662: Pastry Diplomacy with David Lebovitz

27:47How would you describe that? It was so good. Well, it's actually not hay. They translate it to hay because the word is something else. It's like ragweed or something. But everything they make at Tepeserie, it's a very special bakery. I'm happy I live down the street from it. Everything they make there, they use really good ingredients. People always think, oh, in France, everything is wonderful and all the ingredients are organic and natural, which isn't true. There are commercial bakeries. You know, people use, you know, not, you know, great flour and so forth. Tapisserie, they use really good ingredients.

28:27They use raw cream. They use fleuve from their fields. They have a, it's part of the Septim group. So they have a restaurant out in the countryside and they use ingredients from there. And that shoe, the shoe dough is this delicious eggy dough with crunchy sugar on top. And then they have the most amazing, this cream inside that has this flavor and you can't describe it. It's very, you want to say it's barnyardy or farmy, which makes it sound like it smells like animals, but it's not. It's, it's very, it's, it's almost proustian where it takes you to this place in nature. And I'm probably over describing it, but you've had it and you're still talking about it.

29:15So. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it tastes like what I would imagine like sun warmed grass to taste like, or maybe like that when you have wildflower honey and it has that kind of herbaceous, like green quality, like that element of it kind of imbued. It's very special. Yeah. And it's, they do, what's funny, you know, in my new book, Ready for Dessert, I added recipes to it. And one of them was from that bakery because I said, you know, this recipe is so good. I have to share it. Yeah. I think enjoyed seeing that in the book and I want to dive into it, but just while we're on the subject of your favorite places in Paris, I'm curious if there are any other kind of pastry dessert destinations that you are especially interested in these days?

30:00Well, that's a tough one. I'm one of those, I'm very French. And one thing about being French is you don't leave your neighborhood in Paris. I do go to Terroir d 'Avenir Bakery, which is part of this, and I hate to use the word chain. They have three little shopping streets in Paris where they have like a vegetable store, a fish store, and everything is really good quality. And they have a bakery that's excellent. And they're Queen Yaman, which is one of those pastries that kind of went viral in America, this Breton butter cake. Theirs is very light, and it's delicious, and you don't feel like you've eaten a block of caramelized butter after you've eaten it.

30:42It's delicious. There's another bakery, and it's cute because it's not that cute, but that's probably the wrong word to use, but they're advertising it as the biggest bakery in Paris, and it's called Leoni, and it's L-E-O-N-I, and there might be an E on the end of it. but they just opened near me. It's huge. You walk in there and it's like all this bread, and they have beautiful desserts and you have to walk like half a mile to the cash register. But they have outdoor seating and everything. It's very good. It's very French. It's not, you know, a lot of bakeries in Paris are trying to do Anglo-y things, you know, stuffed with cream and so forth.

31:24They're sort of keeping it French, which is nice.

31:36I did have a chocolate chip cookie dough croissant that one of my local bakery was making. They gave it to me. And I have a pretty open mind. I was like, oh, okay, I'll try this. And it was really greasy. The word should be buttery because it was butter. but I was eating it and I was like, there's a lot of like, it was just, I mean, the reason I eat a croissant is because it has crispiness on the outside. It has these flaky layers inside. And the reason I eat chocolate chip cookies is because they're soft and warm and they've got big chunks of chocolate chips. So they're sort of competing things that don't really work together, in my opinion.

32:24Yeah, it's kind of like when you see certain dog mixes that you look at the dog and you're like, I don't know exactly how this happened, but maybe it shouldn't have.

32:38That's a very interesting comparison. Yeah, someone listening is going to be upset who has a very rare husky chihuahua. Maybe it's like meeting a couple who is very different and you're like, what do these two see in each other? and maybe they shouldn't be together, but it works for some people. So we can leave it at that. Yeah, I think you're right. That's a diplomatic way to talk about it. I've learned diplomacy living between two countries and I used to give tours, culinary tours, and I was at the Beaumarchais leading a tour and I was talking about products and this French, and I was being very clear, but diplomatic.

