'd be different colors inside. And I just thought it was magic. I really did.
Jessie Sheehan:
I feel like when you're little, there is something special about other people's food.
Joanne Chang:
Oh yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
You're always like, "Oh my gosh. They get..." I remember Ellio, my friend, was the Ellio's Pizza and Pepperidge Farm cookies. My mind was blown.
Joanne Chang:
What are all these things? Yeah. Well, it's funny. At that dinner, Linda's mom served us dinner, and I remember it was a very traditional... I think they were Irish and it was like a meatloaf and potatoes and peas. It was just very standard fare for them. But I remember her serving it, and I just sat there and her mom was like, 'Joanne, are you okay? Do you need anything else?" And I said, "Where's the rice?"
And she just laughed. She's like, "We don't have rice." And I was like, "But you have to have rice." And then she said to me... I mean, again, I was six or seven. She said, "Do you eat Chinese food all the time?" And I looked at her, I said, "No, I eat regular food." Because to me, the Chinese food that I'd eaten, that was regular food. What they were eating was the weird food.
Jessie Sheehan:
Besides being in your friend's home and getting inspired by sweets there, you obviously were making a lot of things maybe until you were older and tasting them. You were dreaming about them.
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
But before college, had you started to enter the kitchen and bake things for your family?
Joanne Chang:
No, not a lot of baking. I mean, before college, I helped my mom make dinner. She was working. She and my dad would be at work, and I would get home from school and she would always leave me instructions on how to get something started. And so I was always really comfortable in the kitchen. I loved helping. I loved making the beginning part of dinner, so that when she came home, she could just finish it off. But I didn't do a lot of experimentation with baking. In college, I was mostly focused on my studies and then making the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe for my friends.
Jessie Sheehan:
Didn't you have your first cookie-baking job at Leverett House?
Joanne Chang:
Yes, in Leverett House. So, Leverett House was the big dormitory that I lived in. And at the basement of Leverett House was a student-run grill where you could get hot dogs and hamburgers and fries and all that. And the guys who ran it were suite mates of mine, and they knew about my cookies because I would make them all the time. And they said, "Will you sell us your cookies and we will sell them at the grill?"
And so I did. I still remember, I sold them for 25 cents each, and then they sold them to the students for three for a dollar. Every semester I made about $80. I remember I would lug all of the ingredients from the local grocery store back to the dormitory kitchen, which was... I mean, it was a tiny little closet of a kitchen, but I would make these cookies, and then bring them to the grill, and then I would get my cash. And by the end of the semester, I usually had about $80 in net profit.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. We'll be right back. Peeps, did you know that we have a free She's My Cherry Pie newsletter that coincides with each new episode? It comes out every Saturday morning and shares insights about the guest, their recipe, and other fun tidbits and baking news, like our Cake of the Week. To sign up, head to cherrybombe.substack.com or click the link in our show notes.
Have you tuned into Radio Cherry Bombe? It's the flagship podcast from Cherry Bombe hosted by founder Kerry Diamond. Every Monday, Kerry sits down with the most fascinating folks in food, drink, and hospitality, from icons to rising stars. Don't miss her conversations with Ina Garten, Alice Waters, Padma Lakshmi, “The Bear's” Liza Colón-Zayas, and so many more. Listen to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now, back to our guest.
So after college, you joined the corporate world. You were a consultant, but you spent your salary, your money on cookbooks and kitchen appliances, and it was starting to happen. And I love this, there was this... It's a little bit insider baseball because I grew up in Brookline. I don't know if you know that, but I know you had this pivotal moment where you took Judy Rosenberg's class about opening a restaurant, and Judy Rosenberg had this iconic Boston suburb, I can't remember where it was, bakery called Rosie's that I 100% remember going to or getting baked good from.
Joanne Chang:
Yes. She ended up with three locations, I think, in the end. There was one in Inman Square. That was the original.
Jessie Sheehan:
Read Rosie's baking book, which I'd love you to tell us a little bit about, and it inspired you to bake more cookies.
Joanne Chang:
So Judy Rosenberg had this really lovely bakery that I visited, and she had a fun cookbook. It's so funny to think about how cookbooks have changed over the years, because this cookbook and many cookbooks from that period didn't have pictures. And if you'll remember, it was illustrated with drawings, but it wasn't filled with actual life pictures of the things that you were making.
But I remember buying her book, and she offered a class at the Boston Center for Adult Education. This was when I was working as a management consultant, and she offered a class, a three-hour class, called How to Start Your Own Restaurant. I was just thinking about, "Wow, what a fun idea." It wasn't anything serious. I just thought, "Oh, this will be so fun."
And I took this class. And at the end of it, I stood in line, like everybody else, to get my book signed, my cookbook signed. And I said to her, "I'm a consultant, but I really want to get into the restaurant business. What advice do you have?" This is after taking this class, where she had basically said the same thing, but she said, "The thing you need to do is you need to go work in a restaurant. You need to find out if you really want to open a restaurant first by working in a restaurant."
And it sounds so obvious, but at the time, I was like, "What? Really?" And I said, "Okay, so how am I going to do this? And that's what I did. I decided to look around for a restaurant job, and then I gave notice at the consulting firm. And instead of going to work in a suit, I started going to work in clogs and a chef's coat.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love the story of that because, at least to me, this seems so ballsy and bold. But you just wrote four letters to the four top restaurants in Boston, and I remember Biba as well. Something about those letters, you got a job in one of them.
Joanne Chang:
I found the letters. I was going through some old... Yeah, I still have the letters.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's amazing.
Joanne Chang:
Isn't that crazy? Amazing. I found the letters. I must have made photocopies. Yeah, I looked up in the Zagat guide the top restaurants in Boston, and I wrote letters to them all. And I said, "I have no professional experience. I have not gone to culinary school, but I'm very passionate about food, and I work really hard, and I will do anything. Anything at all that you need in your restaurant, I will do it. Please take a chance on me."
And Lydia Shire from Biba called me the day she got my letter and said, "We have an opening if you want to come and interview for it." And I was like, okay. I was at work and I said, "Okay." So I told my boss, I said, "I got to go do something." And I remember taking a cab down there. She interviewed me. And by the time I got back to my office, she had called and said, "You have the job."
And I couldn't believe it. And I thought, oh, shoot! I haven't told anybody I'm going to do this. I haven't told my parents I'm going to do this. It was kind of on a lark that I just sent these letters, not thinking anybody would really respond. And within two weeks, my whole life changed.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. How did your parents take the news?
Joanne Chang:
I still remember. I was at Monitor Company, the consulting firm. I was all dressed up in my pumps and my suit, and I remember hanging up the phone with Lydia and thinking, "Oh, shoot, I got to tell mom and dad." And so I picked up the phone, dead silence. I mean, when I say dead silence, I thought the phone broke. I didn't know what to do. I was like, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Finally, I think mom was like, "Are you sure about this?" And I said, "I know that I want to try it out. I don't know what it's going to lead to, but I really am passionate about food and being in the kitchen. I have to give this a shot." I think they heard how desperate I was to at least try it. I didn't plan at that moment, oh my gosh, this is going to be my new career. For me at that moment, I needed to figure out what to do next.
What was next wasn't going to be business school, it wasn't going to be more consulting, but I needed to try something else. And so I think they recognized that I just needed to try this. And I think honestly, in their heart of hearts, they hoped that I would try it and then come running back to the business world. But that's not exactly what happened.
Jessie Sheehan:
No. No. When she hired you, it was to be garde manger?
Joanne Chang:
Exactly, garde manger.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. And you kind of bounced around a little with Rialto, and you went to a bakery for a while in West Newton or Newton, which was also an important stop on your professional journey. It sounds like you learned so... What was his name, Rick?
Joanne Chang:
Rick Katz. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, it sounds like you learned so much from him.
Joanne Chang:
I learned everything. I mean, everything. It was a second chance that somebody took on me. I had been working for Lydia for about a year in garde manger. And in that year, I started to gravitate more towards pastry because the pastry station was right next to my station. So I told Lydia, I said, "I've been here a year. I've been doing garde manger. I don't want to move up on the line. I'd rather work in pastry."
And she said, "Well, I don't have an opening, but my opening pastry chef has gone on to open a bakery of his own, and I think you would learn a lot from him." And so that was Rick Katz in Newton Center. He opened this lovely bakery called Bentonwood Bakery that still inspires me. So many of our recipes are from Bentonwood and from the time there where he just crafted everything with such incredible care.
He really instilled in me that sense of everything has to be perfect. And we would stay late just to get the perfect finish on a cake or the perfect crunch to a cookie. I mean, he was just tireless in trying to achieve this level of perfection. That once we got it, we'd both look at each other and be like, "Oh my gosh, this was so worth it."
Jessie Sheehan:
When you first opened the first Flour, it was one of the few bake-from-scratch bakeries in town?
Joanne Chang:
I think so.
Jessie Sheehan:
What does that mean exactly?
Joanne Chang:
Well, a lot of places you can... I mean, there's a couple of things you can do. If you go to your local coffee shop and they have pastries, it could be that they've bought them from a bakery. They could buy them from a wholesale bakery. A lot of the places in Boston at the time, that's what they did. The other way you could go is if you were running a coffee shop or a bakery, you can buy muffin mix.
You can buy tart shells. You can buy pastry cream mix where you just have to add water and cook it over the stove and then it's done. There's a million ways you can bring a pastry case to life and not have a pastry kitchen in the back. But that's not what we wanted to do. That's not what I was trained to do. I wanted to make every single thing. And so that's what I did, and that's what we still do. We just make everything from scratch.
We don't buy croissant dough. We buy butter, and then we pound it and make it into a butter block, and then we mix the croissant base, and then we laminate it, and then we stretch it and roll it and cut it into triangles, proof it, et cetera, et cetera. So we make everything from start to finish, because for us, that's the fun. That's the joy part for us in the back, is taking all of these ingredients and then manipulating them in a way so that it creates this flaky, buttery croissant.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell us about the name. I didn't know this, but it was almost kind of inspired by a college math class. And what was it, you were asked to rework the number system?
Joanne Chang:
Yes. So the name for Flour Bakery, originally it was just in my head Joanne's Bakery, which I didn't want to name it Joanne's Bakery, but I needed something just as a placeholder. And I remember calling Christopher and telling him, "I plan to move back to Boston, and I want to open up my own bakery. And I need a name." And he's so creative. And so he was tossing around all these really cool ideas, and I kept saying, "No, that doesn't seem right." And he said, "Well, tell me what you're trying to do."
And so what you're referring to is in pure math, and this was as a freshman at Harvard, I took a pure math class and totally got smoked. I had no idea what was going on. I found out the first day, the first day of pure math class, what you do or what we did was you eliminate the number system. There are no numbers, and then you create it from scratch, which don't ask me how to do it because I didn't know what we were doing then, and I still don't know how to do it.
But there was this idea in pure math that you start with nothing, and then you have a building block, and then you build and you build and you build, and then you create something really beautiful. And so while I didn't understand how to create the number system for my Math 25A class, what I did get from that is that in pastry, isn't that kind of what we do? We start off with just these raw ingredients.
And if you look at the ingredient list of any bakery or in any cookbook, it's really incredible how limited the number of ingredients we have that we typically use. And so it's flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and then there's leaveners, and then there's dairy, and then of course, you can add nuts and fruit and chocolate. But really it's those six to eight ingredients that you can either whip together, fold together, knead together, bake together.
I mean, there's just so many things you can do, and you create this incredible array of mouthwatering pastries. And so I was telling this to Christopher, "I really want something that just speaks to the fact that baked goods and pastry are kind of magic. And you just start with flour, butter, sugar, eggs. And depending on how you mix it together, you can get pâte à choux. You can get croissant. You can get scones. You can get cake."
And he said, "What about Flour?" And I thought, huh. And it took a while for it to resonate and feel right. But yeah, in the end I was like, "That's it. That's what I want to call my bakery, Flour."
Jessie Sheehan:
It's such a good... Yeah, and I love the branding and the blue and the flour, and then there's the broken egg. Everything about it is so brilliant. For those that have not been lucky enough to visit, would you just described the pastry case, like what we might see if I was lucky enough to be with you right now and was walking over to one of the bakeries after this, what's in the pastry case?
Joanne Chang:
So when you walk in, depending on the bakery, but we have a pastry case, which is a refrigerated case, and then we have a pastry counter. So in the pastry case, you'll see lemon meringue pie, chocolate cream pie, coconut cream pie. Then you'll see triple chocolate mousse cakes, little individual triple chocolate mousse cakes. You'll see sticky bun bread pudding.
We have cake truffles. We have coconut and chocolate cake truffles. We have cheesecake. We rotate between a Basque cheesecake, and then sometimes we have a raspberry cheesecake. We have carrot cake. We have a lemon raspberry cake. We have coconut cake, a midnight chocolate cake and a Boston cream pie. And there's probably a bunch of other things.
And then move on to the pastry counter, and that's where you'll see all of the breakfast pastries, all of the cookies, all of the breads, a ton of different breakfast pastries such as muffins. We have seasonal muffins and blueberry muffin. We have scones. We have brioche, sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, croissant, almond croissant. And then we go onto the cookies, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, ginger molasses, double chocolate.
And we have brownie bars. We have vegan granola bars, and we have raspberry crumb bars. I mean, it just keeps going and on and on. And we always have specials. It makes me so happy every time I walk in there. I walk in and I just look at everything and it's like, "Oh my gosh, this is happiness."
Jessie Sheehan:
And every single thing you named, even things I don't normally like, I'm like, "Yes, I want that. Yes, I want that. Yes." And I'm so glad you have a Basque cheesecake because I don't actually... I know there are a lot of haters out there.
Joanne Chang:
Oh really? How can you hate Basque cheesecake?
Jessie Sheehan:
I don't like cheesecake, which I know is very controversial, but I love Basque cheesecake.
Joanne Chang:
Jess, you have to try ours. Oh my gosh, we worked so hard on it. Finally, it took I think it was like six or eight months of just eating cheesecake every week. And this one is...
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, until you got there. Okay, I'm coming in.
Joanne Chang:
Okay.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, tell us about your newest location in the Boston Common. That's so exciting.
Joanne Chang:
We actually just had the ribbon cutting with the Mayor, Mayor Wu of Boston. We celebrated our 10th anniversary of Flour Boston Common. We are in the nation's oldest public park. It's right in the middle of the Common. From our location, we can see the dog park where all the dogs are. We can see the tennis courts, the baseball field, the fountain. And right in front of us is The Embrace. It's the statue which commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott.
And it's this beautiful bronze statue. So for this bakery, we created a new pastry called The Embrace, which mimics the bronze color and the intertwining nature of the statue. You can't come inside. So it's a little bit different from our other bakeries in that it's more of like a big kiosk. We do all of the cooking and baking inside, but there's no room for guests, but we have a beautiful outdoor patio, so you can hang out outside.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. And even in the rain, can you come with your umbrella and you just won't sit, but you'll take something to go.
Joanne Chang:
Yes. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
I can't wait to visit.
Joanne Chang:
We have soft serve, which is only at this location. We also offer hot dogs, which is only in this location. We worked on a milk bread bun that we make in-house, and then we have a little chili. We have the Flour Dog, so it's got chili and celery salt and onions and homemade relish.
Jessie Sheehan:
Before we start talking about the milk and honey pound cake, and also we're going to talk a little bit more about The Embrace, just tell us a little bit, I have heard a rumor that there might be a new book.
