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Fruit Is Expensive and It Should Be
Nicole Rucker shows us some of the best ways to enjoy it
For years, Nicole Rucker has been a hometown hero of the Los Angeles pastry scene, working as the pastry chef at Gjelina Take Away and Gjusta Bakery, winning four separate awards at KCRW’s 2012 “Good Food” pie contest, and turning out exceptional doughnuts at Cofax Coffee.
More recently, until it closed in August, Rucker was the founder and owner of Fiona, a bakery and all-day cafe. The pies at Fiona were the stuff of renown; Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison loved Rucker’s Key lime pie so much that he made it the subject of his review. On the subject of that pie, Addision wrote that the lime juice “slashes through the pie’s condensed milk custard, creating a tension between sweet and sour akin to a compass needle reacting to an electromagnetic field.” Between that, the pie’s sour cream-spiked whipped cream topping, and the “distinct and pleasant saltiness” of its graham cracker crust, the pie in its entirety was, Addison wrote, “a feat of reinvention.”
You can find that pie in Rucker’s new cookbook, “Dappled: Baking Recipes for Fruit Lovers,” where it’s titled — now poignantly — “The Lime Pie That Saved Us.” It is one of the numerous pies in the book, but while those pies — pictured in their oozy technicolor glory — are reason enough to buy “Dappled,” they are but a fraction of what it offers. The book is a frequently irresistible glimpse into the mind of a baker who treats fruit as limitless: there’s almost nowhere it can’t go, and no situation it can’t help but improve. Fiona may be gone, but Rucker is here, and she wants you to bake the hell out of some fruit. And as we move into fall at my local Brooklyn farmers market, that currently means apples, pears, plums, and the last of summer’s peaches and nectarines.
The inspiration for “Dappled” was straightforward. “I’ve always loved fruit,” says Rucker, who grew up in a neighborhood alive with tangerine and lemon trees and patches of wild strawberries. She and her…
