♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we travel to Portland, Maine, to the Tandem Bakery.

We visit with head baker Briana Holt.

She makes a savory kale and two-cheese scone, then a double chocolate cake-- and then she adds honeyed juniper syrup-- it's absolutely delicious.

Please stay tuned as we investigate the new American bakery.

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♪ ♪ (birds squawking) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - I think something that happens to me is I see something out in the world that excites me, whether it's a pastry someone else has made, or even a dish that's savory and something about it gets me really jazzed, whether it's a textural combination or a flavor combination, and I will, you know, spend a couple of weeks kind of thinking, like, "How can I do that?"

Or "How can I make that?"

Or "How can I combine those things together also?"

♪ ♪ I think sometimes it's really just about trying something and it might be terrible... (laughs) Or it might work, you know?

I mean, chocolate and juniper don't make sense, really.

But to me, it's a really fun combination that can be a little playful.

Sort of gets me into this fantasy land of, like, a thick slab of chocolate juniper cake, you know, wrapped in a cloth, like, hiking through the woods.

You know, sometimes things like that are all it, all it takes to come up with, like, a fun combination of flavors.

- "Why, grandmother, what big teeth you have."

- Exactly!

- Those kinds of...

Yes, a huntress in the woods.

- In the Schwarzwald?

- Yes, yes.

- Okay.

♪ ♪ - In England, scones are nasty little biscuits, I think.

- (laughs) Oh no!

- Well, they're tiny!

They are-- no, but here they're big.

- I think they serve a delicious purpose.

I think a British scone is something more refined, it's made with cream, it's a little denser, you have it with tea.

Here at Tandem.... - I don't think Queen Elizabeth gets a scone like this... - (laughs) - ...at 4:00.

- No.

Here, at Tandem, it's crispy on the outside, it's tender and cakey on the inside, and you can get any number of combinations in there, I mean, we make savory ones.

- The one we're gonna make today has got kale and what else?

- Yeah, it's got kale.

It's got really sharp cheddar in there, some pecorino for a little extra sharp cheese flavor and some currants for that hit of sweetness.

You know, that kind of hinted it like a little bit of, like, an Italian meal shoved inside of a scone or something.

I don't know-- very Willy Wonka.

- You just took the English scone, Willy Wonka, and the Italians and put them all together?

Am I allowed-- I hope so.

(laughs) - Well done.

- I always like to make sure that every aspect of what you're eating is gonna have, like, you know, some kind of dynamic that's exciting.

And for me, topping this scone with a nutty, roasted, sunflower seed seemed like a really fun idea.

Um, it's one of my favorite snacks.

So yeah, that's a really fun one.

♪ ♪ So these particular scones are savory.

They're made with kale and cheddar, a little pecorino, some currants in there as well, and we'll finish it all off with some toasty sunflower seeds.

So the way that we make scones here at Tandem is in a food processor because we make big, huge batches.

You can do this at home if you don't have this piece of equipment, totally fine.

You're just gonna use your hands and work the butter into the flour with your fingers.

So we've got butter here that I have chopped up into little pieces.

There's no need for them to be super uniform, just small chunks that will fit in your food processor.

And we're gonna take this dry mix, which has flour, leaveners, salt-- there's also a little black pepper in there for a savory kick, and there's sugar, too.

It is a savory scone, but sugar, of course, has a lot of jobs to do in a pastry-- moisture, it helps with the flavor, it's also gonna keep the scone nice and tender and get a little color and crispness on the outside.

So just don't forget that savory things also need sugar.

So we're gonna dump this in here, and we don't have to put it all in there, just enough to kind of cover the butter.

We're just gonna pulse it.

Like that.

(processor whirring briefly) We don't want to decimate it... (processor whirring briefly) into the flour.

We just want to kind of cut it up a little bit.

Now, what we're working with is a mixture that's a little bit sandy.

You might have heard people say small peas, but I like to get in there after the food processor with my fingers and just kind of flatten the butter a little bit like this.

It's sort of like, almost like you're spreading it.

What we're doing is we're gonna make flaky layers in the pastry by kind of combining the butter and the flour together like this.

♪ ♪ So now we have this kind of shaggy, sandy mixture and we're gonna start adding our dinosaur kale.

and I chopped it up really fine, I kind of, like, chiffonade... perhaps one might say, and I did season it.