33:18And this French woman stopped me. She was listening. She goes, you are very diplomatic. Very good. Yeah, it must be interesting. I feel like Paris is obviously like so idealized, like not just in the U.S., but around the world. And so many people come and they bring their kind of like high expectations or their fantasies of like what this city must be like. So I think to be, you know, navigating the expectations for people who are visiting, like while taking them on a tour, you must kind of have seen a lot of different impressions or ideas of what French food is supposed to be. Well, I used to get, I don't want to say criticized, but criticized, because I would write about everything about France.

34:02I would write about things that weren't so great, and I would write about things that were great, and things in the middle, like just my daily life. And I kind of made a decision early on, inadvertently. I could have made a huge amount of money writing beautiful books about France and how wonderful France is and all the beautiful pastries and how my life, I wake up in the morning and I go shopping and I get a croissant and I go to the bakery and I talk to the people and I have a cup of coffee with Jean-Luc, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not real. And I think Paris is a really interesting place to live.

34:39Like every 30 seconds when I'm out in the street, there's something really interesting that happens to me. It's not always good, but I'm always thinking about, it's like, wow, the city really keeps you on your toes. But living in New York City, New York City is great. But the other time, last time I was there, I got stuck. I was like, I had to walk through Times Square. And I was like, oh my gosh. It was like, how do I get out of here. So, but I let you know, that's one thing. I'm very motivated by Paris. I love Paris. I'm very intrigued by French people and their differences. The differences between America and France.

35:22A friend of mine said this to me once. He said, Americans always want to say that they always want to live in France and French people say they want to live in America. But in the end, they both, both cultures, they admire each other, but they think that their way of life is the best ultimately. So most people stay where they are. And I like that. Yeah. That's, you know, it's, it's not easy to live here. It's, you know, I have stacks of paperwork to prove it, but there are some really great benefits to being here. And so here I am. Yeah. And also like, how boring would it be to live in a perfect place forever?

36:03Yeah. And that's the New Yorker in me who had to like, you know, traverse Times Square to speak with you right now. But sometimes you got to have a low so the high can really resonate. Well, I was just in, I was on vacation and we were in Arles, which is a small city in the south of France. And everybody was really nice. It was like, you know, you'd walk around. It's like, they're in New York City and like a smaller city. Like, it's like, that's charming. Like maybe the Hudson or something. I was like, oh, maybe we should be living here. But I'm kind of like a big city guy because I'm an introvert.

36:37So I think if I lived in a small city, I would never see anybody. So I want to go back to 2012 with you, which is when you published Ready for Dessert for the first time. I'm curious what inspired the first version of the cookbook and then also the re-release that is happening right now. Well, my first book, which was called Ready for Dessert, came out in 1999. and did really well. Then I wrote another book called Ripe for Dessert, which was a book of fruit desserts. And shortly after that, there was a big, I don't know what you call it, but there was a moment in publishing where everything kind of went crashing down and people got fired.

37:23Publishers decided, you know, digital, I think it was the start of digital, the digital world. They were just terrified. And my books went out of print and they stopped doing cook, this publisher that I was working with stopped doing cookbooks for a while. So the publishers that I'm with now, which is 10 Speed Press, they had said, you know, why don't we combine the books somehow and do like a greatest hits, which sounded like a great idea. So in 2012, I released Ready for Dessert, which was kind of the best of the recipe, best recipes from those two books. So that was what inspired that version.

38:00And the best of these recipes were, I imagine, largely recipes that you had developed and refined over your time at Chez Panisse. Many were. I had suggested to Alice that I could do the second Chez Panisse dessert book because Lindsay Shear had done the original one, which is a classic, which is an amazing book. but our repertoire had expanded from then. And so many people were asking us for recipes. And Alice, who I love, she said this with all her heart and honesty and wonderfulness as part of her family. She said to me, you're very different than we are. You should go do your own thing. This is after 13 years.

38:47I was like, okay. so that meant I should be doing my own book because my taste was very different. Alice's idea of a perfect dessert is a peach, the perfect peach, the perfect plate of figs, which I love too, but I'm more grounded in chocolate chip cookies and ice cream and so forth. So I wrote my first book and that was the start of everything. Yeah. I was reading over this re-edition of Ready for Dessert and you're talking about chocolate cake and you say that you developed a chocolate cake for the menu at Chez Panisse, but we're told that it was too chocolatey to go on the menu. I didn't realize that was like a too much problem, you know?

