My son Jacob owns Roaring Fork Mill, a stone flour mill in Colorado. I’ve been working on developing recipes utilizing the flour and he recently requested that we add some baking mixes. If you are a fan of these boxed and bagged kitchen shortcuts you might know that for years Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines occupied most of the grocery aisle and the options were pretty limited with a focus on cake and brownie mixes. There’s been a renaissance with lots of other brands entering the space. New mixes feature coffee cakes, hot pretzels, lemon poppyseed bread, and so much more. There are gluten free varieties and brands that are including specialty ingredients like date and coconut sugar. I’d love to hear from you about your baking mix preferences.
Do you use them?
If yes, are you loyal to a particular brand, and why?
What do you look for in a mix? Ingredients, ease of use, a pretty package; I’m curious about any details you want to share.
Are you interested/willing to use a mix that guides you through multiple steps, or is quick and easy the reason you use them?
What’s missing in the baking mix aisle?
Anything else I’m forgetting to ask?
Please let me know by commenting or sending me an email: hello@ingredient-one.com.
The stack of books capturing my attention:
Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine by Olia Hercules. Full disclosure, I’ve never heard of Hercules. I scored this copy from a little free library and quickly schooled myself. This memoir is her most recent book and chronicles four generations of her Ukrainian family; she previously published three cookbooks. Hercules also co-founded a global initiative to raise money for Ukraine through cooking, #CookForUkraine, which has raised over £2 million pounds to date.
Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes by Erika Council. The owner of Bomb Biscuit Company in Atlanta (on my bucket list!) shares a great complement of recipes alongside stories of her family and other important figures in the Southern kitchen tradition. I’ve tried three recipes: Sweet Potato Biscuits, Sweet Potato Bis-Cakes, and Biscuit Bread Pudding made with sweet potato biscuits. Can you spot an ingredient theme? Sweet potatoes!
Kitchen nugget: I love to take skin-on sweet potatoes, put them on a foil-lined pan, and roast them for a really long time at 350 degrees. Cooking time depends on the size, but you want them to be oozing sugar, super gooey, and soft. After eating one piping hot out of the oven, smothered in butter and salt, I’ll cool the rest then put them in the fridge, still with the skin-on. Once they are fridge cold, it’s much easier to peel and smash for recipes calling for cooked sweet potatoes. It’s nice to have this step out of the way before the day has come for you to cook or bake a recipe with smashed sweet potato. I’ve never tried freezing the potato because they usually don’t last long at my house, but I bet it would work well.
The bis-cakes (pancakes) were divine. The recipe called for a bit of nutmeg which elevated the classic Saturday morning pancake recipe that’s typically in my rotation. I failed miserably with the sweet potato biscuit recipe. They ended up being wet and dense which probably had something to do with talking on the phone to a friend while I “followed the recipe.” The bread pudding recipe called for dry, day-old biscuits but my version utilized the too-moist, failed biscuits instead. With a bit of intuitive tweaking, they worked just fine in the bread pudding, sublime with a drizzle of maple syrup.
100 Afternoon Sweets: With Snacking Cakes, Brownies, Blondies, and More by Sarah Kieffer. Her cookbooks never disappoint because the recipes are well tested, her ingredient combinations are interesting, and the pictures are mouth watering. I picked this one up for flavor inspiration while testing baking mixes.
Sesame: Global Recipes + Stories of an Ancient Seed by Rachel Simons. I keep going back to this cookbook for the simple hummus recipe that has a lot of lemon juice, which makes it super bright. Making it assuages the fact that I still haven’t had the chance to get to the brick and mortar shop located in the Chelsea Market in New York City.
Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love: A Cookbook by Samin Nosrat. My dream dinner date because of her laugh, endless food knowledge, and candor. This cookbook is a personal exploration of what it means to be well-fed emotionally and includes recipes that are best served shared. I’m very excited to try the salad dressing recipes using aquafaba (the liquid remaining from cooked legumes).
Dorie’s Anytime Cakes by Dorie Greenspan with illustrations by Nancy Pappas. These recipes are for (mostly) simple cakes that are meant to sit out on the kitchen table and be nibbled throughout the day. I attended an event with Dorie in conversation with Casey Elsass and she mentioned this cake made with Cream of Wheat and very little liquid, mostly from grated apples. My curiosity piqued, I purchased a package of Bob’s Red Mill Creamy Wheat cereal on the way home. The cake had good flavor but was a disappointment, moist in some spots and dry in others, because I didn’t follow the directions, which you can read more about in a previous post. I am undeterred and will try again.
