How Fat + Flour's founder busts the myth that baking has to be hard

Los Angeles Times

15-04-2025

Pies piled with cloud-like whipped cream, cookies chewy and buttery, loaf cakes and cheesecakes bursting with ripe seasonal fruit: Walking into Fat + Flour is like entering a dessert dream world.
It hasn't always been a dream world for founder Nicole Rucker: Her lauded bakery and cafe started as a means of survival after she closed her previous restaurant and, for a while, she fell out of love with baking.
But she found new ways to work, helping her to re-mbrace her trade and build Fat + Flour into the bakery powerhouse that it is today, with a cafe in Culver City and a stall within Grand Central Market. Her approach serves as the throughline in a just-published cookbook that includes some of her most popular recipes, along with entirely fresh ones.
With an eye toward streamlining ingredients and techniques, 'Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake' is designed to share some of Rucker's simplification journey, especially when it comes to her now-signature 'Cold Butter Method,' or 'CBM.' Butter doesn't need to be tempered or creamed; save that time, Rucker says, to focus on other thoughts and tasks, and make life easier for yourself.
'It is really about not fighting against the fact that the world is different and we've got to do hard things,' Rucker says, 'but we shouldn't have to do so many hard things to enjoy something like a treat.'
While her 2019 cookbook, 'Dappled,' focused on letting seasonality sing in fruit desserts, her latest dives into comforting classics done simply. Rucker reached back decades to pull inspiration for her latest book, including instant-pudding recipes of the 20th century. The instant dessert might have a 'trashy' rap, she says, but in 'Fat + Flour,' it forms the base of white chocolate banana cream pie, pistachio ambrosia pie, chocolate silk pie and more, and proves a money- and time-saving decision in an era of rising egg costs.
Some recipes call for the 'cold oven' technique, a lesser-used method that doesn't require preheating at all. It bakes sweets evenly — albeit longer — and allows for one less factor to track while cooking.
A few years ago, simplification became necessary for Rucker.
Toward the start of the pandemic she became disillusioned with what she calls 'the daily chores of baking.' The Gjusta alum had recently closed her short-lived but acclaimed Fairfax restaurant and bakery, Fiona, and just as she debuted Fat + Flour, COVID-19 struck.
'The things that I found meaning in weren't really giving me any meaning anymore, you know?' she asked. 'It just felt like, 'What's the point of doing all of this?''
In May 2020, with social distancing and other regulations, Rucker realized she and her team could no longer work together as closely as they had. Fortunately she was able to repossess a sheeter for rolling out dough that she'd originally purchased for Fiona, expediting workflow and cutting down on the number of people in the kitchen (who no longer had to prepare pie dough by hand).
Then an egg shortage, coupled with the price of butter quadrupling overnight, caused her to rework multiple recipes and flip a number of her cookies to plant-based — which are now some of Fat + Flour's most popular items.
Reinvention saved Fat + Flour during the pandemic.
'I started to find baking processes that made me think, 'OK, maybe this is a potential silver lining: Because everything's changing, everything can actually change,'' Rucker said.
'We don't have to hold on to these old-fashioned techniques that were things that brought us a false sense of pride, like doing everything by hand and struggling. Why the hell are we struggling? Why is struggling such a badge of pride? I just became very disinterested in the struggle mentality. And I was like, 'I need things to be f—ing easy right now for me.''
That's not to say Rucker doesn't still see the beauty and ritual in some of cooking's more painstaking processes — hand-rolling dough for a single pie, hand-shaping fresh pasta — but when it came to building a sustainable business model, at scale, she needed to streamline.
Relying on some machinery, as opposed to an entirely handmade process, doesn't lessen the final product, she says, despite years of being told it does. If bakers are intentional and maintain a high level of ingredient quality, their cookies, pies and cakes should taste just as delicious.
Rucker took note of older cake recipes that mention reverse creaming, essentially what she now calls the 'Cold Butter Method.' In cakes it helps to produce a level bake, sans dome. Eventually she watched a YouTube video from London bakery Crumbs & Doilies, which tried to reverse-engineer the famous Levain cookies; the key technique was to avoid the full creaming of butter and sugar, leaving the butter still cold and forming a sort of sand-like dough base.
She reached out to friend and longtime D.C.-area baker and chef Pichet Ong, who confirmed the technique for cookies. She needed to try it. At a commercial level, to sell thousands of cookies each week, scraping mixing bowls of 10 to 15 pounds of butter and ensuring the even dispersal of sugar was time-consuming — and physically demanding.
After Rucker streamlined Fat + Flour's cookies, she realized CBM could potentially work in her famous pie dough as well. Not only did it expedite the process but it made training her staff easier. Hands and wrists received a much-needed rest, especially during holiday pie orders, which require months of preparation for the bakery.
A more foolproof method, she said, also can help home bakers to feel less self-conscious about diving in, even when tackling mercurial pie dough.
'You're taking out the part that everyone is the most nervous about, which is their body: Don't touch it too much, and make sure you don't have hot hands, and make sure you're not scared, and, you know, make sure you don't look at it the wrong way,' Rucker said. 'And that is like, the lore of making pie dough that everyone has in the back of their minds. It's this rhetoric, and it's just so silly.'
Nicole Rucker will be cooking from 'Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake' with a live demo at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, from 2 to 3 p.m. on the Cooking Stage.