Ask Yourself "What If?" with Milk Bar Founder Christina Tosi

0:00 This episode is brought to you by True Classic. The way they became our sponsor is because I love their t-shirts, and so we just called them up and asked them if they wanted to work together. And they said yes. So check out their clothes at TrueClassic.com. That's a hundred percent going like over my dead body.

0:34 Is this not going to happen? I don't know how that will bake. Me neither, but we're going to find out. What if? What if? So, a bazillion years ago, I went for dinner in New York City at a place called Sambar, which was a David Chang restaurant. And in the back, they had a little thing called Milk Bar, which was there, basically the dessert place for the restaurant.

0:53 Well, I fell in love with one of the desserts called cereal milk ice cream. And yes, it is the most nostalgic ice cream you could ever eat. It tastes exactly like the milk from the cereal bowl from when we were kids. That's a sweet milk that we would drink. Little did I know that the founder and owner of Milk Bar would later become one of my closest closest friends, Christina Tozi.

1:12 Christina Tozi has got on to have wild success. We can all buy Milk Bar products in our local supermarkets. You can see her on Netflix and her TV show. She's got multiple cookbooks out. But best of all, Christina is the most wonderful baker because she bakes with love. It is her love language. Because Christina was in my hometown this week, we thought we would do something different.

1:34 We would do an experiment. And if there's one thing Christina and I both love, it's the unknown. So this is a live cooking show that Christina and I did. So if you're listening to this on audio, you will hear some clinking and clanking because we are actually in the kitchen. We are actually baking. If you'd like to see us bake, go to YouTube.

1:54 The whole episode is there. Or we will do our best to explain everything we're doing. We did something we've never done. It could succeed. It could fail. You'll let us know. But no matter what, I know one thing will happen. You will learn how to make a compost cookie and you will learn how to make the tastiest beer bread of your life.

2:11 This is a bit of optimism. This is a thrill for me personally, because you were my first guest on a bit of optimism during lockdown. You and I have done this, I think, two or three more times. But I thought you were in LA. How much fun would it be that we actually bake together? You and I have never, that's not true.

2:31 We have baked together. I was like, every time I come over, well, it's less about baking. No, it's not about baking. Simon has an idea that it's about introversion. It's about introversion, because I went to a dinner party at your house, and there were lots of people who were all outside being entertained by your front of house husband.

2:47 And you disappeared into the kitchen. You're a happy place. You don't have to talk to people. Turns out I was very close behind you. And we ended up experimenting. And we invented new breads. We also made new ice creams. We did a, it was an ice cream loaf. That's like baked club. That's what baked club is.

3:06 It's like, come in, bake with us, learn something new. We're going to set you up for success. And you're the genius, because it's putting the things together in your home that will bring you delight that you can share. You know, I've never talked to you about baking, because I'm either doing it with you or we talk about other things.

3:21 I've actually never talked to you about baking. And now we're going to talk about baking. What was your, like, where was your entry into baking? Like, was it an escape to, like, because you didn't want to play outside with other kids that you were like, I was like, I'm just going to be over here baking.

3:34 Like, what, where did, like, why baking? Baking, okay. Why not baseball? Yeah, I love to be outdoors, and I love sports. But baking, so my mom was a working mom. She's an accountant. So January through April every year, my grandma's, my aunts would watch us, basically. And in my family, the matriarchs bake.

3:55 That's just what you do in your free time. Right. Ohio and Virginia. And then my mom would ship me off to Ohio to live with my grandma on her farm every summer so that we didn't, we didn't become city kids when we moved to Virginia city kids. And I loved it because it was time with them. But really, I loved it because I like cookie dough.

4:18 Only, I started eating too much of my grandma's cookie dough. And she started doing the math and being like, this is not adding up. This should equal this many cookies, demand planning in her head. And she realized I was the culprit. And she said, there's like no more baking with me because you keep eating the cookie dough.

4:34 You're spoiling your dinner, all the grandma things. It was like survival of the fittest moment. And I wasn't allowed to turn on the oven, but I loved cookie dough. So I would add a very young age to make these concoctions of like, I don't know, flour, sugar, things that I remembered putting in. And it was trial and error, right?

4:52 Like if you don't put in enough sugar, it's not really cookie dough. I'd put a rag and be like, oh, this is good. You put too much salt and not enough baking soda, etc. Then I was then got to the age where I could turn on the oven and still these concoctions would actually start baking. And I learned how to bake self-taught as a home baker.

5:10 And then I moved to New York City because I was like, I want to do this for a living. And then you went to culinary school. Culinary school. Culinary school. Became a fancy baker. Worked in fancy restaurants. Yeah, because I'm intense. I like the competitive, the inner competitive spirit. I'm going to do it the highest of my games.

5:24 So here's the thing that I find amazing, which is most kids who discover baking. It's science. It's following the formula. And their first recipes are memorized, or you read them, but you didn't have that. So from the get go, it was trial and error. From the get go, you had to learn like one egg tastes good, three eggs taste bad.

5:45 And that's how I learned. And things crumble or things stay together. So your baking was never precious for me, right? Most people, why do they bake? Because they like the control of it, the science, the security behind it. It's hard, but it's accurate. What I love about baking is the opposite of that reason.

