Tartine’s Elisabeth Prueitt, Beyond the Pastry Case

But this, her second cookbook, is stocked with recipes that don’t adhere to her public identity as a pastry chef. Seem destined to refashion her as a champion for the kind of thoroughly modern home cook who fears neither fermentation nor alternative grains. There’s cornbread in Tartine All Day , but it’s made with millet flour and masa harina, and a sauerkraut method that calls for a five-day fermentation.

But for Prueitt, it simply became an excuse to do what she does best. “I like finding new ways of doing things,” she explains. “I’ll think of the classic thing, but how to change that thing.” Since 2002, Prueitt has been best known as the co-owner, with her husband, the bread baker Chad Robertson, of Tartine, a tiny San Francisco bakery of outsize acclaim. Some of those salads appear in Tartine All Day, which, as its title points to, caters to the home cook’s needs from morning until night, with a bumper crop of recipes that manage to be both imaginative and deeply practical at the same time. Prueitt began working on the book after Tartine’s planned (and highly publicized) tie-up with Blue Bottle Coffee fell through in late 2015; as a way to cope with her disappointment, she had began preparation at home “to change gears,” she states, and realized that the food she was making for her family, and developing for the Manufactory, could lend itself to a cookbook project.

It was her first since the 2006 Tartine , which she cowrote with Robertson. “I’d been wanting to write another book,” she says. Take Prueitt’s potato gratin: On first glance, it’s the same orgiastic union of starch and fat as any other potato gratin.

But look closer and it contains the instruction to simmer the potatoes with milk. Cream before baking the gratin in the oven; the step, Prueitt explains, catalyzes the preparation process and ensures even baking. She’s a force of nature.” Prueitt, who grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and studied acting. Photojournalism before enrolling at the Culinary Institute of America, was actually the face of Tartine back when it was just a producers’ marketplace stall. “My job was to do the selling and to bring our products to the stores,” she states. “Chad never wanted anything to do with that.

Prueitt stepped away from Tartine for the next several years to take care of Archer and in the process founded a nonprofit organization to fund a summer camp for kids with disabilities. “It speaks to her obsessiveness and incredible vision that she could step away for so many years and [the bakery] would still hum along perfectly,” explains Nosrat. “You got a sense of Liz’s presence almost by her absence. When Prueitt was writing Tartine All Day , Instagram was a springboard for ideas; the site, she explains, “is sort of where I enjoy having an audience, and sometimes that would just inspire me to make and create.

I like the performance aspect of it.” She has no qualms about posting recipes to share with her 33,000 followers; instead, she finds it gratifying, an extension of her own appreciation “when creative people are open about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it,” Prueitt states. For the make-ahead mix, assemble a quadruple batch of the dry elements and store in an airtight jar at room temperature for up 3 months.

When you are ready to cook the pancakes, measure out 1 heaping cup/130g of the mix and place in a large bowl. Stir the egg, butter or olive oil, and milk together in a small bowl, add to the flour mixture, and mix with as few stirs as you need to get it all combined. Potato gratins are often baked entirely in the oven, but by first simmering the sliced potatoes on the stovetop in milk and cream, the starch is activated and this jump-starts the preparation process, ensuring an evenly baked gratin and offering you the opportunity to adjust the seasoning before it goes in the oven.

To make ahead, use 1/2 cup more liquid than when you serve it straight out of the oven. Prepare a 3-qt gratin dish by rubbing the inside surface first with the cut garlic and then coating with the butter. Add the potatoes, milk, cream, garlic, nutmeg, and salt to the pot with the cooked leek or onion and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Once at a boil, decrease the heat to medium and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring continuously. Scatter the cheese evenly over the top of the gratin. (The unbaked, assembled gratin can be covered. Refrigerated for up to 2 days or tightly wrapped and frozen for up to 3 months.) Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the cheese on top is nicely browned and bubbling.