Joanne Chang:
Oh, yes! I am working on a cookbook called “The Joy of Cookies.” So this started a couple years ago, actually. I was talking to my book agent and she said, "Do you think you have another one in you?" And we've been playing around. Cookies are just... Honestly, when you're at home and you want to bake, cookies are the easiest thing. I love making cakes. I love making croissant.
I love all of those things, pies, all of those things. For the quickest reward, making cookies is the way to go. And so when she came at me and said, "Do you have another book in you," I thought, gosh, I have these awesome cookie recipes that I've been playing with at home. It'd be fun to collect all these together and to pull some iconic recipes from the first book, which at this point is I think 15 years old.
And so there's some really great recipes in there that people have been baking from for the last decade and a half. And so I pull them together into this book. And so this is hopefully going to come out next fall, fall of '26.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. One of my favorite cookies is the chocolate hazelnut cookie from the first book. So good. I also love the photograph of the cookie.
Joanne Chang:
Oh, good.
Jessie Sheehan:
Sometimes there's the photograph. The name would've pulled me in any way because I do love chocolate and hazelnut, but also I love that photograph. So it'll be kind of a collection of your own stuff, maybe some from the book, some stuff from the bakery now.
Joanne Chang:
Yes, it's stuff from the bakery now. It's stuff from past books. And also a really fun part of this is I thought, so much of pastry is sharing, not just sharing of baked goods and wonderful treats, but it's also sharing of recipes. All of the pastry chefs I know, if I'm interested in something that they make, all I have to do is pick up the phone and call them and say, "Hey, I had this incredible pastry at your place. Do you mind sharing the recipe?" And I've never had anybody say no.
And I think we all really respect each other, and we would never take advantage of that. And so I thought, wouldn't it be fun to include cookie recipes from my favorite pastry chefs, from the pastry chefs that I've been lucky enough to get to know over the last many years of being a pastry chef? And so I reached out to I think it's six or seven of them. And like I said, nobody said no.
Everybody said, "I'd love to share a cookie recipe." Part of the book is my favorite pastry chefs sharing with me, and then me to you, all of their favorite cookie recipes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I love that. All right, so the last time we chatted, I was lucky enough to talk to you about or we did a deep dive into your recipe for Flour's famous sticky sticky buns. And this time we're going to talk about two new recipes that you're launching soon. One that will be in the Boston Commons that we talked about a teeny bit, and then the other one that will be in all the locations.
Joanne Chang:
Yes. Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, so the first one we're going to talk about is this milk and honey pound cake. Can I just say that there's something about the name that makes you want to eat it? It's sort of based on a honey butter toast.
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And why have I been sleeping on honey butter toast? I don't even know about honey butter toast.
Joanne Chang:
People always ask, "Where do you get your ideas from?" It's traveling. It's reading books. It's reading magazines. But lately, I feel like the last three or four years, it's probably longer than that, it's Instagram. I go on Instagram and just my feed is all the different pastries that different people are doing across the world. And honey butter toast started to float onto my feed maybe a year or two ago, and it's just this super thick piece of toast that has been fried in honey and butter.
And it's caramelized on the outside and it just looks so good. It looks a little bit like the crème brûlée version of toast and the toast inside when you watch somebody eating it. Jessie, I've never eaten it. I've seen it a gazillion times on Instagram, but I have never been able to eat it. And so I said to my team, we have this incredible pastry chef Steven, and I said, "Hey, let's do something like this." Now, it's a challenge for us in 10 bakeries to try to do one thing that's made to order consistently.
And so we tried to do something that we could offer at the bakeries that was exactly like honey butter toast that I'd seen on Instagram, but it would be really challenging logistically. So what Steven did was he came up with this milk and honey pound cake recipe, which has all the flavors of honey butter toast, but instead it's in a pound cake. And it is incredible. Gosh, I wish I could just zap this through the microphone to you so that you could taste it. Did you grow up with Sara Lee pound cake?
Jessie Sheehan:
Of course. Totally.
