Stafford Gemma - Bigger bolder baking: a fearless approach to baking anytime, anywhere

Copyright 2019 by Taste Buds Entertainment, LLC

Photography 2019 by Carla Choy

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stafford, Gemma, author. | Choy, Carla, photographer.

Title: Bigger bolder baking / Gemma Stafford ; photography by Carla Choy.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019002549 (print) | LCCN 2019002715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328546388 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328546326 (paper over board)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, American. | Baking. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX715 (ebook) | LCC TX715 .S77526 2019 (print) | DDC641.81/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002549

Book design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger

Food and prop styling by Kate Martindale

v1.0719

Mum and Dad,

Which one of your other kids wrote a book??!

Love, Gemma

A Heritage of Baking

I pressed down on the crumb topping, feeling the slickness of rich Irish butter between my fingers. I was seven years old and standing on my tiptoes to reach the kitchen table as my mum taught me how to make her apple crumble, a quintessential Irish dessert. I did everything just as Mum instructed, and I was bursting with pride when it came out of the oven. Like everything we made, it was a bit of this and a handful of that, and it was glorious.

Baking, in my family, has always been about making do, about turning out something absolutely delicious no matter what obstacles lie in the way. With five children to feed, my large Catholic family was always bumping into each other in the kitchen, trying to get my mums attention. Everyone had a jobI did the tasks that little hands were good for, like slowly adding spoonful after spoonful of sugar to egg whites as they whipped into a pavlova under my mums watchful eyes. Or shed set me down on the kitchen floor with cookies in a bag and a rolling pin, which Id use to bash the cookies into crumbs for a lemon cheesecake she was making for Sunday lunch.

My mum was an amazing cook, and she set the bar high for other mums. She knew how to improvise and worked with whatever resources she had at her disposal, and that meant she could make almost anything, even with a practically bare pantry, and only a bowl, a whisk, and a few small (but willing!) hands to help.

I watched my mum create spectacular desserts from just a few simple ingredients and soon enough I was doing it, too. But while my mum would make a loaf of white bread, I would tinker with the recipe and make a loaf stuffed with bacon and cream cheese. Or Id transform a regular meringue by adding butterscotch and bananas. It was never enough for me to simply make a recipeI always wanted to make it better or different.

As I grew up, I continued to spend time in the kitchen and I began to think about attending cookery school. My mum warned me that becoming a professional pastry chef was a tough road, but she didnt realize that everything she had taught me had already set the stage for a career I was more than excited to begin.

Heading to Culinary School

At nineteen years old, I went off to study professional cookery at Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin, an institute that focused on catering and hospitality. From there, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to attend Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry, County Cork. There I trained under celebrity chef, acclaimed cookbook author, and TV personality Darina Allen, who had been named 2005s Cooking Teacher of the Year by the IACP.

My mum and I had watched Darinas show Simply Delicious on Monday nights for years, and there I was, learning from her in person. Under her direction, an important lesson was ingrained in me: Do not cook by halves. Your ingredients and how you manipulate them are the only things that matter in the kitchen. Everything else is a distraction.

A Baking Professional

With the incredible instruction I received under Darina and my own bold style of baking, I took off to conquer the world as a young new pastry chef. My first stop was a priests priory on the north side of Dublin, which housed dozens of elderly priests. The kitchen had nothing but some bowls, wooden spoons, and a small handheld electric mixer. But that was familiar territory to me, and the priests adored dessert, so I was in heaven making homemade doughnuts, tea cakes, and Chelsea buns all day for those sweet old men. They all had such an appreciation for what I didexcept for Father Green.

On my first day at the priory, I was told by the head priest, Dont try and make him happy, because you wont. Father Green complained about everything, and he drove everyone batty, including me. One day, out of the blue, I received a phone call from Father Greens niece. She was calling to thank meafter a recent visit, he had spent the entire time describing the latest thing Id baked for him in intricate detail, and all in positive, glowing terms. It remains one of my greatest accomplishments to this day.

After that, I realized that I could bake anywherethere was no kitchen from which I couldnt turn out something I was proud of.

Throughout this experience, my mum was always there to offer wisdom and the encouragement I needed to take the next culinary step. That next step led me to pack my bags and head to Tuscany, where I worked as a private chef in a familys villa. In that gorgeous region of Italy, I would spend my mornings in the village, buying locally grown fruits and vegetables and farm-raised meats. I can still taste the homemade gnocchi and prosciutto I would buy from the delicatessen. Even the herbs in the familys herb garden were like nothing I had ever tasted.

Then I was faced with an unexpected dilemma: the family asked me to make them fresh pasta for dinner. I had never made pasta from scratch before, and the tiny, outdated kitchen didnt even have a working fridge, never mind a pasta machine. With no internet access to rely on, I realized I would have to improvise. I took a pasta recipe from a book I found in the kitchen and tinkered with it, adding my bold style to an otherwise basic recipe. I rolled the dough as thin as I could using a bottle of wine as a rolling pin. I did know that pasta should be dried before cooking so I looked around that barren, ancient space and started hanging strands of pasta anywhere I couldon broom handles, wooden spoons, any long object I could find. In the end, the whole experience turned into a labor of love, and it was some of the most delicious pasta I have ever eaten, even to this day.