You want to remember to season all the parts of your pastry.

And the kale I gave a little lemon juice and salt, and I really like squished it around with my fingers to kind of macerate it a little bit.

And then we got our cheese here, this is some pecorino, which is gonna add a nice little sharp bite.

And then this is really sharp, really dry cheddar, and I chopped it up into chunks.

You could also grate it, but what I like about these chunks is that when you bake the scone, this little guy's gonna kind of melt out and you'll get, like, a little pocket of cheese.

You might even luck out with, like, a crispy, burnt cheese section on the bottom of your scone.

The next thing I'm gonna put in here are some currants.

And I did clump these up for a few minutes with some boiling water.

And then we're gonna toss everything together.

So we're gonna hydrate these scones with buttermilk.

You want it to be nice and cold so that your butter in your mixture doesn't get warm as you're working.

The buttermilk is gonna add flavor, acidity.

It's gonna help tenderize the dough.

The acidity in the buttermilk is gonna react with the leavener.

And that's gonna make for a nice, tall, tender, flaky scone.

And you just want to dump it all right in.

Like this.

So now we're gonna toss this together, and I like to start with a spoon so I don't get my fingers all totally covered in buttermilk-- but we're just gonna toss it loosely.

You just kind of want to get all that stuff in there to kind of touch the buttermilk a little.

Hey, how you doing?

And now once that's mixed together now we're gonna use our hands.

I've got some extra flour here.

I'm gonna do a little of this on the surface, and then just dump that bad boy right out like that.

What we want to do is treat this dough almost like a buttermilk biscuit.

A little bit of flour just to keep your hands from getting too sticky.

And then gentle but firm, so you like to gather it from the top and just kind of gently bring it over, and then turn the whole shebang and do it again.

Gather it from the top and just a gentle little knead, not like bread dough... you know, you want e nice and gentle, You don't want the warmth from your hands to melt the butter.

Once you've gathered and folded your scone dough a couple of times, you should have this relatively homogeneous little ball here.

Just gonna cut that baby right in half.

I'm gonna give it a little more flour here and now we're gonna shape it into almost like a big puck.

So you kind of like toss it around a couple of times and just use the tips of your fingers if you can help it, and gently poke, prod, and flip.... ♪ ♪ until you get a disk that's kind of tall and fat.

So I just use this gentle, pinching motion.

And I remember to flip my scone dough every so often to keep it from getting too smashed.

And you just want a rustic-- messy, that means messy-- disk just like this.

There we go.

We're gonna take our scone rounds, and we're gonna brush them with egg wash. You can make an egg wash from a lot of stuff-- plain eggs whisked together, eggs and milk, eggs and cream.

That's what we do here at Tandem, we use eggs and cream.

It gives it a nice shiny exterior, kind of seals the surface.

And at this point you could top your scones with whatever your heart desires.

But here, when we make these here at Tandem, I top them with sunflower seeds.

They're lightly roasted with a little salt, just a little olive oil and salt in the oven until they get toasty and flavorful.

It's got a nutty, delicious flavor, and it's really gonna add a little extra something.

So really shove a bunch on there, doesn't need to be neat.

You want them to kind of pile up... just like this.

And you want to use a knife that's pretty sharp here.

You're cutting through all those layers that you made by gently folding it together, and you don't want to smush it or smash it down.

So you take a nice, sharp knife and just cut it nice and evenly like that, then in there, you have all your nice layers, you got all your kale, some currants in there, and we're gonna cut this into three so that we get 12 scones.

All right, so now we have 12 very beautiful scones.

And I'm just gonna tray them up and get them in the oven.

If you want to bake them some other time than right now, you could put them in the freezer.

Once they're frozen solid and you want to bake them, you're just gonna lower your oven temperature a little bit, 15 to 25 degrees.

You kind of got to get to know your oven to know for sure.

♪ ♪ So we're gonna get these in the oven.

They're gonna bake pretty hot and kind of jump up right away.

Get a little lift from the leavener, the acidity of the buttermilk is gonna help that along.

Let's get them in the oven.

♪ ♪ There we go.

♪ ♪ - You mentioned the idea of having fun with baking.

