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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan in for Alison Stewart. The quote "joy is not made to be a crumb," they're words from the late poet Mary Oliver, and they're quoted in the latest cookbook by Alison Roman, who wants you not to hesitate and grab joy where you can. For Alison, that joy can be found in something as simple as a one bowl cake or peak season strawberry. Her cookbook Sweet Enough is devoted to un fussy desserts easy enough to be put together quickly, while also being really satisfying. Alison Roman joins me now. Alison, welcome back to WNYC.

Alison: Hello. I'm so happy to be here.

Kerry Nolan: I'm delighted that you are. I've spent the weekend poring over this book. Why did you pick that Mary Oliver poem for the book?

Alison: I guess you could say I'm in a real Mary Oliver phase.

Kerry Nolan: I hear that.

Alison: [laughs] But when are we not? I felt like when I read that it really spoke to the general core mission statement of the book and desserts specifically. I believe this about all food, but desserts specifically I think are meant to be an all or nothing experience, and much allowing yourself to feel love or joy or these other feelings that we tend to not prioritize, as a society dessert should just be an all-in all-encompassing situation.

Kerry Nolan: For someone who's associated with things like the cookie and the cake, despite your love of desserts, you describe yourself as not really much of a dessert person. Why a dessert book aside from the need for joy?

Alison: Because I'm a contrarian through and through. [laughs]

Kerry Nolan: There you go.

Alison: I got my start in restaurants and the first job I had in restaurants was working as a pastry chef. It wasn't my pursuit, but it was the only job available. Basically, they said you can work here, but the only job position we have is in the pastry department. At the time I was 19 and I didn't have any experience anywhere, so it was all the same to me. It didn't really matter what part of the kitchen I was working in because I just wanted to be in the restaurant. It was an unlikely start given that wasn't something that I aspired to, but it really set the tone, I think, for the rest of my career as a person who had their foundation of cooking rooted in desserts, but very much taught and mentored by people who believed that desserts should be salty and have bitterness and plenty of texture and be as interesting and as inspired as all of the savory food.

Kerry Nolan: If you have any questions, listeners, for Allison Roman about Sweet Enough, give us a buzz at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. You can also reach out to us on social media @AllOfItWNYC. Alison, you wrote in your newsletter that you wanted the photos in Sweet Enough to feel "very intimate, juicy and personal." One photographer, one assistant, no prop styling, no food styling, no hair, no makeup, and if you were going to be on set, you had to hold a dessert and let us take a photo. I will say that generally when I'm talking to a cookbook author, I like to make something from the book and bring it into the station for the crew to have. Of course, it was Easter weekend and that went out the window, but because other cooking had to happen, but I was almost compelled to make that strawberry cake based on the photo of the man holding it.

Alison: He's extremely attractive and so is the cake.

Kerry Nolan: Oh, the cake looks amazing.

Alison: They're both beautiful to look at, but yes, both very inspiring.

Kerry Nolan: Yes. In different ways, I think. [laughs] The thing that I noticed about the recipes is that they're simple, but they aren't simplistic. The flavors are really forward. The textures are really appealing. How did you go about choosing the recipes that you were developing? Was there an overall theme?

Alison: I think for me with any food that I am writing about or recipes I'm developing, for me accessibility has really become the north star, equally as important as is this extremely delicious. For me, I know that baking can be annoying, time consuming, frustrating. You just don't have the energy or it's like you need to eat dinner, but you don't need to bake a cake. To even get to that point where you're going to make a dessert, you have to really want it. I want the barrier to entry to be as low as possible. I really want it to be reasonable for people of any skill level.

I pride myself on my pantry-focused recipes, and the desserts are the ultimate pantry recipe because you're working with flour and baking powder and sugar and salt and things that most people have on hand. I like to say that if you bought the book today, I promise there's at least one recipe you could make without going to the grocery store. I think beyond that, I had to really think of myself as, okay, as a discerning dessert person I don't think every dessert is wonderful, I don't think every dessert I make is wonderful. Where do my strengths lie, and what to me really defines an excellent, wonderful dessert?

