RG: With roots in Sonora, the land of wheat tortillas, what role did masa, or masa harina, play in your early cooking life?
MG: While it’s true that in Sonora we love flour tortillas, we still eat a lot of corn tortillas. I grew up with a tortilleria of nixtamal blocks away from my house and I used to walk there daily. While waiting I have the fondest memories of the owner giving me a fresh hot tortilla and I’d roll it as a “taco de nada” in other words a taco out of nothing. I didn’t grow up with masa harina, we only used fresh nixtamal given the proximity of it at our house. We had the tortillas daily along with our main meal which in Mexico is at 2:00 PM. We used fresh masa to make zucchini blossoms freshly pressed quesadillas, made gorditas, sopes and of course tamales. Probably my earliest memory was being 4 years old and playing with it like play-doh. Also, it’s worth mentioning that there is a distinction in Sonora, on how you use flour tortillas. Flour tortillas are typically used for breakfast burritos filled with chorizo, potatoes and eggs…or with machaca. We also use them for quesadillas and our steak tacos. Though for all the other kinds of tacos and as our "daily bread" with our main dinners we typically use corn (for example, we eat chicken with corn, carnitas also only with corn, etc… so its almost how do you take tea? It all depends on the tea).

How do you decide when to use fresh nixtamalized masa versus masa harina in your different projects and recipes?
It’s all about how much moisture I want going in my recipe. For example, if I’m baking I want masa harina. If I’m doing something like freshly pressed tortillas or masa shapes such as tetelas, gorditas, etc. I want fresh masa. Though no matter what, I always keep a stash of masa harina in my home pantry. There are times I’ll forget to bring fresh masa and in a pinch I can make something with it, not ideal but it does the work.

I find blue and red masa and masa harina to be really earthy, while yellow and white are usually sweeter. However, after trying your yellow masa harina, my eyes were opened to how rich and earthy yellow masa harina can be! I am curious how you think about the flavor differences, culinarily?
In Mexico alone there are 59 native varieties of corn and they all have a distinct flavor profile based on the composition of the kernel. Flavor of the kernel comes to one thing: starch vs sugar ratio. We tend to use starchier varieties on yellow and white as we use those for frying into chips. The starchier, the better chip.

Blue corn is always mushroom like and it tends to hold moisture in the tortilla even as it gets exposed to the air. Let me explain more, corn tortillas rely a lot on holding moisture. The death of them is exposing them too long to the air resulting into a hard and inedible tortilla. While all tortillas will get hard as they get exposed, it seems to me that blue corn holds the best. I like to use them for caterings where I know they will hold up longer. I also don’t like to do too much with them as far as fillings go, I keep it to more simple grilled vegetables and good quality cheese. This ensures that the flavor of the blue corn comes across.

Red, pink and light purple varieties - their kernels usually have higher sugar content and natural fat. I find red corn best used when I want to balance a dish. If using in tortilla form, I will want to contrast it with steak and some sort of acid in the salsa. If I dry it into masa harina, I think it makes the best pinole or atole. Given its high sugar content, it makes an excellent choice for sweet beverages or baking cookies.

Do you see masa harina experimentation — in pastry, savory baking and cooking, etc — as a natural extension of your work? Is this a revival, a reinvention, or something else entirely?
I see all of our masa uses as a natural experimentation on how to incorporate the flavor profile into something existing and make it our own. We are in the midwest and we love our cuisine here. I love thinking of the intersections between traditional Midwest and Yoli’s Mexican roots. Examples are making masa millionaire bars or as a thickener when making gravy, really the sky is the limit.

Are there any uses of masa or masa harina that you're really excited about and think we should know about?
Right now, in our test kitchen our fermentation section is filled with masa experiments. We can’t stop ourselves from making masa miso (maizo), masa koji, amakase, etc. We use these ingredients in our caterings and we sell them in batches at our store in Kansas City. The maizo has been insanely popular, so we just implemented a 100 pound process every other week to keep up. It takes us 3 months of fermentation.

What have been some of the challenges with scaling a business based largely on nixtamalization?
The learning curve for customers has been huge. Many people don’t know that when you have a natural product shelf life is short. So we needed to teach people to eat our products within 14 days or to use the freezer. I think freezing gets a bad rap, but honestly when you only have 3 ingredients, freezing is the best mode to naturally preserve your product.

What's next for Yoli?
We continue to build on experiences. We have a stadium stand at KC Current, stalls at farmers markets, retail shop with a loncheria, cooking school, etc. We see ourselves immersed with community experiences and continue to share our passion for Mexican food. Our fermentation program will continue to grow and we want to make it more accessible, from maizo to vinegars.

How can we stay up to date on new Yoli projects and stay in touch?
Instagram is where we are mostly social and we do have a newsletter via substack that you can sign up at www.eatyoli.com

@yolitortilleria - our general all product and events page
@yolitestkitchen - watch all of our mistakes, fermentation processes
@eatyoli - focused on food

All photos courtesy of Marissa Gencarelli and Yoli Tortilleria

My friend Nimco is a phenom. She is an extraordinary cook with exquisite artistic style. She is smart, curious and kind. And she knows how to throw just enough salty language into our conversations to keep me laughing. I met Nimco years ago when, much to my chagrin now, she took an early cooking class of mine. I cannot imagine I had or have anything to teach her, but nonetheless, we remained friends. She has taught for us at Milk Street and also shared a few of her recipes. When Chris tasted this Somali Chicken Soup he declared, in very Chris fashion, “This is the best food we’ve had at Milk Street.” He was right.

This soup is everything I want food to be: Delicious, nutritious, beautiful and satisfying. It’s also versatile—a soup for all occasions. You can dress it up or down with your knife work; I have brought this to sick friends and served it at nice dinner parties. The flavor needs no adjusting—it is naturally perfect for all occasions.

I hope to get Nimco’s smoked yogurt-tahini with charred eggplant situation for you sometime. Stay tuned. Now, for the soup—here’s how to make it and why it’s perfect.

Why it Works

Perfectly cooked chicken. A whole chicken is positioned with the legs submerged in the broth and the breasts resting above it. This means the white meat steams and the dark meat braises. Steaming is a gentler, slower cooking method than braising (which is also gentle, but not as gentle), so the two kinds of meat cook at the same rate.

Water not stock. As the chicken cooks it makes the soup’s broth, scented with onion, cardamom and coriander. Truth be told, sometimes all I want is the mild broth and perfectly cooked chicken. A bowl of them, with some nice rice, is tonic for an unwell body.

• A note about the chicken: The bones don’t simmer very long when you’re cooking the meat, so save them to make chicken stock later. There is plenty of collagen available for a nice, rich stock.

Texture diversity. The vegetables are varied in flavor and texture. There are soft, sweet tomato cubes, crunchy bitter cabbage ribbons, citrusy chopped cilantro, peppery radish slices and mineral-y spinach leaves.

A customizable finish. The two sauces are transformative. I always put a little berbere sauce in my soup to turn the broth a beautiful brick red and to add its heady scent (pungent, smoky and sweet) and its exceeding flavor (earthy, sweet and spicy). The berbere sauce is like instant charisma for the mild soup. The other sauce, a wild green chili affair, is for brightness lovers. The Serrano chilis, fresh cilantro and bracing lime make the broth pop, sizzle and sing. I am often one of those people, as well. But I am a berbere gal first.

How to build a bowl:

If you want wilted vegetables: Put some rice in the bowl and add the vegetables and chicken. Ladle over the extremely hot broth and let sit a minute before stirring in the hot sauces.

If you want crispy vegetables: Put some rice in the bowl and chicken. Ladle over hot broth, stir in the hot sauces and then add your vegetables on top.

Or, do a mix: Add some vegetables before the broth and some afterward.

OK! Now the recipe. I am including Nimco’s original and Milk Street’s adaptation.

