For Helen Goh, Baking Is Always Meaningful

Baking marks the big moments. Just ask the pastry chef Helen Goh, whose new cookbook “Baking and the Meaning of Life,” explains how baking is always meaningful, whether you’re making your mother-in-law’s chocolate cake recipe or a spur-of-the-moment apple pie. I sat down and talked with Helen about her culinary journey, her upcoming Milk Street Class, Baking and the Meaning of Life on May 2nd, along with her new cookbook, which combines the psychology and baking sides of her life (in addition to being a pastry chef, Goh is a psychologist). Here, she takes the chance to gaze inward and talk about the recipes that hold meaning for her.

You’ve been a psychologist for many years while working as a pastry chef. What led to that combination?

I went to university to do a Bachelor of Science with the intention of doing a Master’s in Psychology, and after I did the undergraduate I was told that I was too young, that I should go and get some life experience—so I did. Because I had a Bachelor of Science, I fell into a job in pharmaceutical sales, and part of that job was to talk to doctors about new drugs. I found that I could invite them all for lunch and, rather than going clinic to clinic, I’d talk to them en masse about the drugs. Very quickly I realized that I was much more interested in the lunch than in what I was actually supposed to be saying to them.

I was spending more and more time at the caterers’, and eventually I came to feel that this was much more interesting. It excited me more. Serendipitously, my boyfriend at the time had an option to take a redundancy package at work, and he said, “What would you do if you had this small sum of money?” And I said, “Let’s just open a cafe!” It was the most foolish thing. Neither of us had any experience. But we just did it. We poured everything into it. I wasn’t trained, he wasn’t trained. Somehow it worked.

Was cooking a break from psychology, or was it the other way around?

In order to support myself through graduate school, I cooked in the evenings as a pastry chef at a restaurant. But when I graduated I still found it difficult to leave cooking, so I’ve always just kept the two. For me, they’re two very separate vocations, and they access different parts of me. I really enjoy them both for different reasons. I just didn’t think there was any reason to quit either of them.

I have always done one more than the other. When I was working on the Ottolenghi books, I really scaled back my work as a practitioner, and when I needed a break from cooking and baking, I would sort of scale up my psychology practice. I was very worried about my patients knowing that I was a pastry chef because I just didn’t want them to feel that I wasn’t 100% focused on psychology. For a long time, I felt like I was leading this duplicitous double life, so it was really great to write this book and finally combine the two. It’s a bit like my coming out, you know?

How did you begin developing recipes with Yottam Ottolenghi?

When I moved to the UK, I thought that it was time to hang up my chef's whites and focus entirely on psychology. Between the time when I applied to the doctorate and when it started, there were three or four months, and my husband said, “Look, there's a cute little deli down the road.” We were living in Notting Hill, and of course, it was the Ottolenghi deli.

I went to have a look, and I thought, “Oh, this is just beautiful.” I wrote to them that evening to say that I was looking for part-time work. Unbeknownst to me, somebody that he (Ottolenghi) knew in the Melbourne food scene had told him that I was moving to London. They’d told him that if he came across me, he should get me onboard. So he was waiting for me when I wrote that email. And so we met, and we just really hit it off in terms of what I could contribute to the company.

And I think it's a particular kind of trait of Yotam’s, that he's very open and flexible and kind of fluid, and open to flexible working arrangements—with him it's not “you work full-time or you work part-time or you're out,” you know? He just made it work. And it meant that I could study, and I could see my patients during the day, and then on weekends, I could work at this warehouse at Ottolenghi developing recipes. Yotam would come in in the afternoon, so we'd kind of taste and see if there was anything we liked. That was kind of how Sweet, our first cookbook, came about as well.

“Baking and the Meaning of Life”is your first solo cookbook. How did you use this book to express yourself, and set it apart from your other work?

Ottolenghi recipes are very outward-looking. We're constantly thinking of the reader, and the customer coming in to eat at the restaurant or coming to buy something at the deli. But when I looked inward, I realized that all through the years I've always baked for people. I've always baked things that I loved or that captured something about the person I was baking for, and that was slightly different to the Ottolenghi work. Suddenly I felt like I was going inward to things that I've always made without asking myself whether it was “Ottolenghi” or not.

