Want better bakes? This cookbook explains what your ingredients actually do

For anyone who loves to bake, there's always the pull between making a surefire hit or a comforting dish we've prepared countless times before and the excitement of making something new. The latter often requires learning new techniques or acquiring specialized knowledge that will inform our baking practice. The beauty of Nicola Lamb's cookbook, Sift: The Elements of Great Baking, is the breadth of knowledge she gives us in the service of better bakes. Her substack, Kitchen Projects, is also fantastic. 

Evan Kleiman: Tell us a little bit about your baking journey. You're from the UK. Not everyone here may be familiar with your baking journey. 

Nicola Lamb: Of course, I'd be delighted. I live in London, at the moment, in North London, and I started my professional baking journey over a decade ago now. It actually started in New York. I went to New York in my early 20s with this dream of being a pastry chef. I thought, "I'm going to go to pastry school in New York." It was also a way for me to get a visa, and I really wanted to live in New York at the time. I applied to school, I got my visa, I packed my bag, I even put some of my favorite cakes into my bag, and I had a couple of months before my school officially started. This was in 2014-ish, and I don't know if you remember the cronut.

Of course.

The cronut had taken over, maybe in 2012 or 2013. It was the first time, I think, where I'd seen a pastry on the news. I thought, "Wow, can baking really make this much of a splash?" It was so exciting to me. I saw this cronut and I thought, "Chef Dominique Ansel, my goodness, what a genius!" I decided that if I was gonna learn how to bake, then it was gonna have to be with chef Dominique. So I decided to start showing up to the bakery and going, "Hey, I really want to learn from you guys." I think they thought, "Who's this weird British lady who keeps turning up and saying she wants to bake? She isn't actually a baker. She just is really into cakes." 

I spoke to enough people at the bakery, including the managers and a couple of chefs, until eventually I went in one day and they said, "Hey, chef Dominique is upstairs. Why doesn't he just interview you now?" I thought, "Oh, my goodness, I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull off this interview." But amazingly, chef Dominique came and spoke to me, and we talked about my passion for baking. He said, "Okay, come in for a trial." That was the beginning of my baking journey. I went straight into this dream kitchen, and that experience has informed everything that I've done since. 

I was working with these brilliant chefs who were so generous with their knowledge, and that has informed the book. It's this idea of being next to someone who has experienced it in a professional kitchen, hundreds and thousands of times, and they're standing next to you and they're saying, "This is what the dough should feel like, this is what's happening when you're mixing that cookie dough, this is what happens and what you should do if things go wrong." That was really the beginning, and I just loved it. 

In colder months, use cranberries to stand in for plums in this karpatka recipe. Photo by Sam A. Harris.

I think what's so interesting about the way you've chosen to lay out this book is how much technical information is imparted in a very easily digestible way. I would love it if we could take a deep dive together into sugar. 

I would love that.

It's an ingredient that's often so vilified but is central to baking. People think of it as a sweetener but when it comes to baking, it's so much more than that. You talk about some of the roles that sugar takes in our baking, and you say it interferes in everyone's business. What do you mean by that?

Sugar really does need a new publicity tool. I think through the ages, it's been in fashion, it's been out of fashion, it's been in fashion, it's been out of fashion. At the moment, it's definitely out of fashion. In Sift, I really do want people to know that sugar is so much more than sweetening. It is just like the nosy neighbor of baking. 

One of the things that sugar does really, really well is attract water. It's probably the most important thing it does, and it's what it's doing in your doughs, in your bagels, in your ice cream, in your brownies, in your cookies. It is pulling water from the other ingredients, and that is what's keeping it moist and chewy. So when you think of sugar, you should actually think about it as being the savior of dry bakes. I think that's the worst thing that people talk about in baking. There's nothing worse than making a sponge cake and it's really dry. I think, often, you have sugar to thank for a beautiful, moist sponge cake.