39:30Well, it's, you know, it almost sounds like complaining, but it's actually a, you know, everybody has different tastes. And one of the things Alice told me when I was being interviewed for my job, she said, I don't like people to leave a restaurant stuffed. And I've left restaurants stuffed. And once I was so stuffed, I felt really ill. I was in Los Angeles. I remember I had eaten so much food. And I think about that a lot. A lot of people think, oh, it's a good restaurant. There's a lot of food. Well, I like to be sated, but I don't like going home and going, oh, I felt bad for eating that. So I love things like this really rich chocolate cake, the chocolate orbit cake in the book.

40:15You just have a thin slice of it and it's really good and it's super satisfying. You don't feel like you've missed anything. You feel like you've had dessert. And that's one of my favorite desserts. But it was banned from Shabby News. I mean, you could put that on a t-shirt, honestly. And I think it is that balance that's so interesting. And looking through Ready for Dessert, I think it is like your point of view and your perspective on dessert is so specific and special. And I guess I'm curious when it comes to the revision, like how much of the book is the same? Like what did you decide to kind of improve upon or differentiate?

40:56Well, when my publisher first, you know, suggested, you know, doing a new edition of the book, I was like, oh, OK, you know. And I'm not a lazy person. I mean, I have like a newsletter. or I have a website. I do a lot of things, but I thought, oh, well, I'll just combine the book, the recipe, just combine the recipes and add a few more, and they'll be done in a week. So I spent a year redoing the book. I remade almost all the recipes, rewrote most of the recipes, and added more recipes. Just because as I got into the book, I realized, oh, well, we have all these different ingredients now in the supermarket.

41:36So why shouldn't people use them? Plus, I figured, you know, easier ways to make certain desserts, or representing some of them that were in the book that I thought people should make that maybe they hadn't considered making. So, and actually, I just made one of the desserts this morning, and it just popped into my mind and easy jam tart because I made a huge amount of fig jam from figs I picked in Provence, but you can use any kind of jam. So I loved redoing the book. In life, you don't get a chance to go back often and make better what you did before. And I got to do that. Yeah. I think from a recipe development point of view, it is so cool to have the opportunity to really revisit things and not necessarily improve upon, but just kind of expand.

42:31And you talk about your chocolate chip cookie recipe in the book and some of the evolutions of it. Could you speak a little bit to the current version of it and how you've kind of evolved it? One of the things I did that's not as dramatic as the other one, but I used to roll cookies. I used to make cookie dough, roll it into logs, and then freeze or chill those, which is a very restaurant thing to do. Because that's what we did at a restaurant. We were making hundreds of cookies, and you didn't roll out the cookies one by one. You rolled it up and sliced them. So I did that. But I also realized I learned two things over the years.

43:10One is there was a famous New York Times recipe that said, oh, you should cure the dough for a couple of days in the refrigerator. which I'd been doing anyways, you know, refrigerating dough before baking it. So I talk about that in the book, in the recipes, because that's really important. But it's not urgent, but it really does change the texture of the dough. And the other thing I learned was I was trying to get cookies that had like a soft center and crispy on the outside. and I realized when you take them out of the oven, there was a technique where people bang the sheet on the counter and the neighbors were like, what's going on in there?

43:58But I found if you took a pancake turner or spatula and just tapped them assertively, but not to smash them, it sort of compressed and compacted the center so they stay soft and gooey inside with crusty edges. So those are things that I've learned over the years that I incorporated into the book. And they really are, I don't like to use the word best in recipes because it's been used a lot, but they are my best chocolate chip cookie recipes in the book. There's a chocolate chip cookie and there's a buckwheat chocolate chip cookie because living in France, we use a lot of buckwheat and I love that flavor.

44:38Yeah, they sound like, Matt is also my ideal cookie, that kind of interior, exterior combination. And I think a buckwheat cookie can be really special because it has a little bit of that like nutty, almost savory flavor that's balancing out the chocolate. It's not too sweet. Well, I always wanted to write a book on buckwheat desserts just because I love buckwheat and desserts. It's very earthy. I love using ingredients that have a lot of flavor naturally. And buckwheat goes really well with chocolate. These buckwheat chocolate cookies are really special to me. I just love that flavor. And I put buckwheat groats in them for a little extra crunch too.

