Friends, hello! Here’s the beginning of a short essay I recently wrote about The Bakehouse Texas. We reopen the monthly popup in a few short weeks on Saturday September 5th (Labor Day weekend) and if you’re in Bellville or anywhere near Houston or Austin, I hope you come by! If not, here’s a bit about the inspiration behind my backyard bakery. I’ll be sharing more about the logistics and process in the coming weeks! xo Joy
When I was a kid, I loved to play house, though I was never especially interested in the husband-and-child portion of the game. Funny now, considering I have both and am pleased as punch with the arrangement.
What I wanted was the house.
I wanted a room that belonged to me. I wanted to move the furniture around, decide what pretend cakes we were serving, and choose who was invited. Very middle-child behavior: Please come to my party. I have made everything as nice as possible on a budget of nothing. Also, I reserve the right to yell for mom if you make fun of me.
My grandparents had a strange unfinished space above their two-car garage that I discovered one very boring afternoon. It was a wooden platform with two windows, a few mostly broken chairs, an old school desk, dusty tables, and boxes nobody needed but nobody wanted to throw away. It had at least a decade of dust on it and was emphatically not a place for children. Naturally, I decided it was mine.
I snuck bowls, plates, utensils, and the odd tchotchke upstairs from my grandparents’ house and arranged the space into my version of a clubhouse. My grandmother, of course, eventually noticed and made sure I returned everything. But the vision remained.
Up there I would throw imaginary parties and work the counter at my imaginary bakery. I stirred imaginary batters in very real bowls and served invisible customers. Sometimes my older sister played along until she had the nerve to get bored and leave. Understandable, but I had an imaginary business to run.
I hadn’t thought about that room much until recently - because I finally built it!
Continue reading on joythebaker.com
The Bakehouse Texas is back September 5th
After our maternity-leave intermission, we’re reopening Saturday, September 5th, and keeping things simple this fall: no preorders. Just walk up, see what’s come out of the oven!
Saturday, September 5
9 a.m.–noon, or until we sell out
310 E Palm St., Bellville, Texas
Look for the big leaning Victorian and come down the side driveway into the backyard.
September’s menu:
The Bakehouse Texas Chocolate Chip Cookies — enormous, Guittard chocolate-loaded, crisp around the edges and gooey through the middle. (Recipe linked!)
Big Buttermilk Biscuit Jammers — tall buttermilk biscuits with bubbling pockets of jam baked fresh throughout the morning until we run out. (Recipe linked!)
Pork, Cabbage & Ginger Sausage Rolls — flaky pastry wrapped around savory pork, cabbage, and ginger. A recipe from Martin Sorge’s new Great Bakes cookbook!
Brown Butter Cornbread Cookies — nutty brown butter meets sweet, craggy cornbread in cookie form, topped with brown buttercream and honey.
Olive Oil Polenta Cakes with Raspberry — tender little cornmeal cakes with bright raspberry glaze.
Cheddar Scallion Scones — buttery, savory, cheesy, scallion-y. You get it. (Recipe linked!)
Everything is baked fresh Saturday morning and sold first come, first served until it’s gone.
Bring your own mug and I’ll pour you a complimentary cup of Bellville’s own Interstellar Coffee.
We accept cash, Venmo, and Zelle.
We’ll be open the first Saturday of every month (aka Market Day in Bellville) this fall:
September 5 · October 3 · November 7 · December 5
See you in the backyard!
Now let’s talk about a new cookbook I love! I’m so happy to welcome Serena Wolf to Baked In this week!
Serena is a Le Cordon Bleu-trained recipe developer, culinary instructor, cookbook author, and the kind of kitchen friend who makes you feel like you can absolutely pull dinner together without spiraling in front of the open refrigerator. You may know her from The Dude Diet cookbook, her longtime recipe site Domesticate Me, or Spiraling, the optimistic anxiety podcast she cohosts (a title I relate to perhaps too personally).
Her brand new cookbook, You Do You: 100+ Endlessly Adaptable Recipes to Boost Your Culinary Confidence, is exactly the sort of book I want on the counter when the groceries are giving “figure it out.” The whole spirit of the book is generous and freeing: here are smart, delicious recipes, here are the swaps and riffs, here is permission to trust yourself a little more in the kitchen.
Serena joined us for a very fun cookbook chat, and we’re giving away a copy of You Do You to one lucky reader below!
What was the “aha moment” recipe while writing this book - the one that made you think, oh, this is the heart of it?
My aha moment actually came prior to writing this book, and each and every recipe was designed to fit into this collection of specifically flexible recipes. I had always known that home cooks sometimes struggled to tweak recipes on their own, but it wasn’t until I started teaching virtual cooking classes back in 2020 that I realized how huge of a pain point making substitutions can be. Those early classes were characterized by students’ panic over missing one ingredient in a recipe, and my email was constantly flooded in the hours before class with all caps, “I DON’T HAVE/LIKE [insert ingredient]?! What should I do?!!!” To save the communal sanity, I started including a “You Do You” section in the recipes that were sent out to students ahead of class with a list of possible substitutions for the primary ingredients in a recipe. This soothed everyone’s anxieties, and I was shocked at how much more calm students seemed having been given permission to make so many substitutions. AHA! Every recipe in this book is accompanied by a You Do You section, and my hope is that by reading through them, home cooks will start to understand the role various ingredients play in a recipe (is it acting as a binder? adding sweetness? crunch? tang?) and become increasingly confident tweaking recipes to suit their personal tastes and what they have on hand. Ironically, my goal with this book is to help readers go off book more often and feel good about using recipes as roadmaps.
If your cookbook had a playlist, what three songs would be on it?
Ooooh I love this one. Since I listened to the Nancy Meyers’ Kitchen Spotify playlist on repeat throughout the entire book process, and I almost always have it on during dinner parties, I’m going with a few classic favorites with feel good, confidence-boosting vibes:
You Send Me Aretha Franklin
Baby You Got It Brenton Wood
Best of My Love The Emotions
What’s one ingredient you’re evangelical about?
This is a boring one but…DIAMOND CRYSTAL KOSHER SALT. I know everyone has their salt loyalties, but I will die on the Diamond Crystal hill. I just really appreciate its light, hollow flakes (they adhere particularly well to the surface of food) and the fact that it dissolves more quickly than Morton’s. The latter is key for people like me that are impatient taste testers—you’ll be far less prone to over salt something because you think it’s under seasoned when really the salt just needed a tiny bit more time to dissolve!
With that said, I remember reading a review of my last cookbook and someone saying, “She really looooooves chipotles in adobo.” And that made me crack up because I do, in fact, love them very much, and I hadn’t really noticed how often I use the peppers and sauce in my recipes. I’m a sucker for the controlled heat of the chipotles and the slightly sweet, smoky flavor of adobo sauce, so I find myself adding one or both to everything from salad dressings and marinades to meatloaf and savory baked goods.
If someone cooks just one recipe from your book to understand you as a person, which should it be?
The Bee Sting Bites from the Happy Hour chapter! They’re bite-sized pieces of oven-crisped salami topped with a Calabrian chili whipped ricotta, plenty of Pecorino, basil, and a drizzle of honey. They’re a little bit fancy but not fussy, and they’re more fun with friends. They’ve also got a bit of unexpected spice that tends to surprise people ;).
What’s a mistake you hope readers make at least once?
Not reading a recipe all the way through! Reading a recipe from start to finish before you start cooking is so important, and it’s a simple thing that so many people skip. I get it! We’re all busy, but spending an extra couple of minutes up front to read through a recipe at least once versus diving right into cooking—doesn’t matter if it’s a super simple or more involved recipe—is the easiest way to ensure success. Forewarned is forearmed, if you will.
What kitchen tool deserves more respect, and which one do you think is wildly overrated?
I don’t know how people are cooking without bench scrapers! I think the bench scraper often gets relegated to the baking category, but I rarely bake, and mine is hands down the most used tool in my kitchen aside from my chef’s knife. I use it for portioning ingredients, transferring prepped goods to bowls/pans, and for keeping my work surface clean, and I am infinitely less efficient and tidy without it. I’m personally not a fan of any single use kitchen gadget (avocado slicers, onion choppers, etc.). I feel like all of these jobs can be easily accomplished with a good chef’s knife and a tiny bit of practice, so it’s a waste of precious kitchen storage real estate. Not to mention the fact they’re usually a huge pan to clean.
Fill in the blank: People think I’m _tidy__ in the kitchen, but actually I’m _a human tornado__.
If you could hand-deliver this cookbook to one person (living or not), who would it be and what would you want them to cook first?
Jennifer Garner. Have you ever watched her “Pretend Cooking Show”?! It’s adorable and comforting (which is the type of content I want more of these days), and I very much respect the joy and realness she brings to cooking. I’d love for her to make the Foolproof Roast Chicken with smashed potatoes because I feel like she would appreciate how something as simple as salting the chicken the night before can have such a huge impact on the flavor and texture of the meat. I also think she would get a kick out of saying the word “spatchcock” multiple times…
What’s your most controversial food opinion (The one that gets you yelled at on the internet?)
I think that mayo is the devil’s condiment. I truly wish it did not exist, and no, I do not like aioli! It is just a fancy name for mayo. Needless to say, this aversion devastates many people.
When you’re not eating your own recipes, what are you absolutely guilty-pleasure ordering for takeout?
I shamelessly live for chicken fingers and French fries.
What do you hope someone feels (like, truly feels) when they cook from your book for the first time?
Calm. We live in such a high-stress world, and cooking can so often be an added stressor, especially if you’re not a confident cook. After so many years of teaching, I’ve learned to write recipes in a way that hopefully makes people feel like they have a friend in the kitchen helping them troubleshoot any potential issues and offering plenty of options to help tailor a meal to their tastes/fridge/pantry. If they can feel at ease when cooking from this book, I’ll feel like I accomplished my goal.
You Do You Giveaway!
I’m so happy to be giving away a copy of Serena Wolf’s brand new cookbook, You Do You: 100+ Endlessly Adaptable Recipes to Boost Your Culinary Confidence, to one lucky reader!
And Serena has my full support with Diamond Crystal Kosher Sald and chipotle in adobo. :)
To enter the giveaway, leave a comment below and tell me:
What’s the most underrated tool in your kitchen?
(There are many correct answers. Tiny whisk is one of them.)
The giveaway is open to U.S. residents only and will remain open until Friday August 28th. One winner will be selected and notified via Substack message.
Have a great weekend!
xo