I found that actually, over 30 years, I've baked so many things for so many people that I genuinely love, that I've baked again and again. And I thought, “Well, you know what? It's time to share those as well.” It felt more personal in that way. But I also I didn't want nostalgia and sentimentality to get in the way of a really good recipe. I think avoiding that is really, really important.

[The cookbook] did, I think, open up the usage of Asian ingredients for me—like pandan, coconut milk, five spice powders and tamarind, which I love to use to temper sweetness. There's some savory baking in there too, like Sambal Prawn Buns. So, in that sense, it wasn't that I was thinking that it was so different to Ottolenghi, but I just focused on whether the recipe works and delivers, and that someone else would enjoy it as well.

Quite organically, it finally seemed like I was combining personal stories with my professional insights—blending my psychological training with the kind of cultural things that we do to mark moments. I think that we're very good at marking time and occasions with baking, whether it's mince pies for Christmas or Hot Cross Buns at Easter or pecan pie for Thanksgiving. We do this in a way that's personal to us, but we also do it in a collective way. At any given point in November, you could pick up Instagram and there'll be people making pumpkin pie or pecan pie. Suddenly I was combining psychological insight with personal stories using my baking expertise. It just finally came together in this book.

It didn't click for me until very recently, that each recipe had a context and a story. Realizing that was what led to the personal stories, which I then subjected to my psychological training. Why did I choose that cake for that occasion? Why was it important for me to make that for that person? And that made me think, “This is a universal thing.” We bake for a reason. It's not random. And of course, there are times we don't bake for other people, but instead for our sense of achievement and mastery. And I think that also gives us a lot of meaning. That's why there's an extra chapter in the book called Learning, Growth and Achievement. All these things give us meaning, whether we're trying to nurture somebody or give something at a picnic, or have a sense of continuity because we're cooking our mum's apple pie, or we're remembering an occasion.

Did it always feel joyful when you were writing “Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes”?

No—because although I've been developing recipes for a very long time, I'm someone who's very plodding. It doesn't come easily to me. It's just that I am persistent and I persevere, and I love that feeling when I nail it. And at Ottolenghi, we've been very lucky because we work as a team. So there's an editor to overlook my recipes, to make it flow better. Doing my own book has been liberating in some ways because you don't have all these other constraints and competing perpectives, but it was also daunting because suddenly I had to do it all myself—create, write, test.

I came across a book designed to help you become a better writer. It's by Anne Lamott, and it's called Bird by Bird. I read it in the hopes that it would help me be less self conscious about writing, and it really did that. What made me so slow at my work was that I was both insecure and perfectionistic. So this book helped me get down that crappy first draft, and that first bake. You know, it's not expected to be perfect—it's a first bake. And that has been so transformative for me, because I now approach it with curiosity, or I wonder how that's going to work, rather than, “Oh, my god, is that going to work?” That shift has really helped me, and has helped me write this book.

You’re leading a virtual livestream cooking class with Milk Street in May, what recipes will you share?

We're going to talk about green tea. We decided to showcase two different kinds of green tea, matcha and Hojicha green tea. Matcha is obviously the one that most people know, it’s kind of vegetal and mineral and a tiny bit bitter. I'm going to demonstrate using it in the green tea [matcha] brownie with red beans. It's adzuki sweet red beans, and they give that pop of color and sweetness and crunch as well.

Hojicha is a fermented green tea. It's actually a really unappealing brown-y color, and it’s smoky. It tastes to me like hazelnuts and coffee and cocoa. And I love those flavors, so I'm going to be making a short bread with hojicha. We're going to talk about green tea, their different flavor profiles, and how to incorporate them in baking. They're both in Baking and The Meaning of Life.

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.

And if you're looking for more Milk Street, check out our livestream cooking classes with our favorite chefs, home cooks and friends for global recipes, cooking methods and more.

Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.