Give Me Some Sugar: Christina Tosi

Who: Christina Tosi
Where: Momofuku Milk Bar (Five locations in New York City)

You may know Christina Tosi for her whimsical, sugary creations like cereal milk (think the dregs of the cereal bowl in drinkable or soft-serve ice cream form), compost cookies, and crack pie—all of which she makes as pastry chef for New York City’s Momofuku Milk Bar. What you may not know is that Tosi is a Southern gal at heart. “I grew up in Virginia and have family in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Ohio. Living, cooking, and eating within the region, with a waste not-want not mentality; celebrating tradition and what’s around you on the breakfast, lunch, or dinner table—that was the spirit of my family’s upbringing.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Lisa White →

Who: Lisa White
Where: Domenica, 123 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA

When Lisa White has a bad day, she makes bread. “It’s so simple—flour, water, salt, and yeast—but it’s magical,” she says. “You don’t know if it’s going to turn out, but when it does, it’s so awesome. It hits people on all levels—you can smell it walking down the street.”

She speaks from experience: Bread is what prompted her to change careers and become a pastry chef. “In March of 2008, I took a personal pilgrimage to France. While walking the isolated trails of the Camino of Santiago de Compostela, I was drawn into the village bakeries by the smell of bread baking. It’s then that I remembered what I had always wanted to do.” Three months later, White had enrolled in culinary school to become a pastry chef.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Baking with Nothing in the House →

I started baking pies the summer after college. My friends and I had discovered a wealth of berry trees and bushes near the house we shared in Ann Arbor, and we’d go out on frequent picking missions. We collected so many berries that we started baking pies together in the evenings. When I moved away after that summer, my friend Margaret suggested that we start a blog to keep in touch through the pies we baked, and “Nothing in the House” was born.

Nothing-in-the-house pies, also called “desperation pies,” were popular during the Great Depression in the South and beyond. These pies were made from a few inexpensive ingredients, and include vinegar pie, cracker pie, and green-tomato pie. Thus the name of my blog is a nod to history, thrift, and practicality, in solidarity with other home bakers, past and present.

Read on in Gravy.

Give Me Some Sugar: Stella Parks →

 Who: Stella Parks

Where: Table Three Ten, 310 W. Short Street, Lexington, KY

In a kitchen drawer at Table Three Ten in Lexington, Kentucky, pastry chef Stella Parks keeps a set of plastic measuring spoons that her parents gave her when she was 8. “I dug them up recently at my folks’ house and decided to take them to work. It’s a nice sense of coming full circle.”

But Parks, a Kentucky native, didn’t always know that professional baking would be her path. Though she’d baked since she was little and started working in restaurants as a teenager, she always thought she’d write books. When it came time to pursue a college degree, though, she reconsidered. “I knew I didn’t have a personality suited to teaching, or to journalism, or to whatever other English-major-y jobs I could think of. I knew I liked working in restaurants, working with my hands and on my feet. Then I started researching culinary schools, thinking I could work in food service and write on the side.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Phoebe Lawless →

Who: Phoebe Lawless
Where:  Scratch Bakery, 111 Orange Street, Durham, NC

“I consider myself more of a baker than a pastry chef,” says Phoebe Lawless, owner and chef at Scratch Bakeryin Durham, North Carolina. Having had my fair share of her desserts—her Shaker Lemon pie, fluffy buttermilk biscuits, and signature doughnut-muffins—I’d say this is not a qualitative statement, but an explanation of her approach, which she calls “pretty pragmatic,” and “homey and delicious rather than perfect and gorgeous.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance