That's what 'Dappled' author and Fat & Flour chef-owner Nicole Rucker thinks. (And we agree.) Nicole and Kristen talk about the olive-oil-glazed kabocha cake Nicole dreamt up at Gjelina, how Nicole trained for the KCRW pie contest, plus how to deal with winter squash seeds and guts.
Referenced in this episode:
Genius-Hunter Extra-Credit:
Special thanks to listeners Carey Neuman and Rich Shih!
Have a genius trick for those seeds and guts? Tell me about it at genius@food52.com.
Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi. I'm Kristen Miglore, lifelong genius hunter. For almost a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we get to hear from the geniuses themselves. This week, I've been talking with Nicole Rucker about her Genius Kabocha, Olive Oil and Bittersweet Chocolate Cake from the [Gjelina}(https://amzn.to/37khQ9z) cookbook. Which is a shareable, giftable, and very pretty loaf cake. What I loved about this recipe is that it reminded me of that soft, almost squishy type pumpkin bread that you often see served in nice, thick slices. But really, when I'm left alone with them, I end up just making my way through the whole loaf, pulling off big palmfuls. So it's like that, except that Nicole has just ratcheted all of the flavors way up. It's more pumpkiny, more chocolatey, just more everything.
And yet other than roasting the squash, it's as straightforward as any dump-and-stir cake is to make, and I was able to bake it many times while my toddler slept. It's also doused in this beautiful, glossy, sweet-savory glaze, just from whisking in a little bit of olive oil. That I want to pour over my next lemon cake and my next zucchini bread and maybe one day, apple hand pies when my kid is old enough not to just eat all of our work along the way. And in talking with Nicole, I also learned about a step that was in the cookbook version, where you drain the roasted squash overnight in cheesecloth that you don't have to do anymore because she doesn't. So you can complete your kabocha cake mission today instead of tomorrow, and it will keep beautifully for days, as oil-based cakes tend to do.
You can get more on the food science going on there, plus the full recipe and video for how to make it on Food52 today. But here you'll get to hear all of the other fun stuff that we couldn't quite fit in. How Nicole plotted to win the KCRW pie contest, what she learned from closing her beloved restaurant Fiona after nine months, and how much better life is running her, as she calls it, tiny pie shop Fat + Flour at Grand Central Market in LA. But to start here's the first thing she ever baked, which might surprise you as well as her path to becoming a professional baker.
Kristen: What was the very first thing you ever baked?
Nicole Rucker It might have been biscuits from Bisquick, to be honest.
Kristen: Did that spark anything for you in wanting to become a baker? Or did that come later?
Nicole: I think it all came later. I really wanted to be an illustrator. Illustrate Disney movies. But also, I was just counting all the jobs that I had. The list is long. It was almost an afterthought.
Kristen: The baking was almost an afterthought?
Nicole: Yeah, it didn't come till much later. I started baking and cooking. I think it was 2003 and I'm 40 now, So I was 23, wanting to do it as a profession. That was when I decided I wanted to do it. I tried so much other stuff first.
Kristen: What did you try?
Nicole: Well, when I was a teenager, the first job I had was doing voice-overs for radio commercials, and that's what I did. I did that a couple of times, as a gig. And, then I worked at a smoothie shop and was a hostess at a pizza place. When I was in college, I worked at a photo studio. It was an assistant to an artist. I worked in an ad agency as a receptionist. All kinds of stuff, just random stuff. But I did bring baked goods to every single one of those jobs. I loved to make stuff, but I just didn't think about doing it as a job.
Kristen: So when did that change for you? When did you realize that it could be a job?
Nicole: That was around 2003. When I saw that somebody was hiring an AM baker and I thought, I really want to learn how to do that. I think I want to do that. And so I lied about my job experience, and I got this job. Little did I know that most people, when they wanted to get into food, were not 100% transparent, But it doesn't matter, because you just want someone that wants to be there at 3 am. So if somebody wants to show up at 3 am and doesn't mess everything up they are trainable. That's what you found somebody, congratulations.
Kristen: So you felt like you had pulled a fast one?
Nicole: But I did. Yeah, but the golden job role of showing up is the first step of success. That's true. So I kept showing up, and then it was a back and forth all the time. I would get this job working in the food until I had I didn't have enough money to, And then I had to leave and go get a job as a receptionist again for a couple of years, and then I would get a job at night working at a restaurant, and then I would, you know, go and work as a grocery delivery person during the day so that I could make tips. Then I went to work as a barista for Intelligentsia. That's where I met Travis Lett because his restaurant was right down the street and he wanted to hire me as a barista. But I said I have a baking background. I know how to do this stuff. I would like to do the other stuff, not just be a barista. And for some reason, he said yes to that. I would never hire anybody like that. But, you know, he hired me as the manager/baker/barista. I was just all over. Even when I won the KCRW pie contest in 2012, I believe they referred to me as the general manager and I was like, wow, that makes it sound really impressive that this general manager just rolls up and sweeps this competition. But actually, I was baking every single day.
