Put cream cheese in your pies
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Blueberry. Cream Cheese. Crumble Pie.
If you love cream cheese, listen up.
If you love crumble tops, listen up.
If you love a bubbling fruit pie with bursting berries, listen all the way up.
Because Nicole Rucker was in the studio with Jessie Sheehan for this week’s podcast, and the beloved baker from Fat + Flour in Los Angeles is known for all of the above. Her new cookbook, Fat + Flour: The Art of the Simple Bake, is an unfussy tour inside her home kitchen with recipes that’ll get you from cookie cravings to prize-winning pudding pies. You bet there’s a chapter of five banana breads, because bakers, says Nicole, “have multiple banana bread outfits!”
The book’s art direction is strikingly straightforward, with close-ups of baked goods that make them larger-than-life. You feel like you could climb a stack of East Coast Crunch Cookies and nap on the feathertop of the Lemon Meringue Chess Pie. A zoomed-in cross-section of the White Chocolate, Vanilla, and Coconut Brownies is the baker’s equivalent of a bombshell centerfold. Well, it is.
There are plenty of vegan and gluten-free recipes within, too. The bases, covered. Nicole shared the recipe for her Blueberry with Lavender and Cream Cheese Crumble Pie with us, along with the important knowledge that “you can put cream cheese on the bottom of any pie if you like cream cheese.” Well, well, well then. Don’t mind if we do. Listen to learn why.
CATCH SHE’S MY CHERRY PIE ON APPLE, SPOTIFY, OR YOUTUBE.
Thank you to Ladurée for supporting our show
Shop the show & more
Yes, we talked about her new book, but if you don’t have Nicole’s Dappled, you need it for summer fruit season
Culinary lavender is not the same as the stuff in tiny pillows for underwear drawers—stock up at SOS Chefs, every chef’s favorite spice shop
Nicole prefers lightweight metal pie pans and look, this one from Nordic Ware comes with a cover
Molly Yeh x Hayden Flour Mills confetti cake mix
Wise words
“I don’t believe in soggy bottom culture.”
–Nicole Rucker just wants you to bake the pie long enough
Tip of the week
Mixing frozen blueberries into her cooked pie filling cools it down and adds “poppy, juicy, bursting blueberries” for textural contrast. Genius.
Question for the class
Nicole mentions being inspired by the dreamy food in The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables. What other novels had memorable food for you?
From the archives
Another pie expert? Erin Jeanne McDowell
The cherry on top
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