Read more

April’s Travelogue:
Day 1: The streets are full of pedestrians, vendors, performers and music—and of course lots of food, from grilled elotes—corn on the cob with mayonnaise, chili powder and cheese—to chilled guava, pineapple and passion fruit paletas. I couldn’t resist the papas locas, a dish of french fries or potato chips doused with hot sauce and cheese.

One of my favorite moments of the week was seeing the face of our tour guide, Paco, light up as we passed an unassuming tiny shop that only sells one thing: panqué de nata, a dense, moist muffin. Paco bought a round for our group, then stole only the tops off of a couple. We then ambled through the Alameda, a public park whose claim to fame is that it’s the oldest public park in the Americas, dating all the way back to the late 1500s. Daytime in the Alameda brings lots of roller skaters—the paths in the park are apparently the best in the city for skating—and vendors encircling the fountains selling esquites, cups of corn kernels with epazote, cheese and more. In the evenings, each fountain becomes the center of dances: the organizers—that is, the person who brings the music—just asks each dancer to pitch in five pesos to join the party.

Our second day took us to the neighborhood of Juárez, which felt like a different world. Leafy trees line the streets and people sip coffee and hot chocolate, or atole and champurrado—two maize-based drinks that date back to the Aztecs—at quiet sidewalk cafés. After winding our way through the Mercado de Juarez, where we sampled an array of Oaxacan cheeses paired with sweet guava paste, we headed to our first cooking class at Casa Jacaranda, located in a gorgeously renovated building just blocks from the market.

Together with Beto Estúa and his team, we enjoyed a four-course dinner paired with agave spirits. Most of what we tasted was mezcal; unbeknownst to most Americans, mezcal actually pre-dates what we now call tequila. So, rather than thinking of mezcal as “smoky tequila,” you’d be more correct to consider tequila a not-smoky mezcal!

Later that week, we visited the agricultural area of Xochimilco, which boasts canals that date back to a time when the area surrounding Mexico City was home to an enormous lake. There, you can travel via trajinera (a wide-bottomed boat) to chinampas (human-made islands), where you’ll find farms like the one run by Arca Tierra, an agrotourism collective with a focus on community and sustainable practices.

After watching the sun rise over the mountains that surround the city, we made a breakfast of tetelas—triangle-shaped pockets of fresh masa stuffed with beans—plus fresh beets, kale and radishes we pulled from the fields, and café de olla, a local preparation of coffee and raw sugar called piloncillo.

After a morning on the canals, we spent the evening in the busy, metropolitan Roma Norte neighborhood, home to editorial director J.M. Hirsch’s favorite Mexico City bar, Licorería Limantour. J.M. didn’t lead us astray. We were met there by two of Limantour’s bartenders, who had prepared batches of their Al Pastor margarita for us to try.

These margaritas are inspired by al pastor tacos, which are made by marinating thin slices of pork in a blend of chili peppers and pineapple, among other things. In the cocktail version, Limantour infuses gin with a blend of fresh herbs, combines it with orange liqueur, pineapple and lime juice and tequila and finishes it with a chili salt rim. (Want to make your own? The recipe is waiting for you below.)

Our week also included a trip up into the hills of Milpa Alta, Mexico City’s southernmost borough. This rural area is filled with family farms that grow, among other things, the maguey plant from which the pre-Colonial drink pulque is made. Historically drunk only by the nobility and pregnant women, much of Milpa Alta’s pulque nowadays is consumed either by the families who produce it or sent to pulquerías across Mexico City.

After sipping our pulque high in the terraced fields, we made our way down into the town of San Pedro Atocpan, a quiet village that has distinguished itself as the producer of up to 90% of the mole consumed across Mexico City. Third-generation mole guide Maira put us to work frying nuts and seeds, crushing discs of chocolate, and chopping the onions, apples, plantains and more that go into the mole especial. After being ground in her family’s mill, the resulting powder can be turned into creamy, rich mole sauce in 20 minutes or less, thanks to all the work that goes into its preparation.

On our final night in Mexico City, we traveled to the neighborhood of El Pedregal, a word that means “scree” in Spanish, a nod to the fact that this area was covered in volcanic stone until the 1940s. Inside a house—or, more specifically, in the home’s renovated stables—designed by celebrated Mexican architect Luis Barragán, we had dinner at Tetetlán, a restaurant led by 27 year-old Norberto Ruiz. On the restaurant’s grounds, the sky was clear enough to see the stars and the air was cool, smelling faintly of fresh masa and smoky mole. In the small shop attached to the restaurant, you can purchase artisanal mezcal sold in bottles made of recycled glass made by a skilled glassblower. In line with the restaurants sustainability ethos, if you have one of those bottles, you can come back any time and have it refilled for about $30 USD—a steal for some of the best mezcal we tasted all week.

In the eight days of our tour, we found ourselves among shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, atop a quiet cactus-covered mountain, in the aisles of a market just waking up for the day, and on a brightly-colored boat twisting through canals as the sun rose. In all that time—from Juárez to Xochimilco, from Milpa Alta to El Pedregal—we never technically left the confines of Mexico City.

Margarita Al Pastor

• 1 lime wedge

• Tajín or another chile or chile blend of your choice, blended with salt and a pinch of sugar

• 2 sprigs fresh mint*

• 2 sprigs fresh basil*

• 2 sprigs fresh cilantro*

• 15 milliliters agave honey or syrup

• 60 milliliters tequila blanco

• 25 milliliters pineapple juice

• 15 milliliters orange liqueur (such as Cointreau)

• 15 milliliters lime juice

Rub the rim of a rocks glass with the lime wedge, then roll in the tajín, salt & sugar blend. Set aside.

In a cocktail shaker, combine the mint, basil, cilantro and agave honey. Muddle thoroughly to make a greenish paste. Leaving the muddler in the shaker, add the tequila, pineapple juice, orange liqueur and pineapple juice. Swirl your muddler to remove any bits of herbs from it, then set it aside. Add several large ice cubes, cover the shaker and shake vigorously until it’s well chilled, at least 30 seconds. Double strain into the rocks glass over several large ice cubes.

*If you’d like to have the same bright-green cocktail that they serve at Limantour, you’ll need to blend your herbs with the tequila, rather than just muddling. This doesn’t tend to work well with a single batch; multiply it by 2-4 and have a party! Just combine herbs and tequila in a blender and blend until smooth, adding more herbs as needed to get bold color. To make sure you don’t have any herb bits in your cocktail, pour the tequila & herb blend through a fine mesh strainer when measuring it into your shaker.

I am writing these up in twos: two cities or countries per newsletter. We’ll start with New York and Massachusetts.

New York:

• Chelsea Galleries to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Here is one of my favorite days: I walk the High Line starting at 34th Street, I ogle the plants and people and exit around 24th Street to enter Chelsea.

  

  There, I always check out what’s on at Tina Kim, Hauser & Wirth, Lehmann Maupin, Pace (also, they have a public bathroom) and the Dia Foundation (also has a bathroom). I’ll get back on the High Line and go to the Whitney, which, to be honest, is hit or miss but has had several great hits recently. I eat at the Empire Diner, Chelsea Market or the fab new ground floor café at the Whitney. This day has all the ingredients for a Great Art Day: good art, beautiful nature, plenty of fresh air, ample places to sit down and fabulous food.

• The Frick Collection. For an immersive, one-stop education in European painting—go here. It’s smaller than the Met, which means it’s less overwhelming. The collection includes true masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, El Greco, Goya and on and on.

  

  They also have very good contemporary art program. Note: the café is très expensive. I’d plan for lunch at EJ’s Luncheonette afterward for a massive, classic NYC diner meal.

• Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aside from getting access to see some of the world’s best art ever (much of which should only be there if the home nation wants it to be), the Met is doing an increasingly good job with their contemporary art program. Look online before you go and identify one or two exhibitions and one or two works of art in the permanent collection that you want to see. Your brain will actually explode, or your marriage will end, or your back will give out, if you try to do more. Also, the Met is in Central Park—one of the world’s greatest parks, if not the world’s greatest park. For food on a Met Day, I am eager to eat at Al Badawi on 2nd Avenue and 89th Street—if you go, let us know what you think.

• El Museo del Barrio. I love a museum with a tight focus. Having reasons to say no is as important as having them to say yes. This museum is dedicated to art from Latin America and the Caribbean, and they have excellent shows.

• Storm King Art Center. The landscaping is an artwork, which means walking from sculpture to sculpture requires you to walk through an artwork. That is reason enough to go to Storm King, but there are more. The permanent collection is astounding.

  

  I really like the Richard Serra pieces and the Andy Goldsworthy wall, just to name a few. Each time I have gone, there has also been temporary work that I like on its own and for how it makes me look at the whole park with fresh eyes. For food, pack a picnic! Food tastes better when you’re eating outside and looking at a great view.

• Dia Beacon. More Richard Serra sculptures! And what a collection of them. Dia is a great organization (see my notes on Chelsea above) and their humongous exhibition space in Beacon is an immersive education in mid-to-late 20th-century American art. The first time I went, we scheduled an appointment to get on our bellies and look down into Michael Heizer’s “North, East, South, West.”

• Possible contender: I have only been to one show at the Ford Foundation Gallery but it was so excellent that I can’t wait for the next one.

• Wish list: Jack Shainman’s The School (Kinderhook, New York) and the Studio Museum in Harlem (I am embarrassed I have not been).

Massachusetts:

• Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. When Eva Respini took over as head curator at the ICA (she has since gone to Vancouver, those lucky ducks), the place just started to pulsate with energy. It became a Serious Art Destination. Eva led a smart curatorial team that continues to produce excellent shows since she left. Also, the glass wall outside the galleries on the fourth floor is just perfect. Sunny, cloudy, stormy, rainy—no matter the weather, the view is always spectacular. The ICA also offers excellent dance and film programs. You can’t get much food at the IC, but the wine list at the small café is perfect. Next door is Tatte, a bakery chain with excellent salads, sandwiches, pastries and coffee drinks

• Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. I grew up in this museum. My mom is an art historian and she thought nothing of bringing us there for a show, movie or lecture—whether we wanted to go or not. When I was older, she taught me to scour the collection for primary sources for high school history research papers. (DM if you want to know the topics.)

  

  The MFA is also the museum that taught me the value of being a museum member. I can pop in to see one show or even one piece of art and pop out. There is no lurking burden of “getting my money’s worth” in one day. (Though I am in the camp that says one great art experience is worth more than even an expensive $30 ticket. To counter that, I also think art museums should be free. That’s for another day.) Recently, I have been exploring their impressive ceramics collection and think their contemporary art program is very smart. The MFA film series is great and I’ve attended excellent lectures by leading artists, critics ad scholars. And, like the Met, a gorgeous garden is right outside.

• Mass Art Art Museum (MAAM), Boston. This is the new gallery space at MassArt, the only public art and design school in the nation. Lisa Tung directs MAAM and she’s as smart as they come (she also has impossibly cool style). It’s a non-collecting museum, which means they don’t have the financial burden of a collection and can focus on very good temporary exhibitions.

• The Freedom Trail, Boston. Go be a flagrant tourist (or local, we all love it) and walk the Freedom Trail. It’s great.

• Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Just north of Boston, the Peabody Essex exhibitions might be historical or artistic or multi-disciplinary. Recently, I’ve seen great shows about the Salem Witch trials, Georgia O’Keefe’s love of fashion and mid-20th century Indian painting. Go to Essex or Ipswich for fried seafood afterward (not before—you’ll be in a serious food coma).

• Mass MoCA, North Adams. At this series of factory buildings on a large campus, allow yourself to get lost. It’s impossible not to—and the maps don’t help. Accept that you will and enjoy. There are permanent and temporary exhibitions of exceedingly good quality around every corner. Some are in massive, cavernous, repurposed industrial spaces and others are in custom built white-walled galleries. There is an awesome long-term temporary James Turrell situation I return to as often as I can. Here’s a little video of Turrell’s C.A.V.U. installed at MassMoCA:

  Try to book a sunrise or sunset viewing in the oculus and a day time viewing of his rooms inside. The food at the café is pretty good, but Casita space from Mass MoCA and it’s great.

• The Clark, Williamstown. The permanent collection and temporary exhibition programs are both fantastic and I love that I can take a break to go walk the very good nature paths without leaving the beautiful museum grounds. Make sure to see the Jenny Holzer benches by the infinity pool thingy.

  

• Wishlist: New Bedford’s Whaling Museum and the annual nasturtium extravaganza at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum.

Next edition: London and Italy

Heike mills all her own flour from almost exclusively local grain (she makes an exception for rice, which doesn’t grow in Vermont, and a certain pastry flour she loves from a small mill further south). Wait – rice? Isn’t she a bread baker? She is. And also a bread sommelier devoted to investigating all kinds of flavor one can develop in bread. Her rice starter lends a milky sweetness to some of her breads and pastries. She also has buckwheat, teff, rye, and all manners of wheat starter and each lends a different flavor and texture to her loaves. Which means the loaves pair with foods differently. This is important to Heike, for whom bread is not just something in a basket eaten while you wait for the real food.

For Heike bread is a fundamental element of a menu, creating contrast and cohesion with the other food on the plate. Heike had made me a buckwheat and teff flour German-style loaf, dense and studded with sweet-and-sour dried cherries and citrusy coriander seeds. She also had baked lemon-poppyseed tea cakes made with her rice starter. They were mild and sweet with a perfect cake-crumb. Both bread and cake happened to be gluten free, but that was not the point. The point was the flavor the starters and flours created them. They were stunningly delicious.

Heike and I have now planned a three-day local grain sourdough intensive that we’re offering in May and September at Brot Bakehouse. Students (me, too) will get to work with her different starters and hand-milled flours to make loaves, muffins, flatbreads and cookies. We’ll also get a mini-sommelier course, learning how to taste bread analytically. I am really intrigued to see how fat highlights or diminishes the flavors in rye versus white wheat flour, for example. This is going to help me plan menus — and just make better sandwiches.

I’ll share what I learn here, maybe in the form of a menu. There is space in our September workshop, too, if you want to join us in Vermont.

Yours in the power of sour,
Rosie

p.s. Since I wrote this, Heike sent me some buckwheat starter culture. So far I’ve made discard crackers, discard chocolate chip cookies and two loaves of buckwheat-rice sandwich bread. I’m loving my little starter buddy!

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• New York: Cross the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise. The Statue of Liberty will come into view. The low light of dawn and (almost) solitude makes this a very emotional, contemplative but also exhilarating experience for me.

• Venice: Walk along the Grand Canal and through Saint Mark’s Square before 8 a.m. I have been in the square alone before 6:30. The view across to Paladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore is beautiful in the morning light and the pulse of what is to come—a haphazard parade of red flags bobbing tour guide’s heads, the clamor of thousands of people talking—is still faint. I feel like I’ve won the lottery to have the square, the view and the air to myself.

• London: Walk, jog, or bike in Regent’s Park at daybreak. London is famous for its gorgeous parks and the landscaping in this one is my favorite. I love the light in the willows and on the water and the layers of foliage covering the small hills. Knowing how gardening, power and colonialism go together makes the experience honest, which I appreciate immensely.

• Istanbul: Cross Galata Bridge for simit. I like to stay in Karaköy neighborhood. I cross the Galata bridge, get a coffee or tea and a simit – simit vendors are up early – turn left and walk along the mouth of the Golden Horn. You walk through gritty city made clean by morning air, then along Sarayburnu Garden and the fortified walls.
  

It seems l like water fronts, hills and gardens in the early morning. If you know me, that tracks. Maybe I’ll write a newsletter for each: water, hills and gardens. What do you think?

If you’re curious about traveling with Milk Street, this email is a little bit illustrative of our culinary trips. Here’s an example: In London, one evening we walk through a less-hip part of Hackney and along a canal to a large warehouse that is the definition of industrial. We take a service elevator that creaks its way up a floor and then walk down a hall past closed steel doors. We open the one that a peachy glow emanates from. Paper lanterns light a room filled the scents of macerated lemongrass, torn mint, grilled pork and stir-fried shrimp. Pink camellias float in small bowls lining long dining tables. We’ve arrived at Uyen Luu’s supper club, a weekly dinner only Londoners’ know about.

In Venice, we skip Venice. By that I mean we avoid Saint Marks square and instead take boats to the small islands that make Venice possible. On one, we go to a farm to pick seasonal vegetables and sit down to a family-style lunch with the farmers. At another we meet mussel farmers. And on another we go into a bakery’s back kitchen to bake buttery lemon cookies (and eat them hot).

In other words, we visit places like those who explore cities at dawn, but at more reasonable hours. I don’t wake you up at 5 a.m. (often). Let me know if you want to learn more about these trips. And let me know if you ramble around in the wee hours, too.

I love a trip that requires a personal floatation device, a chef’s knife, an expert with a wealth of knowledge, quiet footsteps in the forest, a notebook and an open mind for some weird stuff to happen.

In 2010, I migrated from a career in visual art to one in food. Food was an appealing way for me to engage many other topics: art, history, the environment, politics, community, wacky people who do wacky things and Culture. Yes, with a capital “C.” Art can do the same, but food felt more accessible. Importantly, this meant the programming I designed would appeal to a wider array or people. I also felt more equipped to be a teacher based in food.

Teaching cooking seemed so tidy. Students walked in to my classroom wanting to learn how to make soup. I taught them how to make soup. They accomplished their goal. Voilà.

Art was so much harder. The learning and teaching is open-ended, ambiguous, unresolved—or, rather, resolved over a much longer timeframe. For a young educator, this was daunting. I couldn’t evaluate how effective I was. The students left after a few hours, and the art—or their impressions of it—left with them. And maybe in a day, two weeks, a year, never, they’d understand that they’d learned something interesting. This was not soup.1

Fifteen years later, I’ve become a better teacher. But, I am a little tired of the limited scope of only teaching the techincal aspects of cooking. The comfort of teaching measurable skills now feels restrictive.

And, while my teaching skills have improved, food seems to be rarified—it can be a pretentious topic now, not art! There is no “one right way” to do anything in the kitchen, and the demands from people who say there are feel tedious and boring. Who cares if (sorry Chris) someone scrubs their cast-iron pan with soap, so long as they like using it and the dinners they make in it? Sometimes dinner is just dinner—calories to get us through tomorrow. Sometimes dinner is the most important hour of the week, a personal event that meaningfully changes the way we breathe. It’s never either/or. It’s both.

So I find myself craving art again, both as a learner and a teacher. I seek questions that are posed but not answered, respecting the viewer’s ability to draw their own conclusions. I need people, like Maria Finn, to help me with my work—people for whom food, science, art, craft and even spirit are natural bedfellows. There is no question of whether they make sense together during a single weekend. Of course they do.

Today, I am grateful for my career change 15 years ago. Food proved to be a phenomenal training ground for teaching—and it got me out of the art world silo. But now I need a bigger field. Things need to expand. I’m not going anywhere. I love Milk Street. But I might get Milk Streeters to make perfumes with foraged wild edibles and kayak under a full moon to harvest mussels.

If you’re interested, join me on Substack. Sometimes we’ll talk straight food. Sometimes I’ll share my favorite art exhibition. Whatever we do, we will be learning. There will be cookbook clubs, city guides for the culture-and-food-obsessed, member-only travel opportunities and classes, reading recommendations, conversations with an array of guests, suggested monthly recipes plans and more.