ALEXANDRA STAFFORD IS A food writer, cooking teacher, and author of the fabulous cookbook, Bread Toast Crumbs, my copy of which is nearly always open on our kitchen counter, since one of us is almost always baking her famous bread. And why not? It’s no-knead, it’s perfect and the book is full of that recipe and numerous other wonders. Ali is the perfect person to ask for advice on how to become a food writer, or on how to make any of your talents or passions into a multi-platform life.
Marion: Welcome Ali.
Ali: Thank you. Thank you for having me Marion.
Marion: I’m delighted that you’re here. I am such a huge fan. My whole family, we’re just all mega fans. So let’s just dial this back a little bit. And I have this theory that the entire pathology of any person, of any family can be traced back to the kitchen. Some of us have bounty and plenty. Some barely got fed. Parents who cook, parents who don’t cook. Grandmothers, who taught us to bake. Some of us had grandmothers who taught us to mix martinis, but never baked. And so the stories are endless. So set this up for us in terms of what you witnessed at home growing up that carried you into this beautiful career as a food writer.
Ali: Well, my mother loved to cook and her sister loved to cook. And my memory is of being in the kitchen, and listening to them just talk recipes on the phone all the time. And there was never a day when there wasn’t like a bowl of bread with a towel over it, either in the oven (that’s where my mom would let bread rise), or on the counter. My mom always had not a huge selection of cookbooks, but I think before cookbooks were really time, she had a pretty extensive library of cookbooks and always available in the kitchen.
So she’s Greek, she’s a 100% Greek, not from Greece. She loved cooking all kinds of food, but I feel like I grew up … She would make spanakopita and tiropitas and we would always have a big Greek salad. And yeah, I did grow up in a household where people loved to cook.
Marion: It helps. There’s a lot of story that comes out of that, but you also attended cooking school in Philadelphia and then spent five years working in catering and restaurant kitchens in and around the city of Philadelphia. And you spent two years at the great restaurant Fork and ultimately became a sous-chef there. So your culinary education is solid and in place. So give us some advice to anyone aspiring to be a food writer, how and where to go to get a solid basis for this work? Outside of our own family kitchens, where it may start, then what do we need to become a food writer in terms of that culinary education?
Ali: Sure. Yeah. I don’t think you necessarily need to do all of those things. You don’t need go to cooking school. You don’t necessarily need to work in a restaurant. I think it helps to have some of those experiences so you have a reference point. I remember as soon as I started working in a restaurant kitchen; first it was a catering company kitchen. I realized, “Oh gosh, I didn’t really learn much in cooking school in terms of what applies to what I’m doing now in that kitchen.” But looking back, I was so happy to have had the experience of going to culinary school, just to see what you do learn in culinary school.
And the particular school that I was going to, their goal was to get these kids into good jobs with benefits, and that was interesting to me. I was really more interested in what are the fun, new dishes that restaurants are cooking, and how do we make these fun appetizers? I was more interested in the creative and the cooking side. And I wasn’t really learning that in cooking school, and in the catering company and the restaurant we were. That was really inspiring and fun to me. I also learned in restaurant kitchens that it became … I wanted to work in kitchens because I thought one day I would love to open up a restaurant, not right away, but after several years I was like, “This is not for me.” One, it’s really hard. Two, it’s not even so much about the food. It’s about making sure people show up on time, making sure the towel delivery arrives on time. It’s all these moving pieces. It’s not just about cooking delicious food and making the guests happy.
So I think if you want to write about food, and I guess it really depends–there’s so many different ways to write about food. You don’t have to have any of those experiences. You can just write purely about your family or just whatever you’re doing, but it helps to have stories around the food. And I don’t feel like I’m ever just writing about the food. It’s always the story around the food.
Marion: Yeah, you do it beautifully. I love food memoir. I grew up reading A.J. Liebling, MFK Fisher, the astonishing Laurie Colwin.
Ali: Oh, I love her.
Marion: I know, Laurie Colwin is a goddess.
Ali: She is so funny.
Marion: She’s so funny and she makes domestic life, the richest territory for story of anyone I’ve ever read. Yeah, she really does. So you open up your cookbook, Bread Toast Crumbs with a beautiful little piece of memoir. How comfortable were you writing that? And of course, I’m dying to know if we can expect more memoir from you as you write.
Ali: The original recipe of Bread Toast Crumbs, it’s my mother’s recipe. And it’s this no-knead bread recipe that you bake in buttered Pyrex bowls. It’s very simple. The dough you mixed together in five minutes, it’s an hour and a half rise, punch it down, put it in the bowls, another 20-minute rise and then you bake it. It’s very, very simple. And it was my mother’s like really cherished and treasured recipe that she really shared with nobody for so many years. And I convinced her to let me share the recipe on my blog. And I think this was 2012, so that was not comfortable initially. So by the time I wrote the book, the main bread recipe was already out in the world, so that wasn’t hard to share. I had to have a couple of conversations with my mom about sharing her recipe. That was the one recipe that I was really not allowed to share on my blog.
Marion: And so you did.
Ali: I did, and I got her permission before I did. It took a lot of convincing. And part of it was, was that, I remember when Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe came out and Mark Bittman wrote about it in the Times. And everybody went crazy, and I loved it, too. I wrote about it on my blog. I was like, “This is amazing.” And then I remember when the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day books came out and I was like, “This is so much fun.” And I remember, I think the title of that when that came out in the Times was, “Soon, the Bread Will be Baking Itself,” and all along I thought, “My mom’s recipe is just as good as these and it’s just as simple, but it’s still different.” And I love all of those bread recipes. And I just thought, “Gosh, like people could really use this bread.” And I was like, “Mom, you just… So many people, they need to know how easy it can be.” And she finally, it was like, “Just go for it. It’s fine.”
So I had had the post drafted, I think we hung up the phone and I hit publish. And she was like, “Well, that was fast.” So it’s a different generation, my generation. And I think even it’s the younger generations, they’re so comfortable sharing everything, but she still came from a generation where they’re doing dinner parties. And this is the star recipe for dinner party. That was her kind of signature. So I think it was hard to let go of that in some ways.
Marion: I think it’s a wonderful story. And so these days we’ve got this wonderful book, which we’re going to talk more about in a second. But these days, if someone’s looking you up while they’re listening to this, they’re going to see that you teach online. I’ve attended a number of your cooking classes and they’re delightful, but you didn’t start there as you just told us. And for someone who has some expertise, perhaps in cooking or perhaps in something else that might make a lovely life, including online writing a book, a blog, some online instruction. It can just seem overwhelming. So is that where you started? Did you start with a blog?
Ali: I did. I started my blog in 2006 and I had just finished working. I had left Fork and I thought, “What am I going to do?” And there was a newspaper in Philadelphia. It’s gone out of business since, it was called The Bulletin. It used to be called The Evening Bulletin like a million years ago. Then a man brought it back. It lasted for only about a year, but I knew that it was around. I walked in and I said, “Do you need a food editor?” And he was like, “Sure.” And I had no idea what I was doing. My favorite day of the week always, for as long as I can remember, was Wednesday. When the Wednesday New York Times came out, I would go to the news, stand by it just for the food section. I loved seeing the big photos and I loved seeing what the recipes were and the stories.
And that’s all I wanted to do was write recipes and put a little story with it, but it was a tiny space. So I found myself with all this extra material and that’s really why I started the blog. It was sort of just to have a place while I was in Philadelphia to record all of the things I was finding, the restaurants I was finding. And I had a lot too, when I was working in the restaurant, I just didn’t have time to write down and record because I was so busy, but I had the head chef of the restaurant was this Vietnamese man named Tien. And we would go on our bikes all the time to Chinatown and just all different adventures. And we were eating in all of these different places. And I finally had a kind of a space where I could … and I finally had some time to write all these things down.
So that’s how it started. I didn’t have any agenda when I started. I didn’t really care if anybody read it. You never posted something and then put it on Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest and hoped to drive traffic. It was just a journal, essentially.