Joanne Chang:
Everybody, right? Everybody. And you take it and you slice it thin and then you toast it. I used to do that all the time. That velvet crumb, for me it's what I'm always trying to mimic when I'm baking, when I'm doing a pound cake. And so this pound cake does that. It's got this melt-in-your-mouth. It's like dense, but light at the same time. It's like pastry magic.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh.
Joanne Chang:
And then the flavor, it's buttery. It's creamy. It's got so much vanilla. It's got a lot of honey. I mean, this is the epitome of the simple thing. It doesn't have a lot of ingredients, but the way in which they're all combined, I mean, the honey is reduced and reduced and reduced with some buttermilk to make a syrup that's then poured on top. When you're eating it, it's super velvety. But then you get these hits of vanilla and then a little cream, and then a little butter, and then a little sugar, and then a little more cream, and it just keeps going and going. I mean, it's "just a pound cake," but it is incredible.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. All right, first things first, we're going to preheat our oven to it said 325 in the recipe I saw, but is that convection? So if someone was making this at home, it would be 350.
Joanne Chang:
Correct. Correct.
Jessie Sheehan:
So if you're at home and you were making this, you would preheat the oven to 350, and then we're going to spray a loaf pan. Is there no paper? You guys just do the spray and no paper?
Joanne Chang:
We do the spray, but I mean at home you could definitely do paper. We used to do paper and it was very time-consuming. And we found that if we just spray, it's so much quicker. We're doing dozens at a time. And so it was a time saving thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
Are you guys like an eight and a half by four inch pound cake person? Is it a nine by five inch?
Joanne Chang:
I think it's a nine by five. It's a very classic loaf pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll melt some butter. I assume unsalted butter?
Joanne Chang:
Unsalted. Always unsalted. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll melt some unsalted butter with some honey. Is there a favorite brand or a favorite flavor?
Joanne Chang:
We actually just use a very neutral honey. It's not a specific brand or flavor. This is what I love about baking is that if you're making this, I encourage you to make it just like we do and then make it again and make it your own. And so if there's a certain type of honey that you like, if you like that flavor, then you can add it at this point.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we have our honey, our unsalted butter, and vanilla paste. Is there a brand that you guys love of vanilla paste?
Joanne Chang:
We've been using a brand called Prova. I love Madagascar beans. If you don't have paste, you can use extract. You can use actually the real beans if you have that. That would give you the most intense vanilla flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we have the paste. We have the honey and the butter. We're going to melt them together. Would it be like over medium heat in a small saucepan situation?
Joanne Chang:
Exactly, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Melt that. Set aside. Then we're going to whisk some eggs, some heavy cream, sugar, I'm assuming granulated?
Joanne Chang:
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
And granulated sugar in a stand mixer bowl on speed three, which is maybe like a medium.
Joanne Chang:
It's a medium. Well, actually speed three is high for us.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, it is? Okay.
Joanne Chang:
In the big mixer, it's one, two, three. So it's high. You're trying to really add a lot of volume to the eggs.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's what I was going to ask you. Are we looking for something ribbony?
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
For about two minutes. Then we're going to add some all-purpose flour. Is there a brand that you guys love?
Joanne Chang:
We do King Arthur. King Arthur unbleached, unbromated.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to add some all-purpose flour, some baking powder, salt. Is salt always kosher at Flour?
Joanne Chang:
It's always kosher. And it's funny, now that I'm writing the cookbook, I mean, I've done this for all the other books, but I've been getting more questions about it. I get a lot of bakers who ask, "Why kosher salt? Salt is salt, right?? And it is, but most professional pastry chefs use kosher salt because most professional kitchens, they use kosher salt because it's much easier to measure. It's much cleaner. And I think if you use table salt like iodized table salt, as you know, it's super, super fine. And so it's really easy to overuse and overmeasure, and the flavor isn't quite as clean.
Jessie Sheehan:
We always have kosher salt to cook with in home kitchens, I feel like. Why not always...
