8 – APRIL 2020
PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA M
URRAY
They’re Here for YouEditor’
s LetterADAM RAPOPORT
editor in chief
@rapoport on instagramTeam Basically,
from left: Molly Baz,
Sohla El-Waylly,
and Sarah Jampel@Krispy 1
Hi Sarah,
I’m in Australia and butter is sold as
500gm blocks here. Are you able to advise
how many grams a stick of butter is please?
My other question is about buckwheat.
Is wholemeal flour the equivalent in Aus?
Kind Regards,
Krispy@Sarah_JampelStaff 1
Hi Krispy!
1 stick of butter in the U.S. weighs 113
grams! Buckwheat flour isn’t the same as
whole wheat flour because it’s gluten-free
and grain-free, made from dried and
ground buckwheat groats. BUT if you can’t
find buckwheat flour, I think that rye flour
or spelt flour would be the best substitutes.
WHEN I ASKED SARAH JAMPEL why she was testing her salty Does that help?!buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies for what seemed to me like the
97th time, she started going on about the absence of gluten in buck-
wheat flour. She jotted down notes in her tiny, meticulous handwriting
while explaining that the half cup of buckwheat flour called for in
the recipe balances the one cup of all-purpose flour and how it was
imperative that we get the ratio just right.
Sarah is the editor of Basically, our learning-to-cook onlinevertical (eatbasically.com). And this month Basically takes center
stage in the magazine with its Guide to Better Baking (page 48).
Much of the success of the 16-page package can be traced back
to Sarah’s obsessive nature, but that would be ignoring the fas-
tidious habits of her Basically teammates, Sohla El-Waylly and
Molly Baz. One kitchen island over from Sarah, Sohla spent a
Okay, now imagine that same exchange
roughly 62 more times—all in one day. Do
that and you’ll get a sense of what Basically
is all about. A site that not only pops with
snappy headlines, a conversational recipe
tone, and crisp, gorgeous imagery, but also
has recipes that work each and every time.
You know, after they’ve been tested again
and again and again. And again.recent afternoon baking her cardamom car-
rot cake for, literally, the 11th time. She was
striving to achieve a mirror-like glaze on her
cake, as opposed to the candy corn–orange
candle wax that her previous testing yielded.
It is this patient, compulsive attention to
detail that I don’t possess—at least not as a
home cook. I like to think that, you know,
I don’t need recipes, that I can cook by feel.
Of course, when you’re running a site like
Basically, cooking by feel isn’t an option. If
the recipes don’t work, the site doesn’t work.
And if, for some odd reason, a recipe isn’t
working, Sarah will do all she can to right
a possible wrong. Like spending six hours
a few Sundays ago fielding questions on
our Basically Baking Forum (basicallybaking
.bonappetit.com). Baking acolytes from all
over the world peppered Sarah with queries: