Book 3: Milk Bar, 2011

Alt text: The cover is dominated by a pink, neon sign-like text that reads "Milk". Underneath and left-justified is the title in white lettering. The author's name appears to the bottom right. This is all against a background photo of what looks to be a city building at dawn or dusk.

Image courtesy of the Milk Bar Store website.

Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi; David Chang (Foreword by)Call Number: TX773 .T6684ISBN: 9780307720498Publication Date: 2011-10-25

“The highly anticipated complement to the New York Times bestselling Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar reveals the recipes for the innovative, addictive cookies, pies, cakes, ice creams, and more from the wildly popular Milk Bar bakery. Momofuku Milk Bar shares the recipes for Christina Tosi's fantastic desserts--the now-legendary riffs on childhood flavors and down-home classics (all essentially derived from ten mother recipes)--along with the compelling narrative of the unlikely beginnings of this quirky bakery's success. It all started one day when Momofuku founder David Chang asked Christina to make a dessert for dinner that night. Just like that, the pastry program at Momofuku began. Christina's playful desserts, including the compost cookie, a chunky chocolate-chip cookie studded with crunchy salty pretzels and coffee grounds; the crack pie, a sugary-buttery confection as craveable as the name implies; the cereal milk ice cream, made from everyone's favorite part of a nutritious breakfast--the milk at the bottom of a bowl of cereal; and the easy layer cakes that forgo fancy frosting in favor of unfinished edges that hint at the yumminess inside helped the restaurants earn praise from the New York Times and the Michelin Guide and led to the opening of Milk Bar, which now draws fans from around the country and the world. With all the recipes for the bakery's most beloved desserts--along with ones for savory baked goods that take a page from Chang's Asian-flavored cuisine, such as Kimchi Croissants with Blue Cheese--and 100 color photographs, Momofuku Milk Bar makes baking irresistible off-beat treats at home both foolproof and fun.”

When I was a culinary student, Christina Tosi was everything I wanted to be when I thought about my future career as chef. For many of us, she represents a truly American style of cuisine that consists of cake, cookies, bars, and ice cream. Her recipes are sweet, buttery, indulgent, and unctuous with items like cereal milk ice cream, classic birthday funfetti birthday cake, cornmeal cookies, and Milk Bar pie on the menu. This book exemplifies what I want in a cookbook- photographs, replicable recipes, good instruction, and things you’d both want to bake and eat!

What we love:

• It is uniquely American, similar to Edna. These books serve as examples of what American cuisine is at its best.
• Modern day desserts that people actually would want to bake, unlike Ammelia where her recipes, especially her pastries, are more inaccessible to a modern palate.
• Just like Edna, every recipe is formulated for a modern American kitchen. Recipes can be easily replicated.
• Beautiful color photography. Being able to correlate what we bake to a picture is so helpful.
• Christina Tosi is a prolific chef who has a large internet and TV presence. Unlike Amelia, we know so much about her and how her Midwestern White American childhood influences her baking and this book.
• The physical size of the book is large. It’s nice to hold, especially when actively baking.
• Recipes are provided in metric. Christina is a culinary school trained chef, I trust these recipes. This raises an issue that many cookbooks face—errata! The recipes are tried, tested, and replicable. While this might seem obvious, not every cookbook is of great quality.
• Her humor shines through in the directions and anecdotes. I like being able to feel a chef’s personality in a book. Similar to Edna Lewis, we get to read a narrative through recipes.
• The cover is beautiful and is very much displayable on a bookshelf.
• Tosi is unapologetic. An example of this is that she proudly uses clear imitation vanilla extract to recreate a boxed cake mix flavor. This is an affront to many chefs but I love that she gives us permission to use such an ingredient.
• To a lesser extent, this book also serves as an ethnographic study of Christina Tosi. She is White, female, raised middle class from the Midwest and her praxis and palate as a chef are explicitly influenced by this in her writing.

Things to keep in mind:

• Tosi is strongly associated with David Chang and the Momofuku Milk brand, who has been accused of serious workplace abuse, and backlash for trying to trademark chili crunch. Tosi has not commented publicly on David Chang at the time of this writing (April 2024).
• Why mention this? As a former pastry chef, who has been on the receiving end of workplace abuse, I find it hard to separate my experience from this book and other chefs like Anthony Bourdain or Gordon Ramsey. For these reasons, I actually don’t often cook from this or frequent Milk Bar. There are dozens of other recipes that I could use while still being inspired by Christina.
• Even though the book was released in 2011, many of the recipes in my opinion are already starting to become “outdated”. With the NYC food scene in constant evolution, something like cereal milk seems kitschy and not as fun or exciting as when it first appeared on the scene. Would someone in 2024 still find this interesting? What about in the year 2034 or even 2064?
• Its cover is aesthetically pleasing, but doesn’t really clue us in that this is a book of pastry recipes, unlike Edna’s evocative cover that makes us feel and helps us to understand what type of book we're holding.
• Tosi includes a recipe that is controversially entitled “crack pie”, but later changed the name to Milk Bar pie due to a warranted and reasonable public outcry. An article from the Washington Post captures these feelings:

“The name was a reference to crack cocaine — the gag being that the pie was just as addictive as the drug. But an increasing chorus of critics have pointed out that the name makes light of a serious drug epidemic, and one that had an outsize impact on the African American community. The callousness with which people throw around the word “crack” isn’t the same with other drugs. We don’t call any desserts “opioid pie,” even though those drugs, which claim predominantly white lives, are highly addictive, too.”

• • A pastry should make us feel good. It’s certainly not healthy, but that’s not why we would eat Milk Bar pie. Therefore, a person should be able to eat such an item without any kind of negative feeling.

What I recommend you make:

The birthday cake! I’ve had it many times. It really is what you want in a celebratory cake: sweet, buttery, moist, clean layers, delicious as separate components.

Other Resources:

What is exciting about Christina Tosi is how popular she is. She has a lot of output in terms of content like videos and writing. I have linked her TED Talk below, as well as an op-ed she wrote. Additionally, I've included a New York Times article about Tosi and Milk Bar. This is a great contrast to Ammelia Simmons, who we know almost nothing about, and Edna Lewis, who is difficult to find in archival video recordings.

My Secret to Creating Real Magic | Christina Tosi | TED

Milk Bar's Christina Tosi: What Failing Has Taught Me | TIME

For Christina Tosi, Building a Dessert Empire Is Not All Milk and Cookies - The New York Times