Tartine Isn't What It Used to Be, and Neither Are We

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I have only been to the original San Francisco location of Tartine once, a dozen years ago. And yet I have returned to Tartine many, many times. I have returned for the almost-too-intense brownies, the cherry clafoutis, and, every December for a decade, for the bûche de noël. Of course, these visits were made not to Tartine but to Tartine, the cookbook, which I bought 48 hours after visiting the brick-and-mortar.

The cookbook wasn’t my only option to eat recreations of Tartine’s food; as soon as the book was released, Tartine’s food was everywhere. I remember being served sublime, sugar-topped rectangles of shortbread at a small restaurant in Chicago, and being told later (by the pastry chef herself) that it was the Tartine recipe, straight up, no adjustments. That’s the extent of the influence that Tartine has had on pastry and bread in this country: not only do restaurants and bakeries openly copy them, they don’t even try to make it better.

Tartine is an exacting book (it includes metric measures, a move that was not very common in 2006), and if the recipes included aren’t the exact recipes they used in the bakery, well, they’re pretty damn close. But, since it’s a book, Tartine is static, where Tartine the bakery is fluid; one is necessarily stuck in 2006, the other has evolved.

So a couple of weeks ago, Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson released a new version of Tartine. Not merely updated with a new introduction and a few fixed typos, Tartine: A Classic Revisited has 68 new recipes, and 55 of the old recipes have been updated to be less sweet, more complex, or both. Many more alternative flours have been incorporated into the book (einkorn flour pops up again and again), and there’s a lot of matcha in these pages now. Some of the original recipes remain largely untouched, but every page has a new photograph by LA photographers Gentl + Hyers.

Technically, this revised version is unnecessary, because the old book works perfectly (and it doesn’t really look that out of date). But Tartine hasn’t gained influence by keeping quiet about the way they do things. The books, particularly Tartine Bread, could have merely been aspirational, but they’re just too actionable. The recipes work, and they inspire. (How many people do you know who have gone through a sourdough-at-home phase thanks to Tartine? I’ve personally lost count.)

The new Tartine nods to a simple but somewhat unexplored reality: every home cook changes. What we wanted to bake last year is not the same as what we want to bake now. Our palates change. We get bored. If we’re being proactive, we push ourselves to cook new things, new ways, with new ingredients. But sometimes we need a push. Right now for me that push is coming from two famous bakers who could have easily cashed out by now, could have retired, but are instead clearly still in the kitchen, trying new things.

I had never baked with einkorn flour until this book landed on my desk a few weeks ago. The einkorn-rye shortbread in the new Tartine—a riff on the same shortbread I ate in that restaurant in Chicago—changed that. The method was familiar (get the butter to a mayonnaise-like consistency; chill the shortbread after it cooks or you’ll never be able to slice it), but the result was definitely different. More bite in the texture. More earth in the flavor. It did not taste like the shortbread I’ve made a million times from the original Tartine, and that’s how I knew it was right.

Whole Grain Shortbread with Einkorn and Rye Flour

Originally Appeared on Epicurious