- Yeah.

- Be irreverent.

You said to me only a time ago that when you're prancing around baking, you know, why not... - I won't ever live that down with you!

- No, no, no, but, like, what is the prancing thing?

I mean, like, is this like baking, you're kind of like a school kid?

- I just happen to be really lucky and I've gotten to be able to do the thing that I love as a job.

I mean, if I weren't doing this as a job, I would be doing it in my free time like crazy.

I love baking.

And if I'm at home alone, I might feel inspired, but I also love sharing with people, come up with something good that someone's going to be excited by and share it with them.

Playing in the kitchen and making stuff the way somebody might be painting or drawing-- I mean, I'll mess around in the kitchen for hours.

- Not long ago, I had a chocolate juniper cake, which... - (chuckles) - (clearing throat): ...you make it here.

And I go like, okay, chocolate and juniper, that struck me.

I mean, like, strawberry and rhubarb goes together, or maybe cheese and kale.

But I had to think about that one.

Piney and chocolate.

- Yeah.

- They balance each other, or... - I think so, yeah.

The chocolate is a really dark kind of deep chocolate.

That cake has got some black cocoa powder, and it's got melted 75% chocolate in it.

And the cake itself is kind of, um... Squidgy.

(laughs) You know, it's-- it sinks a little bit in the middle, it's, it's a little dense but soft because of all the chocolate.

Juniper, which has sort of like a piney, citrusy, floral vibe, kind of like brings the cake out of the low base level of, like, fudgy and chocolatey and kind of like steps it up a notch.

It becomes something that has kind of like two layers instead of just being kind of one-note.

You know, like I said, I like to play around with flavors, and I think it opens people up to a new world of, you know, maybe they've never heard of juniper.

Maybe they didn't know that it went in things other than sauerkraut.

And for me, I just, I like playing with those ingredients.

The juniper berry itself is really beautiful, and when you heat it, it releases these oils, and the cocoa powder is really oily and fragrant as well.

And I like the combination of those two things.

- Thank you, Briana.

♪ ♪ - So now we're going to make a dark chocolate loaf cake made with black cocoa powder, which is a really heavily Dutched cocoa powder.

If you've ever had an Oreo, it's that kind of flavor.

Not as chocolatey as you might think when you think about eating a chocolate bar or like a slice of chocolate birthday cake, but a little more bitter, a little more grown up, a little more subtle.

It's a really nice flavor, and it's also flavored with juniper berries.

These, of course, are not real berries.

They're more like a pine cone, sort of the seed of the juniper tree, most often used in sauerkraut or with a gamey meat.

But here, I think it pairs really nicely with a bitter dark chocolate flavor.

The first thing we're going to do is get the pan ready.

That way, you're done, you're all mixed, you don't have to stop.

So we're going to spray it really well, so that nothing sticks, and then we're going to line it with some parchment paper.

Just like this, on the bottom.

And then spray it one more time And then we'll set that aside, ready to go.

So we're going to start this cake by creaming some really nice butter, and then we're going to put our sugar in.

There's some white sugar, there's some brown sugar for a little extra moisture.

It's going to make a really good, really kind of fudgy pound cake.

So we're going to mix that for a minute.

Really important is to remember to scrape, scrape, scrape.

So turn it off.

Lift it up.

The butter will cling to your paddle.

Every mixer has a little blind spot down on the bottom where things like to hide.

That's why you want to scrape it really well.

That way, when you're done mixing, you don't have a sneaky pile of unmixed butter, or eggs or something.

So then we'll keep mixing.

Maybe for about 60 seconds.

We just wanna cream that butter till it's a little bit aerated.

It will get a little bit lighter in color, but you don't want to blast it.

We're going to add our eggs and vanilla.

When you're baking and when you're buying your ingredients, just make sure that you're paying a lot of attention to the vanilla you're buying.

It's an ingredient you might forget about, but there's a lot of unethical vanilla out there that's farmed badly.

People aren't paid.

Uh, they're in dangerous situations.

It can be hard to do the research, but it's really worth it.

It might be a little more expensive, but if you know that vanilla is coming from a farm where people are paid and treated safely, you'll feel a lot better about the whole thing.