You'll notice the cookie chapter is pretty small, and that's because I feel very passionately about shortbread cookies and less so about others, so they didn't make the cut, and the cake chapter's very large. I love cake. The pie tart chapter, very large. Love pies, love tarts. Then there's some other tinier chapters that I just felt like, you know what, for my dessert book, this is going to make it in a cinnamon roll or cornbread, which, yes, has a little bit of sugar in it, scones, things like that that would definitely not appear in any other what's for dinner book that I make.

Kerry Nolan: If you're just joining us, my guest is Alison Roman, she is the author of the brand new book Sweet Enough. We are taking your calls if you have any questions about your baking quandaries. What do you like to bake? Do you have a real sweet tooth or do you like that salty sweet balance? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. One of the things I love about watching you cook online is that it does feel casual and unfussy and as you said, accessible. I loved the one time you scooped up some flour and just leveled it off with your finger. We've been taught so much that that baking is a precise science and you can't fool around with that the way you can when you're cooking something. You make it seem a lot less intimidating. Is that from having lots of practice or is that just what you've discovered going along the line and learning your own craft?

Alison: I think it is like any person who's been doing something for a very long time and perhaps was trained in the most traditional, most exacting high standard situations. It's nice to know how to do things the right way, the professional way, the precise way, and then to bend the rules on your own terms, when they matter, when they don't matter, I think is something that I take pretty seriously. There's certain things I'll tell you to do because I'm like, if you don't do it, the cake won't turn out, I told you so. Or I'll say, this doesn't really matter whether you have a pound of fruit or a pound and a half of fruit. It's all good.

I've done everything so many different ways and had my own failures in the baking world so many different ways that I can speak from experience on what is needing to be fussed over versus not. Also, with that in mind, I did develop these recipes so that if you were shy two tablespoons of flour and a cake, you're still going to end up with something pretty fantastic. Just allowing for a little bit more grace, a little bit more wiggle room when it comes to other people's definition of what a cup of flour is.

Kerry Nolan: The book seems to be in a class of cookbooks that almost read like novels. There are explanations at the head of different chapters. One of the things I loved about the beginning of the book is the two pages, what I love about baking and what I hate about baking. What do you hate about baking?

Alison: It's got to be the same list as you, if you've ever baked anything. It's so many bowls. You have to wait forever for something in the oven. You have to be a little bit more present. You can't just totally wing it. It's a lesson in patience, which is something that I don't really have, either waiting for it to bake, waiting for it to cool, the uncertainty of it all. There's a lack of control when you put something into the oven and you're like, wow, I hope whatever comes out is edible, because I have people coming over in two hours. There's just a lot of unknown and it really does throw us for a loop. A chicken with salt and pepper put in the oven is always going to be great, but a cake batter or a pie or a pudding, you never know. You really don't. I feel like it adds an unnecessary level of stress, but to that opposite, there's a lot that I love.

Kerry Nolan: There are two competing and contrasting sentences in what I love about baking and what I hate about baking. I found myself going, "Yes," when I read it. What I love about baking is I love finding whipped cream in my hair after whipping it by hand. I love mundane, repetitive tasks like pitting cherries. Then I hate finding frosting in my hair after frosting a cake and I hate messy eternal tasks like pitting cherries. I so related to the pitting cherries thing. Every year, I go out and I pick sour cherries and you have to do something with them really fast because they're not going to last.

Alison: No.

Kerry Nolan: Pitting those cherries, it's just almost a zen experience. It's just mindless and repetitive and so lovely and awful at the same time because your fingers get so stained.

Alison: It's fantastic unless you have somewhere to be or a hungry room of people, but I think that that's also part of the book and part of what I try to talk about with cooking and with writing, in general, is just that most experiences have two entry points and have two experiences and have two feelings that can come up and that's okay. We contain multitudes, so does baking. I wanted to speak to the people who maybe aren't 1000% on board with being a person who bakes in their home, but every so often, it does call to you or there's an occasion or there's a reason.

I really wanted to provide a really solid tome of reliable and delicious and easy-to-make recipes for everybody, not just the people that are accustomed to the perils and frustrations of baking, which, again, you can also find a lot of joy in.

