353: Rose Wilde

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I've always loved impressionism and abstract art, and so starting to see that sort of expressed through cake and pastry, just kind of anything goes, is I think more exciting because it makes the walls of what's good less rigid. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Rose Wild is the pastry chef and owner of Red Bread in Los Angeles, a pioneering micro bakery that's been championing whole grains and sustainable baking for over a decade. She's headed the bread and pastry programs at Michelin-starred Rustic Canyon, Manuela, and Mother Wolf, and now she's sharing all that wisdom in the wonderful new baking book, Bread and Roses. We loved having Rose on the show to talk about the joys and challenges of baking with whole grains, her flock of chickens, and more.

1:34Rose Wild, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm so pumped to be here. I'm so happy to be talking with you. And to start off, I want to know about what was like the last good pastry that you've had. Oh, I have been having a lot of bagels. Do those count? I think I think those count and you're in LA which I think the bagel scene in LA has been discussed a lot lately so I'm curious what your thoughts are where are these good bagels um well I usually make a lot but recently I have been uh not uh baking as much just kind of taking a beat post book tour so I have been hitting up courage bagels a lot um I really like they're just like kind of wonky, open crumb, crispy exterior bagels.

2:19So that's usually my go-to right now. Yeah. I've heard a lot about courage and I actually have not been before. I'm from LA, but I stay on the West side with my family normally. And I've heard the bagel line is so long that I'd have to get up quite early to make it over. I'm curious, how early are you getting in line. That is true. Usually you have to get in line at 7 a.m. if you want to kind of get in and get out and still have things you can accomplish in your day. I usually buy like 12 extra and then just have them at home so that I don't have to be in that line as often. But if you go any time after eight, you're looking at standing in line at least an hour and a half.

3:02It wraps around quite a few blocks, like very happy for them. Yeah. That's so exciting. Do you have a favorite cream cheese or topping combination that you go for? I'm pretty classic. I like the cream cheese and some capers and some red onions and some like, you know, fresh cut locks. All good things. And you mentioned your book tour, which is for your great new book, Bread and Roses. And I'm curious, like how was the book tour? Did you have any kind of special eating experiences when you were going around talking to everyone about the book? The book tour was amazing. I went to nine cities in eight weeks, which was quite a whirlwind.

3:40Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. It was really wonderful to celebrate in so many cities with so many friends, new and old. You know, a lot of people came out who I've known for a long time. And also I got to meet a lot of new bakers who were just really excited about whole grains. I ate at all my favorite places and tried some new ones. I really enjoyed my time briefly in Chicago, sorry, Portland. Which Portland? Oh, in Portland, Oregon. I was only there for 36 hours, which was like Not enough time, but I went to to bore bread and I hit up Lovely's 5050 where they just make the most incredible pizza and the most incredible ice creams.

4:30So I always go there. I've been dying to go to Lovely's 5050. Actually, my sister lives in Portland, so I have had it on my list for a while. And it doesn't surprise me that you've been eating a lot of bread and pizza, et cetera, on the book tour. I'm curious, like when you walk into maybe a bakery for the first time, are you looking for anything in the pastry case or behind the counter that's an indicator that you're going to be into the kind of food that they're doing? I always look if they are highlighting whole grains in some form or fashion. And I also always train my eye on the savory pastry just because I think that like, you know, the normal offering that people put out is sweet.

5:11but I love a savory pastry to like balance those things out. I definitely am like a savory in the morning kind of sweets at night person. So those are always exciting to me because I feel like people really kind of stretch their creativity. Whereas with sweets, you have to touch a few more nostalgia points. And yeah, like if there's something with whole grain, that's going to be the thing I order because I just know from my own taste and experience, like white flour tastes like nothing. So I'm only going to taste sugar and whatever, maybe fruit they're highlighting. But if there is a whole grain at play, then there's going to be a whole nother layer of flavor for me to experience.

5:55So that's always what I go for. Definitely. And I'm not surprised that you're mentioning whole grain because that is kind of the beating heart of your book. I'm curious with your own like bread pastry background, maybe even, did you have like a gateway whole grain that first got you excited about baking with whole grains? So I grew up eating whole grains without realizing that was not necessarily the norm just because my father and my mother ran a little like natural food store and cafe when I was very young that was attached to a garden and a yoga studio and an apothecary. They were very big hippies.

6:32So I grew up eating quinoa and millet and corn and didn't realize until I got to school and I got some very weird looks at lunchtime that what I was eating was not what everyone else was eating. So I think that they were all sort of my gateways. Um, but when I, when I teach people, I usually encourage people to check out corn millet or Sonora because there's such tender grains, especially with corn and millet, they're gluten-free. Um, and you can sub in 10, 20, 30 % or the case of Sonora a hundred percent. And it's just really hard to tell texturally that there's necessarily any difference. Like you're not going to get density out of those grains.

7:20but you're going to get a huge explosion of flavor. So I think those are like simple, easy ways to like start baking with whole grain and just immediately maximize like the flavor of things that you already love. Yeah. I really like how you're talking about this ratio that you can sub in because I think that for people who are home bakers, certainly for myself, like there are certain things that I make very often. And the idea of finding a new recipe that is friendly towards whole grain, like maybe is a little stressful, but being able to incorporate it into like my brownie recipe that I make all of the time is cool.

7:55And then also I imagine it kind of empowers people to be developing their palate and tasting for the difference in the first place. Absolutely. I think generally, especially with food trends, which is like a word I hate when applied to food, we're always asking people to like sort of give up something and go all in on something else. And I think in whole grains, you see that as like, you have to try this whole new recipe or go a hundred percent, or are you even trying, you know? And I really kind of pushed back at that narrative because, you know, from a sustainability viewpoint, if all of us bake at 10, 20 % whole grains, which again, will not change the dynamics of how you make it or the way it cooks.

8:42It will be so sustainable for our farmers, for our millers, and for your pocketbook, as well as for, you know, nutrition and flavor. So it's really the smaller things that we do at scale that have the bigger impact when we're all doing it. And I have no desire to make you abandon your grandmother's incredible biscuit recipe. I just want you to use a little whole grain in there because chances are her grandmother was using whole grain because that's what it was available to her. So I think it's all about like using the best of what you have today with the things you love from the past. I love that perspective so much.

9:26And I think it is true and interesting to think about the fact that even what we think of as the family recipe was not always the family recipe and not the way that like agriculture was homogenized or just what was available to you kind of shaped what those family recipes were in our immediate knowledge. And it also is very sweet to me because I read in your book that I think at one point your parents were using your grandpa's bread recipe in the restaurant or something like that. Do you, have you baked from the bread recipe recently? Is it still in the rotation? It's still like the, I would say definitive bread recipe, but I have, you know, he was really making like a country sourdough and that's it.

10:05That was his extent of his obsession. He was an in-house lawyer for RKO Pictures. So he was pretty busy, but this was his like hobby. And I've since taken that recipe and ratios and technique and like adjusted it to like what I have in California and like more whole grains than he had access to. So I would say it's a living document at this point that has trickled down into all the recipes I have. Oh, I love that. And I love thinking about like before there were the bread bros, there was your grandpa. Yeah, he used to, I mean, he had everything hidden in the closet. So I often joke that I'm like the first person in my family willing to come out of the closet with bread making.

10:49Do it in the light of day. Yeah, you're really putting your name on it. And I like talking about these ideas of sustainability because I know that your micro bakery red bread in Los Angeles is very sustainable. And I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about maybe like what was the hardest part of getting a sustainable micro bakery infrastructure up and running and what's been like one of the rewarding parts? I think when I started it in 2011, which was way before we had like the language to describe it, like I used to tell people it's an Internet bakery and I deliver by bike. And I was like, OK.

11:26Okay. Yeah. But then, you know, 10 years later, the pandemic hits and suddenly that's how everyone's doing it. And now we have this word called micro bakery and now people get it. So, you know, oftentimes what you're doing, um, language or trends or stuff like that has to catch up. So I, I'm a really firm believer in just like doing what makes you happy instead of trying to chase anything like that as a result. Um, so I think certainly in 2011, describing it was difficult to like get people on board. Um, it was also a time when there was way less whole grains, like in the time since I started the Tehachapi Grain Project has become available to me.

12:08Nan Kohler, um, established Gristin Toll. And these are two of the places that at least locally I get a ton of fresh flour from, which has amplified my baking as well. But yeah, I think that if you're looking to do anything sustainable, that's not, that's increasingly becoming the way we do things, but it is still a little economically out of reach in terms of sort of the structures on the back end available for you to like buy food from and buy pantry staples. So I think it can become more expensive than a traditional model. But I think the more of us that choose it, the more of us that push that to become the way.

12:51And it sort of evens out after a while because what we're really doing is hiding the cost of real food. So if we move to being more transparent about that, I think it becomes easier for everyone. And, you know, conversely, like the reward has been the fact that like from the out of the gate when I started making stuff and I was going to the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesdays here in California, which is very famous. It was immediately recognized as food that people hadn't seen before, but still somehow recognized it. Like it just looked more real to people. And so that connectivity, I think, is why anyone in food does what they do, because you want to feed people.

13:42You want to feel that visceral, unbeatable connection that you can only get through food and literally breaking bread with someone. Um, so that was really exciting and, um, continues to be exciting. And, um, yeah, I think the tide is turning because every day I get approached by people who are making products that I think make me more sustainable. Like I just got sent a whole host of compostable, um, saran wrap and bags, which it's right. It's amazing. It doesn't sound that sexy, but like one of the biggest things that you produce plastic within a kitchen is wrapping things and storing them properly.

14:24So like I'm really pumped about this compostable saran wrap. Yeah, no, I think that's really cool. I think that that's one of the things that when you work in pastry production or in all kinds of food production, you're using a lot and maybe to an outside perspective, like there's beeswax and there's kind of other alternatives that you can use. But when you're doing things at scale, especially like the things I've seen people use plastic wrap for, like there just isn't an alternative necessarily. Yeah, I totally agree. There's a lot of ways you can switch and do, but like it's still plastic wrap has always been for me like the the like, I don't know, the deepest cut because it's like it's so hard to avoid even if you're trying.

15:05And so like, yeah, this company making these compostable items is very cool. Yeah, that is really cool. And I want to obviously talk to you about your book because I think it's so special. And I have been wanting to get back into bread baking. I had a phase in like late 2019 into 2020. So the pandemic was well-timed for my own bread baking, but it's kind of fallen out. And I think that like something I talk to people in cities about is that there's so much good bread available to us to buy like in a bakery. And obviously you do more than bread in the book. But I'm curious if you could maybe kind of pitch somebody on the value of making bread at home, whether that's like personal or culinary or something else.

15:47Yeah. I mean, honestly, my bakery started because I couldn't find anyone making bread at the time in Los Angeles that I felt met the simplest definition of bread, which was just flour, water, salt. that's it without any intervention and um you know the the ingredient we constantly want to throw out the window is time and even beyond bread like with stews and cake like time makes everything taste better I was not surprised that during the pandemic people really exploded their exploration of bread because they had time on their hands and I think the funny thing is is that we actually all have quite a bit of time on our hands, even if we're super busy.

16:36We just kind of fill it with these time socks, either scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or just like watching mindless TV, which turns out you can do at the same time as you make bread. I'm not even telling you to give anything up. I'm just saying use your hands at the same time. I think one of the misconceptions for people who have never made bread is that it's going to be six or eight hours long. And while it is, you are actually only doing anything for maybe half an hour with like very low intervention, just mixing it, folding it, letting it rest, letting time do the work for you. So I, I mean, my first reason is like, if you like to work with your hands and you like to touch things, there's nothing more fun than bread because it'll change textures over the course of that time.

17:29And And it is so fun to play with. Children really dig this. So if you've got young kids, great activity. Make them make bread. You can pause bread at any period and throw it in the fridge and come back to it later. And it'll still proof out okay. So it's very malleable. I feel like it's gotten a lot of bad rep. Now that there are so many great bread places for you to choose from, shouldn't stop you from making your own because other bakeries are making their favorite, their best. And the beautiful thing about flavor is our unique palate and how personal and individual that is. And so like, if you like bread, like this is your opportunity to make your favorite food exactly as you like it.

18:20I love making bread also to like use up waste, you know, like if I have a cup of carrot soup left from like the other night's dinner, I'll like fold that in with the hydration. And now I've got a really fun carrot bread. Or if I've got just like half a cup of cranberries that I didn't use for the cranberry sauce and some wayward nuts, then I can make a cool bread there, you know? So I think that bread can be so much more than itself. And anything that we practice gives us great life lessons about ourselves and time and community. And so I think bread is a really wonderful one to just do over and over again and nourish yourself with.

19:08No good reason not to make your own bread. I've taught and they're done and they're like, wow, I don't know that I do that again, but I have such a much deeper appreciation for bread. and like I eat it slower now, I savor it more. So learning is never a waste and doing is always rewarding. Well, I feel like you gave me like seven great reasons, but the carrot soup bread baby is the most one that's speaking to me right now. I think that sounds so cool. And I love what you're saying about time because I think that is so right that simultaneously the thing that keeps me from making bread and also inspires me to do it is feeling connected to something in that moment.

19:50Like this is all I have to do is fold this dough a couple of times and then I'll go back to something else. But there's kind of singularity in that moment, which is so special. Yeah. So also I want to talk about flavor. I love the flour tasting wheel in your book. Can you maybe explain what the porridge shortbread tests are for learning how grains will taste differently in a bread or in a pastry? Because I thought that was so cool. Thanks. I was really proud of the flavor tasting wheel. It probably took as much time to kind of organize that information into an illustration as it did to write the book.

20:28Informational illustrations are really a lot of work. I admire them so. So it was fun to do them. So the porridge test and the shortbread test are just tests I developed internally in my bakery, which is not to say that they weren't like things people were doing. They just became like part of my structured regiment that I would run new grains through to kind of learn as fast as I could. And it was a really great way to then sort of give that to a new pastry cook to learn themselves. So the porridge test is really easy. It is honoring the fact that around the world to this day, most of us eat grains in the form of porridge.

21:12And it was the original way we ever ate grains long before bread or pastries came into being. And you just mix water and flour together. This, because it's a test, you don't necessarily need to have a scale and do one-to-one. You can do it visually. I really try to leave the book open-ended for whether or not you identify as being a more sensory inclined person or more science inclined person, whatever makes you comfortable. and then you're just going to let it sit for 15 minutes and come back to it and you will see its hydration rate from this test you know if it's really really sticky and tacky that grain can take a lot more water and but if you don't give it more water it's going to be kind of dry and dense so you're learning about what it's going to do in a more complicated recipe while having invested not a lot of time or ingredients, right?

22:09But if it's really funny and soupy, then you know that you could pull back on the hydration, or this may be a better flour suited to pastry because it doesn't have a lot of elasticity, right? When we talk about any kind of baked good, we're looking at elasticity, which is how well it snaps back on itself or extensibility, which is like how well it spreads, right? And those are kind of the two competing things that kind of give us the whole arsenal of baking. So that one is super helpful to tell you how it's going to work in breads because bread is primarily hydrated with water or some sort of lean liquid before we get into things like brioche and stuff like that.

22:56And then the shortbread test is sort of one step further and more of a pastry test because you are introducing sugar and fat. And these are important because whole grains really love fats. Not only does it help to really amplify their flavor because fat is flavor as a rule. It carries it. It has it. Fat is glorious. And it is going to tenderize it as well. And then sugar does a similar thing. It kind of tenderizes the grain. It balances the grain because a lot of these grains have tannic qualities, earthy qualities that at least here in America, we don't necessarily celebrate bitter as a flavor as much as other countries might.

23:45Like, you know, you see in throughout Asia, like a love of teas or amaros in Italy, and we just don't quite have the same love of bitter. So like these can often, that's kind of the first thing that people kind of remark on when they're tasting grains. So sugar will balance that and also add moisture and you'll kind of see how it'll play out in a more enriched situation, which is all of your pastries. Um, so yeah. And again, like a shortbread tastes like maybe 10 minutes to pull together, 10 minutes to bake. So really low entry, not a lot of ingredients, and you can figure out a lot about the grain, taste it, see if you like it, and then go to your more complicated recipe, you know, because recipe making, feeding yourself, if it's just a hobby, it's exciting.

24:41It's still expensive, if it's to feed your family, like there's a lot of pressure on there, you know, like we don't all have endless resources to just chuck it in the trash and order takeout or like order a cake necessarily. So I really want you to have success, which is why these tests came out as a way to quickly learn a lot. And if you just take like four grains, you're really pumped about from the book and make four shortbreads, you will just learn so much in that one afternoon. See, this is how I know that you teach things to people because I think that's the really special part about these two tests is that you're not just learning how to make a forage or a shortbread, but you're learning how to pay attention to things in a recipe.

25:26And I think as someone who's a novice baker, that's kind of what's most intimidating to me about baking is that you can't necessarily be tasting and adjusting as you go quite in the same way that you do with cooking. And often a recipe does say to, you know, mix dough until it has a certain texture or something like that, that like, maybe you don't have that knowledge. And so I think these tests are cool because they are kind of knowledge building exercises more than anything else. Totally. Yeah. I think there's a lot of terms of art in baking that feel more foreign than necessarily cooking ones because we inherently cook more than we bake.

26:01Even if you love baking, You'll end up cooking in your life more than baking. So I want it to be as approachable as a language, as playful as it can be, and really explain to you why things work. Yeah, I love that. And I hate to ask you this question because it's a hard one, but I'm curious if you could call out maybe not your favorite recipe, but like a recipe that you're really excited about making right now, just kind of what some of your favorite children are in the book, if not a favorite child, you know? It's my favorite children. It always, yeah, nobody gets asked. We won't tell them. I think they already know.

26:40I mean, obviously I love all of them. I think right now people really know me for cakes. And because of the season we're in, I've been making a lot of the buckwheat chiffon cake that has yuzu curd and coconut cream and like a torched, just really fast finish of meringue. but I think that the favorite child, the most guarded child that I finally decided to add to the book was the oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies. It's the only recipe that I've made for 12 years that hasn't changed once. And they were, we'd sell like 800 a week at the Santa Monica Farms market. They voted the best cookie in Los Angeles several years in a row.

27:24I used to joke that I I would keep it to myself until I was dead and it was carved on my tombstone. People would have to visit me to get it. But I decided to put it in the book. So they're really delicious. If I'm not having a bagel in the morning, I'll usually have this cookie because it's almost a granola bar. It's so stuffed full of oats. It's got this geological gradient to it when you break it apart. So really pleasing. I love geological gradient. to describe a cookie. And, you know, I do love gravestone recipes as a genre. I don't know if you've like seen them before. Yes. I'm obsessed. Yeah.

28:05They're so cool, but I'm glad that we didn't have to wait until then to get the recipe. I'm curious, like, what do you think about it? Like, is there a single ingredient or technique? Like what makes it like so special? I mean, I just think it's special because I think it tastes like the best oatmeal cookie. I never loved the fact that oatmeal cookies usually were like a chocolate chip cookie or an oatmeal raisin cookie, but it just seemed like someone as an afterthought threw in a little oatmeal. I wanted something where that was as forward as possible. So I've yet to encounter another oatmeal cookie that has as many oats as mine does.

28:46So I think that sets it apart, but honestly, you know, people have been trying to come up to me and like reverse engineer it by like guessing ingredients and trying to watch if my eyes twitch. Even knowing that I am primarily, I mean, you know, a whole grain baker through and through, um, they would never guess the grain or that there was a grain. It was always people were trying to figure out the spice mixture I used. Um, and I think that that's one of my favorite things when I explain to people whole grain is that you could actually drop vanilla and cinnamon and any other fun flavoring. I mean, I don't encourage it.