Marion: That’s fascinating. Then one day you on this blog, you put this bread recipe up and I make this bread. My husband makes this bread, our daughter and her partner make this bread. My sister makes this bread. Honestly, I have now lost track of how many people I’ve told about this one-quart Pyrex bowl bread. And I interviewed a year or so ago, interviewed Zoe Francois here, with her five-minute artisanal bread, and I know the history with the Mark Bittman and the bread. And yet this bread of yours, it got a lot of hits when you first put the recipe on … Well, and continues to do so with the recipe online. And it would have been really easy to write a little book that just repeated that success. In other words, it just was that small book about that bread recipe. But instead you wrote Bread Toast Crumbs, and it isn’t just about breaking bread, even in the jacket copy, it states definitively, that it’s not. It’s about what to do with the slices and heels and nubs from the many loaves you’ll bake.
So set this up for the listeners. How did you decide to go that route? In other words, that’s a really very specific branding thing that you decided to do. The title doesn’t even have commas between Bread Toast Crumbs. It’s this continuum and I love it. And I think it’s brilliant, but I don’t suspect it came to you overnight that, that’s where to go from a blog post that went viral to a book that says, let’s use every scrap of this bread. So walk us through that thinking a little bit, please.
Ali: Sure. So I think part of it was … So when I published that bread recipe, people were making it immediately, but right away, people had problems still. Bread is just tricky. I felt like I had anticipated every question, writing the recipe in grams so that people would measure everything, accurately. Anticipated all the things, but still people … Sometimes it was just because people didn’t have the right size bowls. So it didn’t look like the photos and they thought they were doing something wrong. So I found myself baking and baking and baking more bread, as I was troubleshooting with people and trying to answer their questions and figure out what was going on. And then I found myself with all these loaves of bread on hand and I thought, “Oh, boy. What am I going to do with all these loaves of bread?”
I had always, of course, made toast and sandwiches with the leftover bread, but all of a sudden I found myself like whizzing the heels in the food processor so that I could have the breadcrumbs. And it was kind of this whole other world that I had not really explored before. And I was doing a lot of cooking with the breadcrumbs and finding recipes to use. I remember finding a breadcrumb salsa recipe, and I thought, “Who would ever make salsa out of breadcrumbs?” but it’s delicious. So I think also at that point of blogging, I had seen a number of other bloggers make the step to writing a book. And I thought, “Maybe that’s something I would love to do, too.”
My blog wasn’t big enough, I didn’t have a big enough audience to write the Alexandra’s Kitchen Cookbook, and everything I read about, if you want to write a book, it should be pretty specific. It should be very targeted. So I just kind of had this idea, this kind of like loaf-to-crumb, nose-to-tail breadmaking book; it hadn’t been done. And I thought it would be helpful for people who are doing a lot of baking to have these recipes for what to do with the loaves of bread. That was the thinking behind that.
Marion: It reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine, briefly opens a company and she’s just selling the tops of the muffins but then she realizes she has this terrible problem of what to do with the bottoms. And she has like thousands of muffin bottoms she can’t dispose of. I’m picturing you amid all these loaves going, “Oh, no.”
Ali: Totally. And my freezer was stocked. At this point, we didn’t have a freestanding freezer. So it was just stuffed with plastic bags of bread crumbs.
Marion: Yeah. That’s great. This is what’s so great. I think a lot of people think that this book writing thing is something that sort of descends from the gods through the muses, into your head. And it’s like, “No. I had no more room for bread in my apartment or my house.” And so back to this idea of cookbooks; my favorite bedtime reading is cookbooks. I’m not even sure why, but nothing makes me happier than climbing into bed with a mug of Sleepytime tea and a good cookbook. It’s my idea of utter perfection, but I’m not a professional cook, and cookbooks to you are going to be a very different beast. I have read that you have a 500-book cookbook collection. So when a cook climbs into bed or doesn’t in your case, maybe., with a cookbook, is this work or pleasure reading? And what’s the thinking behind you’re collecting? What made you collect those particular 500 books?
Ali: Yeah. Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. I have to say right now, more recently it’s pleasure. There was a period when … And I was writing a column for Food52 Weekly for a little bit over a year, and maybe a couple of years sort of on and off. But there’s a period where I had a weekly column and I really felt like I needed inspiration. So I was just constantly sifting through cookbooks because to kind of find things that weren’t … If it’s online, then it’s online, it’s already there, it’s out there. And chances are, people have seen it in some form. So having books was really helpful, and having a lot of books was really helpful because I could always find some recipe that wasn’t known, or something that would be relevant.