So many people are trying to use less sugar, and they play with lowering the amount in a recipe. What happens when you do that, if you don't have enough of it, compared to when you do? Could you give us an example, maybe using cake.

You can lower the sugar a little bit. I'm going to say that up front because a lot of people ask me, "How much can I reduce it?" I think we do have to have trust in our chefs and our recipe developers and our cookbook authors. But generally, if you are that worried about sugar, then you could probably reduce sugar by about 20% and it's not going to have a huge difference. 

However, if you reduce it too much, what's going to happen is, number one, that cake is going to be extremely dry and it's going to be very, very domed. If you reduce the sugar, what it's also going to do is make all of those proteins and starches that are apparent in the flour that make the structure of your cake, they're going to set much earlier. Everything is just going to start drying out in the oven. So you definitely want to make sure you have enough sugar in there. 

If you put too much sugar, what it's going to do is overly tenderize your bake and it's just going to collapse. If you were to double the sugar in a cake, for example, it might look okay for the first 15 minutes of baking, and then suddenly the roof is going to fall in. That cake is just going to have huge holes in the middle and not in a good way. 

I would love it if we could talk through some of the interactions. Is the interaction between flour and sugar the most important? 

Well, it depends. Sugar is important when it comes to flour because it is delaying gluten formation. That's going to help tenderize your cakes but it's also going to help tenderize your bread. That's why something like brioche will have a much softer crumb as well as the fat that's in brioche, of course, but it's going to have a much softer, more tender crumb, compared to a white tin loaf. 

That being said, because of that interaction, you do have to be careful about when you introduce the sugar. Usually, if you're trying to mix a strong dough, and I'm sure you've experienced this in the past, you throw in your sugar, and the dough completely comes apart. That's because as soon as the sugar goes into your bread dough, it's gonna start pulling all of that water away from the flour, and flour needs water to make gluten. So it is this kind of battle between your ingredients.

That's one thing that I really loved about writing this book. It was trying to tell people that your ingredients — the fat, the sugar, the eggs, the flour — there are a finite amount of actions that all of those can take during baking, and knowing what they are will help you feel so much more in control.

I'd love to talk about some recipes. In addition to all of this technical information, there are a ton of really delicious-looking recipes. Here in the US, we're thinking about holiday bakes and sweets for gifting. Tell me about the pickled pineapple pâte de fruits. 

Oh, my goodness. When I first moved to New York, I did not realize that there was this whole category of fancy gummies called pâte de fruits. If you haven't had them before, they are the most delicious, pure fruit flavored sour gummies in the world. Often, they're using a much higher percentage of fruit than if you were to just go to the grocery store and pick up a bag of candy watermelons. If you were to get a watermelon pâte de fruit, it would actually have watermelon in it. I absolutely love pineapple. I think that I was quite inspired by the Taiwanese pineapple shortbreads. Have you ever had those?

Oh, yes.

That sticky, buttery jam inside is so delicious. I really wanted to transport that slightly fibrous but sweet pineapple and make it as dense and as flavorful as possible. So the pickled pineapple pâte de fruit is one of my favorites, and it's tossed in a slightly numbing Szechuan peppercorn sugar. To me, it's just the perfect gift because it has that compacted, sweet flavor but also a little bit of citric acid and a little bit of numbing to balance it out. There's a lot going on in it, considering it's pretty much just a gummy.

With dreams of becoming a pastry chef, Nicola Lamb landed in New York at the height of the cronut craze. Photo by Lin Pei Pei.

So intense and such complex flavors. The way you've organized the recipes is kind of genius. You organize them according to the amount of time they take. There's a section called An Afternoon, a section called A Day, and a section called Over A Weekend. With that pâte des fruits, which section would it be in?

