The Grain Pioneer
Alice Medrich
Author and blogger | Berkeley, California
Pastry chef and teacher Alice Medrich popularized the chocolate truffle in the U.S. in the mid-1970s, and was one of the first people to sell cake by the slice. In her tenth cookbook, Flavor Flours: A New Way to Bake with Teff, Buckwheat, Sorghum, Other Whole & Ancient Grains, Nuts & Non-Wheat Flours (Artisan Books), Alice offers a collection of gluten-free recipes that feature non-wheat varieties of flour as the hero ingredient.
Flavor Flours breaks the mold in gluten-free baking by celebrating non-traditional flours, where many before her simply used them to fill the gap left by wheat. “There was a time 40 years ago when the flourless chocolate cake was becoming the next big thing, and Julia Child used to joke, ‘Why are we naming a dish for what isn’t in it instead of what is in it?” says Alice, who was a guest on Child’s PBS series Baking with Julia. “Then Julia went on to joke about the Tuna-Free Chocolate Cake. I like to think that Flavor Flours is a book about what is in the recipes, not what is missing from them.”
What she’s up to now: Alice is either teaching cooking classes across the country, promoting her book, Flavor Flours, or consulting for established baking companies.
The Pita Master
Angel Osbey
Shaya | New Orleans, Louisiana
There was a time when you may not have been able to leave New Orleans without grabbing a beignet. Now that Angel Osbey is making pita bread, you won’t leave the Crescent City without a piece (or stack) of Angel’s pillowy, pliable pita perfection. This is the fluffiest flatbread known to man. All of Angel’s homemade, wood-fired creations bring a distinct deliciousness to the menus of Shaya, Domenica, and Pizza Domenica—all restaurants that are part of the John Besh group that helped transform and diversify New Orleans’ culinary scene—but it is Angel’s pita that has developed a cult following among bakers, chefs, and food lovers nationwide.
Pita is crucial to the modern Israeli cuisine of Shaya, where Executive Chef Alon Shaya, who was named the 2015 James Beard Best Chef South, handpicked Angel to bake the bread of his birthplace. Angel has never been to the Middle East, but this bread tastes like a dear family recipe she’s been baking for decades. After graduating in 2010 from Café Reconcile, a non-profit that gives at-risk youth culinary training, Angel began an internship as a prep cook at Domenica. She’s now been with the company for six years. “Passion,” says Angel, when asked what makes her pita so unparalleled. “I put a lot of love into it.”
The Paleo Pâtissier
Jenni Hulet
Author and blogger | Dallas, Texas
Jenni Hulet, the voice behind The Urban Poser and author of My Paleo Patisserie, didn’t choose to pull all dairy and grains from her diet. In early 2011, the yoga instructor and active mom was suddenly incapacitated by excruciating muscle pains all over her body—the result of severe food sensitivities. A lover of cooking, baking, and entertaining, Jenni was forced to reevaluate her family’s lifestyle—until one long-shot gluten-free baking experiment. “It was the first thing I’d baked in a year and I used to bake so much,” Jenni says. “It was like, ‘I can bake again! Oh my goodness!’” So began her journey into the world of gluten- and dairy-free baking.
She longed for the artisan approach to baking and complex flavors that she once loved, so that’s what she painstakingly recreated, through multiple rounds of trial and error. Now, Jenni’s blog and cookbook are filled with sophisticated baking recipes tailored for people who suffer from food intolerances. These are no simple flourless brownies. With striking photography and bakery-level recipes for treats of all kinds, My Paleo Patisserie (Victory Belt Publishing, 2015) and The Urban Poser give people who live a gluten-free or paleo lifestyle the chance to enjoy food and baking with gusto, despite food allergies. She’s blazing one tasty trail.
What she’s up to now: Jenni is a certified 500-hour yoga instructor and dedicates her time to helping others eat well and live vibrantly through her recipes on whole 30 and 21-day sugar detox. If she’s not doing that, odds are she’s behind the lens of her camera, photographing and styling her latest food creations.