I was writing a lot about produce and how to use an overload of cabbage. If you have a CSA, like what to do with an overload of carrots, all those kinds of things. So I needed a lot of inspiration and that got really hard. Honestly, one reason why I stopped writing was because it was so hard to write about food without having a story behind it. It was just really challenging. Now, when I’m not doing that column, I’m not really cranking out blog posts at the rate that I once was doing. Also, part of my collection of cookbooks has to do with … When I was writing my cookbook, my publisher would just send me books all the time. I think I was just on the list and books would just show up at my door. And now that it’s been almost four years since I’ve written a book, books aren’t arriving at the same rate. The pace of collection has slowed down a little bit, but it’s still very big. And I do still find myself buying books. I have neighbors who love to cook, and I let them borrow them. And sometimes I never see them again, but I have more than enough to go around. So it’s fine.
Marion: Sure. So just sticking with this idea of cookbooks. I grew up with the cookbooks that had little or no photography, and some illustrations perhaps, but usually it was of the really weird stuff, like the aspic. Like, “I’m not making that.” But it was never of the grilled-cheese sandwich. It was never of the toast or the croutons like you have. So how important is it these days for a food writer to get comfortable with the camera, with video and the like? You do a really nice job with it, but I think that’s part of the deal these days, if you want to be a food writer.
Ali: I know. And it’s kind of unfortunate. I think it’s a really fine balance, because I have come across blogs, where the photography looks so perfect. It looks like it’s out of Martha Stewart and I’m almost right away, like wary of it. I’m like, “Is the recipe going to be good, because the food looks so perfectly styled. It can’t be.” And sometimes I come across like an old Italian grandmother’s blog, and it’s just like terrible lighting and bad photos, but step-by-step in her kitchen. And you know that like these meatballs are going to be totally delicious, because you just trust. So I think it’s, if you have good photography, Pinterest is a big driver of traffic. Your chances of being discovered and people finding you are going to be better, if you have better photography, because people will share your stuff. Like, “This is beautiful.”
So it’s kind of unfortunate, because it doesn’t necessarily mean that the content, the recipe itself is going to be good or that the writing is necessarily going to be good. But it’s kind of an unfortunate part of the food-blogging process is that, they want the step-by-step photos. People are becoming more visual; they expect it. Video, too, more and more. At this point, I’m kind of used to it. Every year, there’s something else that you’re expected to do, but I hate for somebody to be deterred by that. You can take pretty decent photos with a good camera and with some basic editing. And I think what it comes down to, they’re not going to follow you, unless they’re a photographer, they’re not really going to follow you for the photography, they’re going to follow you for what you are writing and for your recipes.
Marion: Mm-hmm. Well, I think it’s worth noting that you’re on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, you have a blog, but let’s just talk about YouTube. On YouTube, you have a distinctive brand. I mean, your cookware looks like mine. It’s used, it’s got that baked-on edge. I’m so glad. I’m so wary of people who have perfect kitchens. You have this very distinctive spotting around the edges of your Dutch oven. And I love that. And in some lessons, I hear kids playing piano in the background. You don’t show us your face, except for in that intro video, it’s all about your hands and the work. So break down for us a little bit, how important it is for you to decide who you are in full, as you move forward as a cook. Does showing the public who you are and displaying these experiences online… I feel very like I’m in the kitchen with you and that we’re friends because your cookware is not perfect. And we could not be friends if your cookware was perfect. Sorry.
Ali: No, well, that’s nice to hear, because I think video is very helpful for people to see, and that is one reason why I wanted to do more video. And it really started from Instagram Stories. I was doing videos on Stories and I got a good response but the problem is with Instagram is, it’s just kind of a waste. It doesn’t drive traffic to the blog. Not that, that’s all I’m focused on, but it sort of feels like a little bit of a waste of time. Now, I’ve upgraded to a better phone so that it takes high enough quality video that I can … If I do an Instagram story, I then can also use the same material for YouTube. And YouTube is, this is kind of getting too technical, but YouTube is a search engine. People aren’t searching Instagram for recipes, but people do search YouTube for recipes. So it could potentially, make people find my blog.
I am not somebody who loves being in front of the camera at all. When I started blogging, I never was like, “I’m going to be an influencer.” I hate that word. I’m very uncomfortable with … I could never imagine being in front of the camera. And again, if people do sponsored content, I think that’s great. You have to do what you have to do, writing a blog costs money, and you have to earn money. I’m just not comfortable really selling anybody on anything but the recipe, and trying to teach them. So I wasn’t really sure how that was going to work with YouTube, because YouTube is very much a personality. People follow people on YouTube for the personality. And that’s really not … I don’t ever speak in any of the videos except for that one intro video. So they’re not really getting me, but I guess they’re getting a sense of how I cook, my family. I guess maybe a little bit, because I’m not there, they get a sense of who I am as a person.
Marion: I think it comes across very clearly and it fascinated me, quite honestly to watch it. So let’s just talk about how we do this. Professionally, you’re a cook, baker, writer, teacher. You’re also a daughter, wife, mother, and probably inevitably many other things that we don’t know about. So let’s talk about time, and how to manage it as a person who works from home for herself, who clearly has ambition to deliver the best product you can. So long before anyone makes their mark as a food writer, they’re going to have to get that culinary education a little bit, whatever that is as we discussed. But they’re also going to have to find and make the time to do so. So what does your work-life look like? Everybody teases me. I live on a grid, we call it. Now it’s really just an electronic calendar, but it used to be up on my wall. And every single thing I do is gridded out. So you’re testing recipes, you’re writing, you’re filming, you’re teaching. How does it break down and how do you marshal the time to be this person?
Ali: I do also have a planner. I have my weekly planner. I like the calendar view. I like looking at it, like a month and at a time as opposed to a week.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Ali: And I don’t have a strict editorial calendar. I am not somebody who plans. Some bloggers, they have six months or three months of content planned in advance. I am still every week. I might not publish anything this week. I might publish something next week. I really don’t… I’m not very good about having a schedule like that, but there’s certain days of the week where, the kids are at school. They get off the bus at 1:30. So I have that time from when they get on the bus to 1:30, that I know I have to use that time. I don’t schedule anything else during that time. It’s my time to either cook and photograph and take some videos, or to write. I can write better in the morning. That’s when I try to write.
Something I always keep in mind, though, and this is something that my husband told me, and this was something he learned when … So he was in the Marine Corps for a few years, and something that his commanding officer said to him one time. And I think this guy had something like six children, and he said, and sorry to be crass. But he said, “When I get home, I don’t have five seconds to scratch my ass.” And he said, “You have to make use of the scraps of time.” And that always stuck with me. And it’s just, you really do. There are moments throughout the day. So I always have my laptop out. I always have my Google docs out. I have like a note, sort of like an anecdote page, where I just can write thoughts.
And this can be when the coffee is brewing, when the toast is toasting, when the car is running, like there are little scraps of time throughout the day. And if you can make use of those scraps of time, you really can get more done. And I feel like I actually valued that even more when I was really, really writing the book. My husband would say, “Go to the library for five to six hours on the weekend.” And I would go, so I would finally have this big chunk of uninterrupted time. And I feel like I would work for an hour to two. And then it was time to go get a grilled cheese at Gershon’s, and an hour later I would come back. And of course, it was so nice having that big chunk of time, but there is only so much you can really get done when you have a huge chunk of time, too.
Marion: Yeah. Well, I kind of love that. You have to make use of the scraps of time. It’s so much like the theory behind your cookbook. I mean, we have to make use of the crumbs. And honestly, we now make bread crumbs, we now make croutons. We now make things around the leftover bread we’re anticipating, from the loaf that we haven’t made yet. There’s a whole new way of looking at the world because of your mother’s bread recipe. Oh, I love it. Well, I can talk to you all day, but I can’t. Thank you, Allie. This is a joy. Really, a pleasure to talk to you. And I’m looking forward to my next cooking lesson with you coming up very soon. And I hope that there’s another book, or I look forward to whatever it is you decide to create next. Thank you so much.
Ali: Oh, thank you so much. This was so much fun.
Marion: The author is Ali Stafford. Author of the essential cookbook, Bread Toast Crumbs. See more on her, at Alexandracooks dot com. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe, wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overitstudios.com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lauren Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit Marion Roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening.
Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.
Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.
Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.
How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.
And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the 2022 Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.