45:16Hi there, it's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on Three Things? What about a lesser known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair? You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible. That's the This Is Taste listener survey, link in our show notes. From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story.

46:04The 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time. Montreal's top restaurateurs will reimagine 65 years of the city's iconic astronomy, crafting inventive, nostalgia-inspired dishes with a modern twist. Prepare your palate. World-renowned chefs, including several Michelin-starred talents, will team up with over 80 of Montreal's finest local chefs to create unforgettable, one-of-a-kind menus. The full program is available at MontrealOnLumière.com, presented by Lotto Quebec in collaboration with National Bank. Is there an example of a completely new recipe in the book that you're excited about?

46:44Well, it doesn't sound that exciting, but my food stylist, George Dolis, who's a friend of mine, he came to Paris and he made the recipes with me in the kitchen for the book, as long as with Elizabeth Dornetherlander, who works with George a lot. And food stylists don't eat a lot of food. They're around a lot of this food all the time, and they have to moderate themselves. George ate three of these cookies right away. These are called Palais Breton, and they're thick, shortbread-like cookies that you bake in a muffin tin, so they're very round. And they're just—the flavor of salted butter explodes in your mouth when you eat them.

47:23They're a little tender. They're a little crumbly. They hold together, and they're delicious. so that's one recipe that really really i thought needed more press so i thought i got to put those in the book and another one is my my probably my all-time favorite dessert um is il flottante which is a french bistro classic which is creme anglaise with a baked meringue on top and caramel sauce and nuts and i just i i absolutely love that dessert um so much so i put a wonderful recipe for that in the book as well. I think that that dessert translates to floating island, right? Yes. And they kind of look like that in the dish.

48:08Yeah. Well, it was funny because, you know, the book has a lot of pictures in it. The publisher, which is unusual, the publisher said, we want a lot of photos in the book, which is great because usually they only have a certain amount of space. But we ended up shooting for almost three weeks here in my apartment in Paris. And it was great. Like we made the floating islands and we ate them. We ate everything. So that's when I knew the recipes were it. And also the food stylist made the recipes and there were like all these, you know, and they're the one, they point out any problems. They're like, oh, this took, you know, twice as long to bake as possible.

48:48We had none of that. They're like, everything's working really well. So I was like, well, I'm going to go for a walk. So I'm going to come back when the desserts are done. But it was a great experience. I loved writing this book and shooting it. Yeah, the photos are really so beautiful and they feel like contemporary without being dated. I think it's a really nice companion for it. Do you feel like the shoot process, I mean, it seems like it was pretty easy if everything was working really well, but did it give you any kind of like new perspective on the book and how it was actually coming together?

49:24Well, what's interesting is I worked with Ed Anderson who photographed my first French-based book, My Paris Kitchen, and I'd never heard of him. Well, I'd never met him before, I should say. And he had photographed this book called Sweet Mexico, I believe it was called, by Fanny Gershon. And I was like, wow, he caught these Mexican desserts. Like, this is what I want pictures to be like. So he came to Paris, and Ed is, like, the most soft-spoken, reticent, the most passive person you'll meet. And now he's shooting all these famous people's cookbooks. But he, you know, gosh willing, he came to Paris to shoot this one.

50:13And I always see things differently through him. um he's very he's got a really good eye and he'll move things in the picture maybe or look at an angle it's it's hard to take pictures of food and he always captures exactly what i want to see in the picture and i just i love ed personally too so it was a pleasure to spend three weeks with him yeah i think if you're going to spend three weeks it helps that you enjoy spending time with that person. It seems to make it go really well. I can't even, I was trying to tell you what my favorite section would be aesthetically, and I'm not even sure, but I do think that the tarts and the pies, there's something about seeing like the slice taken out of the pie and then the kind of slightly messy plate beneath it that just is so satisfying to me.

51:04Well, what's interesting is I'm looking at the picture of the apple tart with whole wheat puff pastry in the book. And this whole wheat pastry is actually very easy to make. And I love that heartiness of it. And the food stylist, I believe it was Elizabeth, who did Elizabeth, she's Swedish. She made the tart and it's beautiful. And they were shooting it. And often photographers and stylists don't want the author in the studio because they don't often have good ideas, but they like me and they're like, oh no, we like your ideas. And I said, you know, it's a little too perfect. Like how would somebody at home do this, present this tart?