So we're just going to dump these eggs in slowly, one at a time-ish, and let the mixer run.

Then you want to stop and scrape again.

A lot of scraping involved in cake-making.

And then just let it run for another minute here until the eggs and the butter homogenize a little bit.

Now we're going to add our melted chocolate.

This is a 70% dark chocolate, really tasty, really flavorful.

We melted it over the double boiler.

This is going to bring out a little more of a chocolate flavor, a little more of a fudgy texture.

We've got the black cocoa powder, which is sort of bitter.

This is going to have a little more of that rich chocolatey flavor that you're after with a chocolate cake.

So we're just going to put this right in.

Keep mixing.

Nice and gentle this time.

You don't want to beat your chocolate too hard, just get it slightly mixed into your egg mixture.

And then we're going to take our dairy here.

We've got sour cream and buttermilk, a little extra tang.

Sour cream is one of my most favorite ingredients to use in baking.

It's got a lot of fat, lot of flavor, and the acidity is helpful, again, for flavor and for tenderness.

And like a lot of different styles of cakes, you don't need to beat this cake so smooth, you can leave some lumps in there.

It can be a little bit sloppy, that's going to help it have a really tender texture.

So just a gentle mix, just for a second.

Next thing we're going to do is get our dry ingredients in there.

This is flour and black cocoa powder and some ground juniper.

You want to toast it to bring out some of the oils that are in there, which will really release that flavor.

It's so good, I can smell it from here.

It's like piney and citrusy and just really amazing.

♪ ♪ The next thing I'm going to do is put some boiling water in this cake.

That might sound wacky, but it's a trick I learned from sort of vintage cookbooks that might have ingredients we don't want to use anymore.

(chuckles) But lots of fun tricks.

Sometimes called a hot water cake, it helps make a really soft and tender cake.

However, it also is going to bloom that black cocoa powder that we have in there.

It's going to release some of the fat and some of the oils that are inside of that cocoa powder and really bring out the flavor.

So, we'll just mix it.

Let it incorporate.

And I like to finish all my cake batters by hand.

It really helps me not overmix, which is not something that you want to do with a cake, you almost want to undermix it.

So we're just going to fold like this.

So we've got this batter.

It's a little sloppy, it's a little lumpy.

That's okay, that's what we want.

We don't want it super smooth or super homogenized.

And now, since we were smart and we prepped our pan, we don't have to stop and do it.

Next trick is a shimmy.

To spread it out and then drop it.

You want to get the air out, you want to settle the batter into the pan, get it into all the edges.

So it's a shimmy and a drop.

We're going to finish this cake off with some white sugar.

This is going to make a really tasty crust on the top.

That's, that's really all it does.

It bakes up kind of crunchy, and then we're going to soak the cake with the juniper syrup.

It's just a really fun, really nice topping.

Tastes good, looks really pretty.

So, just a nice, even layer like this.

And then I'm going to put this loaf pan on a sheet tray.

I like to do that at home.

It helps bake the cake a little more evenly.

My oven at home is really hot on the bottom, so anything I put in there gets blasted.

Also, who knows?

Maybe you overfilled it.

Maybe your pan's too small.

Maybe you tripled the baking soda.

All totally fine mistakes to make.

But this way, if it kind of overflows, the bottom of your oven isn't trashed, and you don't have to spend time cleaning it and being really mad at yourself.

So I put a tray under there.

And now we're just going to get this in the oven.

♪ ♪ I'm just going to poke this cake all over with my trusty poker, which is also a thermometer.

And that's going to help this syrup really get down in there, and nobody is going to notice these holes.

And if they do, then they're just going to know how hard you worked to get this flavor in there.

So just pour this juniper syrup all over, let it soak in.

It's kind of like a simple syrup made with honey and ground juniper and toasted juniper berries.

Here we go.

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♪ ♪ - Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to be the first to welcome you to Tel Aviv... - Welcome to Oaxaca's airport.

- Welcome to Beirut.

♪ ♪ (man speaking Hebrew) - (speaking world language) - Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

♪ ♪ - Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

♪ ♪ - So this is the Eduardo García blender.

- This is the no electricity.

♪ ♪ - Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

♪ ♪ I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

♪ ♪ - Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

♪ ♪ - This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

♪ ♪ - Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