Nicole Rucker 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 bakes.
Today's guest is Nicole Rucker, a straight-up pie genius. Nicole is the head chef and owner of Fat + Flour, the beloved bakery in Los Angeles where fans line up for her dreamy pies, cookies, and other sweet treats. She's known for her rustic desserts and is a two-time semi-finalist for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef. Nicole joins me today to talk about her new cookbook, “Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake.” It's a follow-up to her 2019 debut book, “Dappled: Baking recipes for Fruit Lovers,” and it's chock-full of so many great pie, cookie, cake, and brownie recipes. There's hand pies, galettes, custard pies. You get the picture.
Nicole and I discuss what inspired her new book. Spoiler alert, it was when she had fallen out of love with baking during the pandemic. Her mind-blowing new technique that she calls the “cold butter method” for mixing up pie dough and cookies, and why she believes a stand mixer is the best tool for making pie dough. Plus, she walks me through her blueberry with lavender and cream cheese crumble pie recipe. And let me tell you, peeps, you will be craving this pie once you're done listening. So stay tuned for our chat. You can find today's recipe at cherrybombe.com.
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. This is Kerry Diamond, host of Radio Cherry Bombe. Today's show is presented by Ladurée. Some gifts whisper, a Ladurée gift speaks in fluent French. Whether you choose Ladurée as the perfect companion to a graduation bouquet, as a hostess gift for that sun-drenched Memorial Day soiree, or as a delicate surprise slipped into a picnic basket. Celebrate each moment with Ladurée. With its heritage rooted in 19th-century Paris, ladurée has long been the authority on the art of sweet indulgence. Their macaroons with the crisp shells and soft whisper-light ganache filling are more than a delight, they're a gesture. Some of you know how much I love Ladurée, and especially their famous macaroons, my favorites, the vanilla rose and caramel macaroons, as well as the Marie Antoinette tea flavor. Trust me on that one. A box of Ladurée macaroons is really one of the chicest gifts around. I discovered Ladurée and fell in love with them when I started spending a lot of time in Paris back when I worked for a French beauty brand. And you could say it's been one of my more enduring love affairs. Another thing I love is the Ladurée boutique and cafe in Soho right here in New York City. It has a beautiful walled courtyard that's like a secret garden right in the middle of the neighborhood. Stop by for breakfast, lunch, or afternoon tea. Then pick up some macaroons or other gorgeous Ladurée patisserie on the way out. Whether it's a birthday, an engagement, or just a Tuesday, there's always a reason to gift beautifully. This season, make your gifts as memorable as your moments with Ladurée. Visit laduree.us or any Ladurée boutique for more.
Jessie Sheehan:
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 their guests, 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. Let's chat with today's guest.
Nicole, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk blueberry lavender cream cheese crumble pie with you and so much more.
Nicole Rucker:
Hi. I'm so happy to be here.
Jessie Sheehan:
So first, I'd love you to tell us about like an early baking memory, whether it was an actual baking memory or just like a baked good eating memory.
Nicole Rucker:
My family was not very adept at baking, but we did make very simple things. The Clabber Girl biscuit recipe. There was a drop biscuit recipe on the back of that container. We used a lot of Bisquick at times. But it wasn't a really big baking thing in our family until I started baking.
And actually, one of my uncles got a bread machine when I was a little kid, and that kind of became a thing. But yeah, I mean we liked things like store-bought strawberry shortcake on Sara Lee pound cake and Marie Callender's pie.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I know when you were little, you did kind of love watching grown-ups cook?
Nicole Rucker:
Mm-hmm.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you loved playing kitchen and having tea parties. Did all of that kind of lead into you making more baked goods for your family? I read that there were some Nestlé chocolate chip cookies happening and maybe some banana bread when you were a teenager.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, I grew up reading books like “Secret Garden” and “Little Women” and things like that where I guess people were making things. And “Anne of Green Gables,” especially, I remember when I read those stories, I was captivated by. But my family is Native American and Hispanic, so a lot of the food that they cooked was of that type. So I got to see a lot of delicious things being made on the stove. But yeah, definitely not so much baked stuff until I started watching public television after school. And then I saw Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, and watching all of those people cook and really being into that. So it's kind of started there.
And then I definitely started making things in middle school and high school for sure, banana bread and trying to make chocolate cake and making Nestlé Toll House cookies, and just anything to make friends with, I guess.
Jessie Sheehan:
You did end up going to art school when you graduated from high school, and you were in San Francisco and you studied photography and film. And you were kind of making baked goods so that you could photograph them, and then kind of realized you loved the making of the baked goods more than the actual photography.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. I was. Yeah. I was making things, taking pictures of them, making things to bring to critiques in San Francisco in early 2000s, late '90s. And I was also in a band, and I would bring stuff to our shows, make things for my bandmates. And by the time I was graduating from college, I realized that I just really liked that more.
And when I graduated, my bandmates got me a KitchenAid mixer because I was making everything by hand. You know, instead of something like camera-related or music-related, they were like, "Here, take this mixer." It's very sweet of them.
Jessie Sheehan:
What kind of music was it, and what did you play?
Nicole Rucker:
It was like late 90s style indie rock. I barely played the guitar, and I was a singer. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
What was the name of the band?
Nicole Rucker:
Oh, there were various bands over the years, multiple, multiple names.
Jessie Sheehan:
This is a part of you that I did not read about or find on the internet, so I'm like, "What?"
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. We'll keep it under wraps. There were various, various iterations, but they were all very of a time. It was a sweet moment.