51:46So I encourage them to be a little more casual and they really, they captured it perfectly. So I love everything they shot in this book. And I also love the chapter openings. We, that's always like doing a book, I was recently interviewed with a difference between working digitally or working in books, on books. And when you write a book, it's like an art project. And you think about it. You think about the pages, the flow, the look, the typography, the fonts. And the chapter openings are always very interesting because they tell a story. They tell the story of the chapter. You only have sort of one picture to do that.

52:29You could probably add six or seven and do a mosaic. But there's a picture of frozen desserts. That's the frozen dessert chapter opening. And my friend Margot, who is really great, she's a bartender. She owns a bar in Paris. We went out for ice cream and Ed shot our picture. And we're just having fun eating ice cream on the street in Paris. And that's kind of what it's all about. Ice cream is fun. It's two different people from very different worlds. You know, she's like young, hip bartender, and I'm like old and cranky. And we're out in the street eating ice cream. I love that. And I have to ask about the ice cream.

53:11I don't know where it came from, but I'm curious if you've been to the like ice cream wine bar in Paris. I think it's called Fol d 'Rolle. Yeah, I met them when they opened the shop. And I was like, ice cream and wine? It was kind of like a strange idea. but it's been a huge hit and I like them both a lot. Robert and Jessica at Rigmorand.

53:39I've always wanted to open an ice cream shop in Paris and everybody told me, oh, nobody eats ice cream here in the winter. You're going to go under, don't do it. And I didn't do it. And now all these people are opening ice cream shops and they're really successful. You got to do it. It's not too late. Well, it's a little too late, But it's okay. The other people who are doing it, they're doing it really well. And years ago in San Francisco, before I moved, I was having lunch or coffee with some friends that own bakeries. I said, you know, I've always wanted to own a bakery. And they both said, well, why don't you take over ours for a month and we can go on vacation?

54:20That's the way to do it. But in the book, you talk about how you, for many years, would make a coconut cake for Alice Waters' father's birthday at Chez Panisse. And, you know, you wanted one for yourself for a long time, and then you finally received it. So I was wondering what your preferred birthday dessert is these days. Well, my birthday, unfortunately, falls during the week after Christmas. And there's two times in France you don't want to have a birthday. It's the week after Christmas or the month of August because everybody's gone. And all the bakeries are closed. But I get a Paris Brest, which is my favorite pastry in Paris from Jacques Chanel every year.

55:04And that's my favorite dessert. And his is really, really good. And he's kind of my frenemy, where we've known each other a long time, and he likes to give me a hard time. And I give him one back. But he's extremely talented. and he makes this amazing peri breast, and I always have that for my birthday. And one year, he screwed it up. They screwed up the order, and he invited me back, and he gave me a huge box of dessert. So he's not a bad guy. Okay. And that is like a ring of choux pastry with cream inside of it, right? Yeah, with a praline caramelized hazelnut cream. and often you see them in a lot of bakeries in Paris and they're good, but his is really good.

55:56So he uses these really good Italian hazelnuts. It's delicious. It's unbelievable. That's my birthday dessert. It sounds like a good birthday dessert. Another impression I had while reading the book is that I should be using like more alcohol in my baking. What do you think like alcohol as an ingredient kind of unlocks? Well, it's interesting. When I moved to France, I was surprised that they didn't have vanilla extract. They have something called the vanilla aroma, but it doesn't have alcohol in it. And food didn't, it doesn't taste the same to me. And they use vanilla beans in Europe a lot, which are delicious, but it always seemed like something was missing.

56:36And then I was talking to Harold McGee, who wrote on food and cooking about it. And he said, well, you know, they've done studies and they've shown that alcohol added to food, even if it's cooked out pretty much, changes the way you perceive the food, the way you taste it. And ever since then, I've realized it's kind of like adding salt to vanilla ice cream or something, where you don't taste it, but it provides a little bit of balance to it that's missing. So when I make jam, I often put like a little bit of kirsch in the jam just to augment the fruit flavors. I don't use alcohol in everything, but I do like it as a seasoning.

