Award-winning Butter and Brioche blogger and author of the nature-inspired dessert book, Wild Sweetness, Thalia Ho shares the 'wild' inspiration behind a genius pound cake recipe. And in the case of this dessert -- it's ALL about the sugar.
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves, and we get to hear from you. This week, I’m talking with Thalia Ho -- you may know her as the blogger behind Butter and Brioche. Or from her drop-dead gorgeous chocolate-chip-puddle cookie shots that will stop you dead in your scroll on Instagram. Or you may now know her as an author of the recently released Wild Sweetness. We started the interview by talking about Thalia’s lifelong love of nature and how it fuels her recipe development process.Wild Sweetness, get it? Anyways, here’s Thalia.
Thalia Ho: I remember, in childhood, I was always outside. Growing up in Australia, we lived in a house. Woods and Woodlands surrounded it. And I always remember being in that environment; that was formative. I don’t remember spending time inside, around technology. Now it's different. Now I have to take the time to go out and be in that environment. My parents raised me to spend time outside; they encouraged it.
Looking back on this book, this was a coming together of both. The way I was raised, the adherence to the wild as a child. But then growing up as an adult and having all those memories and wanting to recapture them. I always say that I like food that tastes like a memory, a seasoned, a place, a feeling, and I want to re-experience that. I tried with all of these recipes to capture the essence of the wild. Whatever I was experiencing in the outside world when I was writing the book became the recipes.
Kristen: So, how do you make that happen now when you do plan to go out in nature?
Thalia: I book holidays; I consciously make the time. There's a beautiful rose garden, about five minutes down. And I walk down there, and I go and take photographs, and it stills my mind a little bit, but. Yeah, some plans need to be made to get out into nature. And I wish it wasn't like that. And I think for me writing this book; it was very much me trying to take my memories of my childhood and encapsulate that and taste it through the food. I was less focused on external trends, food trends, what would be appealing to an audience, and more about what I wanted to put out into the world. And that was, that was a process and a journey. And it found itself in this book.
I always say this book, I didn't want to write it, but I had to in a way. It was always inside of me. And I spent a lot of time writing it in the wild. I made that conscious decision. I'm not going to sit in my city place. I'm going to take myself out. And I was able to see things and translate what I saw in the world into the food and the photographs.
Kristen (voiceover): This entirely made sense to me, especially when flipping through the Smoke chapter. There you’ll find recipes like black tahini brittle ice cream, s’mores pie, and scorched cheesecake — all inspired by the hazy, woody, heady, cozy feelings of sitting around a fire. Oh, and of course, the smell of burnt hair.
Thalia: I have strong memories of being around the fire from youth, and I'm attracted to those flavors. I always say the women in my family have this palette that borders on carcinogenic. We love burnt nasty things. It doesn't make a lot of sense. There’s a lot of burnt sugars. When I was sick as a child, I remember my grandmother, for some reason, she would, then she'll go over the stove and make burnt sugar. And that was some cure. I don't even know how I ate it, but I just remember the scent and the smoke rising from the pan and what she had to do it. And I remember sitting around the bonfire, and my head would just like, smell like the next. And so all of that smokey intensity and the hair smell. I use black cardamom in this book, which is cardamom but roasted down. And it reminded me of my burnt hair, as delicious as that sounds.
Kristen (voiceover): As with the chocolate puddle cookies, flowers in all their forms -- from extracts to literal petals -- are hugely emblematic of Thalia’s work and unique style. I’ve always been amazed at how fluidly Thalia can add floral elements to all of her recipes. So I asked her about how writing the Flora chapter went and how more of us can introduce flowers into our cooking without making food that tastes, well, like perfume.
Kristen: I know the Flora chapter was a more arduous chapter for you to write. Do you have examples come to mind where you triumphed over that and found a connection?
Thalia: It’s so interesting; the Flora chapter is complex because I could write whole books on flowers. Even if something as minuscule that we forget about vanilla is a flower, it comes from an orchid. So the breadth of what I could include in that chapter made it difficult. I wanted to make the flowers accessible as well. So you don’t have to run around and forage for cherry blossoms. That is challenging if you don't know what you're looking for and how to use them. And also seasonally wise as well. With this book, I wanted to make sure that you could pick it up and bake a recipe out of it that isn't necessarily a seasonal recipe. So you can experience a bit of winter in summer and vice versa.
Kristen (voiceover): Hey! It’s Kristen. If you like this interview with Butter and Brioche blogger and Wild Sweetness author Thalia Ho, check out my recent interview with Daniela Galarza. We talked about her recipe newsletter, the dangers of using the word “exotic,” and how her recipes schooled her on a basic pesto. In the second half of the episode, we talk about this week’s Genius Recipe, Thalia’s Basil Sugar Pound Cakes -- which was inspired by something curious Thalia spotted as she was tromping through the snow but had to go through a few twists and turns to get there. Stay tuned.
Thalia: It started as a granita because when I was in Tasmania, I was in the forest one day, and I was like, I had on these terrible Doc Marten boots that I was trying to work as snowbirds, and they weren't working. I was slipping all over the place, and I was looking at the ground. I could see all these verdant, bright greens coming through the ice. And I took a photo, and I was like, this looks like granita.
