Recipe takeover: Rebecca Firkser
Two exclusive recipes from Rebecca’s forthcoming cookbook Galette!, a day in her life, and what ingredient home cooks aren’t using enough
There are certain ideas so sharp, so utterly right, you can’t help wishing they originated from your private musings. Galette!, the forthcoming cookbook from Rebecca Firkser, is a perfect example of a singular ode to the endlessly adaptable, gorgeously imperfect pastry that plays both sweet and savory, rustic and refined.
Rebecca is a Brooklyn-based food writer, recipe developer, and stylist, with a gift for making seasonal cooking feel both creative and accessible. Formerly an editor at Food52, she’s the mind behind Nickel & Dine, which celebrates budget-friendly recipes that never skimp on flavor. Her work has appeared in Bon Appétit, TASTE, Epicurious, Eater, The Kitchn, and The Strategist.
This week, I made my way back to the States having spent the autumn and winter in the UK. Joy of all joys, I’m currently waking at 3:30am each morning - any tips for jet lag? While I ease back into things (and finalize some very exciting projects for this newsletter), I’m handing the reins to Rebecca Firkser. Here she shares not one, but two exclusive recipes from her forthcoming book, Galette!, both flavor-forward, quietly brilliant, and generous in spirit. We also tag along for a day in her life, from the first cup of coffee to the final bedtime scroll, with plenty of kitchen moments in between.
This is a rather long post, so if your email cuts out, you can view it in full on the website or app.
Sarah: I’m rather nosey, so could you describe a day in your life right now, with timestamps?
Rebecca: OK, so I have a lot of jobs, and every day can look very different—I'm going to talk you through a "work from home" day:
6:45am: Wake up, brush teeth, drink water.
7am: Work out—I love Kara Duval's online movement platform Range. I pick a class from her archive to do in the morning before the day gets too hectic.
7:45am: Set up the drip coffee to brew while I shower. Every morning I steam milk (whole, cow) in my little Nespresso frother for coffee and it makes the whole experience feel very luxe.
8am: Drink my first cup of coffee while I reply to any "urgent" emails I may have missed from the day before.
9am: Drink another cup of coffee while tackling any writing that requires depth. I bang out some work on drafts for my newsletter Nickel & Dine, as well as for freelance projects I'm working on for other outlets. I eat breakfast sometime in this window as well, today it was a smoothie recipe I'm developing for the newsletter.
11am: This morning I prepped galette dough for a little pop-up I'm doing at Rude Mouth.
12pm: More calls/emails—I've been communicating with a lot of folks about promoting Galette!, so while this isn't usually a part of my work routine, book promo organization has made up a large portion of my workdays the past couple of months.
1:30pm: I get most of my groceries delivered for freelance recipe development and testing and/or shooting and styling my own content. This saves time (thank goodness for Fresh Direct!), but if there's anything specific I need to shop myself, I'll do that first, then get into the kitchen for a few hours. Today I'm testing a pasta salad recipe for my newsletter (that will also be lunch), and another for a digital media website. I’ll also make the filling for tomorrow's galettes.
5pm: I will try to make sense of the notes I took while cooking through the recipe tests and make adjustments to the documents I'm working in. Then I’ll tackle more emails and other writing work that requires less voice (at this point, I'm pretty useless in terms of being quippy).
7pm: Dinner is another recipe test (this happens a lot); then I eat dinner with my partner, Ben, if he's around.
8:30: Ben does the dinner dishes(!) while I sprawl out on the couch and melt my brain on social media. Afterwards, we typically watch a show (very into The Studio right now!), and then I try to get into bed by 10.
Sarah: Your cookbook Galette is such a dreamy concept. What can readers expect from it?
Rebecca: Thank you!! Readers can, unsurprisingly, expect a deep-dive into galettes. I tried to get into the nitty gritty without going intimidatingly technical. It's a book for bakers of all levels, with recipes that never skimp on flavor. I submitted the book proposal to the publisher in April 2023, and filed the manuscript just under a year later (we shot the photos last April). I turned around copy edits last summer, and we worked on design and final edits from fall into winter. Writing recipe headnotes is basically second nature for me at this point, so the writing came quite easily (once I was through the bulk of research, of course). A big challenge for a single subject book like this is to keep the topic interesting—even though it's galette after galette, I constantly asked myself how I could make the content feel well-paced and varied.
Fun fact: I also did the food styling for the photoshoot myself, which was a huge challenge. For those who don't know, on most food photoshoots, there is a food stylist on set, as opposed to the recipe developer who is solely there to cook and make sure all edible things look good on camera. A cookbook author is typically on set as more of a creative director, making sure the whole shot feels right—as opposed to being in food stylist-mode, like adjusting crumbs on a plate that aren't falling naturally. I feel really happy with how the food looks in the photos, but would I do that again if I someday write another book? Maybe not!
Sarah: Now that sounds like an incredible amount of work! Alright, let’s talk pantry. If someone was just starting to build up a kitchen from scratch, what five pantry staples would you recommend they buy first and why?