Jessie Sheehan:
You ended up, I'm not sure it was your first job, but a big job that you had before you opened up your own bakery was being the pastry chef at the Gjelina Group?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. I actually had come to L.A., and I started working at an ad agency, and then I worked at a restaurant called Tender Greens at night. And then I worked at a restaurant down the street in Culver City. I had two restaurant jobs. And then finally I said, I'm going to get this job as a barista working for Intelligentsia who was opening in Venice, and that was on the same street on Abbot Kinney as Gjelina when it opened. And so one of our everyday customers was the chef of Gjelina and Travis. And so I kind of just met him over the counter there.
And it was a very casual process. It was so interesting. He needed a manager for the takeaway that he was opening. I was like, "Well, I can be the manager, but also I know how to bake." And so I made him some chocolate chip cookies, and I became this hybrid manager and baker. And then I think the pastry chef from Gjelina had stepped away at a certain point and so then I was making content for both places. It was a wild time in Venice for sure. And then we opened Gjusta, and then shortly after tha,t I left and started working on my own.
Jessie Sheehan:
Such a great reminder for people like, you never know.
Nicole Rucker:
No.
Jessie Sheehan:
You could be the barista at a new coffee shop, and just one of your customers happens to be someone who's doing something that you're interested in.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. And also like it's not really a straight line. I think a lot of culinary jobs these days, they try and plot this very straight line to having your own place. I once calculated it during the pandemic, I calculated how many jobs I had that led me here, and it was like 80. It was a lot of jobs.
I remember my dad and my stepmom, who has since passed away, they were very worried. They were like, "What is she doing? What's she going to be doing?" They were really trying to pin me down, but one day my dad did tell me and my stepmother before she passed too, they did say, "We really didn't know where you were going with this, but we can see that you're going somewhere. Now it's clearer that you're going somewhere."
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. I love that.
Nicole Rucker:
Because all of them added up. I was working in kitchens, and then I needed to make more money, so I took a job that would make me tip,s and that's how I ended up as a barista. Then I went back into baking and then learned managerial stuff. So, it all adds up at the end.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, no, I feel the same way because I've been an actress and I've been a lawyer and I was a stay-at-home mom. I feel like every single thing I've done now makes it possible for me to do everything I do today. Even though part of me just wishes that I had just gone straight into baking when I was younger, but I wouldn't have known to do that. I had to kind of get through all of those other things first.
Nicole Rucker:
I agree. And also timing-wise, it wasn't as obvious that that was a career goal that people would have. For me in high school, going to culinary school as a woman was very rare in America. It wasn't an option. It was like trade school, which is, wasn't very popular. I knew one person who went to culinary school when I was in college, just one, and it was a high school friend who ended up going to culinary school and then he doesn't even cook anymore, but it wasn't like a thing.
And cordon bleu, I feel like was around, but no one ever mentioned it to me. No one was like, "You should do that." No one said anything like that. There was no, "Go to Paris and go to Cordon Bleu there." I mean, we didn't have as much of a picture of Julia Child’s story. I feel like if I had known more about that storyline, I might have been enticed, but I didn't, so I just kept doing what I was doing.
Jessie Sheehan:
Did your parents give you any pushback when you went to art school? Were they like, "What are you doing?"
Nicole Rucker:
Not at all. I got zero pushback.
Jessie Sheehan:
Good. Good.
Nicole Rucker:
As long as I wasn't in jail.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Nicole Rucker:
I was doing all right. I'm a middle child. I was always very independent. They were not worried about me very much. Even when they were like, "How does she have so many jobs?" They weren't that worried about me because they were like, "Thank God she has jobs."
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll be right back. Cherry Bombe's summer issue will be out in early June. Stay tuned for the cover announcement, but I did hear that...dan, da, da, da… there will be multiple covers and I can't wait to see who's on them. To get this issue, subscribe to Cherry Bombe magazine, so you'll be the first to receive it when it's released. Subscribe at cherrybombe.com or click the link in our show notes.
Peeps, 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 Cólon-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 you've opened the first location of Fat + Flour, most amazing name ever, in 2019. And the second, more recently in Culver City. Tell us, for those who have not been, I was lucky enough to do a little event there with you in September. Tell us a little bit about the bakery's vibe for those that don't know.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. So we're really a pie shop, pie and cookies. The downtown location opened just before the pandemic started, so she had a rocky start. It's in a big food hall, a legendary food hall called Grand Central Market, and it's very much a little fast take-and-go type situation. Cookies and pies and coffees and stuff, and it's in this very vibrant bustling market.
Then, Culver City is this very cute little neighborhood pie shop that is very much like going into someone's house, I feel like. It's got cool art and it's very cute. Kind of like a grandma space to be honest.
Jessie Sheehan:
I would say a hip grandma.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. I mean, it was, yeah, definitely a cool grandma.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah.
Nicole Rucker:
It's an art school grandma, so it really is neat. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Nicole Rucker:
Anyway, it's just a nice cozy place to sit around and eat pie and eat cookies. And we have sandwiches, and we've got good fun things you can buy, little gifties and things.
Jessie Sheehan:
The story about the first location having to close due to the pandemic is very important to your story because it was really the period of time, the pandemic, that inspired the new book that I cannot wait to talk about. I'm so excited about this book for so many reasons, but one thing that's really cool about it, it literally as you write, it changed your kind of dessert ethos when you were thinking about and writing this book.
And before we get into it though, I did want people to know about “Dappled,” which is your first book, because I think you've said fruit is your first love, and that was so clear in that book. Can you just tell us a little bit about “Dappled” before we jump into your new book?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, so “Dappled” is a book about baking with fruit. It is my first love. I love fruit. I was always that kid that was stealing, foraging stuff in my neighborhood just because I had a lot of time to walk around. We weren't as monitored in my day, so we would walk around and steal things. Basically, we were thieves. Steal strawberries from someone's front yard, or you know? I learned about pomegranates hanging over fences and citrus everywhere.
It's just about the love of baking with fruit. And as a pie maker, especially, I think more than other parts of baking, I really do connect with fruit in a large volume because fruit and pie, that's like the big thing. We use most of the fruit for making pie. There's not as many ways to use it in such a large quantity unless you're making a cobbler or a pie. But the book has all kinds of different, you know, some of it just uses a little bit of juice, or some of it uses a handful of berries. So, as long as you're using the fruit, I feel like that's the point is like using it and making something delicious, and that's the point of “Dappled.”
Jessie Sheehan:
Also listeners, if you want to see something hilarious, you have to watch Nicole promoting “Dappled” on Seth Meyers' show making her gingery pear crumble pie. It is truly hilarious. Hilarious.
Nicole Rucker:
Oh man. Yeah. I can't believe I landed that. I did theater in high school too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, you did?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, and I've done some commercials. And I think that if you watch this Seth Meyers clip, my friend works for them, and I think they were a little bit nervous like, "What is this? What is she going to talk about? Is she going to land it?"
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, you were amazing.
Nicole Rucker:
It was great.
Jessie Sheehan:
You just completely held your own with him, and you were funnier than him and you made him really ...
Nicole Rucker:
He didn't know what I was going to say. That is for sure he didn't see it coming, so.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah, that's what made it great. So you can find it easily if you Google it peeps, if you want to watch and listen, it's great.
So, first with the new book, “Fat + Flour,” I love your voice. Just the way you write, and it's very you and very engaging, no nonsense, straight to the point, which I just think is so nice in a baking book. Because people can be so scared about, "Oh my god. There's so many rules." And I just feel like you guide us, but you're also like, will you please chill out? It's going to be fine.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, I mean I think you resonate with that, especially, I know that's your general ethos as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Nicole Rucker:
Can we just chill out a little bit.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly.
Nicole Rucker:
The point is to make something. That's the point, just make something.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. So you discussed how you literally, when everyone in the world was falling in love with baking during the pandemic, you actually were falling out of love with baking. And there was I think a ricotta biscuit that might've brought you back? Can you tell us a little bit about why you fell out of love and a little bit about this biscuit?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. Basically we had just opened this business, and we had all these plans to open, and then a week after my 40th birthday, the world shut down. So it felt terrible, and we were all very scared of what was to come and we didn't know how it was going to progress and unravel, and we thought it was going to be two weeks and then it was going to be three months and then it was five years. But you remember during that first year, everybody was like, "You have to stay home," and everybody's like, "What can we do?" And all the shelves were bare because no one had butter or eggs or flour because everyone was deciding that they were going to bake at home. Hot time, right?
I was like, "I'm not going to be able to open this business. What is my life? What is my career? Is this ever going to end? What am I doing? I hate this, I don't want to bake anything. I don't even like it. What's the point?" If we're going to get together in the room and I'll be baking together, is my employee or my friend who works with me going to get sick and then die? It didn't feel like any of it was worth it. And then as we learned more and things went on, we had to get back into it, but I was just really down on it. I was just like," I don't care about this." I took up hobbies, I took up paper marbling, drawing and journaling. I did chapter 1 of “The Artist's Way” and then promptly dropped that while everyone was making banana bread and sourdough at home.
But one day I just was really ... I was just like, you know what? Maybe I need ... it was actually through “The Artist's Way” that I was like, "Maybe I should return to something that's very basic" and I made these drop biscuits. The recipe is in my first book, in “Dappled.” And I decided to make them. I posted this little story on my Instagram, and it was like, "You can use buttermil,k but you can also use yogurt in a little bit of milk" because people were running out of stuff. And I was like, "If you want to make something that's not sourdough, you can just make a little drop biscuit." We've totally forgotten about the simple pleasure of that little very easy-to-make item, but then you could also turn that into pancakes if you added a little bit more liquid. And I posted about that on my Instagram stories, and I don't know, a lot of people made them. They were just like, thank God someone's not telling us to have a starter for five weeks.
Yeah. I got very nice messages from people saying like, "I was so tired of trying to figure out things for my kids and I had to do. And then I just made some biscuits. Finally, and it wasn't that complicated. And now we're eating and it's great." And I felt very like, "Okay, this is my place. I can do this again." And not that that made the rest of the pandemic easy by any stretch of the imagination, but I did really feel like, okay, maybe I need to return to something and simple. And then I started to ask questions about how I can make my own baking processes simpler and not put people at risk and make things less daunting. Because when you're in that headspace of fear, every big task feels bigger. And one of the things it was like, well, we need to make cookies, but I really hate creaming butter. I've always hated it. And when you're making cookies for a bakery, you're making 10 pounds of butter in a 60-quart mixer.
And for those of you who don't know what that means. We could put two Jessie Sheehans in a 60-quart mixer if we fold her up. It's so big. It's a sofa chair. Take your sofa chair from your living room, and then imagine that full of cookie dough basically. And you have to cream butter and sugar in that the perfect way. And then someone has to stick their whole arm in there and scrape the bottom to make sure that you're getting all the butter mixed in. And then you add the eggs and you continue on and then someone has to scrape it again. And if you're not using a hand spatula, by the way, there is no glove that goes all the way up your arm. So this is your entire forearm in there. And then if you use one of the long spatulas thinking you're going to be smart about it, you get one of the long spatulas, they have a removable head and it suctions off inside. And then you have to stick your hand in there anyway and get that buttery spatula head out.
