WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020D1

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RESTAURANTS RECIPES WINE SPIRITS

2 A GOOD APPETITE

The joys of roasted peppers,

the easy way. BY MELISSA CLARK

3 DRESSING UP

Chicken salad balances sweet,

savory and spicy. BY SUE LI

8 CULINARY ARTS

Showing off the options from

a master of technique.

7 THE POUR

Wine’s path to the wonders

of the outdoors. BY ERIC ASIMOV

Like a lot of 13-year-olds, Daniella Senior

loved to bake, and thought she might be-

come a pastry chef.

Unlike most of them, she already had six

employees.

Ms. Senior started out on her own, collect-

ing and filling orders for miniature sweets

while growing up in Santo Domingo, in the

Dominican Republic. “I was getting up at 4

a.m. every day before school to bake,” she

said. Her mother, who had lent her $200 in

seed money, made her bring on professional

help.

Ms. Senior went on to attend the Culinary

Institute of America, was mentored by the

chef José Andrés, and is now an owner of

five bars and restaurants in the Washington,

D.C., area and a member of the board of

Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.

As the coronavirus swept through the

Northeast this spring, closing thousands of

restaurants, Ms. Senior, 31, went back to

baking. With the Washington pastry chef

Paola Velez (who also has roots in the Domi-

nican Republic), she repurposed her

kitchens and remaining employees as

doughnut producers for a bake sale they

called Doña Dona.

They created doughnuts with Dominican

flourishes of tamarind, pineapple, guava

and meringue, and sold them online, offer-

ing curbside pickups once a week. In May,

the effort raised $6,000, enough to pay the

bakers and donate a thousand dollars to

ROZETTE RAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MELISSA GOLDEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES CHRISTOPHER GREGORY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Top, Mallory Cayon says

pastry is dismissed as

women’s work in many

professional kitchens.

Above, from left: Cheryl

Day making biscuits at

her bakery in Savannah,

Ga; Dianna Daohueng, at

Black Seed Bagels in

New York; and Daniella

Senior, with her guava

rhubarb tart.

SCOTT SUCHMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bake Sales Power Up

These familiar, once-homey events have gone

global, and long-sidelined pastry chefs are

raising millions for the fight against injustice.

By JULIA MOSKIN

CONTINUED ON PAGE D6

Last month, the writer Bill Buford at-
tempted to teach me, using Zoom, how to
bone, stuff, tie and poach a chicken. It was
something like one of those MasterClass
courses that everybody is watching these

days, except that those run for 20 minutes,

and my lesson lasted more than six hours. It

may not have been the longest Zoom call in

history, but I suspect it set a record for

Zoom calls with a strong focus on boneless

poultry.

It came about because for the past few

months Mr. Buford has been on what he

calls “a chicken kick.” He tends to get pre-

occupied with a recipe or technique or in-

gredient and keep coming back to it, over

and over, until a new obsession takes hold.

Recently he went on a mayonnaise kick,

whisking grapeseed oil into egg yolks a

drop at a time, sometimes adding the zest of

a couple of lemons, a trick he learned when

he worked for the chef Michel Richard.

Several years ago, Mr. Buford went on a

bread kick. He made the dough with flour he

brought back from his last trip to France, a

flour that he said was “magical in the way

that Bob’s flour was magical” — Bob being

what everybody called Yves Richard, a

baker in Lyon who gave Mr. Buford his first

apprenticeship after he moved to that city

with his family in 2008.

He said that as soon as the magical

French flour ran out, “I thought, ‘There’s no

Studying French

With a Fanatic

The literary chef Bill Buford

offers a Zoom tutorial on his

quest for the perfect chicken.

The author Bill Buford in New

York last month, after several

years as a chef trainee in France.

BRITTAINY NEWMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES CONTINUED ON PAGE D4

By PETE WELLS