The Secret Ingredient: Flour

"Whenever flour is involved is when you start seriously affecting the materiality of other ingredients"

Nico Fonseca is a good friend and the Montreal-based creator of a variety of food installations including the In the Mouth series — a fantastical dinner party that weaves together participants’ own stories and memories of food. Since the pandemic, he’s been living a few hours outside of the city with his partner Patrice, a ‘seedsman’ who grows and sells seeds for a living.

Our conversation about flour felt timely, since I just got Joshua McFadden’s new cookbook Grains for Every Season and have been experimenting a lot with grains myself. I bought a huge bag of rye flour from the farmer’s market that I want to use while it’s still fresh and substituting half or even more of the AP flour in any recipe has turned out beautifully, creating much more interesting flavors. Just wait — I’m convinced that grains are the new beans and we’ll be seeing a lot of attention to grain sourcing and quality in the next year.

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Nico: Being on a farm that produces so much food for the past few years, I was like, What is my ingredient? It's mostly seasonal, like I'll trip out completely on tomatoes or zucchini or other stuff. It's almost like trying choose a child you know? I like them all equally because they have different scents and perfumes and textures and there are all the different things you can turn them into…but if I had to single one out it would be flour. It comes down to my own awakening, to how I felt passionate about cooking when I was a preteen.

I feel like whenever flour is involved is when you start seriously affecting the materiality of other ingredients. As soon as flour comes in then you can be baking, or sometimes it's a bit liminal, between cooking and baking. It's where you start getting into transformations, when all of a sudden a vegetable can be part of a cake or transformed into something that’s a bit creamier and softer. You need a bit of flour to go into this soufflé or it can become a tart, or you can go into the whole world of pasta. I find there's a sense of playing creativity. I guess the same could be said of sugar to an extent but I think flour is the most playful one, because you can veer into so many directions texturally.

Kate: Yeah, I guess flour is the most transformative, because it always ends up being different from what you started with.

N: Yes, exactly. Flour just zigzags in so many ways. It connects most to that sense of fun and awakening. Baking is probably the big gateway drug to cooking when you’re really young, because desserts are so flashy and they’re sweet, you’re into them.

K: It’s a funny way to think of it though. Because I think a lot of people who aren’t in the kitchen as kids end up cooking because they have to eat dinner. But they’re very intimidated by flour —

N: — in all its forms. I think you’re right, they’re afraid of baking, afraid of pasta. Like the fear of pie crust is one of the most rampant fears that I hear. Pie crust is super easy to whip together, you just mash it up with your fingers and you can make it with olive oil, you can make it with butter, but people are like, No way.

K: So what do you think about the baking/cooking dichotomy?

N: You know, for me, my interest in food started with baking. And I've always been attracted to recipes that are liminal. Like Beef Wellington or like — the French have a lot of savory cakes, like cheddar and broccoli, or zucchini and a bunch of spices. We'll call it a cake, but it's almost in its own category [see: Cakes Salés]. So I'm attracted to those kind of in-between recipes. One thing I really enjoyed doing when I was 14 or 15 was these pies that had spinach and cheese and bell pepper, then some ham and some eggs and all layered, so it was beautiful.

I think I got attracted to that from my paternal grandparents, northern Portugal, which is where there's a lot of very strange charcuterie. At Easter, they always made Bola de Carne, which are these really intricate, very difficult-to-make brioche type of batters with a bunch of different meats in them. There were the ones where you had to roll the spicy meat in them but you had to do it in a specific way so that the batter rose in the center and didn’t stick into a raw ball. Because brioche is so finicky, you can’t just treat it any which way. There was another one that had these big pieces of bacon and stuff like that. I remember spending summers in Portugal and my grandma would always save some of it in the freezer, because she would only make it once a year. And just being mesmerized by that, a savory cake that had as much meat as you would have in a hearty breakfast, but in a cake that's still kind of sweet. Sometimes it even had a sugar crust that was hard on top. So yeah, I’ve always been attracted to that liminal baking-cooking.

K: Do you have any thoughts about the types of flour that you use?

N: One of the advantages of living out in the country is that there's a few mills out there. And there's a lot of younger farmers who are starting to grow grain again, and mills that know how to treat them. One thing that I found out in the last two years is that most of the flour we buy in supermarkets is dead, it's been on shelves for a long, long time, for years. And when you start working with more local flours, their shelf life is a lot shorter.

K: They turn rancid?

N: It’s not that they turn rancid, it’s that they’re still alive. The good flours still have active agents in them. I don't know how to say this, but after a certain point they go stale, not rancid. Most commercial flours are actually stale. They're super old. So I started experimenting with different kinds of flours and different grains.

K: And do you see a difference in the food?

N: Completely. In the raise and the density and the taste. Even wheat flour, if it’s local and not so old, it just makes everything taste so much better.

K: What have you been cooking lately?

N: I just started entertaining again. I made an amazing beetroot and chocolate cake a few weeks ago that was just out of this world. It's fun to play again. And then when flour comes in, it's like okay, now we're gonna really try something.

When I started making a living for food, I got a lot less creative at home. One of the things I always enjoyed most was hosting dinners, that sense of ease that comes with putting something out there and trying things and having fun with it. And I think that's something that I had lost. It crept up during these past two COVID years, I was like, that's something I miss even more than the professional practice.

K: How did you balance professional projects, like having some sense of play but still being able to produce something pretty consistent?

N: Well, I had easy in the sense that I was paid to play. Which can’t be said when you're a chef or a restaurant. The economic reality behind what I do is not profit margins on each plate. I sell a concept and I manage to have a budget to play. Whereas the reality in restaurants is that your bottom line is always there and you have to be careful.

I’ve also always valued formal training in terms of food making. Like I’m a great home cook. I love cooking at home, where you have all the time you need and if something doesn't work out, you can just do it again. And you just get into your own headspace, which is not the reality when you're a professional cook. Being able to be fast and make a huge amount of food in a short period of time, I don’t have that skill. I can do it, but never as well as somebody with formal training. So I’ve never tried to do that part myself, I’ve always seeked out people I knew could veer into something creative, but that had that skill and that expertise. And that's where the whole collaboration is fun.

K: So what are you excited about now?

N: I’ve started to cook again. In the last few years, like pre-Covid, I was very busy and as soon as I came home I started to lose interest in food. So I ate a lot of yogurt and hummus. I entertained less as well. But lately it's been a lot more like play. Just having a vegetable and trying to find something inspiring and relevant that I feel excited to make with it. I don’t know what my practice is going to look like in the future. But I'm really happy that I'm going through a phase of experimentation and being interested in different types of ingredients. I’ll see how that’s going to inform this next phase that's going to happen. I’ll be able to make a choice soon. I just don't know what it's going to be.

What I’m cooking

Lentil pancakes with coconut & turmeric (v, gf)

These savory pancakes pack a lot of spices and flavor into a pretty simple lentil and coconut base. They could be a fun alternative to veggie burgers, if you wanted to put them in a bun with sautéed or caramelized onions and some kind of nice sauce, or mayo and chutney, or any pickled Indian condiments. They’re a little dry and crumbly by themselves, so some kind of sauce is good, even if it’s just yogurt. We had some parsley and cilantro that were getting limp, so I blended it up with olive oil, lemon and salt. You can do the same with most herbs you have.

Recipes go out on Fridays for paid subscribers:

Lentil pancakes with coconut & turmeric (v, gf)