And it was just like a joke. And I'd been doing it for years. Just like the pain of that process, just thinking, "Why are we doing this? This is so dumb." Finally, I asked that question. And then I realized that there were some people who were not doing that and it was not openly talked about, especially for home cooks. It was really not a thing. It was more of an industrial process where you utilize the reverse creaming method. So if we want to get into it, that's where it starts. That's where we really get into what drove me to want to write this book was that process right there.
Jessie Sheehan:
For those that might not know, will you tell us what reverse creaming is? And then I think yours is CBM?
Nicole Rucker:
Reverse creaming is where you take the fat, and I believe it is closer to room temperature fat, and you mix it with the flour and the sugar, essentially all the dry ingredients and then you mix those together to a certain point and then you introduce the eggs and the buttermilk for a cake and it's really a cake method. And what it does is it prevents you from making too much gluten, prevents you from over-creaming butter, which will make something dry after you bake it because you introduced more air to the mixture. And it also makes a very like, on a cake, it makes a very flat surface, so not domed, and a tender crumb. So that was reverse creaming.
And a friend of mine told me that a Levain Bakery was mixing cookies sort of in that way. And then I found another source on YouTube, Crumbs & Doilies in the U.K., they were kind of trying to reverse engineer the Levain Bakery cookie, and they were dumping all of the dry ingredients into the mixer and mixing it and then introducing the eggs later. And I thought, this is great. That's great.
So basically, what you do is that you don't have to scrape any bowl, you mix it all together, right? So once I thought, okay, so we can do this with cookies and will any cookie recipe work this way or do I have to create a recipe that works this way? And I found out that any cookie pretty much works that way. All of my cookies were easy. You just change the mixing method and you have the same cookie at the end, if not a better cookie, because occasionall,y when you make a ton of cookies in 60 or a 40-quart mixer, there's always like one that has a buttery pocket. So it kind of eliminates that little pocket if you do it the right way.
That is what became the cold butter method. And what I thought to myself is, well, if reverse creaming is using a little bit of tempered butter, but when you make pie dough, you use cold everything, is that going to affect things? Is that going to change things? And so I decided I would make the cookies that way with cold butter. And you don't have to temper your eggs either. You use cold eggs, cold butter altogether, it happens so fast. And then you have cookie dough. The cookies are great. And you don't have to relax the dough because you really didn't introduce any crazy gluten. That's another thing that has been talked about in cookie making for a couple of years now is aging the dough for three days or overnight to relax everything and chill everything out.
That's not as necessary when you mix it this way because there's not really anything to relax. It's just about bringing it into an even temperature and then baking it. So we use a quick 30-minute chill time and that's the same amount of time you should preheat your oven and then you're done.
Jessie Sheehan:
I really want to get into the recipe. I promise we're going to, but I just had two things I wanted to ask about the book because I love the book so much. Just tell people about the banana bread section because it's so brilliant.
Nicole Rucker:
When you get the book, you'll see there's actually several sections that have multiple iterations of recipes. So in the cookie section, there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 chocolate chip cookie recipe,s and then potentially another couple versions of chocolate chip loosely. In that chapter, there's multiple versions of brownies, using white chocolate, dark chocolate and milk chocolate. And then when we get to the fourth chapter, it's called five distinct banana bread recipes and it has five totally different banana breads, not just one. And that's because I really felt like everyone who is a baker, we have multiple banana bread outfits.
There's not always one. And banana bread can go in so many different directions. But really what I thought it would be funny, I had talked to a friend of mine, Brian McGinn, about making banana bread during the pandemic and I said, "Oh, maybe we should just make a zine of all banana bread recipes." Would anyone buy it? Is the question. He loves banana bread as well, which is why we were discussing it. But then when I was pitching this book and we were meeting with publishers, only one person we pitched it to thought that was a whimsical and a welcome idea and that was Tom at Knopf. So they won because they saw that banana bread list and they were like, "That's fun" because it is fun.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. They're the smartest. Yeah, it really is. And then just because I want to know, I noticed that the cookies, I think all of them are baked at 375. Talk to me about that versus 350, I feel like so many cookies are 350, and I just wondered what your thinking is there.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. I mean, I think our cookies are kind of a style. They're very thin usually. Because of that, they spread fast and they bake fast. Especially if you don't have a convection oven, that's really the place where I think that cookie should be baked, yeah. If your oven runs hotter and you're uncomfortable about it, definitely turn it down. But what I don't want is for somebody to bake a cookie for too long at 350 and then have the bottom to be tough because it gets a little bit dried out. I feel like it's a thing that can happen. Yeah, I think 375 is good.
I mean it's all based on my oven. I would also like to say that these things, these temperatures and these time things that authors write in these cookbooks, these are really, when it gets to that section, it's really a guide. It's not a rule. Everybody's different. At that point, I'm not in your kitchen, so I can't do that. If you're thinking they're cooking too fast and you want them to be less dark or you want them to be more dark, like keep going or take it out, you know? Use your judgment.
Jessie Sheehan:
I want to talk about the blueberry with lavender and cream cheese crumble pie.
Nicole Rucker:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
You have said that your pie dough recipe, which now that the ratios are the same, but the technique has changed. We're going to talk about that because it's now CBM. But that you have said that a pie dough recipe is the basis of your bakery and your reputation as a baker.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. So the pie dough recipe that we use has evolved over the years in terms of the technique. And I think that it really is, this version of it to me is the best because it really empowers people not to be scared of this one product, which is something that in the history of pie and the lore of pie has really been beaten into people like don't touch it too much, add more liquid as needed. There's all these little things that people have gathered over years of pie making that then ultimately result in people being too terrified to mess it up, touch it too much, add too much liquid, not add enough. There's all these things that happen. It's a very, very simple product that has so much fear behind it, which is so strange. And I just blindly went into making pie thinking like, "Oh yeah, I can make that, that's fine." And now it's my calling card. So I try to make it as best as I can.