6:03 The thing, because I've see, I'm having bake with you before and having experiment with you before. The thing that I love that you do that no one, I've never seen anybody else do, which is usually somebody makes a thing, right? And even if they experiment, it'll either work at one work and they say, oh, next time, I'll add this to it.

6:18 You will have four things going on simultaneously. It's like a conveyor belt. This one's got a little more of this. This one's got a little more of that. This one has less and you are. You're treating it like ABCD and see which one comes out. And that's what we did when we made the beer bread. 100%. I remember, because I went and bought the beer.

6:34 I came here. How many bottles of beer did you have? We went through a lot of bottles of beer in the wall. And we probably tried, I remember we tried a raspberry beer. We tried a chocolate beer. We tried a stout. We tried like a fancy beer. We tried a not fancy beer. And we did the same recipe with all these beers until we discovered one we like.

6:54 That's right. And so for me, baking. Love. I like all of them. Love, yeah, to be fair. For me, baking and the approach to life is always walking around with this sense of what if? Yeah. What if? What if the raspberry ones are really good? What if the chocolates? What if, what if I put pretzels and chocolate together and swirl them into?

7:16 What if I put cookie dough, sweetened condensed milk, grits crackers and bugles in the oven? There they are. But there they are. I'm looking at them right now. And you never know. And the beauty is. There's a bugle on a cookie. The beauty is you don't know. And I love that part of baking. You only know what you know.

7:33 And I go into it. But then I'm not disappointed. Because that's the other bit of trial and error. Being a great chef, a great baker. You have to be so good at disappointing. But you know, even with all your training, you know things that go together and things that shouldn't go together. So how often are you actually disappointed?

7:49 So often. Because I wanted to find the odds. For me, like Milk Bar was built on. We're going to have a bakery. And we're not going to have vanilla ice cream. And we're not going to cover cakes on the sides. And we're not going to make normal cookies that you would find in a bakery. And we're going to make pie.

8:05 But it's not an apple pie. So you get cereal milk ice cream. And you get milk bar pie that's dense and gooey and fudgy. That note, we pull it out when it is still dense and gooey and frite. Because who knows? And who's to say? Who gets to make the rules? Where did you come up with the name milk bar? To name your company?

8:23 Your company. OK, it's kind of two parts. One. Milk and bar. Those are the two parts. But I'm from. No, close. No. My idea for Milk Bar originally, and still is, like my north star was a modern day take on dairy queen with a bakery case. Like I knew I wanted cookies cakes and pies, but for me it was all about a soft serve ice cream machine.

8:48 And this is before a soft serve was anything beyond what you find at dairy queen or like a roadside custard stand. Chocolate vanilla. Yeah, so like dairy queen milk bar, you can see that, right? And then I started Milk Bar originally in the back of a momofuku restaurant because I was helping Dave build all the momofuku restaurants.

9:04 And the naming convention that we always had was something bar, right? Noodle bar, some bar. Or some bar. Milk bar. So part of it's like the origin story. And then the other part is like the nostalgic origin story. So milk was really your homage to dairy queen and bars because you were forced into it.

9:19 Now forced into it, that was just how I thought. No, no, you said all of the things were sambar, milk bar. But it wasn't like it must be this. I just thought that's a beautiful way to talk a lot. So you like it, it's good. I mean, it's worked for us. What if I said no, that's like that's part of it, you know?

9:35 So how much has baking influenced you as a person in life, your relationships, your friendships, your marriage, your mom-ness, or the other way around? How much does outside life come into your kitchen? It has gone through waves in my baking career. Here's what I know about baking. Even after all that I said, I thought I knew why I love to bake.

9:57 And it wasn't until a few years ago that I realized that I actually love to bake. Not just because I love to eat dessert. I thought that was really the motivating factor. And not just because I love the creative outlet of it. But I do my best talking through dessert. So dessert is my relationship to the world to community.

10:15 I'm an introvert. The reason I like to hide in the kitchen is because I want to bake you. I want you to feel known and seen and loved by you're not too sweet chocolate cake, right? Like I, that's how I say I got you. I'm here for you. I love you. I'm sorry you had a shitty day. Happy birthday, like anything in between.

10:32 It's your love language. It is, that's why I bake. And it gives me the never ending capability to fall back in love with anything. A simple ingredient, feeling good about a day, being a human in the world. Like it is my bed of optimism. I think what I want, I think what I, what's important, what I want to get across is that too many of us think baking is follow the recipe.

11:01 And it is, it's not like cooking. Cooking, you can experiment more in baking. You can't, there's less room for experimentation. Because if you, you change the variables, the science changes, the chemistry changes. And it doesn't work. And this idea that getting comfortable with failure and that baking is an education for getting comfortable with failure, like it doesn't taste good, so throw it out and make it again.

11:22 Like, so what? Just what did you learn from it? When you failed from anything in life, what did you learn, right? Use that. There's always good and something. And for me, if you're not failing, you're not taking risks, you're not growing, right? What have you learned today? I didn't learn anything because I crushed it.

11:39 How do you define failure? There's nobody wants to fail. Things not turning out the way that I thought they would. And guess what? That's fine. If not, that's great. That's flexibility. So how has this mentality towards your cakes impacted you as an entrepreneur? Because you, milk bar is your company.

