Family Heirlooms Made Mine: An Introduction
It was November 16, 2001. The house was dark and it was an unseasonably warm day in Denver, where we were living at the time. It was two months after September 11, when the world felt unstable and strange. My grandfather had passed away in the morning, and while I was mourning his loss, I received a letter informing me that I was being laid off from my marketing job at a big corporation. My husband, Chad, had lost his job weeks before. I sat alone on the kitchen floor, resting my head on my knees, anxious and worried about the future. Then I stood up, pulled out jars of flour and sugar, and started baking. Since childhood, this is how I have calmed myself. Later that evening, sharing a piece of the marble cake I had made, I said to Chad, “I really think I want to pursue this.” As always, he nodded.
I called my parents the following morning. My hands were shaking. Even though I was twenty-seven, married, and living half a world away, I was afraid they would be disappointed with my decision and that they would remind me of all the money they had spent on my education or ask me why I had never shown any interest in our family’s pastry business. Of course, they didn’t say either. They were surprised but understood that I was to find my own path in my own time, as I’d always been one to go against the grain. A few short weeks later, we moved to Florida and I enrolled in culinary school.
I am a fourth-generation baker. My family says it all started with my great-great-uncle, Julian Mugida, who worked as a baker and store manager at Martina de Zuricalday in Bilbao, in the Basque Country in northern Spain. When my grandfather Angel Ayarza turned fourteen, Julian secured an apprenticeship for him. He excelled and worked at Martina de Zuricalday until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out. At sixteen, Angel was sent to war. We know very little about this time. He worked as a radio operator and spoke to me, just once, about a stormy night of battle where he witnessed tremendous death. After that night, my grandfather could not bear nights of wind and thunder. No one knows much about his years immediately after the war, but he married my grandmother, Miren Gaztelu, in 1946 after being introduced by one of his aunts, and they settled in Amorebieta. My mother was born shortly after and another seven children followed. In early 1949, while working at a local factory making vacuum cleaners, my grandfather decided to lease a small storefront and adjacent workshop on Luis Urrengoetxea, number 11. He opened a bakery called Pastelería Ayarza that September. The family slept in a small room next to the workshop. He taught my grandmother everything he knew. She prepped for him during the day while also tending to the children. Sometime in the late 1950s, my grandfather quit the factory job and dedicated his life to the pastry shop. They bought a flat right above it and moved in. We called this flat “upstairs” and the pastry shop “downstairs.”
I grew up across the street from the pastry shop and my grandparents’ flat. I often waved at my grandmother from my bedroom window. The pastry shop was our world. My mother worked front of the house along with my uncles and aunts. I spent my time there before and after school. On weekends, I delivered pastries all around town on foot and helped my grandmother peel fruit, fill brioche with buttercream, or glaze shortbread cookies. The pastry shop was always warm--literally and figuratively. It was a gathering place for friends, relatives, or anyone who needed a place to rest and converse. I remember my grandmother stepping outside the shop to greet strangers and familiar faces, always with her apron on.
I was encouraged to study and to be curious. From the age of eleven, my parents enrolled me in foreign exchange programs and I traveled all over Europe and the United States. They wanted to show me there was a vast world outside of our small town of Amorebieta. I studied business and economics in university, and in 1998 I moved to the US. I married my American boyfriend and found work in the corporate world. Those years were marked by a secret eating disorder, anxiety, and disconnection from my own path and self. All along, I baked. I baked to feel connected to my family and I baked to find purpose. On that unseasonably warm day in November 2001, everything changed.
My professional career in pastry was short lived, but it was tremendously educational and intense. I learned and worked under some of the best pastry chefs in the US, most of them European men. I worked from dawn till dusk; sometimes from dusk till dawn. I went to school in the morning, then headed to one of the several restaurants where I worked during the evening. Once I graduated from culinary school, I landed a job at a five-star hotel. I continued to work my way up the ladder. I was consumed by the work, and the pastry team became my family. But in 2006, when Chad and I started a family, I left the professional kitchen. At the time, raising children and my life as a pastry chef felt incompatible. Eventually I began creating and sharing recipes on my blog,
Cannelle et Vanille. It became a vehicle to channel my creativity and my love for pastry. I began experimenting with photography and taught myself about light and composition, always with the goal of creating an emotional response in my readers. I realized that a recipe could be so much more than a mere list of ingredients and steps--it was a tool for the creative expression I had longed for.
I come from a close-knit family of pastry chefs but developed my own career trajectory on a different continent. My uncles, aunts, and cousins have carried on my grandparents’ torch. Their spirit is always with me and we maintain a strong connection through our shared memories. My goal has always been to mesh the world of traditional pastry with the new horizons of alternative baking. To take the knowledge I was given and honor my family, yet transform the recipes through my filter and experiences with gluten intolerance. And with this, it is my hope, dear reader, that the recipes in this book will become part of your life. Share them with your family, with your neighbors, and create heirlooms to pass along to those you love.
How to Use This Book
This book is divided into six chapters, each one organized by type of baked good. Please take a moment to read the sidebars sprinkled throughout as they include important information about ingredients, processes, and substitutions.
A note about simple. In my mind, simple doesn’t always mean quick or short recipes. Sometimes simplicity requires understanding why we do what we do. So even if a recipe is longer, know that I wrote it in a detailed way so you understand the goal of every step. Some recipes are in fact fairly easy to make, like the Chocolate Sourdough Cake with Chocolate Glaze, Herb and Cheddar Scones, and Quick Crusty Boule. Other recipes require time to ferment or set but aren’t inherently complex, such as Sourdough Boules, Chocolate-Olive Oil Babkas, or Lemon Meringue Tartlets.
All the recipes in this book are gluten-free and also offer dairy-free options. As I get older, I have noticed that my tolerance for dairy has decreased. My son has a casein intolerance, which has forced me to make most of what we eat at home without using cow’s milk products. There are so many great products available these days that it is easy to substitute non-dairy ingredients.
If gluten is not an issue for you, you can use all-purpose wheat flour in place of the total weight of the gluten-free flours and starches in many of my recipes. This works well for cakes, tarts, and cookies. For example, if a recipe calls for 140 grams of superfine brown rice flour, 100 grams of sorghum, and 60 grams of tapioca starch, you can use 300 grams of all-purpose wheat flour instead. Remember that gluten is a very elastic protein though, so the texture might be slightly different. However, wheat flour substitution won’t work for the yeast breads, which were formulated to use psyllium and flaxseed as an alternative to gluten.
Copyright © 2021 by Aran Goyoaga. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
