The Bravetart Is Back and As Opinionated As Ever

Stella Parks—aka The Bravetart—has been hiding out. Just over four years ago, with a James Beard Award-winning, New York Times best-selling cookbook and a stint as a Senior Editor at Serious Eats under her belt, the Culinary Institute of America-trained pastry wiz wasn’t just on the rise, she had risen. Then she disappeared, retreating deep into what she calls her “hermit era.”

But on the latest episode of Milk Street Radio, she resurfaces to sit down with Christopher Kimball to bust baking myths, champion American butter and explain how a step back from public life made her an even better baker.

Read on for the highlights, along with bonus takes and opinions not featured in the aired episode.

A “hermit era” helped her gain perspective

I’ve got a little bit more of a romantic idea of baking now that I'm getting some time and space away from the restaurant industry, and getting some time and space away from the deadlines. When I was at Serious Eats, I was producing two new recipes a week. Your brain just goes into crunch mode, and it changes how you think about baking and how you think about moving in the kitchen.

I do think [recipe development] breeds a certain way of thinking where you start to think, “So this is the problem. I will be the one to solve it.” And in my hermit era, as I've called it, I'm just happy to take some time away from recipe developing all the time to realign myself with what baking should be for a person, for a family, for a lifestyle, and not what it should be for a deadline and for a food publication and for consumer culture. I personally went into kind of a psychosis of recipe development, and needed to back away a little bit to try and get that perspective.

American baked goods need American butter

If I was going to make croissants, I would definitely not be reaching for Land O’ Lakes, because that's not how that recipe was developed. That's not the origin of the technique behind it. It relies on having a butter that has a really nice plasticity. Grab one of these European butters [from the fridge], and if you squeeze them, they're going to have a little bit of give, whereas an American-style butter will be rock hard. For croissants, it's going to make all the difference. Conversely, if you're using that higher fat butter in an American pie dough, you're going to have butter leaking out of your crust. I want that butter to be fully absorbed in the desert when I eat it and just enjoy every bit of it.

It really depends on what your recipe calls for. And I think that's the most important thing. I think there's this inclination to make these proclamations like, “Never do this,” or “Always do that,” or “This one trick is going to step up your game!” But if a recipe wasn't developed with a certain ingredient in mind, switching it is not going to necessarily be helpful. Chocolate chip cookies—that was developed here. And if you're using a classic recipe, American butter is not going to take you to a bad place.

“Baking is building a house made out of butter”

Baking is a little bit architectural, and in some ways cooking is the art. You can just lead with your heart. And sure, there are technical details for properly browning something and properly caramelizing. There's a lot of technical bones to it. But baking is building a house made out of butter, and that's not the most conducive brick for a stable structure.

I think that aspect can kind of surprise people when they aren't expecting it. Because they don't think of it that way. They think, “I'm just making a cake” or, “I'm making a frosting.” And then their pie is leaking butter all over the sheet pan and their frosting is dripping off the cake. No one thinks, “Oh, I need to manipulate the temperatures involved in my kitchen and my ingredients to produce a better outcome.” They think, “This recipe doesn't work and I failed.”

Temperature is an ingredient

Pay attention to the temperature of your kitchen. [If] someone's getting ready for a dinner party, they've got all the burners going, they've got something they've been roasting all day—their kitchen is sweltering. And that's not a problem. I come from a restaurant background [and] we are well used to working in an unbelievably hot, humid environment. But you have to take steps to correct it. If you just finished running the dishwasher, and your only flat work surface is above the dishwasher, and your kitchen's warm and whatever, and you have to roll a pie dough out...I don't think people even think about it, they're just like, “I'm just going to roll this dough out.” They don't think, “Maybe this surface is too warm.” The surface matters.

Conversely, if it's Christmas in Vermont, all your pantry ingredients are going to be quite chilled. When it's wintertime, for some reason [your] pie dough is always cracking. It's because it's too cold. It's that simple. People think, “Well, it's cracking, I need to add more water to it.” Now you're changing the hydration of the dough, and that facilitates gluten development and that's going to make it softer. It's kind of like a snowball effect of outcomes you weren't anticipating. I think it's better to change your environment, to change your equipment, to change your ingredients rather than try and modify the recipe on the fly if you don't have that depth of knowledge to pull from.

All-purpose flour isn’t always all-purpose

Not all all-purpose flour is the same and some all-purpose flour is really bad. There are some all-purpose flours that are a little higher in protein, and they behave a little bit more like a bread flour. When I think about what flours I want to stock in my kitchen, I want to have a really strong, high-protein bread flour. I'm going to have a really soft, really weak cake flour. And I'm going to have a nice middle-of-the-road all-purpose flour. And, for me, that's generally coming from a brand that's going to be blending red and white wheat flours to get the right mix to get it real soft. And then some brands, especially organic brands, kind of skew towards a harder wheat style.

I'm not saying that you can't make something amazing with it. But because the bulk of my career has been focused on nostalgic, all-American treats, I'm going for a different style of baking that's not so rustic. So I'm reaching for an all-purpose flour that's going to help me get that softer result. The other thing that I see so much [of] is people talking about every hack in the universe to try to avoid gluten development. Just a quick suggestion: What if you tried using a flour that wasn't so filled with gluten-forming proteins? That could help.

Save money on butter and spend it on chocolate

From a consumer standpoint, you can walk into a typical supermarket and find a pretty good assortment of [70 to 80%] chocolates that are well made and reasonably affordable. I don't want chocolate to be cheap because of what goes into chocolate. For it to be cheap, slave labor was involved...that's a reality. I don't want my chocolate to be cheap. I want it to be good and I want it to be available. So that's a sweet spot for me [70 to 80%]. Whereas a lot of the 100% chocolates that are in the baking aisle are often a little unbalanced or a little harsh. They're kind of mass-market formulated and not particularly great. With butter, I say, “Fine, get some off-brand butter.” The FDA regulates how it has to be composed, so it's going to meet the minimum standards. But with chocolate, they can roast the crap out of it, they can use a blend of beans, they can source from wherever. There's no standard in how it's going to be formulated, and I haven't been in love with the flavors that it produces.

You can soften butter in the microwave

I'm personally a huge fan of [the] microwave. I've lately seen, especially on social media, people insisting you can't microwave butter to soften it. And it really comes down to knowing your equipment. If you don't routinely soften butter in the microwave and just throw a stick in there and hit some random time, you have a real opportunity for things to go sideways. And a good way to do this is if you're using butter for some purpose that it doesn't matter or you are going to be melting butter anyway, just practice with your microwave a little bit, figure out the sweet spot.

In my microwave, if you put a stick of butter on the very edge of the turntable—don't put it in the center, because then it's just going to get bombarded with all the rays and it doesn't really move anywhere; it's just right in the middle, getting everything. Scoot it all the way up to the edge so it's actually moving around in the microwave. I'll microwave it for eight seconds on full power, and then I'll rotate the stick on its side and then do another eight seconds. And for me, it's got a perfect consistency from edge to edge. It's like the perfect “room temperature.” When I was working at Serious Eats, they had a more powerful, newer microwave, so I would do five seconds and then I'd rotate it and do three seconds. And that was perfect.

Quotes have been edited for clarity.
Photography by Sarah Jane Sanders.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.