11:59 Yes. You founded it. Yes. It's had its ups and downs like any other company. You have all the same issues as every other company. Human in the world. You're right. Believe it or not. So I'm very curious, because for me, I can look at myself. I know as an entrepreneur and a business owner, like I know what elements of my personality come and show up better and sometimes worse.

12:20 But I know how they show up and work. So because I'm an artist and I have an artist's sensibility. And I love seeing things. I love my senses, I love hearing things, I love tasting things. I just love all of that. I know how that shows up in at work. Yes. You know, I love the experimentation. I love the messiness.

12:37 I love the chaos. Because for me, creativity is the skill of finding ordering chaos. Right? The skill of an ordering chaos. Creativity is finding ordering chaos. And sometimes that chaos is thrust upon you. Market conditions. And sometimes I have to inject chaos in order to get some creativity. So I find, for me, for work when it gets stale.

12:59 And sometimes I don't realize things are stale until I realize I'm bored. And when I'm bored, I realize it's because there's no. And so sometimes I inject creativity. I inject chaos in order to produce a creative output. And by the way, not just mine. Everybody is. This is a very, can I tell you? This is a very chef mentality.

13:18 Really? Some of the greatest chefs that I worked for were most drawn to chaos. Some might call it drama. But in a way that was like, if it doesn't exist, we're not alive. We don't feel alive. The spirit of getting something done. The herculean effort of it. Yeah. And the sparks that come from that don't exist.

13:36 I think the difference, at least from TV shows that I've watched about chefs. It's probably is a terrible way to make this conclusion. But I don't want to be the hero. I don't want to inject chaos and then be like, and I put it right. It's not it's not like that. It's I want to inject chaos and be like, all right, everybody, we have a mess.

13:55 I don't know what to do. Even if I made it, what are you going to do? And I love, I love watching people and pushing people to find creative solutions to the mess that sometimes I make. So what is it about as a baker? And the way you bake and the style of which you bake that you can you can make it one-to-one correlation to you as an entrepreneur and a business sort of.

14:19 The way you make decisions, the way you leave people, any of it, any of it. This is a human business. And if humanity is not a part of what we do, we have failed and anything is possible. But what about being a baker is influenced you as an entrepreneur? Like what like me as an artist, I can see it. I can see where it comes in as an entrepreneur.

14:38 So what about you as a baker? How do you bake the way you're approaching baking? You can see. You know nothing. Like ask yourself what if and give it a try. But it's that sense of possibility. That is like how do we build a bakery? That is locations all over the place. A care package business across the country.

14:56 Right. Product in the out like all kinds of crazy stuff. It's because we didn't follow Roadmap and we were just like what if? But to your point of the creating chaos, if we're not asking ourselves what if with this anything is possible in mentality. And by the way, when you're building business, right, we're 17 years in right now.

15:14 It would be smart to keep just doing what we're doing. Sell the icon, sell the classics. Don't iterate. Like play it safe. Keep it simple, right? Go with your greatest hits. Right. But you still have to sing respect if you're gonna read the Frank. You still have cereal milk ice cream in the machine. But if that's all we're doing, the spirit and the heartbeat of who we are, we don't feel like ourselves.

15:37 We love to do that. And you have to be able to nail your classics every time. But if we're not experimenting and trying and falling flat on our faces and finding these moments, we're suffocating ourselves. Let's bake. Okay. I want to learn. So you've made something not with me but I've been in the room when you're making them, which is a compost cookie.

15:56 And I knew that we were going to make these because I was told I was given one instruction which is bring stuff from around my kitchen. Just bring stuff. I have no idea if any of this stuff is bakeable. You don't know what I brought. I have no clue what you brought. But I brought stuff from around my kitchen.

16:11 So I think every baked good, like it's not about us when we make baked goods. It's about what the baked good does for the person that's eating it. Not too sweet. So the compost cookie. Yeah. Is a chocolate chip cookie? When you don't have enough chocolate chips to make a chocolate chip cookie. That was the origin.

16:27 It's butter scotch chips. It's pretzels. It's potato chips. It's ground coffee. It's graham cracker. It's whatever. It's anything and everything. I used to make it almost island off the coast of New Hampshire. A bad storm would come in. I had to bake for 600 people. Breakfast lunch and dinner. And it was basically the like, oh, we're not getting any fresh.

16:44 So I just go into the pantry and grab stuff and it became this beloved cookie because people would guess every time. So this is my bespoke cookie. This is your bespoke compost cookie. I also just think it's fascinating what people keep in their pantry. It says everything. It's the food that fuels them.

16:59 It's the food that fuels your creative engine. I didn't bring kimchi. And it's always in my fridge. That's OK. But you want to know what? I would've gone the distance with you. But I think the food that people keep at home is the most really good side into them. And I think your taste buds are fascinating.

17:18 OK, well, they're different than mine. Well, hopefully this will pass on to you. This hopefully is a pass on you. OK, let's see. We're trying something a little different. Instead of a traditional host red ad, I invited Ryan Bartlett, the founder of our sponsor, True Classic, to sit down for a conversation.

17:35 And it turns out there's a lot more that we can learn from him beyond just how great his t-shirts are. And his t-shirts really are great. We call this an ad with authenticity. I was obsessed with reading the reviews about what people were saying about the product. And there was a magical moment very early on.

17:53 It was in the first couple months. This lady hit us up and was like, hey, I just want to let you guys know. My husband, because of your product, he walks out of the house with an air of confidence now that he's never had. Like ever in his life, I spent $49 on a three-pack. And somehow that has translated to confidence in him.

18:13 I can't tell you how transformational it's been. He doesn't feel subconscious about how he looks anymore. He's actually proud of himself. So thank you so much for developing this thoughtful product. It has quite literally changed our lives. And I read that. And it just hit me. And I was like, we're not selling t-shirts.

18:33 We're selling confidence. And like all great companies, what you're doing for your customer, you're doing for your employees. You're building a culture where people feel confident because they have the opportunity to experiment, be their true selves, and build a career with you. So one of my favorite things in the world, I brought what I have left.

18:52 Yeah. Lapsang Sushang T. Okay, so we got T. So really fancy T. My brother-in-law makes the breakfast granola in the world. His name's Brad, and so we call it granola. Okay. I brought my, our favorite almond. Oh, yeah. I introduced it to these almonds, which are almonds from Afghanistan, all things, but they're the tastiest almonds in the world.

19:11 I had those in the pantry. I have a half-eaten bag of, oh, those are really good. Of kettle corn pop chips. I love kettle corn everything. Getting some play here. I brought a bag of my optimism coffee. Oh, this stuff. That's the magic. Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna loop these into categories. I, somebody, I think somebody stayed in my house and left these in like, in my pantry, and I don't know what they are, but it's some wheat pop.

19:40 Some wheat or some sort of wheat puff, something, or I don't know what it is. Okay. There are things in here that I, oh, believe it or not, this will tell you something. You say, what's in my pantry, tells you about something about who I am. Well, I have, I have a chocolate drawer. I know about the chocolate drives.

19:55 So I just grabbed a lot of bars in the chocolate drawer, everything from crap to really high in the cell. This is going to be the most primo. Yeah, yeah. There's some fancy chocolate. We've ever seen it. Because I'm an Englishman, I always had English chocolate. I love you that you have a dark chocolate cake hat.

20:08 I have multisers. I have calories, calories, white buttons. Oh. Um, now this will tell you the most, this will tell you the biggest thing about me. And this is, what's funny about this is, I always have this in my pantry. Always. Space ice cream. Always. There's always a space ice cream in there. I love you so much for that.

20:29 This is 100% going like over my dead body. Is this not going to your house? I don't know how that will bake. Me neither, but we're going to find out. What if, what if, what if it works? That really is compost. What if, what if, what if, okay, great. We've got it right away. You talk about what if this entire, um, you and I doing a cooking show?

20:53 Um, that's what it is an experiment. This could be an absolute disaster failure. I'll tell you what, I had a great time. No. No. Okay. So, first things first, which one do you want to choose? Do you want to do the brinola? Brinola. We got you, Brad. Okay, so we're going brinola multisers, chocolate, space ice cream, pop thingies, and then, um, almonds.

21:16 Simon Fills. Okay. I'm going to start chopping some stuff up in the meantime. You're going to do 101. When you're making a cookie, you got to start with fat and sugar and you paddle them together. So, I've got unsalted butter, sugar, light brown sugar, and some granulated sugar. We have to say we did not pre-bake the cookies because I literally just showed up with the ingredients.

21:37 Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. So, what was the other thing I had to add to this? Just fill three. We're going to start there. Okay. So, butter and sugar creamed together till it's nice and smooth. You got it like 101. It's all about a homogenous mixture. It's all about scraping down the sides of the bowl to get it going.

21:55 I'm very excited for that. It's very crumbly. Just keep it going. Just keep it going. It'll come together. You can. We'll do this. Ready? Yeah. You're turning up the... Yeah. Oh, we're making dough. We're making dough. All right. When I was a kid, I used to like dipping my finger in the butter and then dipping it in the sugar.

22:19 I'm going to eat it in my finger. This is honestly baking with children and watching them interact with ingredients is one of my favorite things. No, I just mean you did it as a kid because you looked at it with this... Kid kid kid kid kid kid in air quotes with this child like sensibility. Yes. Are you ready for this?

22:37 See this? This is glucose. It is a significantly less sweet inverted sugar compared to corn syrup. But we put glucose in all of our cookies at milk bar because it guarantees you're going to get a nice, dense, budgie-centered cookie. Okay. And because there's water activity in it, it guarantees that your cookie stays nice and moist and fudgy for multiple days.

23:03 I'd never tell you that. I think that the great British baking show is the greatest television on television. Did I ever tell you that? Because... Second to your show. Oh my. Second to your show. Because it's champions the spirit and the true altruistic spirit of a baking show. It's to me it's the way life should be which is we can compete again.

23:24 It's a show with winners and losers. Somebody will be declared a winner. Every day somebody's thrown off the show. It has losers and yet even though it's a competition they help each other. And that to me is the spirit of what life should be. We can compete against each other and help each other simultaneously.

23:37 They're not mutually exclusive. Also, you can just compete against yourself like that too. We don't need a loser to have a winner. No, but the fact is it is a competition in that case. Oh, so that's the ice cream sandwich. The space ice cream sandwich. I will admit I prefer the Neapolitan. I'm kind of into this.

23:54 It's going to give us a cookies and cream mold. Yeah, yeah. Got a real fun little situation happening. And then do you feel like you have a nice homogenous mixture? It feels pretty homogenous. It feels nice. You don't have any specs of... There's a lot of homogeneity going on here. Okay, great. You got to put all the dry ingredients together before you.

24:15 Oh, I fucked it up. You're fine. But I will tell you when it makes a difference in that well. You didn't mess it up, but... Shit. Also, this is fine. Thank goodness this is your kitchen. This is what I just went everywhere. It happens. Can I tell you even to this day? I'm spilling. I'm mixing. I'm dropping an egg.

24:36 It all happens. It happens. You know, let's just leave the mess. Mess is good. Mess means we're living now. Apparently, in Chinese food, if you leave a mess, it means you enjoy your meal. Highest compliment. So I am... Okay. Whoa, whoa. I'm doing it. So we want to tend... We want the cookie to be on this spectrum, which means as we out the flour, we want to mix it as little as possible.

25:03 Because the more we mix it, the closer it gets on the spectrum to bready. Oh, got it. Which is okay. So let's scrape this down. And now we're going to put our mix ins in. You want to taste some dough? Yeah. Mmm. It's good. That's good. And it is sweet. I didn't screw it up too badly. You didn't. For me, this is...

25:21 This is why I got kicked out of the kitchen. Why? This moment. Because you would stick your finger in it. If I have one bite of cookie dough, I have to like take two grown-up steps away from it now. Wait, wait. This is very tasty. And I can taste the brown sugar. It's so good. Yeah, I like brown sugar.

25:38 All right, so we're going to add some goodies. Okay. It's as much as all as you want. Well, does it all just get thrown in? Yeah. And we're going to let the half of the paddle break some of these bigger pieces down. What I love in a compost cookie. So we're putting in my leftover kettle corn pop chips.

25:57 It's going to be good. Those are tasting. Okay, this is the most exciting one of all. That's just going to be huge and chunky though. No, it'll break down. You think? There's a piece in there. Oh, do you need it? No, just eat it. So we have now put in the, and now we put in the ice cream sandwich, the, sorry, the space ice cream sandwich.

26:17 We're putting in some granola, homemade, family, granola. I think this one's going to be the reason you really like it. I think so too. Then lots of dark chocolate, very fancy dark chocolate. 85 percent. Bunch of multisers. This is a fun one because you're never this untidy about how you think about anything.

26:34 You're absolutely going on. Well, you're, you're intentional. Everybody thinks I meet neat and organized, and I know you're not even organized. It's the biggest surprise everybody has as me of me, which is a messy. I, but look at this, but you're, but you're like, this isn't how one should bake. You think baking is a certain way, and I'm like, no, no, no, it's more on three.

26:55 Let's make a mess. This is true. This is, this is true. This is free-form baking. You're like that in these other places, and that's where your brilliance comes out. Oh. This is ridiculous. So we just turn on the mixer, and it, it sounds like it's the main mixer with what's going on. It's never going to be homogenous, right?

27:13 Look at this. This is either brilliant or disgusting. I can't figure it out. It's your taste buds, babe. No, it's just the random stuff I brought from the kitchen. It's just random. Okay. To harken back to Christina's childhood, you're staring at it like it's- Look at it. But what are you staring at?

27:28 What are you staring at? Because what I see is a glob of mess. What do you see as a professional baker? What I love about it is that when I look at it, I see texture, I see color, I see flavor, and I see possibility. So I see these big pieces of malt teasers, these dark chocolate balls that I know are filled with this malted milk crunch, but some of them have broken down.

27:49 All of your popcorners have broken down into much smaller pieces, so I'm going to get a little corny. The optimism coffee is speckled throughout, which excites me. I know it's going to be bitter. You can taste it. In a way, and it's good for your taste buds. It's very hazelnutty. It's very hazelnutty.

28:02 It's very hazelnutty. But I'm not mad at that, because then you get all the nuts in the seeds from the Bernoulli, you get these chia pops and these big and small nuts that are all super earthy. And then you have these still pretty giant pieces of space ice cream. Yeah. And I love that, because they are the total wild card of how will they bake.

28:19 We have no idea. We have no clue. If they'll melt, we'll keep their shape. But you want to know what? Let's do it. We're going to scoop and bake, babe. My favorite thing about this is for the number of years you've been baking, that here I am, something is going to happen that you have no clue and you've never done.

28:32 That brings me joy. I love it. Okay. We learn together. We fail together. Like that's also the spirit of team, right? But this is why it's fun. I can't take it. We fail, we learn together. With somebody. Okay. You got a scoop, I got a scoop. So here's my thing in scooping. One, baking 101 when you're making cookies.

28:52 You want to use a cookie scoop because you want all of your cookies to be the same amount so that they bake evenly on it. I've always used a spoon and it's never worked. To use an ice cream scoop. Ice cream scoop is the best. So I'm going to do kind of an oversized scoop. I'm not. Well, then you're going on your own tray because they won't bake evenly if they aren't the same amount because they're going to go on the oven on the sheet tray for the same time.

29:14 Do we flatten them or leave them? No, I don't want to flatten them because I'm really curious. They look like giant ice cream scoops of the most random cookie dough. Yeah. You've never thought of that. I've never made cookies so easily because it's always difficult. This ice cream scoop thing is a game changer.

29:33 So I'm going to take your cookies and I'm actually going to arrange them with like two to three inches between them on the baking sheet because they will spread when they bake and you want to give them enough space. All right. You could get more on this. I know I can. I wanted to make sure you had enough.

29:48 I'm really gilded in the lily in the size of my size. You're the best. And you knew what I realized. It really doesn't matter that I make my fingers because they're going to get in the oven and fire cleans everything. You're going to be fine. Yeah. Okay. Great. We do one more in like. Ooh, I got some big popcorners.

30:02 Now, this is the ultimate. Look at the bottom of this bowl. It is just littered with great ideas and flavors. I'm actually looking the spoon. I'm looking the bowl. Okay, great. This is, this is, I know you're having a really good time because you've lost yourself in it. For me, baking is like my favorite activities in life.

30:18 Baking, going for a hike running is to like lose yourself, find yourself. Yeah. You haven't, one of you thought about the rest of life. One of you thought about what you could want to cut a shrimp. We have a giant mess of flower and cookie dough and crumbles of all types all over this prep table. My dreams and ambitions are all over the table.

30:37 You're all baking to science and I'm all baking chaos but whatever you wanted it. No, this has made me very happy. I have a renewed love or a new, a new found love of baking because I always thought it was like getting the ingredients at the right levels. So let's just go through what's in this fantastic cookie.

30:52 A bit of optimism, the compost cookie. A bit of optimism, the compost cookie. So we have flower, salt, baking soda, baking power, egg, glue coast, brown sugar, white sugar, all mixed together. Butter. Butter, lots of butter. Then the added ingredients are kettle corn, popcorn, popcorners. Dark chocolate multisers, which are multiples from England.

31:17 We have fancy dark chocolate, just a bar which we cut up. We have my optimism coffee that I collabed with Phil's, which we put in here, which is amazing. That's such good coffee. We put granola, which is the homemade granola that my brother-in-law makes. We have space ice cream, which is freeze-dried ice cream that you can buy at any science museum.

31:41 If it wasn't a part of your childhood. That's when I first discovered it and it has been in my closet ever since. All right, so we're going to take these two. My cupboard ever since. Your cupboard. 350, 8 to 10 minutes. Might are going to bake a little longer because I made really big hunks of cookie doughs.

31:57 350 to be used Fahrenheit for 8 to 10 minutes. That's it? That's it. Oh, that's easy. I like mine over cookie doughs. Well then, we'll leave them in for the same amount of time. Do you know that about me? When there's a chocolate chip cookie recipe that says 10 minutes or 20 minutes, I do 40. This is my face.

32:11 Okay. I promise to still love you even though I know that. That's against everything I believe in. It's not like, it's kind of like tea. Like, I'll drink tea however you give it to me. But if I make it myself, it's going to be a very specific color. I want to know what? It's the same cookies. Same with cookies.

32:26 Same with cookies. I like cookies however you give them to me. But if I make them myself, I'm overdoing them. I think it's the same. I think it's the space I've seen. No, you know, I can tell you what it is. I like them right before they burn that dark, dark, dark brown because everything's so caramelized.

32:38 That's why it is. It's a depth of flavor. Thank you. Come on. Is that the beer? We're making beer bread. That's Sammy Smith's. That's that? Yeah. Oh, you went and got it? Yeah, the clock here is open. Do you want an excuse to be drinking a word? No, but that's so good. I love it. That's why I was like, what would it be?

32:56 So this is important. We're about to make beer bread. Beer bread. So I discovered beer bread many years ago where it was made for me. And I asked the people who made it for me to give me the recipe and they did. I couldn't find some of the recipes. There was some sweetener in there. I couldn't find so I just started using honey.

33:10 And I used to make beer bread all the time. Then I was with you and I was like, hey, can we make beer bread? And you're like, hey, I've never made beer bread. And I was like, well, let's make beer bread because it's idiot proof and I can make it. You made one tweak to my recipe instead of flour, self-rising flour, which has been a gift because now I get a little more, because it's such a dense bread, it's a little dense now and it raises a little bit.

33:30 And I've experimented for years with so many different beers and we did that one night of beer, beers on the wall. And we discovered that the best beer for beer bread was what's it called? Samuel Smith's Organic Chocolate Stout. It's a good beer. It is a good beer and it has existence since 1758. Oh, God bless.

33:51 Can I tell you that I also, because I love to ask the question, what if like a month or two ago, just started going at not just beer bread, but stuff like, what if I put a right banana into a chocolate stout beer bread? And then I took it as far as, what if I take, what are other brews, kombucha? What if I make a kombucha beer bread?

34:11 Okay, it's going to be sweeter and a little bit more berry forward and then add some berries and my kids are obsessed with, it's not even kombucha beer bread, but what then is it? It's a kombucha bread. It's a very bougie bread. Bouchy breads. Bouchy, bougie bread. But the thing that I love about beer bread and this, and this, I probably shouldn't say this on the air because this is what I do.

34:29 But for Thanksgiving, you know, everybody brings something to Thanksgiving and I'll make one, two, or three loads of beer bread. And I come in and people like, who made the bread? I'm like, I made the bread. And people think I'm kneading dough and I'm spending all day, making beer bread is about, it's about five minutes of mixing ingredients and then putting it in the oven for about what, an hour, a little less than an hour.

