Give Me Some Sugar: Sonya Jones →

Who: Sonya Jones
Where: Sweet Auburn Bread Co., 234 Auburn Ave NE, Atlanta, GA

When asked to name her favorite dessert, Sonya Jones, pastry chef and owner of Sweet Auburn Bread Co. in Atlanta, has a hard time. “That’s like choosing between your children!” she says, laughing. But slowly it emerges that—though she loves her buttermilk–lemon chess pies, sweet potato–molasses muffins, and pecan brownies—she does have a clear preference. “Growing up, there was always cake in the cupboard, and it was usually pound cake. I remember the old women on our street who would make it. I love seeing pound cake come out of the oven.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Lauren Mitterer →

Who: Lauren Mitterer
Where: WildFlour Pastry, 73 Spring Street, Charleston, SC

When pastry chef Lauren Mitterer opened Charleston’s WildFlour Pastry in 2009, she set out to make a big impact with a small shop. She offered handmade baked goods for every occasion, from Sunday-morning sticky buns to fancy wedding cakes. “My vision for WildFlour was to create a place that people could come to, be part of the community, and really connect with one another through baking.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Christina Tosi

Who: Christina Tosi
Where: Momofuku Milk Bar (Five locations in New York City)

You may know Christina Tosi for her whimsical, sugary creations like cereal milk (think the dregs of the cereal bowl in drinkable or soft-serve ice cream form), compost cookies, and crack pie—all of which she makes as pastry chef for New York City’s Momofuku Milk Bar. What you may not know is that Tosi is a Southern gal at heart. “I grew up in Virginia and have family in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Ohio. Living, cooking, and eating within the region, with a waste not-want not mentality; celebrating tradition and what’s around you on the breakfast, lunch, or dinner table—that was the spirit of my family’s upbringing.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Lisa White →

Who: Lisa White
Where: Domenica, 123 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA

When Lisa White has a bad day, she makes bread. “It’s so simple—flour, water, salt, and yeast—but it’s magical,” she says. “You don’t know if it’s going to turn out, but when it does, it’s so awesome. It hits people on all levels—you can smell it walking down the street.”

She speaks from experience: Bread is what prompted her to change careers and become a pastry chef. “In March of 2008, I took a personal pilgrimage to France. While walking the isolated trails of the Camino of Santiago de Compostela, I was drawn into the village bakeries by the smell of bread baking. It’s then that I remembered what I had always wanted to do.” Three months later, White had enrolled in culinary school to become a pastry chef.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Stella Parks →

 Who: Stella Parks

Where: Table Three Ten, 310 W. Short Street, Lexington, KY

In a kitchen drawer at Table Three Ten in Lexington, Kentucky, pastry chef Stella Parks keeps a set of plastic measuring spoons that her parents gave her when she was 8. “I dug them up recently at my folks’ house and decided to take them to work. It’s a nice sense of coming full circle.”

But Parks, a Kentucky native, didn’t always know that professional baking would be her path. Though she’d baked since she was little and started working in restaurants as a teenager, she always thought she’d write books. When it came time to pursue a college degree, though, she reconsidered. “I knew I didn’t have a personality suited to teaching, or to journalism, or to whatever other English-major-y jobs I could think of. I knew I liked working in restaurants, working with my hands and on my feet. Then I started researching culinary schools, thinking I could work in food service and write on the side.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Cheryl Day →

Who: Cheryl Day

Where: Back in the Day Bakery, 2403 Bull Street, Savannah, GA

According to her family, Cheryl Day’s first sentence was, “Are you having a good time?” That says a lot about her personality, but it says just as much about her baking, which for her is about connecting to other people and having fun. “My approach to baking has always been one person baking for another,” she says. “I realized that baking for others would be my path once I starting thinking about what work I could do that I was truly passionate about.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Phoebe Lawless →

Who: Phoebe Lawless
Where:  Scratch Bakery, 111 Orange Street, Durham, NC

“I consider myself more of a baker than a pastry chef,” says Phoebe Lawless, owner and chef at Scratch Bakeryin Durham, North Carolina. Having had my fair share of her desserts—her Shaker Lemon pie, fluffy buttermilk biscuits, and signature doughnut-muffins—I’d say this is not a qualitative statement, but an explanation of her approach, which she calls “pretty pragmatic,” and “homey and delicious rather than perfect and gorgeous.”

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Pi(e) R Squared Revolution is Round

Story and Photographs by Emily Hilliard and Lora Smith

LORA:  I wasn’t sure what I thought about Emily when I first met her. She's smart, witty, a great baker, has an extensive knowledge of avant-garde artists, wears vintage dresses over brightly colored tights with covetableboots, is always coming or going from an adventure, knits a mean scarf, can play guitar, fiddle, and sing.

I briefly considered hating her.

But that quickly changed over a pot of hot apple butter. After a trip to pick apples in the mountains, Emily invited me over to help put up them up. It wasn’t the best batch of apple butter that either of us have made, but it didn’t matter. As we peeled and cored the apples, grated ginger, fumbled in the spice cabinet to find anise, clove and cinnamon, and measured sugar, Emily’s tiny and modestly outfitted graduate student kitchen in downtown Carborro, North Carolina expanded to hold layers of memory, time and stories. By the time we were ready to jar, the butter wasn’t as thick as we’d hoped, but our friendship had found a perfect set.

EMILY: That first food project set the tone for the rest of our friendship. Though we’ve since hiked mountains in Kentucky, stumbled through clogging lessons together, and spent many-a-night out at the bar (but not too many, mind you!), the times I think we’ve felt the closest, shared the most secrets, hopes, and future plans, is in the kitchen—preparing, enjoying, and sharing food.

Read on in Zenchilada