The recipe has a couple of different little signatures in it. It has some apple cider vinegar in it. It also uses dark brown sugar as the sweetener in it. Color and flavor. Apple cider vinegar, they say, inhibits some of the wrong gluten from developing and keeps it tender, uses butter, not lard. It has a fold method in there so that you get a tiny bit of a lamination. But the real core value of making it is that you really take it a little bit further than pie dough methods that I have been seeing in the last few years that really have these massive chunks of butter in them. And there is a photographic layout in here of how far to take the pie dough mixture. And I'm making it in a stand mixer now.
I'm not making it by hand anymore. I'm not making it in a food processor, which is my least favorite method. I'm making it in a stand mixer with the paddle, everything stays ice cold. It takes roughly four and a half minutes. If you make it from beginning to end, you only touch it at the very end. The stand mixer and the paddle does all of the work. And you have a chilled not-too-tough pie dough at the end. And then you layer it up and put it in the fridge and you can make pie.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's incredible. And originally, I think maybe for a while, or at least one of the techniques you were using was fraisage, right? You were sort of putting the dough on the counter and sort of rubbing it with the heel of your hand.
Nicole Rucker:
In my first book, I say it's like passing a letter across the desk. You spread the butter out, and you make these sheets, and that is very beautiful and very fun to do. But when we started making a lot, a lot of pie, that became another one of those things where I was like, this is crazy that we're doing it. It's very hard on your body when you're making it 50, 60 pounds of pie dough at the same time. And it also takes so long. I mean, it's just such a long process when you're doing it that way.
I just really felt like it's not serving me anymore. And I put it all in the mixer and it came out great.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's so brilliant. I wanted to talk about two different secrets of this recipe or of your pie dough. Often when you make pie dough, obviously, you will have some cold water or maybe a little bit of vinegar. Some people use vodka.
Nicole Rucker:
Mm-hmm.
Jessie Sheehan:
But what I love is that you are dissolving a little bit of sugar that's in your pie dough, plus the salt in the water, so that every speck of the flour ends up being hydrated by a seasoned liquid. I thought that was brilliant. Can you just unpack that?
Nicole Rucker:
Once you explain it that way, it totally makes sense, right? If you're mixing dry sugar and salt, it doesn't disperse as much, I find. And when we dilute it in the water, it gets everywhere. It covers the whole thing. At that point, you have to use all of the liquid. You really are not guessing as to how much to use, and that's when you're adding tablespoons of water. But the sugar is in there, dry, right? In this recipe. You need to use all of the liquid.
I think at first pass, if you've been making pie dough for a long time or several times, you might be uncomfortable about that because it does mix slightly differently than when you make it by hand. Definitely the temperature of a person's body becomes a really purposeful point in making pie dough by hand. And that varies season to season. But when you're doing it in the mix, everything stays really cold. So you add this cold liquid in there, and you add every last drop of it. Depending on the type of flour you're using, I mean, maybe if you're uncomfortable and you might want to add a tablespoon of water afterwards if you're using a very thirsty flour. But I have found just every drop goes in.
And then there's no question for the maker of like, "Did I add enough?" And the seasoning stays the same.
Jessie Sheehan:
Brilliant.
Nicole Rucker:
Because it's all seasoned.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then the other secret, which we've also kind of talked about and we'll talk about more, but is using the stand mixer to make our pie dough for mostly hands-off mixing experience. It's just enough power to develop the right amount of gluten.
As you said, your least favorite is a food processor, which totally makes sense because it is so hard to pulse it without getting too crazy, and then all of a sudden you have paste and not dough.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. The paste.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right? So I thought it's so brilliant. I just wanted to ask two quick questions about pies in general in the book. I noticed that when you par-bake or pre-bake, I have recently started using foil and then using foil and I happen to use rice. But I see that you're calling for parchment or a coffee filter. And since you are queen pie, I wondered why you do not like tinfoil.
Nicole Rucker:
Tinfoil is really expensive and I find it also tears pretty easily. You have to use really heavy-duty tinfoil. In a commercial setting that's very expensive. But the truth is, I really think people should use a coffee filter.
We use coffee filters. And you know what, it's the perfect size, a little coffee filter. And the way that that paper is made in the coffee filter, it's very nicely woven. It's like fabric almost, right?
Jessie Sheehan:
It is totally.
Nicole Rucker:
And it just fits so perfectly in the pie cavity. And carries the beans or whatever, the weights that you're using, right? And that's just something we started doing and we'll never go back. Parchment if you have it, but if you have a coffee filter or if you stop at a Smart & Final or something, you get a little stack of coffee filters, you'll have enough coffee filters to make pie for a long time.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. And then also, I love this about your custard pies. They all call for a pudding mix.
Nicole Rucker:
Some of them do, yeah. Not the baked custards, but in banana cream or coconut cream or strawberry cream. We started using instant pudding mixture when the eggs went real crazy during the pandemic. I also found it has a secondary benefit of when you make pastry cream. Making pastry cream is so difficult in a huge volume. It's very hard to train and you're always like, "Did I cook it enough?" But then you're like, "Did I cook it too much?" And it curls.