All the flavors were the same. You had the basil; you had the lemon. I think I had a heap of liquor in there as well. Cause I didn't want it to freeze too hard. And it wasn’t working for me. The basil was masking out in comparison to all the other flavors going on. So my process then was I knew I had in my head aesthetically what I wanted it to look like. I just had to figure out how to do it.
Kristen (voiceover): OK, so frozen basil doesn’t have quite the oomph Thalia hoped it would—where should it go instead? Thalia had one more try to go before landing on basil in its most perfect, basil-iest form in a baked good: straight-up sugar.
Thalia: And it ended up with this basil sugar grassy mess. It looks like granita, And then I wanted something perfect and straightforward to carry it through. So I made a simple vanilla pound cake, but it was always about the sugar the whole time. So even in the photograph, there's no cake, it's just sugar,
Kristen: And it does look like crunched-up snow too.
Thalia: Well, I'm glad you think that, and it's not just in my head.
Kristen: No, I see the connection. And mainly how it played out on the cake, too, that it's just resting on top hiding this buttery pound cake.
Thalia: I think it's a very confronting thing as well. Because it's very green and strange-looking, and you can pile it high or just sprinkle it lightly on, I leave the choice up to you in the book. I like the sugar. We need to get more into this idea of finishing sugars because everyone's into finishing salts and eating gets so creative with those combinations. But lately, I've been playing around with exciting sugars to finish my baking. So I like this basil stuff.
Kristen: It's subtle. It's buttery, lemony, the vanilla it's those subtle flavors are coming through, but it's not itself as the super sweet cake. I noticed this the last time I made it; it brings out the crust. As you're biting, these little sparkles of sugar are filtering in with the crust. So you get this fluffy inside. And the crust of a good cake is accentuated by the crunch of the sugar on top.
Thalia: When I was constructing this recipe, I had basil actually in the cake. The heat ruined the delicacy of the basil. That is why I love making sugars. Because you can bring out that potency in that sugar and let it be what it is without being masked by the fat—the butter in the pound cake masks the basil flavor.
Kristen: After all the different iterations, how did you know that this one was the one?
Thalia: Mainly because it photographed the way I wanted. It looked like the photograph that I took of the snow in the wild. I went, yeah, that's what I want. For me, the cake is more delicious than granita. There is a time and a place for both, of course. But it came down to the photograph, but it also what was yummy.
Kristen: And what do you like about the eating experience of the finishing sugar on the cake?
Thalia: It's a bit weird, I'm not going to lie. It's so textured and granulated. You can make it clumpy or pull back and have the basil look like strips of grass in the sugar. When I'm constructing a recipe, I'm generally looking at texture as one of the main things. Is it attractive enough visually? I like texture.
Kristen: What has been the reaction to this recipe since putting it in your book?
Thalia: People find it very strange. I've received many pictures of the readers making it, and they're doing a good job. It’s piled high. No one's going too scantly with it. For people who are willing to experiment, the response has been good.
Kristen (voiceover): This recipe will make a little more basil sugar than you can probably eat on your cake, which is an excellent thing: it keeps well in a jar in the fridge for a week. Thalia had many ideas for what to do with it: sprinkled on chocolate cookies, as a rim for an icy summer cocktail, and spread over all sorts of fruit, from strawberries to peaches. She also mentioned tomatoes. So, with my toddler’s help, we harvested a few big tomatoes from the vines that are spilling wildly from one corner of the yard, sliced them, and showered them with the sugar. And let me tell you, It was delicious. It is the perfect little dessert salad by itself or with a thick slice of Thalia’s pound cake. And now -- some of your favorite summer desserts worth turning the oven on for.
Listener Marian: Hi, this is Marian calling in from the beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, here to tell you about the beauty that is blueberry, schlump where you basically take a bunch of blueberries and then you take a bunch of butter and sugar and flour and put it on top of it. And then it all sort of melts together in these little like lagoons of topping. And it's a very good excuse to eat vanilla ice cream. I found out about it from a distant relative in Sorento Maine a couple of years ago. And I highly recommend it.
Listener Dina: Hola. This is Dina from Chicago. I love to make apple pie. Me encanta hacer pastel de manaza. I go apple picking with my grandkids at the end of the summer; I usually cook the apples first and the little cornstarch to thicken the filling. I season the pie with ground cinnamon, nutmeg gloves, and sugar. It has become a tradition now to make apple pie. Don't tell my kids, but I use pre-made pie dough. My husband, Jorge doesn't know the difference. Don't tell them!
Kristen (voiceover): Thanks for listening, and a special thanks to Thalia Ho for joining us this week. Our show is put together by Coral Lee, Amy Shuster, and Emily Hanhan. If you have a genius recipe you found wearing your Doc Martens or your bunny slippers, I would always love to hear from you at genius@food52.com. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes and the Food52 podcast network and want to help us keep making it better and better, the very best thing you can do to support us is to take a moment to leave us a rating or review or even just subscribe, if you haven’t already. Thanks so much—talk to you next week.