Joanne Chang:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
I always now write recipes for kosher salt. So we're adding the all-purpose flour, the baking powder, and the salt, and continuing to mix until smooth. Scraping once or twice, I assume with a flexible spatula.
Joanne Chang:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Are you guys using a huge Hobart?
Joanne Chang:
Yeah, we're using a huge one that you can sit in.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my god.
Joanne Chang:
So when we scrape, we actually take a bowl scraper in our hand, and they have these gloves that go all the way up to their elbows. And they take the bowl scraper and they go down and then scrape. That's a really important part of all baking that I sometimes see home bakers who skip this step because they just think, "Oh, it's not that important."
But it's so important because you really need everything to mix together well. Otherwise, you end up with little pockets of whether it's butter or sugar or flour. And then when you're baking, those little pockets end up being chewy or dense or definitely not at you want.
Jessie Sheehan:
I remember in my first and only bakery job being taught about the nipple at the bottom of the Hobart bowl because I was like, "What do you mean nipple?" You had to get in there and make sure things weren't stuck around the nipple. But I still think about that when I'm just at home with my own little tiny stand mixer. Then we're going to stream in the butter and the honey and the vanilla mixture that we melted. Should it be cooled or can it still be warm?
Joanne Chang:
It can be warm, but you don't want it to be hot. And you're going to stream it in because you're trying to emulsify the whole thing. And so if you stream it in as the mixture's going, then slowly, slowly, slowly, it should all combine really smoothly.
Jessie Sheehan:
And this is speed too. So we've dropped it a little. Maybe now we're at medium.
Joanne Chang:
It's more like medium.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to just mix until smooth and we're scraping a lot. I thought this was interesting. It seems a little unusual to me to be adding the fat last, the butter. I just think of a recipe, have your melted butter with your sugar in the beginning, and this is a little bit unusual.
Joanne Chang:
So funny, a lot of our recipes are like this. Our banana bread is like this too. And our carrot cake is like this where you whip up the sugar and the eggs and you really get a lot of volume, and then you emulsify the fat into it. Especially with a liquid fat, whether it's oil or melted butter, if you think about it, when you have firm butter, you can whip, whip, whip with the sugar, and then you're aerating the butter and you're creating lots of air pockets with that sugar, which is really coarse.
But when you have melted butter or oil, there's no opportunity to create air pockets, air bubbles, and you need those air bubbles. Because as soon as you go into the oven, whatever liquid is in your recipe is taking all of those air bubbles, and the liquid is turning into steam, and then the steam makes the air bubbles just a little bit bigger. And that's what causes a cake to be nice and fluffy or a cookie to rise.
And so when you have oil, olive oil, or melted butter, you can't do that with the sugar. And so what you do instead is you aerate the eggs and the sugar, and that will create big bubbles in the egg. You're whipping up the eggs and creating all of this air within the egg, and then you add the fat.
Jessie Sheehan:
You just blew my mind because I love to develop recipes with oil and melted butter only because I love to make things easy for people, and I don't want them to have to use a stand mixer.
Joanne Chang:
Absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love this idea that the first step, why don't I just do my sugar and my eggs and add that melt... Oh my God, I'm so excited. I can't wait to try that.
Joanne Chang:
I can't wait for you to try it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, so we've streamed it in. We now understand why the butter is coming last, and we're going to transfer the mixture to our prepared loaf pan.
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to bake for about 50 to 55 minutes. And how are you guys testing? I always like a moist crumb. Are your people doing moist crumbs, or is it just visual and smell?
Joanne Chang:
It's by touch. So this is probably for dozens of cakes at a time. And so in your home oven, it might not take a full 55 minutes, but they test by literally pulling the cakes out of the oven and then taking their fingers and touching the center of the middle of all the cakes. And if it resists, then the batter has turned into a baked batter, and then you're good, and you can remove it. If when you press you feel your fingers depressing into the center of the cake, then you know that there's still batter that's raw in the middle, and you got to keep cooking it.