The other thing that happens is once you puree the butter into pastry cream and then you chill it, if you mix it after that, it'll never be the same set. It kind of breaks up the proteins. It also doesn't have a very long shelf life because as it sits in the fridge, the egg proteins can start to weep out if they're not cooked to exactly the right temperature. And I just felt like there's too many variables in that. But people really like banana cream pie. It's one of our top sellers. So we decided to go with this white chocolate instant pudding that we make. We make the white chocolate and part of it, we add it in. And you really just kind of zhuzh up instant pudding mixture, which is just starch and sugar.
It's really not anything crazy. It's just a starch and a sugar mixed together in a perfect ratio already. And then you add whatever liquid dairy you want and you mix it. And then we happen to make cream, make a little white chocolate ganache and add it in there. But you can also make a regular chocolate ganache and add some cocoa powder, make a chocolate version. You can make a caramel version. I mean you could make it flavored with fruit if you wanted to make a super strawberry cream pie, but it's so affordable and no eggs.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, which is brilliant. The other thing I just wanted to mention, I promise we're going to jump into the recipe. Cream cheese is used in two ways in this pie. One way it's going to line the pie dough, which I assume is to prevent us from having a soggy bottom, like the cream cheese will kind of be protective and not let those berries get too leaky.
And then the other thing is it's in the crumble, which I had never even seen before, Nicole. I love that, the cream cheese crumble. And then I just wonder, are you putting cream cheese on the bottom of all kind of juicy forward pies?
Nicole Rucker:
No.
Jessie Sheehan:
Just because it's in the crumble too?
Nicole Rucker:
Flavor? Yeah, it's really not that much to protect the pie crust. I don't really believe in soggy bottom culture. I'm not. If you baked it properly and you baked it till you witnessed the signs of doneness is what I tell people, you're not going to have a soggy bottom. I think we're obsessed with that as being a pitfall.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we got to get over it.
Nicole Rucker:
And I think if you ... we got to get over it. Things have juice in them and like something's going to be tender. If it's truly soggy, you didn't bake it enough. That's really what it is. Yeah, the cream cheese does protect, but it has enough starch in it and you bake it until it's boiling in the oven and you see those bubbles coming up. And when you look at the photo, can see it at the very edge, just like a little bubble of juice coming up. If you don't see that it ain't done.
Jessie Sheehan:
I quote this a lot, so at some point I have to stop doing this, but I once heard Carla Hall say at a pie contest, she was a judge. There is flavor in the brown. People do not understand that the top of the pie actually should not be pale. It needs to be dark. And I have found you actually want to see bubbles in the center too.
Nicole Rucker:
You do. It needs to boil.
Jessie Sheehan:
Edge is great. Yeah. And people don't realize that and they're like, "Why is it soupy?"
Nicole Rucker:
That is the science part though, is really that when you're using these starches, in order for them to gel, they have to reach a boiling point for a certain number of minutes. It's not that long. It's really like if you have a pie that looks brown and done, you think you're ready to take it out and it's not boiling, put it in another 10 minutes. The truth is it's not going to burn in that period of time because you're still playing catch-up between the filling and the exterior, and that's like a time temperature ratio thing that's happening.
And then they catch up altogether. And then you have a browned bottom, a browned top, and a set juice in the center. And those starch molecules when they cool, are going to hold the juice. So it's not going to become soggy. If you leave the pie on the counter for four days, things will start to break down and you'll have a softer bottom, but I don't think it's going to be soggy. But the cream cheese is really because it's delicious, it tastes good. And then the cream cheese crumble is, it's just one of those things where I was like, "Yeah, why aren't we adding cream cheese into crumble? It's so delicious." Some people make cookies with cream cheese in them. And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds really yummy. We'll just do that."
Coincidentally, today is the first day that we have that pie on the menu this season. I just ate it right before I got over here.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. For inspo.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. I was like, "Oh man, I'm so glad this is back." But you could put cream cheese on the bottom of any pie if you like cream cheese.
Jessie Sheehan:
All right, so finally I promised. Recipe time. First, we're going to make the dough in a measuring cup. I'm assuming two cup will work here, something with a spout. We're going to combine dark brown sugar, apple cider vinegar. But I wondered if there's a brand you love or is it just something that you get like Dr. Bragg's or whatever that one's called?
Nicole Rucker:
I do have Bragg's most likely. Yeah, it doesn't have to be anything special. It's just apple cider vinegar.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to add some kosher salt. We're going to add some cold water. We'll stir with a spoon until the sugar and salt dissolve. And then first we'll chill this in the freezer until it's very cold, but we don't want to freeze it and then we'll move it to the fridge and just keep it there while we're moving forward.
So in our stand mixer fitted with our paddle attachment, we're going to mix some unbleached all-purpose. So two queries. One, why is unbleached important to you and two, what kind of brand of AP?
Nicole Rucker:
We use King Arthur flour. That's my favorite. It's the most reliable for bakery owners, I believe, and it's widely available. It's available at Whole Foods and Sprouts and all these grocery stores these days. So it's not hard to find. The unbleached part is really just something that I think I've just gotten into habit. It's like an industry standard. Unless you're making something like a cakey biscuit and then at that point you really want that super white cakey flour that is bleached, that's what we use.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to add some cold cubed unsalted butter on low speed. So we're mixing the flour. We're mixing the cold unsalted butter on a low speed until the mixture kind of resembles uneven pebbles with a few larger pieces of butter throughout, about two to four minutes.
Then we're going to slowly add our cold liquid to the bowl with the mixer running on low speed, and we'll continue mixing on low speed until a chunky, shaggy dough forms. No dry bits anymore. Only about 30 seconds. So as you said, I mea,n this is a very fast process in that stand mixer.
Nicole Rucker:
It does. It happens very quickly.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also think this is so interesting. You've dropped so much science today. I'm so grateful to you. But we're not talking about huge chunks of butter that people will sometimes say, I want to see a walnut. That's not what we're talking about here, which I really appreciate.
Then we're going to lightly dust our counter with bench flour or a cutting board. We're going to turn our dough out onto the counter. And by this time, Nicole, is it like cohesive or is it still a little bit chunky we might kind of be dumping out pieces.
Nicole Rucker:
You're going to be dumping out pieces. And you can see it in the book. There's photos of dumping it out on the counter. And you bring it together into a dough by kneading it a little bit. The photos definitely show that bringing it into a dough and then you roll it out and fold it to kind of laminate it.
Jessie Sheehan:
When you do laminate pie dough, this I think is the way people do it, although some people, I think, chill it first and then bring it out and do their letter folds. But I love that we just take the dough, we shape it into a rectangle about six to eight inches. We'll lightly dust our rolling pin, position our short side of the rectangle facing us and roll it out. And then do just one simple letter fold, right?
Nicole Rucker:
Yep. That's right.
Jessie Sheehan:
Bringing the bottom up to the top. The top over. A Couple of questions. Is there a kind of rolling pin that you love? Do you handles, do you dowel?
Nicole Rucker:
At the store we usually use a French pin. That is a little bit thicker in the center and tapered at the edges. If you're making pie dough and you're uncomfortable with that, you should just use a flat pin.
I don't like the ones with the handles on them. Typically, I like just the solid rod-shaped one that's flat across.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So after we make our just a single letter fold, we're going to cut the dough down the center into two portions, about by four inches each. We'll wrap each in plastic. And at this point we'll sort of gently round the corners to sort of have a circular shape so that when we do start to roll out for our pie, we're good to go. And I guess for this particular pie, we're just using one because we have a crumb top.
Nicole Rucker:
Yes, correct.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we'll chill the dough for a minimum of one hour, which is also nice. I feel like more and more people are telling us we need to do it overnight. Do you still feel like overnight is best?
Nicole Rucker:
No.
Jessie Sheehan:
Or are you okay with an hour? Oh my god, I love you. I love you.
Nicole Rucker:
I'm not waiting that long. Put it in the fridge for an hour. See, the thing is you don't need to wait that long for everything to come up to cold temperature. If you made it by hand, you would have to wait longer for everything to come up to temperature or come down in temperature, right?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Nicole Rucker:
But that's not necessary because everything's cold. And you'll feel it when you put it in the fridge. You'll be like, this is already cool to the touch. And then you put it in there for an hour. It chills. It can be in there for days up to a week and a half, I believe, without discoloring. An hour is really all you need, and an hour is probably long enough for you to gather the crumble together and gather the fruit together. And then you'll be almost ready to put something in the oven.
Jessie Sheehan:
Brilliant. While it's in the fridge, we're going to make our filling. We're going to add granulated sugar and dried culinary lavender. Where do you get that? I know I've seen it at Whole Foods. It's not impossible to find. And you can find it online.
Nicole Rucker:
In New York, you can get it at SOS Chefs. I just saw it there. You can get it online, pretty widely available. They definitely have it at Whole Foods, typically. It just has to be a nice-smelling culinary lavender. Yeah, it's untreated. It's just the blossoms that arrive.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Yep. So we're going to take our sugar and our lavender. Put it in a large mixing bowl. I assume at work this is probably a big metal restaurant supply bowl.
Nicole Rucker:
We're making like 10 at a time. It's a big bowl.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to use our fingers to rub the lavender buds into the sugar and break them up same way we do with lemon zest to kind of pop that flavor. Yes?
Nicole Rucker:
Yes, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to add some kosher salt, some cornstarch, and we're going to add half of our blueberries tossed to coat. And then we're going to place the remaining blueberries into the freezer. I know we're going to cook this section with the cornstarch. Why are we putting some in the freezer?
Nicole Rucker:
Okay, so we're going to cook half the filling and it's going to be hot and bubbly and boiling, and I like to do that to bring out the juices and also to set, it activates the starch so it sets the juices, but then you would have to wait for that to cool down before you make a pie. But if you have frozen blueberries, then you would put them in there, and they're going to cool it down for you.
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, you are a genius. Oh my God.
Nicole Rucker:
I just don't like waiting. I don't like working that long.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me either. Me either.
Nicole Rucker:
For transparency, it comes from the shop. One of the best products that we're able to get to make pie effectively and affordably is that frozen blueberries are a wonderful, beautiful product, and they're high quality. And it's one of those things where we get frozen blueberries a lot, and then you add in, you make the filling. We have huge vats of the filling in the fridge. And then you add ... those are broken down blueberries. But then, when you add the chilled, the frozen blueberry back into it, it creates texture in the filling after it's baked, where everything is not baked to death, right?
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it, yep.
Nicole Rucker:
You have some poppy bursting blueberries still intact that are surrounded in filling.
Jessie Sheehan:
The other thing I thought was interesting is before we're going to cook the filling, and basically we're just going to cook it over medium heat until the juices boil and it thickens. I read that we're going to macerate it for a half hour before we cook it. And I thought that was interesting. Is that just because you don't want to pound those juices out with a wooden spoon. While you're cooking it, you kind of want them to come out naturally?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, I like them to come out naturally. Exactly. It's just a nice little bit of time. And again, it's like so that you don't have baby food, blueberry baby food when you cook it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Now we're going to remove the cooked filling from the heat. We're going to transfer to a heatproof bowl. We're going to add our frozen blueberries, some lemon juice, and we're going to stir.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to make our crumble. So we're going to whisk some all-purpose flour, some light brown and granulated sugars. We're going to add some kosher salt, add some melted butter. So I love personally making, and then we're going to add some cold cream cheese. I love making crumbles with melted butter just because I find it faster than having to cut cold butter into a crumble mixture or pinch it with your fingers.
Are you using melted because it's faster or is there a textural difference that you like?
Nicole Rucker:
There is a textural difference because it's not an oat-based crumble. I like the melted butter because it has a really consistent texture to the crumble. More like that streusel texture to me. And then it has a little bit of chunks of cream cheese that kind of melt into it when it bakes. So it's a texture thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
If you were making an oat crumble for a different pie, you would always use cold butter?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Good to know. We're going to mix this up with a fork, which I love. That's like one of my favorite tools that in my hands. We're going to mix the crumble up with a fork until it resembles buttery crumble. Some small chunks of cream cheese are okay. And then can we leave this on the counter? I mean, it's almost time to assemble our pie, but we're not sticking this in the freezer or the refrigerator.
Nicole Rucker:
No, you aren't. You can leave it on the counter. And I actually think if you wanted to do it ahead, we make it in huge batches and you just keep it in the fridge. So if you wanted to do it in bits, do it in pieces. You could.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Now we're going to assemble our pie. So we're going to heat our oven to 375, line a baking sheet with parchment paper. We're going to flour our work surface again. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and remove the plastic. If it was chilled overnight, we might need to temper it a bit before rolling it out, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. But if we just did an hour in the fridge, it's probably okay to start rolling right away.
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, it is.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, great. So once the dough's pliable, which it will be, if it's been only an hour chill, we're going to roll the disc into a 12-inch circle. We're going to definitely be using our bench flour through the rolling process as needed to prevent sticking. Then we're going to transfer the rolled dough to a 9-inch pie plate. Metal, glass or ceramic?
Nicole Rucker:
We use metal.
Jessie Sheehan:
Would you use metal at home? Is that just your go-to?
Nicole Rucker:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Nicole Rucker:
I love a metal pie plate. It's light too. We used to use glass. I used to use glass a lot, especially when I was learning how to bake pies. Yeah, so you can see the bottom. But now at this point, it's just too heavy. It's really very heavy.
Jessie Sheehan:
Maybe you guys are using disposable at work. But is there a favorite metal pie pan that you would recommend for us?
Nicole Rucker:
We actually use a reusable high-gauge metal, stainless steel one. They're reusable up to think 10 or 15 times before they start to oxidize, but we buy them from a local company.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to transfer our rolled dough to our 9-inch pie plate metal, likely, trim our edges to allow 1 inch of dough to hang over the edge. We're going to roll or fold that hanging edge of dough over itself using our thumb and forefinger to crimp the edge. We'll place the crimped crust into the freezer for 20 minutes.
And now this was, I think I might know the answer, but I'm going to ask anyway. We're going to chill the pie again for about 10 minutes before we bake it. Why are we chilling the crust now? Is it because it'll get all weird when we try to smear the cream cheese on, or is it just because it-
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah. You won't be able to smear the cream cheese. But I also like to put all crimped crust into the freezer so that it's hard because it doesn't slump as much and it takes a little bit longer to come to the temperature of the oven, so it bakes nicer.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Once it's chilled, we're going to smear our room temperature cream cheese onto the bottom of the pie crust, pour the filling over it, which is our cold berries, plus our cooked berries and our lavender sugar. We'll add all the juices that may have collected in the bottom of the bowl. I always wonder about that because sometimes you feel like you're supposed to pour out juices or it's going to be, but maybe it's a little different because these are cooked juices anyway, then we are going to scatter the crumble over the top.
We're going to chill the whole pie in the freezer for about 10 minutes. Transfer it to our prepared baking sheet. Place our pie into the oven on the center rack. And we're going to bake until our crust is a deep golden brown and the juices from the pie are boiling. I sometimes will take a wooden skewer and kind of just move the crumble away from the top center of the pie to make sure I see bubbles there. Do you guys do that or you kind of know when it's done.
Nicole Rucker:
We use our fingers.
Jessie Sheehan:
You do?
Nicole Rucker:
Well, no, actually, so we can see it boiling, but also it rises up.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Nicole Rucker:
It souffles a little bit. And you can see it because the activity inside is pushing the crumble up a little bit, so you can see that. And we can see it just by looking in the oven like, oh, it's rising up a little bit, which means the starches are setting and boiling and that's how you know it's going to be done.
Some fruits if you take them out of the oven in the pie, obviously, but if you see any thin liquid in the very center of the pie, sometimes that will happen with blackberries, they're denser and it's not catching up as fast. It needs to go back in for like five to seven minutes so that very center berry juice can start to thicken and boil or else that will be like a wet area.
Jessie Sheehan:
The pie should take a full hour, possibly longer.
Nicole Rucker:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
As we discussed, there's flavor in the brown. We're going to cool the pie for about an hour before eating to allow the juices to settle and continue thickening. An hour seems short for me. Is that because it's a cooked filling so we're not ... it doesn't need to set for quite as long?
Nicole Rucker:
Yeah, I think an hour is the minimum amount of time that you could do something. And it is, there is pre-cooked filling in there, so it's not going to be as liquidy and you're going to see it's going to thicken.
It's definitely not going to be a clean slice. Yeah, it's not going to be like that bakery slice. It'll be juicy. And then as it cools down further, you'll have a little bit thicker of juices.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Nicole. And I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Nicole Rucker:
Oh, thank you so much.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you're my blueberry pie.
Nicole Rucker:
I love that.
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. You can find today's recipe at cherrybombe.com. 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.