Kerry Nolan: Sweet Enough is organized in sections that start out as traditional as you said earlier, pies, gillettes, tarts, cakes, and then we have a section called Things Called Pudding and I've got all this fruit. Now what? You say you don't want to be enthralled to seasonal fruit. Let's talk a little bit about that. What do you mean by that?

Alison: No. I've been on this book tour for a minute and people ask me. I'm from Los Angeles, I live in New York and how has that informed my cooking and my baking. In California and in some other parts of the country as well and the world, you have wonderful produce all the time, 365 days a year. You make a strawberry cake, it's going to be phenomenal because the berries are fantastic. In New York, we don't really have that all the time. We're creeping up on strawberry season. They're beginning to appear, but in December, we're not working with peak produce and peak fruit, but I do feel like you should still be able to make a delicious strawberry cake even if the berries are so so.

I think that's just what I meant, where I do honor seasonality and I do talk about specific fruits like apricots and rhubarb and plums that are really only available when they're in season and depending on where you live, that can be for three weeks or for three months, but I do want people to think of this as a book that does not rely on seasonality or pristine produce or perfect fruit because it's fleeting and when it is around, I want you to celebrate it but also not feel like you can't open up this book and use it in the wintertime.

Kerry Nolan: Well, let's get to some nuts and bolts here. You talk about the difference between kosher salt and regular old table salt. Why is the salt that you use in all of these recipes kosher?

Alison: Specifically diamond crystal kosher. This is not a sponsored plug. I genuinely have a deep affinity for diamond crystal kosher salt. I have since my first restaurant job. It just has a perfect texture. It's not as fine as sea salt and it's not as coarse as Coarse Morton's kosher salt. If you were to take three bowls of those three salts and pick up a pinch in your fingers, you would feel the difference and know what I'm talking about, but for me, it is the best and most reliable, consistent baking salt that you can have.

Kerry Nolan: My guest is Alison Roman. Her new book is called Sweet Enough and there are desserts in here that have nothing to do with sweetness and I want to get to that, but we have to take a real quick break. You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. Stay with us.

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Kerry Nolan: It's All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kerry Nolan. We're talking with Alison Roman whose new book Sweet Enough is out. It's a dessert book with a twist and we'll get to that in just a sec. We want to invite you to give us a call if you have any questions for Alison. Our number is 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Let's go to Don in Lambertville, New Jersey. Hey, Don, welcome to All Of It.

Don: Hi. Thank you. Just a quick question. Kosher salt. I always hear people talk about Diamond and Morton, but I use David's and I never know if a tablespoon of David is equivalent to a tablespoon of Diamond.

Alison: That is a really good question and especially important when baking and also doing things like brining a pork chop or any time where a specific measurement is required, but if I recall, I think David is actually more similar to Diamond. I think it's a little bit coarser, but it's still not as coarse as Morton's. A tablespoon of Morton's and a tablespoon of Diamond weigh completely different and that's what makes it so challenging to-- I try to be brand-agnostic but when it comes to the kosher salt, because I'm a baker, for this specific book I felt it necessary to specify, but David's is good. David would be my second pick if I had to go without my Diamond.

Kerry Nolan: Isn't Diamond-- oh, go ahead.

Don: No, that would be great. It would really be nice if when I'm reading these recipes, especially the ones I see in the Times where they call for ingredients, if they could put the weights and grams there as well. That would work really well with the salt.

Alison: Well, Don, you're going to love this book because it has grams in it as well as cups. I took care of you and it is meant for people like you because I agree. I think we should all be using a scale.

Kerry Nolan: Thanks so much for your call, Don. Alison, can you talk a little bit about the different kinds of sugar and which ones you prefer in baking?

Alison: Yes. I pretty much use all sugar. I'm an all-sugar-is-welcome type of baker. I use granulated powdered, which is also known as confectioner's, light brown, turbinado. Again, I'm very brand-agnostic there because regular cane sugar is pretty much regular cane sugar. The difference I have noticed is organic cane sugar. If you're shopping at a place like Whole Foods or even Trader Joe's, they tend to not sell like a Domino or a CNH, which are two of the more popular East and West Coast brands and Imperial, which I believe is in the South. The coarser cane sugar does weigh a little bit different, but it's close enough to where I don't think anybody's going to be distressed if that's what they're using, but it is something to be mindful of and you can just look at it visually. The coarse organic style cane sugar has larger crystals. It's a little bit deeper of a color than your classic refined sugar.

Kerry Nolan: Now, when you're talking about weights, does that come into play the way it would with salt if you're using the--?

Alison: Minimally. The biggest things to look out for with weighing ingredients and the biggest discrepancies will be in the brand of kosher salt and how you measure your flour. That's a whole other can of worms. That deserves a whole hour on the show because I have so many thoughts about the way that we measure flour and what I say is that you have to really look to the source of whichever recipe you're using and how does that recipe develop or measure their flour? What does it weigh? It doesn't matter if you're measuring it in a cup or on a scale, a number is a number. I find that to be the easiest because some people say a cup of flour is as low as 120 grams, which to me feels impossible. Mine is closer to 140, 145 grams.

Kerry Nolan: We got a tweet from a listener who says, "What are Alison's thoughts on substituting wheat flour for white, both in terms of a more healthful baked good as well as measurement adjustments?"

Alison: I think that there's a lot of flexibility if you want to substitute say, 25% to 30% of your weight of white flour with whole wheat flour, but I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure it's doing it for your health. I don't know that swapping is going to make any remarkable difference in making something better for you. That goes back to the joy is not made to be a crumb and it's like, well, I feel like we should just make the baked good as is and it's not meant to be an everyday situation, but substituting a little bit of your white flour with a whole wheat flour isn't going to do anything I don't think for the nutritional value.

Kerry Nolan: Oh, go ahead.

Alison: I do have very good whole wheat pie crust in the book, which is excellent.

Kerry Nolan: Yes, I saw that. Linda in New Jersey, welcome to All Of It.

Linda: Hi, thank you so much for taking my call. I hadn't heard of this cookbook until I started listening and I'm so excited to get it. I have a six old daughter, and she's showed a real interest in cooking. She's going to baking camp this summer. I'm wondering if there's a recipe in your book that you think would be particularly good to start her out on, try to build her confidence, and really get her comfortable in the kitchen.

Alison: Oh, gosh, yes. Well, that makes me so happy. I love it when younger people show an interest in cooking. I think baking is actually a really good place to start because you're rarely dealing with an open flame or that much knife work so it feels a little bit safer. There are plenty of cakes in the book that are what I call a one-bowl cake. Yes, sometimes you need two bowls, but there's no mixer required. It's just a bowl and a whisk or a spatula.

I think that probably the most foolproof one is the Raspberry-Ricotta cake, which has been really popular this weekend. It's basically a bowl of flour, sugar, eggs, ricotta, and you can use fresh or frozen fruit. You bake it, it has a really beautiful sugar crust, and it's magical. It's I can't believe that this cake required no electronic devices, and only a bowl and a few ingredients because it really is so tender. I think people feel really excited when they realize that baking can be that easy.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you so much for your call, Linda. Alison, talk to us about bread pudding, which you seem to have a complicated relationship with. We'll bring Nora Ephron in on this conversation, too.

Alison: Yes. If we're going to invite Mary to the party, we have to also include Nora.

Kerry Nolan: Absolutely.

Alison: I read about this in a book, and I did want to include a bread pudding recipe in the book, but the more I thought about it, the more I looked at the other desserts present, it didn't really belong. It just didn't feel like it was meant to be in this collection. I did find myself wanting to write about it because it was one of the first desserts I would make as a pastry chef in the kitchen. I talk about how being a pastry chef, you're the lowest person on the totem pole. It is extremely hierarchical, or at the time, at least it was and we still always made everybody dessert. It was a small kitchen, small teams, and yet every day for a family meal, we would say, "Well, we made dessert."

It was a good way to use up leftover egg yolks or stale bread or something. I became really accustomed to making it but I always made it in very large formats. It always felt like an afterthought, even though it was delicious. Then that got me thinking about recipes that I wanted to include from the beginning. I thought I would always include Nora Ephron's recipe for bread pudding, as mentioned in Heartburn, and I tried to make it and it was so not meant for this book. I filed it under personal desert, meaning I would have no problem eating it alone in my kitchen at night after a glass of wine or something, but it just didn't feel like the kind of thing that I wanted to publish for everybody to make.

It was very specific and very quirky, very Nora, I suppose, but I did feel like it was still worth writing about. There's a few things like that in the book where I write about a double-crust fruit pie, but don't really give you a recipe for one. It's more just explaining the process and thoughts and feelings on it although I've also published fruit pie recipes a million times before. Just because I talked about something didn't mean the recipe needed to make it into the book, but is no less important in the conversation about desserts.

Kerry Nolan: I know from watching your whole movie series on YouTube that you love restaurant supply stores.

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Alison: I really really do.

Kerry Nolan: What's the most surprising thing that you've picked up in one of them?

Alison: Oh, gosh. Probably a very bespoke small cake pan that is otherwise completely impractical. That's the joy for me of going there is that I love in-person shopping, generally speaking, but I'm such a practical person that I don't really have much in my kitchen that is superfluous or single-use. When I go to a restaurant supply store, I find "Oh, it's a tiny flower-shaped cake pan or a small spatula for one little bowl." I don't know. They have very interesting, quirky, but also useful tools for the professional kitchens that don't necessarily translate to the home kitchen because you're not baking at scale like that, but it is nice to reconnect with that part of myself and allow myself to buy something that maybe isn't so practical, but just fun.

Kerry Nolan: I do have to touch on this because you wanted the information to be spread far and wide. There was a printing error in one of the recipes.

Alison: Oh, my god, yes. I'm glad you brought this up.

Kerry Nolan: The Salty Lemon Shortbread regarding the amount of sugar. How did you figure that out?

Alison: Well, my sister and I were making the lemon shortbread for a party a few weeks back and I saw it and I was like, "This isn't right." I thought maybe it was because we had scaled it or there was just an error in the measurement and I said, "I'll deal with this later." Then I saw people starting to make it on Instagram. I do try to stay relatively connected, for better or for worse, to knowing what people are making. If they have questions, I try to be available. It's very important to me that people have success with this book.

Some people were like, "Wow, not what I expected, but I love it." Some people were saying, "Oh, this feels wrong. What's going on?" I was like, maybe those people are being nice, but something's wrong. I felt like I had to personally reach out to everybody and say, "I'm so sorry because I looked at the recipe versus my notes that I thought were input into the manuscript and the sugar amount is incorrect." Good news, because I will be correcting that, hopefully, tomorrow morning after I do some recipe testing at my sister's house today.

Kerry Nolan: Yes. Where can we find you on Instagram?

Alison: It's Alison E Roman, Alison with one L. I also have a newsletter on Substack, which is where I produce other recipes and things like that, but that's where I'll be publishing the correction for this specific recipe so people can easily find it.

Kerry Nolan: I do have to say that producer Kate Hinds and I were looking at the recipe and going, "This looks good. This really looks tasty. We'll try it both ways."

Alison: It was [unintelligible 00:26:20] of a lemon bar, but it basically has doubled the amount of sugar. Especially for me, it's going to be too sweet, but it's also going to give you a really chewy texture rather than the classic buttery snappy texture of a shortbread. It's wrong. [inaudible 00:26:37] it's on fire, but I was absolutely wracked with guilt once I found this out because you do everything in your power to make sure that there are no mistakes, especially with baking because one wrong recipe and a person could say, "You know what? I'm never going to bake from this book again. It didn't work." I take it very very seriously.

Kerry Nolan: I'm glad we were able to address it. Alison Roman, thank you so much for being with us. I love this cookbook. It's called Sweet Enough. Thank you so much for being with us.

Alison: Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you for listening. Today, I'm Kerry Nolan. On tomorrow's show, Alison returns. She'll speak with Alana Casanova-Burgess, host of the podcast La Brega. It's about to release a companion album and they'll discuss some classic Puerto Rican songs and play new reimagined versions. Thanks again for being here today. I'm Kerry Nolan, I'll see you next time.

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