34:51 That's all beer bread. It is, it is absolutely idiot proof. It's your first engineering what makes bread bread, right? It makes people, the joy that I give people thinking that I made bread and I, they don't realize it. I did it like 20 minutes before I came to Thanksgiving. And it's because you're taking all of the elements of bread making, but you're, versus engineering them in your favor, right?

35:11 So the yeast is already in the beer. It's in the beer. It's already alive and well. We don't need to wake it up. Okay, well then let me put this in the micro real quick. But I've got our salt. I've got honey if you want honey. But then I saved some room temperature salted butter over here for us to in case.

35:25 Well, I always melt it. Okay, great. So I pour it in. Great. So I'll put this together. So I'm putting the flour, which is self rising flour, into the bowl. I'm now putting the, which salt do I use? I use the salt. I put the salt into the thing and mix those together. I'm still making mass even though there's no mixed master.

35:52 Christina is melting the honey and the butter while I will add the beer very slowly. Slowly pouring the beer into the flour. How's it going, Chef? Good. Slowly adding the beer into here. Perfect. All right, I'm grabbing our cookies because they're really good. Well, they're ready done. Almost. So basically you can make a compost cookie in less time than it takes to mix a bowl.

36:27 To mix a beer bread. A bowl of beer bread. It smells so good. I know. Okay, so it's now getting, it's very gluten-y and gooey. So what should, let's add a little bit of butter. Add butter and I'm going to add, this is honey. I'm going to add the honey. So I always melt the honey in the microwave. Oh, I just did that.

36:49 She's liquid. And I do the same thing with the butter just to make it liquid to make it easier to stir in. No other reason. So adding the honey. Okay, the honey is now in. I did recently discovered silicone bread things. Oh, silicone molds are so nice because they have easy release. So easy. So easy.

37:18 All right, I'm going to give our loaf pan. And by the way, I'm a really big fan of an 8 by 4 inch loaf pan because you get a taller beer bread loaf. Now, am I going to, what am I doing to it? Can I, one can over-need bread. Can I over-stir beer bread? I think to over-stir beer bread, you'd have to be at it for seven plus minutes.

37:37 It takes seven minutes to fully develop gluten in a traditional bread recipe. So you'd have to really go at it. That's so specific. I got your back. Seven minutes. The scientists are my sweet food scientists of the world. The Harold McGee's of the world defined that for me. Seven minutes to fully produce gluten.

37:54 Once it comes together in a mass, seven minutes. Christina gave me a aluminum nine. One of these eight by three, eight by three quarter, whatever. Bread pan, loaf pan. We sprayed it with some sort of spray thing. And now I'm putting my dough into the pan. There we go. In it goes. Very gooey looking. I've made this many times.

38:31 And it's very good. I make it every Thanksgiving. Because it's easy and tasty and a crowd favorite. Okay. I'm just flattening it out a little bit for no reason. And then I'm going to add a little butter to the top. I always save a little bit extra just to add to the top. Because it makes it shiny and tasty.

39:00 And now I have to wait here patiently for Christine to come back. Because I don't know. I guess I can go back to the oven. Okay, I'll go back to the oven. All right, compost cookies. So we're going to do two things. We're going to do the magic of television. We have our actual compost cookies that we actually made.

39:16 And here they are. You want to put those over here? Yeah, I do. We actually made and we did the magic of television where you pre-bake to loaf of bread. Yeah. Because otherwise it would take too long. What do you think? We taste the bread first and our cookies have a minute to kind of cool down. Can you make me your perfect bite?

39:29 So I can taste it through your eyes. Okay, so I'm experimenting here. A nice room tempi butter. Some salt a little on top. I love salt on a little piece of bread. It's again going back to my childhood. My grandfather always put butter on his bread and always put salt on the butter. And to this day. No matter what.

39:48 Yeah, so it's somewhat tasty and somewhat nostalgic for me. Okay, cheers. Cheers. Drink. Differentia. Differentia. It's so good. It's so simple and so good. Oh, that's salt. When it comes around, like, dances on your taste buds. And that chocolate beer. The acid of that chocolate beer. You know me. I like sweet somkin but some honey on this big.

40:15 It's so good. Should we try one of our cookies? Yeah. Do you like it fresh out of the oven cookie? I do. But you like crispy. I like my cookies cool. So we've got some. This I'm very excited about. I love it. Look at look at the peaks and valleys. The texture of these cookies. So we got some thinner crispiers.

40:37 For me. Some taller gooey ears. Which one do you want to try? This one. That okay. Alright, so we're choosing one of mine. More cookie dough. Same bake time. But we've got some real goo in the center. This has got some crunch in it. Chew, right? Crunch chew. It's got all the all the all the things. Oh, it's going to be a real culinary adventure here.

41:02 Wow. For me, this is, I know you're a board by this, but there's like, there's a little inner stripe of just cookie dough. Warm cookie dough. It's not a Simon crisp. It's a Christina goo. Cheers. Mmm. Oh my god, it's a good cookie. The coffee. That works. Oh my god, I like this cookie a lot. You know, the other thing that would make this perfect.

41:27 Was that it was crunchy. Oh, I heard. Oh, there's something that's a good cookie. This is a sellable cookie. I purposefully want to sell a bit of optimism cookies in your, in your stores. You let me feel, you feel free. I have to get my brother in law to start making granola. Granola. A mass. We will give the recipe in the notes.

