The Secret Ingredient: Coconut Oil
A conversation with Alicia Kennedy
I’ve been following Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter and work since she started her Substack four years ago, so I knew her writing voice well, but hadn’t had the opportunity to speak with her until this interview. In person, her energy gushes forth and it all makes sense, that this is a person who might start a micro-bakery on top of a full-time job and then make up her own job through independent writing, but I appreciate that most of this interview is about how she’s found stability and balance, whether that’s emotional balance, professional balance or balance between ethical food sourcing and the constraints of her life.
I also appreciate that she straight-up says she’s not a creative cook. I think we have to take that with a grain of sea salt, since there’s a lot of creativity in simple dishes, but it reminded me that there are so many ways to approach the kitchen and different types of joy to be found in it. Alicia doesn’t love recipe development; I do, or rather, I become obsessed with a new idea and literally cannot sleep until I’ve made it over and over again to my liking (once I’ve done that, it bores me, and I don’t make it again for a year). But there’s something to be said for simple food made well, whose value is in its sustenance and quality rather than novelty.
Anyway, let’s hear about coconut oil, which I also love in vegan baking. When I asked Alicia which vegan baking cookbook she recommended, she said A New Way to Bake, by Philip Khoury, so that’s going on my wishlist.
I don't think I'm a very creative cook. I think I'm just good at it. There are so many people doing so many interesting flavors and stuff, and I love that for them. I don't love it for me. I like peanut butter and chocolate together and almonds and salt; the things I like are very, very banal, flavor-wise.
So it was hard for me to think about [my secret ingredient] because I’m such a simple, basic ingredient person. But something I use strategically is coconut oil. I just get the virgin coconut oil at Costco, but I used to go through it like nuts, I used so much coconut oil. I had this vegan bakery for a year on Long Island from 2012 to 2013, and the thing that I was doing differently from other vegan bakers was that I was making this vegan baking fat from coconut oil and coconut milk. I read that European butter has 80% saturated fat to 20% milk solids, and so I did that ratio with coconut oil and coconut milk and it worked. And it kept working in everything I wanted to use it in, which was weird. And people liked it, especially when I was using refined coconut oil, because it let the flavor be the flavor. Like in a chocolate chip cookie, there wouldn't be that buttery note to it. It’s sort of neutral, it has a lot of fat vibe and mouthfeel without having any flavor to it, so it let the other flavors sing.
My inspiration was reading Lagusta Yearwood’s blog, when she had this really intense blog called Resistance Is Fertile. I was obsessed. I’d read it literally 10 hours a day. I was a copy editor at New York Magazine at the time and I was losing my mind. [Starting the bakery] happened sort of incidentally, where I was doing all this experimentation at home with vegan baking just to have something to do with my hands. Then I started to bring stuff to people to taste and they’d be like, Hey, can you make my husband's birthday cake? Can you make 200 cupcakes? or, Hey, I know this organic grocer, and they became a regular client. None of it was ever really making money, it was just a hobby to keep myself from losing my mind. I was in a commissary kitchen run by Stony Brook University and it sucked ass because I was working full-time and I could only get the 10pm to 2am shift. So I'd be at work all day, prep all this stuff at home, and then bring it there to try and do two farmers’ markets-worth of baked goods in four freaking hours, which is obviously impossible.
Kate: Was there anything you liked about it?
Everything. I loved everything about it. Everything about it was totally unsustainable but I loved doing it. I loved getting up at five in the morning and going to the farmers’ market and setting up. I loved doing the vegan shop-up at Pine Box Rock Shop. The bakery also gave me a lot of the tools that I use now to manage different tasks. It was a trial by fire, learning how to manage not just a business, but also the kitchen and time management and all of this stuff that I still use in my life without even thinking about it. Like I made lasagna last week, just casually in the course of the other things I’m doing, I’ll make ricotta from scratch, make a pasta dough. The things I can manage to do within the confines of a regular day are very weird to other people, but it's because I learned them through the bakery.
So now cooking is my hobby again, even though I'm a professional food writer, because I don't really do recipe development. I frankly fucking hate recipe development, absolutely despise it. It's so against everything I find pleasurable about food and cooking and being in the kitchen. I switched it out of my newsletter, and now I make a lot more recipes out of cookbooks, but I can use what I've learned from recipe development and being a baker to give people guidance. My capacity to be useful when it comes to cooking is that I'll try something a few times, and I'll be like, This helped me or I preferred it this way. Testing things that other people have done is more useful for my skill set than trying to be creative as a cook.
When I was doing the press tour for No Meat Required, people were constantly like, “You could have written a cookbook,” and I’m like, “Where did you get this information? I just tried to sell a cookbook and it didn't work.” But it was instructive for me to hear what other people think when they hear “food writer.” It felt like the product I was supposed to give people as a food writer, especially as a plant-based food writer, was vegan recipes. But that’s not how I want people to know me as a writer. I want to be an essayist. So I constantly had this tension with it, where I felt obligated to do it more than I felt like it was an expression of my real creativity.
K: So if it’s not the creativity part, what is it that you love about cooking?
I just love being in the kitchen. It’s meditative. Or when it's not meditative, that’s instructive to me about where I am personally. Like when things get fucked up and I see how I react, it’s like a mirror for myself, for my emotions. And I like the productivity aspect of it. I always feel weird saying that because people have this weird relationship to productivity or efficiency, but I freaking love doing things efficiently. And there’s some satisfaction in the fact that, like, I'll make a very simple meal of beans and tortillas. But I did make that tortilla from scratch (I use coconut oil in tortillas along with olive or grapeseed. That’s honestly how I use it most often now.) and I flavored those beans even if they were from a can, because I really don't have time or interest in cooking beans.
What is the real difference between cooking canned beans and dried beans? Especially when we're talking about water usage, or energy usage on the stove. Personally I don’t get a lot of satisfaction out of cooking beans unless it’s a very specific type of thing for a specific recipe. Plus, a lot of the good bean people don't ship to Puerto Rico, so I’d be making Goya dried beans anyway. So, I’m gonna cut out some effort there.
K: I actually wanted to ask you about how approach sourcing, since I know you care about it a lot. Does that cause you stress in the kitchen?
I care a lot about where things come from, but I stopped caring so much that it would be a burden on me. Simply out of necessity, financial necessity, time necessity. I've written a lot about going to Costco, where we stock up on basics like dry goods and oils. Am I positive that these are the most sustainable oils? They have Vita Coco coconut milk right now, which I think is pretty good based on my minimal research. They don’t use monkey labor, which is the big concern with coconut milk.
I obviously care about sourcing, but what that really means is that everything I can buy from people who are growing or processing it in Puerto Rico, I do. All of our produce and fruit is local. I get local beans when they’re available and I love them, the white beans are really good and fresh. I get walnuts because they're grown in the U.S. and I know that they don't use as much water as other nuts. What makes sourcing doable for me is the simplicity of how I do pantry cooking. I’m not worried about having six different kinds of nuts, I don’t need them. If I have a variety of fermented hot sauces that makes my life better, but nuts, I don't really give a shit about. By keeping everything very simple, that makes the sourcing easier.
What I’m Cooking
Breakfast bao, with tofu-scallion or tomato-egg filling
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