Kristen: What was that like, entering that contest and winning for you?
Nicole: It was like a very calculated win.
Kristen: Oh yeah?
Nicole: I really wanted to win. I had done barista competitions for Intelligentsia. So I got this bug for competing, and I thought, I want to win this pie contest. That sounds so fun. I'm in it to win it. And I went in really headstrong. And I was doing daily baking at GTA. But I wasn't making pies every day, and I didn't grow up making pie, either. We made box cakes and banana bread and biscuits and stuff like that. And I just thought I'm gonna enter this pie contest. I made my employees that worked in baking, enter the contest with it as we're going to do this fun team-building thing.
Kristen: That I'm gonna win.
Nicole: Let's all enter pies. Basically, let's all enter pies together. So we all entered and none of us placed, everybody did poorly. Nobody won. They were resentful that I made them spend the day in the sun serving stranger slices of pie. We had a good time, but it was still a little bit frustrating for everybody. And then, I didn't win. How could I not win? I really wanted this. So I started to study what the winners did. And I saw the first thing was they all had glass pie plates so they could see when the bottoms were done. I noted, oh, that must be something. And then from then on, I started making a lot of pie, and that's what I did for the next year. I would make a couple of pies every week for the shop and really tried to explore what I was going for.
Kristen: And over that year that you were training to win the pie competition, what changed in your pie-making?
Nicole: Everything. All of it. I developed a pie recipe that I liked, a dough recipe that I liked,. But I think the most important thing was just making them a lot. So I just made a lot of pies and that got me comfortable. The morning of the competition, I decided to make a savory pie and a sweet pie to enter, and I did not plan ahead. And I made the dough that morning, and I didn't let it rest for two hours, and I threw these pies together and drove over to the contest, and they were still hot and entered them in the contest. I threw all of my practice at the window.
Kristen: What were the two pies and which one won?
Nicole: They both won. The two pies, one of them was a pork and peas pie that had apples and pork belly in it. And then the second pie was huckleberry and blackberry that had a crumble top on it. And it had an oat and brown sugar crumble. It was a really nice pie.
Kristen (voiceover): This is The Genius Recipe Tapes. We'll be right back.
Kristen: So you opened your first restaurant, Fiona and people absolutely loved it. And then nine months later, it closed. So what were the biggest things that you took away from that experience? And what did you want to do differently at Fat + Flour?
Nicole: Every restaurant opening and closing has a different set of challenges. But they all kind of face the same trials. In my case, we just ran out of money. We were underfunded from the beginning. The biggest thing I learned was to not base the aesthetics and the picture of the restaurant on future goals of what we think we can be. Only base it on what we have available to us right now. And I think that that is a picture of a restaurant that a lot of people are going to have to figure out right now as well with all the closings that are happening, Because we've typically created these restaurants and these spaces up and they're based on this impression that we're trying to get people on board with. But it doesn't always work out. And so we have to be more honest. I think. So if I think about how that has changed my business vision going to Fat + Flour, I only operate in a way that I know that I can manage and I can do all the jobs and the budget is what is available to me right now. It's not a budget that's, as soon as we hit this sales thing, then we'll be able to breathe easier. No, we breathe easy now because we manage our spending now instead of based on future sales. Projections come into that a lot because when you open a restaurant, people want to see projections but projections their wishes and dreams and they're not real at all. Which is a funny part of a business plan. You're valuing yourself, but it's not actually real yet. So now we just face it in the day to day and the right now and it's working out.
Kristen: Do you find that somehow freeing, being away from the pressure of meeting those projections?
Nicole: Absolutely. 100%. I live so free mentally. My brain is so free and my emotional capacity is so (full). I have a full well, basically. I have the energy to give instead of it being constantly up against this expectation. So it is definitely a lot simpler way to do business. And, it's good for me. We've been open a year as of December 20th. At the time that you and I are talking, we're about to execute Thanksgiving, and it's just different. It's just a different way. Most of the year I get to go home at four o'clock and I get to work at eight. It's almost like a normal person's job! When you don't create the type of business that makes these demands on yourself. But you also have to reconcile with what that means financially, right? I don't have to do that as much. I created the kind of job that I want to work at, and it's only with my money, So that's good.
Kristen: And you don't have to be there at midnight to start the next day's things that I feel that's unheard of at least. I've never worked in a bakery before, but the lore! And the people I know who have their jobs always started in the middle of the night.
Nicole: I've had those jobs. My first job in baking was one of those jobs ready to be there at 3 am. And you know, when you're young, that's exciting because you want to push your mind and your body. It's this big challenge, and I remember feeling so proud of myself for that. And then once you get older, you realize that it's very exhausting and I'm very lazy and I want to sleep in. In the winter. It's so hard to pry yourself out of bed. I don't want any of my employees to have to go to work before seven, ideally. I would not want anyone to have to be at work before 7 am. That would be a dream. And right now that's happening. One of [my employees] has a child, so she gets to wake up and feed her kids' breakfast and take him to his daycare. That's how I want to live. I don't wanna wake up at 3 am anymore unless it’s for a flight to France or something.
Kristen: How did you design that to work? What does a typical week, not a pre-Thanksgiving week at Fat + Flour look like?
Nicole: Well, you know, a typical week this year is not been typical. We have a new typical week every couple of weeks. We opened and then we closed for the first two months of the pandemic. Then we opened again. But the business wasn't there to support us being opened five days a week or seven days a week. So we decided to do two days a week and then those two days became so busy with preorders and people coming in that we needed to spread it out. Out of necessity, we spread it out across four days. So now we're open four days a week, and that's our typical week. So the bakers get there at 7 am and they do their prep and they start making pies. Then we bake up cookies and then we open and then we close at five o'clock. And right now that works for us. And in the future, maybe during the summer, it will be open a little bit later. But right now it gets dark at four. So it feels nice to close up five. And then everyone gets to go home and eat dinner by seven. It sounds very silly when I explain it. It sounds very simple.
Kristen: The way that you're describing having an actual well of mental energy to draw from. If there's anything you could do to protect that, it would be worth it because it sounds so dreamy right now.
Kristen: Before we end today, I had to know what other people do with all those seeds and guts in winter squash? So many food bloggers tell us that the roasted seeds are this free snack that we should never throw away. But any time I've committed to fishing them all out and cleaning and drying and roasting and usually burning them, I'm just sad that they're not more delicious. But as it turns out, I've probably just been tackling them the wrong way. And these listeners have much smarter ideas. Plus one more possibly controversial thought from Nicole herself.
Listener Kari Newman: Hi, this is Kari Newman. I'm calling from Saddle River, New Jersey. I find seeding the pumpkin to be a very, very tedious task. Now my kids are six and four, and I put them to work this year. We scooped out the pumpkin. I gave him a big bowl of the flesh and the seeds and two little bowls, and I have them try to take the seeds out of the flesh. It was pretty good. It lasted a few minutes, and they got a decent amount. But the training continues next year so that one day I will have a little army of seeders in the house. Another gripe I have with the pumpkin seeds is that I've tried a lot of different cooking methods, either the low and slow or the really high, 400 degrees. I always burned the seeds when there at 400 no matter what. I am watching it like a hawk, I turned around for a second and they’re black. What I did was wash the seeds, they were still a little bit damp after I rinsed, I put them on a parchment-lined baking sheet and I put them in a 300-degree oven. I just let them be for quite a while. In fact, I went to feed my baby upstairs and took a half-hour. I came down and they weren't burned. So now I am recommending 300 degrees for pumpkin seeds to anyone that will listen.
Listener Rich Shih: This is Rich Shi, co-author of Koji Alchemy. I know a lot of you out there find it to be messy and a pain to separate the seeds from the strings of flesh connected to them. There's a simple solution to that. All you have to do is roast the seeds with the guts. When you split any squash, just scoop out all the innards and spread the seeds in a sheet pan. Line with parchment lightly coated with oil. Season with some salt. Consider dusting with a spice mix you like and baking in a 400-degree oven. Stir it once in a while until it is either toasted and crunchy. Of course, these are tasty whole, but they're also great, chopped up and used as a garnish. Another way to go is to spend the roasted seeds in a blender while drizzling in a neutral oil to create a nut butter that is similar to tahini. From there, you can add basil and garlic to make an interesting pesto. Have fun with the possibilities, and please do share with us what you make.
Kristen: And as to Nicole's thoughts?
Nicole: There's nothing you could do. Right now, I’m using so much kabocha, hundreds of pounds, there are no ways I could save those seeds. It’s just something that goes into the compost. At home, my husband gets very excited about the idea of something for the compost. Oh, I have more food for the compost. Sorry, I'm so lazy. So I compost them. Just be responsible. Compost them or take them and dry them and then you can plant them.
Kristen: And just in a little pot, they would sprout?
Yeah, Oh, yeah, they'll sprout. They'll sprout anywhere. You put him in the compost and then they show up somewhere in your yard and you’re like, where did that squash plant come from? So definitely.
Kristen: if you have something that you love, really love doing with the seeds and guts of all those winter squashes, I would love to hear about it, along with all your other genius tips at genius@food52.com. Our show was put together by Coral Lee, Emily Hanhan, and me, Kristen Miglore. If you like The Genius Recipe Tapes, be sure to rate and review us. It really helps. See you next time.