And another way it was just visually, you just started to get that golden crumb. And then another way, and this is less so with a loaf pan, but more so in a circular pan, as soon as the batter starts to pull away from the sides of the pan, then your cake is done. Because at that point, the starch has set, and that's why it's pulling away. It's like, "Okay, I'm done." And so then you can pull your cakes out.
Jessie Sheehan:
While the cake is baking, we're going to make our honey butter soak, which I love. I mean, it's obviously because you're a genius, of course, you're doing this, but I love that when trying to pop flavors, when just trying to make things moist, take an ingredient that was baked in and turn it into a glaze or turn it into a soak. So this is a honey butter soak. We're going to heat unsalted butter again, along with some honey, that same type that we used in the loaf, until it boils. And then we will cool that down with buttermilk. So are we taking it off the heat and then adding the buttermilk?
Joanne Chang:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Does it curdle?
Joanne Chang:
No. Well, you're actually going to boil that honey in that butter so that it caramelizes a little bit.
Jessie Sheehan:
Ah, so it's thicker.
Joanne Chang:
It thickens. Yes. And then when you add the buttermilk, you whisk it in. Again, it's sort of like an emulsification. You whisk it and it all comes together. This is something that I love to do. I love to repeat flavors and emphasize flavors and highlight flavors. And this was Steven, our pastry chef, it was his genius idea when he was coming up with this bread.
We tasted it and we're like, "This is good. It's good." And I'm always looking at him like, "But is it great?" And so he came back and he was like, "Okay, I made it great. I made this honey butter soak mixture to really emphasize all the flavors, "and it really did make something that was good and turn it into great.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also think there's a little bit of genius here too with the buttermilk because it could have been cream or it could have been milk, but I assume that tang of the buttermilk is just brightening everything.
Joanne Chang:
Exactly, especially with honey. It can be such a one-note flavor that you need something a little bright.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also wondered about the lemon juice because there's some lemon juice too. Is that the same thing to pop the honey flavor in a more interesting way?
Joanne Chang:
Exactly. We had it without the lemon juice and we kept saying, "This is great, but man, it needs just a little brightness." And so Steven continued to increase the buttermilk. And then it got to a point where I was like, "We're not going to get there with buttermilk. And so he said, "Let's try some lemon." So we threw in some lemon and that really woke it up.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. So we're going to brush that on when the cake is still warm and when the soak is warm. And then as long as you can resist, wait for it to do its thing. If you can't resist you...
Joanne Chang:
I understand.
Jessie Sheehan:
We get it. And then just quickly before we sadly say goodbye, tell us a little bit more about that Embrace morning bun that you mentioned before that I love that it kind of is a nod to the environment at the Common, the new Flour spot is located.
Joanne Chang:
It was actually Christopher's idea. We were standing at Flour Boston Common looking at The Embrace statue and he said, "Wouldn't it be amazing if we made a pastry that looked like that and we can donate the proceeds to the Boston Foundation," which is the organization that built and maintains The Embrace. So Steven and I got to work. We had so many ideas. It was going to be a pretzel.
We were going to do something with cookies. And we had been making these large-format babkas in a loaf pan, and he thought, "I wonder if we can do this individual style." And so that's exactly what he did, is he took the babka dough, which is essentially a brioche dough, he brushed it with brown butter, and then we filled it with chai spices. And then you'd braid it into an individual little ball and plop it into a muffin tin.
And then proof it and bake it. And then we roll it around in butter. When it comes out of the oven, we roll it around in butter, and then into a sugar mixture that has all of the chai spices again. So it's a chai spice morning bun that we call The Embrace.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my God, a chai spice. I also loved, just for the listeners to understand it's, again, using what you put into the baked good on the outside of the baked good to, again, just accentuate all of that.
Joanne Chang:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Joanne. And I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Joanne Chang:
Aw, thanks. You are mine. Thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Don't forget to follow She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And tell your pals about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Thank you to CityVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Jenna Sadhu. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.