Years ago, Christina Wood hopped into her friend’s car and drove across the country from Gainesville, Florida, to Seattle, a city she knew almost nothing about. Wood had little more than a suitcase and an evangelical passion for pastry, which she parlayed into jobs at some of Seattle’s top bakeries (Bakery Nouveau, the now-defunct Besalu). In 2020, she opened her own bakery, Temple Pastries, a destination for pilgrims seeking flaky cruffins and chocolate-rye croissants, or whimsical black sesame macarons, or custom tins of intricate Christmas cookies.
Now Wood is stepping into the cookbook game with Pastry Temple: Baking with Inspired Flavors (Sasquatch Books), a tome for the intermediate or advanced home baker who is looking to take their game to the next level. The book focuses on the three “pillars” of pastry, which Wood defines as brioche, croissant, and puff pastry. There are detailed instructions (with photos) on everything from making a butter block to proofing dough — which, Wood advises, you can do in a dishwasher if the rest of your house is too chilly during the persistent Seattle winter.
You could read Pastry Temple and get a solid foundation in these techniques without even delving into the recipes. But the recipes are impressive concoctions that showcase Wood’s creativity, including things like cheese-crusted scallion French toast, gochujang babka, and ‘nduja doughnuts. This isn’t for baking novices or the faint of heart — this is for folks who, like Wood years ago, want to get really, seriously into baking.
In advance of the book’s October 7 release, and Wood’s pub day event at Book Larder, Eater Seattle caught up with her to talk about the book’s trickiest recipe, the difference between working in a bakery and home baking, and more. This interview has been edited for clarity:
Eater: In the introduction you talk about how this is a book that you wish you would have when you were starting up. Who is your ideal reader?
Christina Wood: The ideal reader is someone who bakes at home a lot but doesn’t quite know how to level up as far as going beyond cakes and cookies. There’s a lot of technical information about that kind of stuff online that you can find. But there was nothing to guide me as far as, “How do I make a laminated dough? How do I make a brioche properly and understand why?”
How different is it to dream up recipes for Temple where you have the facilities and the staff versus a home kitchen?
Here at Temple, when I’m deciding on menu items, they have to be able to sit in a case for several hours without wilting or looking kind of gross or drying out. And they have to be reproducible on a grander scale. So when I was doing it at home, it was like, I only have to make like 12 of these, they can be as involved as I want them to be. So I got a little more involved and fanciful.
I really wanted to make sure that it was actually doable at home, because at the bakery, we have so many special pieces of equipment. Doing it at home is so much harder. Yeah, it feels like I’m cheating sometimes, because we have proofers that have specific temperatures and humidity levels, and our ovens are specifically made to make pastry and the laminator, obviously, is a huge plus.
Was there a specific recipe that you found particularly hard to develop?
The banh mi sausage roll was really hard. I’m not a savory cook by training or nature. So getting that one specifically was such a challenge — forming raw meat into a perfect cylinder and getting it to not burst apart in the oven.
Are there any recipes in the book that are going to make their way to the Temple?
Some of them have. I’ve probably done about four or five different menu changes since the writing was done, and I have definitely taken some things from myself. We did a gochujang cheddar brioche roll last fall, and we’re doing a banh mi sausage croissant right now.
How do you feel about the book now that it’s about to come out?
It’s a huge deal. It’s not something I ever even thought I would do. It’s not something I set out to accomplish. The fact that I was able to is like a dream. I mean, everything to do with Temple is like a dream. I am a little nervous, like I’m gonna go out into different cities and promote it, and public speaking is not like my super jam, I don’t love it. But I try to think of it as another challenge.