Rebecca: Narrowing it down to five is SO hard. But I'd say:
Olive oil - just about everything I cook incorporates some fat, and my fat of choice is olive oil for its flavor and versatility. I use it for salad dressing, sauteing, roasting, and oftentimes in baking too.
Onion/garlic/scallion - alliums of some kind are wildly important when it comes to flavoring food. They'll immediately take something from mellow to layered, and they're really multifaceted; chopped raw onion sprinkled over something before serving is going to be sharp and pungent and so different from sweet sliced onion that's caramelized for an hour.
Pasta or rice - either forms the most quick-cooking, filling, and affordable base to a meal. I always have a few boxes of pasta and a 5-pound bag of rice in the pantry.
Lemons - whether I'm zesting, juicing, or chopping up the whole thing, lemon adds a floral brightness to sweet and savory dishes in a way no other acidic ingredient can compete with.
Canned beans or tinned fish - canned ingredients are always there when you need them, and that's especially nice for protein, which can get expensive and take extra cooking time. A tin of beans or fish can literally be opened and eaten—or it takes very minimal effort to jazz them up. Honestly, for a great meal: saute onion/garlic in olive oil, toss in cooked pasta and a can of white beans or tin of sardines, finish with lemon zest and juice—there's all five!
Okay, I'm going to add one more and hope you'll permit it: salt! A Good Table readers will already know this, but many home cooks don't cook with as much salt as they need in order to properly season food. I use Diamond Crystal kosher salt for cooking and flaky sea salt for finishing.
Sarah: What are your three favorite bakeries in NYC, and what to order? And while we’re at it, your top three go-to dinner spots? I’m stealing all your recs!
Rebecca: Radio Bakery—I go to the Greenpoint location to buy loaves of seeded whole wheat sourdough that I keep in my freezer, but you also have to get a tuna sandwich, or the rhubarb croissant if it's in season.
Hani's—the owners, Miro and Shilpa Uskokovic, are absolutely lovely and so wildly talented. Once I went to brunch at their home and they made fresh rolls in a countertop steam oven for little egg sandwiches. Phenomenal! I love Hani's Triple Chocolate Chunk cookie.
Elbow Bread—led by Zoë Kanan, who I feel very lucky to have met back in 2018 or so, when we both had very different jobs. It's hard for me to not get one of everything at Elbow, but I think the Philly Fluff Marble Cake and Schmaltz Scallion Knot are my favorites. I also like to get a loaf of Black Bread to go.
For dinner, my top three: Superiority Burger, Bernie's, and Cafe China.
Sarah: You’ve worn many hats across food media - cook, recipe developer, editor, writer. Has there been a moment in your career that felt like a turning point, or a piece you’ve worked on that’s felt especially meaningful?
Rebecca: I've been working formally in food media for 10 years at this point - very short compared to some, but also much more than others. In that time I've had a couple of "big breaks," but mostly feel like it's an uphill battle to stay relevant in such a saturated industry. Hopefully right now is a real turning point! Who knows how formally successful Galette! will be, but writing a book *is* a really big achievement, and I'm proud of it.
Sarah: You SHOULD feel proud - it’s such a huge accomplishment! What’s inspiring you lately, food-wise or otherwise?
Rebecca: I just got back from a trip in Portugal—I found it incredibly inspiring to get out of the New York bubble and eat in a few new cities! It was citrus season and I lost count of how many perfect oranges/glasses of fresh juice I had over the week.
I'm also constantly inspired by and in awe of Nicola Lamb's deep-dives into baked goods! Her newsletter Kitchen Projects is one of my favorites.
Sarah: Love Nicola! We are living in wild times! Where do you see food media going in the next few years?
Rebecca: For the past few years we've seen food media splinter off from the hierarchical system of working up the ladder to get bylines in legacy media publications, and watched those who started creating their own content on social media become wildly successful. I think we'll continue to see folks put energy into their own content, be it newsletters, self-produced video, zines, and probably other things that aren't even on my radar yet.
Sarah: Agreed. Power to the people! What about social media, how do you utilize it to stay inspired whilst avoiding content fatigue?
Rebecca: It's really difficult to find a balance of what's "enough" time on social media. Unlike full-time content creators, a lot of my work happens off social media, or behind the scenes of other platforms' social content, so I'm not on it constantly. I watch a lot of it for entertainment-slash-inspiration, and it's always interesting to see what's successful for some creators versus others. I honestly think my favorite part of social media has been the ability to connect with other folks in the industry and then actually meet them out in the real world. I've made a few really good friends this way!
Sarah: Finally, top 3 cookbooks you reach for, right now?
Rebecca: I am constantly inspired by different cookbooks! I'll share the three books I cooked from most recently: Salt Sugar MSG by Calvin Eng and Phoebe Melnick, By Heart by Hailee Catalano, and Cafe Cecila by Max Rocha.
Galette! is out on June 10th. Pre-order here.
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