41:48 100%. Do your kids like to bake? My kids, each of them is different. One of them air quotes likes to bake, but she's here for the cookie dough. She's here for the Simon's in it. She's butter, sugar. She's her mother's daughter. Yeah. The other one loves to bake because he truly loves from what I can tell.

42:09 He truly loves bringing something to life. He loves the act of creation. Does will like baking or does will like eating baked goods? No, will has no interest in baking. Will has every interest in honey. Can you put one of every cookie on a plate and bring it to me the movie starting? Like this is, but you know what?

42:26 That's what makes it great. Well, it's your, I know, you see your love language. I remember I came to your house for brunch. And because I know who you are, I said, can you please make biscuits? Because I love biscuits for brunch and you're Christina Tozi. So to have your biscuits will be amazing. But because you're Christina Tozi, I expected a biscuit.

42:47 We got five different kinds of biscuits. We had ones with bacon, ones with cheese, ones with chives, ones. What up? I mean, the number of biscuits and then which is awful because then you have to eat them all and compare and you have to eat them again because you're like, I don't know. Maybe I like this was that.

43:02 That was a really rough day for you. It was a rough day. I love when people come over to my house and ask for something because to the point earlier, like that's why I love to bake. Now I know that it's your love language. But there's so much to it. Five different kinds of biscuit. I don't mean you don't get more love.

43:16 You're not questioning whether you're feeding people what they want to eat. You know you are. Yeah. And you're giving them permission to eat six different biscuits. It's so good. So here's what I've learned. I've learned that there's one thing better than baking, which is baking with friends. Well, I've learned that, do you know the whole thing about, like, Dunkin Heins cakes, the history of those?

43:41 I think it was in the 50s. They came out with powdered cakes. And all you have to do is add water and you could make a cake. And it was a failure because people were embarrassed that they didn't do anything. They didn't bake the cake. So they changed the chemistry of it and they made one difference, which is I think you add an egg.

44:00 You add egg oil and water. I add egg oil and water. They changed the chemistry. So you add water, egg, and oil. And now people could honestly say, I baked a cake because they mixed in an egg and some oil and of course it exploded. So the idea that people can bake a cake, bake something for someone as a sign of love and putting in a little effort, right?

44:20 Because with no egg and no oil that felt there's no effort. And what I'm learning from you is I've never, one of the reasons I don't bake by myself, unless I'm baking just all my cookies for myself at night, but they're easy, is because I don't want to get it wrong. And what I've learned here is it's nothing about getting it right or wrong.

44:38 It's experimentation. And to be able to say, I just put something together. I threw some ingredients and the compost cookies, perhaps the most lovable cookie in the world, because you literally can't screw it up. And some will taste better and some will taste worse and some will prefer this and some will prefer that.

44:53 But this is, this cookie is, compost cookie doesn't do justice. It's a cookie full of love. And so this was wonderful. And I got a beer bread out of the deal. And we got like, we got so many seven minutes in there. So many seven minutes. So eight minutes. We have so many eight minute blocks in there.

45:11 So many eight minutes blocks. That, yeah, you and I talked about that eight minute story. So in one of the episodes that you came on a bit of optimism, we talked about what the value of a friend was. And I told you the story that happened with my friend Maria, where she was going through a hard time.

45:29 I hadn't seen her in a while. And I met her house and I was like, how are you? She's like, I'm better now. Like, what do you mean better now? She's like, well, I had a hard week last week. I'm like, well, you had a hard week, why don't you text me? She goes, I did text you. I'm like, no, you didn't. And instead of being like sympathetic, I got mad.

45:44 Because you know, to be of service to our friends is a gift. And like, denying the gift of being in service to my friend. And she goes, I did text you. And I pulled out my phone to prove that she didn't. And it said, how are you? What are you doing? Wanna come over? And would you mean these texts? The ones that sound like every other text you send me?

45:57 How am I supposed to know that's a cry for help? And she had read this article that all somebody needs to feel not alone as eight minutes of time with a friend. And so we came up with a code, which is, do you have eight minutes? And that basically means I need you. And anybody can step out of a meeting for eight minutes.

46:14 And you're not going to solve the problem, you're not going to be there in, you know, for the hour or the hour and a half. But to make someone feel not alone for those eight minutes is everything. Somebody sent me a picture recently that they were so inspired by that story that they made hats for older friends that say eight minutes on them.

46:28 Like you're my eight minutes. You're my eight minute club. You're my eight minute club. Like you're my eight minute friend. It's not amazing. And by the way, the eight minutes can be literally making a comp. Can you literally make a comp as cookie? Literally, it takes eight minutes. And so you and I have talked about this before, but you and I are and have been eight minute friends to each other.

46:44 And I am very grateful for that. Through the years. The feeling is mutual. Best. Oh, all right, let's just go eat. Can we just go eat everything now? I've been staring at these the whole time. There are a set that you actually made, but I want to eat them all. You go bars, gretas. They're all gooey. Why don't we cut and have the whole crew come eat?

47:09 A bit of optimism is brought to you by the optimism company and is lovingly produced by our team, Lindsey Garbinius, David Ja and Devon Johnson. If I was able to give you any kind of insight or some inspiration or made you smile, please subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts for more. And if you're trying to get answers to a problem at work or want to advance a dream, maybe I can help.

47:34 Simply go to Simonsonic.com. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.