That's definitely in the Afternoon section. I used to get a lot of recipe books, and even though I am a professional and I shouldn't admit to this, there'd be times where I'd be making a recipe, and I would get halfway down the recipe and it would say, "Okay, next step: Chill for eight hours." And I would think, "Excuse me, I have friends coming over for dinner in an hour. You've got to be kidding me." So I really wanted to be upfront about how long things take to make, especially because for so many people, baking is a hobby, and baking is something that you fit into your already busy life. 

Baking is something that brings you joy and you might think, "Oh, I've got a free morning on Saturday. What shall I bake?" I really wanted to be upfront and to find a way for people to fit baking into their lives. That's why there's also a timeline on every single recipe, so you can see upfront how long it's going to take. That timeline is actually quite realistic. Some of my friends who aren't bakers said to me, "Is this a Nicola timeline or is this a normal baker's timeline?" I said, "I promise, I've tried to make it as realistic as possible for all levels."

There's an unusual-looking cake that looks like a cousin of a Dutch baby. It's the plum and mascarpone karpatka.

Oh my goodness. I can't believe that this cake hasn't made it through because it is basically like a giant, as you say, Dutch baby. It's kind of a giant eclair. It's the perfect cake for anyone who has been worried about making choux pastry because they're worried that it's going to flop. The thing about the karpatka, it's a Polish mountain cake. It's supposed to be wild and wiggly, and it can look kind of bizarre. 

You really want it to have these incredible folds because the more wacky and wild it is when it bakes, the more space there is to put in delicious cream, in this case, a mascarpone-enriched pastry cream. It's got stewed plums, which are just plums that you cook until jammy. You layer it up with that mascarpone, and it is a real sight to behold when you bring it out onto a plate. I think people are so excited when they see it — more than, I think, a regular cake.

If we can't find plums this time of year, is there a more autumnal fruit we could use?

You could do a real Thanksgiving version. You could do a tart cranberry with the mascarpone. I think that would be really delicious.

Mmm, lovely. You also have a savory bake that looks gorgeous and seems not too hard to make, the tomato and fennel tarte tatin.

I love that recipe so much. I'm obsessed with fennel. I think a lot of people, interestingly, who have had my cookbook in the UK said that they'd never cooked with fennel or they'd never bought fennel before they saw this recipe. And now they're all fennel converts. I'm really, really pleased about that. 

All you do really, and it is a summery recipe — I know that you can get good tomatoes all year round but it is a great recipe for the end of summer when you've got a bunch of tomatoes hanging about — is use all the same techniques that you would to make a sweet tarte tatin but with slightly less sugar and a few more interesting spices. We've got some fennel seeds in there. I think there's a bit of soy sauce to help with that umami boost for the tomatoes. It comes together beautifully and it looks dramatic and beautiful when you pull it out of the oven.

You've been experiencing feedback from this book for a while now because it came out relatively long ago in the UK. Is there a recipe that has risen to the surface that has surprised you, that people are just really loving?

People are definitely making that fennel tarte tatin quite a lot. Every single recipe in this book is photographed but there's one recipe that we didn't have time to get a photo of. Because of the page count, we decided to keep it in, just that one. People are absolutely loving that one. This is the leek and mustard tart. 

So out of the savory bakes, I would say definitely the tomato tarte tatin and the leek and mustard tart. From the sweet bakes, people are making the brown butter banana cookies quite a lot. I think it's because they see that the whole thing is a one-bowl mix.

I think people love to spend lots of time in the front of the book, doing lots of reading. People are even taking this book on holiday with them and sending me photos of them sitting by the pool reading about sugar. It's so great. I think when they finally dip into the recipes, they go, "Okay, let's maybe do a cookie or a biscuit." The brown butter banana cookies, which are so satisfying and really simple, are doing well, as well as the super chunky miso chocolate chip walnut cookies. Those cookies, they're monster cookies.I knew that people would like those, and they are really delicious, I have to say.

"Sift" is filled with technical baking information imparted in an easy, digestible manner. Photo courtesy of Clarkson Potter.