57:24Yeah, when I was reading this and your explanation for it, it made me think of, this is not baking, but penne alla vodka. and like how a vodka sauce, even though you don't necessarily have that alcoholic flavor is kind of opening up the flavors and making it be a fuller expression of itself. Well, when I first wrote the book in 1999, the first ready for dessert, I had a very good editor who was very tough and she saw the recipe for champagne gelée and she crossed it out. She's like, no. And so I fought to keep it in because it's a really good dessert. It's like a champagne Jell-O. It's very easy to make.

58:05It's delicious. And it was left in the book. And then that year, a big food magazine called it the dessert of the year. So yeah, why would she not want champagne Jell-O? That sounds delicious. Well, the editor's job is to, it's often to make you look good, but it's often to make you defend your position because you have to sort of pick your battles in publishing, especially with covers and so forth. And fortunately, my publisher now is very, they love my input and they ask me for things. Do I like this? Do I don't like this? What do I think? But in the olden days, the relationship was a little different.

58:52Right. So editors had a lot more, depending on the editor, of course, had a lot more, I want to say power or force. I just saw the Marcella Hazan documentary and she stopped working with Judith Jones, who she had successfully done two books with, but Judith Jones didn't want this third book to come out, Essentials of Italian Cooking. And Marcella left her, and they actually had, they showed the letter that Marcella wrote to Judith Jones, a legendary editor, saying, I'm leaving you, this book will be a hit. And the book was a huge hit. It sold out, like, the third day it was published, like, they sold every single copy, and it was a huge hit.

59:42So that tension, you know, editors don't always know things, you know, but their job is to make you defend your position. Yeah. The editor breakup letter, that's a pretty rough thing to have to write, I would imagine. Well, I'm very fortunate. I work with 10 Speed Press and they're very, they're friends of mine. They're very friendly. We don't have arguments. We had a cover discussion about this book. And we didn't quite know what to do. And the wonderful designer at 10 Speed, Betsy Stromberg, who's fantastic. She's got an amazing eye. She came up with several different covers and they weren't quite right.

1:00:23And we had a Zoom and I made one of my speeches for like five minutes about how I felt. And then she wasn't feeling good, Betsy, the designer. And then the next day they sent me this cover. She sent me the cover, us the cover, me and my agent and my editor. And I was like, whatever drugs you're taking for this, whatever, you know, this cold you have. She just nailed it, the cover. I love the cover. I was like, oh my God, that's exactly the cover. I would never have thought that would be the cover of the book in a million years. But it says everything. It's showing me in France and Paris having a wonderful dessert with chocolate.

1:01:06It's playful. So I've lucked out working with 10 Speed. Yeah, I think it is clearly such a fruitful partnership. And I do love this cover. It's you at a table pouring chocolate over. Is it a plate of profiterole, it looks like? Yeah, it looks delicious and it feels alive and, you know, you're in it, but it's not like the focus just on you. It seems like a really nice kind of balance. You know, it's hard to put yourself on the cover of a book. I wanted me, because the book is very me, it's about my desserts. And I wanted to be on the cover, but I didn't want, you know, the usual picture of me baking or somebody baking and looking off in the other direction or off camera or something.

1:01:51I want to, you know, and Ed took this picture. We were having lunch and I just started pouring the chocolate and he just took the picture. I was like, that's it. That's the picture. That's the cover. Yeah. And I think, you know, you have a following of people who specifically want to make your desserts. So it makes sense that at least a recognizable part of you is on the cover. I would say you're one of like the first big food bloggers. I'm curious, like what your relationship with the food internet is like these days, if there's anyone that you especially, you know, enjoy reading their recipes or seeing what they're posting, or if you find yourself kind of, you know, focusing on your own blog and your own output.

1:02:32When I stopped blogging about four years ago, when I started seeing all these blogs that look the same, that had like, they were following a formula, I guess, for search engines, they're like, lists and it was like sugar sugar is to sweeten things flour flour is an ingredient in cakes eggs eggs are good in cakes you know and I was like who are these people right you know what is going on here um and it just became formulaic and I just wanted to get away from that um even though I was my blog was very successful I was like well this isn't what I signed up for I didn't sign up to write for search engines.

