Nicole Rucker busts decades-old baking myths to simplify classic recipes

While the world perfected their sourdough starter during the pandemic, pastry darling Nicole Rucker fell out of love with baking. She was scared, stressed and tired, so she took a step back from the kitchen to regroup, only to return with a collection of stripped down recipes that simplified the process of baking. It's called Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake: A Cookbook, the same name as her bakery. It's baking unplugged, if you will. 

Evan Kleiman: I find this book really, really interesting. It's so different from your previous book, Dappled, which was a deep dive into fruit. Let's dive right in. The first chapter is cookies. Can you explain what you call the CBM or the shortcut cold butter method?

Nicole Rucker: Yeah, so cold butter method is essentially what could be called reverse creaming. When you're making cookies and you're making thousands of them a week, one of the obstacles is when you're creaming butter and scraping the bowl and getting it just right. I just felt like there's got to be a way around this. 

While I was on my forced sabbatical for that first couple weeks of the pandemic, I watched a video by a bakery in the UK called Crumbs & Doilies, where they were reverse engineering a Levain cookie, those big scone-like cookies. One of the things they do is they dump everything in the mixer and they mix it. They don't cream the butter. It was like a light bulb. I was like, "Wait a second, we can do that?" It was a light bulb, my head was spinning, and I was thinking, why is every single cookie recipe for the last 80, 90 years starting with cream, butter and sugar, and beat butter and sugar with a spoon? Who made that up and why did we do that? I broke it apart from there. It was like taking apart a puzzle and putting it back together in a new way.

I have to say that's the reason I probably make cookies the least of anything.

Because you hate creaming butter and sugar?

A tablespoon of masala chai gives these milk chocolate brownies something extra. Photo by Alan Gastelum.

I hate creaming butter and sugar so much. 

It's just so annoying. And you know what? People who only make cookies a couple times a year, they're like, "What's the big deal, ladies?" And you're like, "No! It's such an imprecise instruction." In the Midwest right now and on the East Coast, it's very cold, and you call for room temperature butter. In California or in Los Angeles today, it's gorgeous and sunny outside, and our room temperature butter is like, my kitchen is probably 70 degrees right now. But my friend's kitchen on the other side of the country is going to be 60, 50. Then you're saying "cream that." It's not exact enough. 

There are uses for that. We can't abandon it all together. But if you just want to make a cookie, that should not be an obstacle. You can't just dump it all in the bowl.

So we're dumping all the dry ingredients in the bowl and mixing them up.

Sugar, flour, salt.

To me, what this feels like is making pie dough. Then you're adding the butter and you're mixing it in until it's kind of sandy, right?

Yes, and that is something once I saw that first video and then looked it up, I was thinking, "Oh, this is so much like making pie dough." But one of the things I still hang on to is making pie dough by hand as this badge of artisanal craft. Oh, we have to make it by hand, it's so much better. But then, in uncertain times, I started to question everything, and I thought to myself, "Is that another one of those lies I'm telling myself that I actually have to do it the hard way when there's a nicer, easier way and I still get the same result, if not a more precise result?" From there, I developed this little myth-busting method. 

Cold butter method was the easiest way to tie it all together because you do have that in common. You want the fat to be cold so that it breaks up a little slower. That's really how it came to be. It was just asking a lot of questions in a time of a lot of questions.

Your signature chocolate chip cookie gives off high school cafeteria vibes. Why chunks versus chips? I personally authorize that because it means that you don't have to have chips in your house, you could just have chocolate bars in your house. What ingredient do you include for texture? And why does the dough benefit from a slumber party in the fridge overnight?

It doesn't go overnight. That's another thing that I decided to put by the side of the road. I only require a brief 30-minute chill out period. If you wanted to leave it longer, you could. But another thing that kind of came up in the last 20 years of people making more and more cookies with nicer ingredients, is that we got on this "I age my cookie dough" train. 

Aging cookie dough is so wonderful. We do it in the bakery. But at home, it's one of those things where people started saying, "Well, I have to age it for three days. And I'm doing it overnight." Then some people are just not going to make cookies because they're tired of that, and they're like, I don't want to do it.

Aiming to make baking easier, Nicole Rucker asked herself, "Do we actually really need another one of those lies?" Photo by Alan Gastelum.

And often, we make cookies because we want to eat a cookie, soon.

Yes, as you should. I want to eat one right now. But the thing is, the dough does benefit from a little sitting because everything hydrates and also gluten starts to relax at around 30 minutes, so it has its benefits. But really, I found that to produce a very delicious, high-quality cookie at home, you really only need 30 minutes, and that's the same amount of time you could be using to preheat your oven. If you're employing some "work smarter, not harder" techniques, it's all going to happen on the same timeline anyway, so there won't be any waiting around time, other than waiting for the hot cookies to come out of your oven. 

But to your previous question, in our signature recipe, we use a little bit of oatmeal, so it's the 1990s oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies. The oatmeal is really there just for texture. My favorite cookie texture is a more flat, dark brown sugar. It's got a real buttery note to it. It's got chewiness at the edge, a little bit more chewy then tender in the center. Not a super fat, fluffy, cakey cookie. That's the cookie that I remember being pretty life-changing in high school, once we got past the generic Toll House phase in the late '90s. 

I would love it if you could talk about the process of Dutching chocolate and your preferred cocoas for different recipes. I always live in fear that I'm going to mistakenly use the wrong one. What happens if I use the wrong one? Is it all over? Do I need to throw out my dough, my batter?

The chocolate chunks versus the chips is because of multiple things. One, if you're gonna get the best quality chocolate and you live in an area where they're not having a wider range of chocolate chips, finding a good chocolate bar is going to be easier. Also, the shape of the chocolate and how it's made and what it's made for will change the way the cookie spreads in the oven. It also changes the way that the chocolate is after it's baked. A chocolate chip is designed to retain its shape, and it doesn't melt out and turn into a puddle. That's on purpose because they want the chip to stay a chip. I love chocolate chips, especially the Guittard chocolate chips. They're so beautiful and delicious, and we use them in the shop. But if you're making that iconic bakery-style cookie with the puddles of chocolate that turn into little striated lines when you break it in half, that's going to be a chocolate that's more like a bar chocolate or a couverture chocolate. And you're only going to get that from not using chips. You have to use a chunk that you cut up, or a coin, which is harder to find for most people.

It depends on what you're making. The thing about cocoa is that at some point we started Dutching and the Dutching changes the color of the cocoa and it changes the acidity. One thing that it does is it changes how it reacts with the other ingredients in the recipe. So if you're making a brownie, a brownie typically doesn't have any leavening agent in it. It doesn't have baking soda or baking powder, so we don't have to worry about a chemical reaction. We can use whatever cocoa powder we want, which is why, in the book, there's all these brownie recipes. Some of them have white chocolate in them and no cocoa altogether. Others have natural cocoa and they have Dutched or processed cocoa. That's because it's all about the color and the flavor in a brownie, and it has less to do with the reactive elements. 

When you're making something like a cookie or a cake, if you're using baking soda, the baking soda is going to need an acid to react off of and that is going to require something like brown sugar, lemon juice or another acid. It just so happens that the natural cocoa is quite acidic, so it's going to incite a reaction. That's kind of like the OG cocoa. We didn't need to question that too much until the game changer of Dutching came on the scene and we got all this variety. Then, those recipes didn't work with Dutch cocoa, or they didn't work as well, because the acidity has been tempered and removed. 

When you think about chocolate and cocoa, you've got to remember it's a fruit, and fruit has acid in it. But if you remove that with the Dutching process, you're going to have something that's going to need a little bit more help, and that's where you would use baking powder. Baking powder has the element in it that will create the reaction. 

You can use them interchangeably, as long as you know the rules. There's only a few recipes these days that still call for specific, I think at this point, most people are using Dutch processed cocoa because it's usually the highest quality,

And you have much more variation in color. The really, really beautifully dark cocoas are Dutched, right? 

Mmmhm. What we perceive as being higher quality chocolate in this day and age is something that's darker or more red and has almost a glow to it. And that's not necessarily true, because there are really delicious and wonderful, natural cocoas but they are very light in color. But they have that traditional, really yummy, sweeter tasting kind of vintage cocoa flavor, as opposed to the Dutch processed cocoas, which have more of a robust, sharper, aggressive chocolate flavor.

"FAT + FLOUR" celebrates baking made easy by keeping ingredients basic and eliminating tedious steps. Photo courtesy of Knopf.

So if you want to make yourself a nice hot cup of cocoa, then you would want a natural?

I prefer natural cocoa with the hot cocoa. We're on the same page. I tried hot chocolate with all the cocoas, and that is the one that really evokes the old school, comforting hot chocolate. But if you wanted something that was Parisian, fancy, you would use a Dutch processed cocoa, and then maybe add in some real bar chocolate for an even more luxurious mouthfeel and flavor.

And maybe a little bit of cornstarch to thicken it up, so it's almost like a pudding à la Angelina in Paris. Let's talk about brownies. Do you have a preferred method of making them? Are there any special indulgences that you add to your brownies and what do you think about milk chocolate?

I love milk chocolate. I love all chocolate. I love white chocolate, which is not really chocolate, they say. But you know, all chocolates are good chocolates to me. We're lucky we even have chocolate on this planet still, so while it's here, I'm gonna eat it. 

My basic brownie method is less flour, lots of eggs. I like cocoa in combination with some unsweetened baker's chocolate and either a 72% or a milk chocolate, whatever the design of the recipe is going to be. But I like all the forms of chocolate in a brownie. I think that makes a really delicious texture and flavor. 

One of my favorite recipes in the book is a milk chocolate brownie that's called the Abuelita Milk Chocolate Brownie, and that is because it really is meant to bring it back to that vintage Mexican hot chocolate flavor when you used to have the lightly cinnamon spiced hot chocolate made from that block called Abuelita in the market. Did you ever have that?

All the time.

Yeah, and it was so good. My grandma made it for me. It was a staple in my childhood, and I just loved it. But when I thought about that, I really thought about a lot that was going on, especially in the '90s, which was my childhood, was we were getting fancy with our additions to chocolate, and people were so high on the aphrodisiac qualities of Chilean chocolate. Remember that era? 

Mmmmhmmm.

I think that might be coming back because it tastes so good and people are experimenting with it again. So one of my favorite recipes is this Abuelita recipe, and it has some pulverized masala chai in it for the cinnamon and cardamom and ginger notes. In my kitchen at home, well, actually, it was at work that I was testing this recipe after I initially made it at home where I have a ton of spices in my cabinet. Once I got to work and I was thinking, well, I need to make a round of this, but I need to make sure it's accessible. I had three different kinds of chilies in it. I thought maybe I should just add some hot sauce instead, which is one of the most out-of-pocket things I've ever done. But I grabbed a bottle of Zab's, and I added some tablespoons of Zab's, and what came out was something very special and delicious. It has a little bit of a spicy note to it and a little bit of a tang, which reminds us that the chocolate is a fruit. Then it has this delicious spiced chai note to it. It's honestly one of the most unique brownies I've ever made, and I love it.