1:03:13So now I have a newsletter and it's pretty interesting because it's not necessarily recipe oriented. I think there's so many recipes online now. Everybody wanted recipes, recipes, recipes, recipe, please, recipe, please. And it's like, you know, all that's like recipes are kind of better in a book. You can take the book in a kitchen with you. It's much sexier. It's fun to have a book open and to look at the pages and read the story. Whereas on the internet, to me, it's more about the story. I like sitting down and reading the story, but I make very few recipes on the internet. I think the Instagram recipe thing seems to be fading, where people do recipes that they do in like 10 seconds.

1:04:00It's like, um, maybe that's not reality. but a friend of mine worked for a big food website and he goes, none of the recipes work. And he also told me, he goes, inauthentic recipes get the most hits. So we love inauthentic recipes because they get the most traffic. People come and they argue about that. So all those people who are upset about inauthentic recipes, you're feeding the machine. Yeah. The like rage bait of it all is interesting. Well, COVID sort of put a stop to that because all of a sudden we couldn't go shopping. It's like, you know what? I'm going to make tacos with pureed popcorn salsa.

1:04:41You know, it's like, this is what I have. I don't want to throw away the popcorn. And nobody said it. It was like, oh, that's so creative. Yeah, I would be interested to try that. To close today, I want to play a rapid fire game with you. So I'm going to ask you to play some favorites. You'll just let me know what comes to mind. Okay. Okay, your favorite ice cream flavor? Mint chocolate chip. Do you like it when it's artificial green or no? No, I like it when it's really minty, but fresh minty. Uh-huh. Your favorite season for baking? Summer, because of all the fruit, especially plums. I love plums for baking because they're tart.

1:05:18Yeah, plums and apricots, I think, get so much better when they're baked. Your favorite cookbook right now that's not one of your own? I've been looking at the French menu cookbook by Richard Olney, and I just love the way it's written. And I'm sad that a lot of people don't know about Richard Olney anymore. But for that reason, I'm just into that book and I've been reading it. Your favorite bakery in Paris? I would say it's tapisserie. Your favorite special occasion restaurant in Paris? Well, every year I have a friend who is born around the same time as me when everyone's away on vacation or holidays.

1:05:55and we always go out in January. And this year we went to Tour d 'Argent and we had a really delicious meal. So that would be a good special occasion restaurant, although we misordered wine. You'll have to go make it right this year, maybe. Well, we were hoping they would invite us back. I'll leave it at that. A French baked good or dessert that you think should be more popular in the US? You know, Queen Le Mans took a lot of space in the French pastry realm in the U.S., but I love far breton, which is a custard tart or like a flan, a French flan, you would say. But far breton has prunes in it that have been flambéed in arminiac or rum.

1:06:46And prunes are a tough sell in America, whereas in France, people like them. I love, love, love Far Breton. And maybe that will be the next trend. Okay, your most used utensil or cooking tool. My new favorite one that I use all the time now is the Metro Blade for my KitchenAid stand mixer. Because all the blades were chipping. And I was like, what's going on here? And I don't know why they chip, but it's a known issue. So I bought one of those Metro blades with a silicone scraper. It's amazing. It pushes the ingredients down into the mixer rather than out. And instead of smashing things against the side, it stirs them.

1:07:33So it mixes things like twice as fast. It's amazing. Okay, final question. A fictional food scene, like from a book or movie, that you wish you could magically eat in real life? Well, if I had to say, I wouldn't say it's a scene, but there was a film that came out long before all the other, you know, Babette's Feast and so forth, called Tampopo. And it was about a woman, I believe, who learned to make ramen in Japan. And I think it's, I should watch the movie again. And it's such a beautiful movie and it's such a great food movie too. And the way you see people enjoying noodles and slurping them and the tentativeness and the very Japanese-ness of it.

1:08:24I love that movie. Yeah, it's a great movie. And I think it's like one of the favorite food ones. So I love that that comes to mind for you. And thank you so much for coming on the show, David. It's been so much fun. Thank you for inviting me. It was great to talk to you.

1:08:42This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Logo and guest illustrations by Ellie Skrzat. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste.