My Failure Tastes Like Key Lime Pie 🥧
Tuesday Tastemaker #36
Last week I tried and failed to make a key lime pie for the first time ever.
It was not good, Reader.
The gluten-free crust I’ve made 100 times crumbled apart and cracked across the bottom.
The filling didn’t set, then it curdled in the oven. 😖
The meringue was… well, it was disgusting. I don’t know if this is because of something I did, or if meringue is actually just disgusting (I suspect the latter).
The good news is, my partner ate it anyway. He’s a keeper.
I’ve lived most of my life as a raging perfectionist — overachiever in school; quit anything I wasn’t immediately good at; incredibly hard on myself.
Mostly, I’ve long outgrown this by now.
I’m still hard on myself, but not like THAT. I’m generally having way more fun and enjoying unprecedented levels of self-esteem as I navigate the last quarter of my 40s. (They do not tell you about this; it makes you ungovernable.)
In the before times, I used to give myself little meaningless outlets for my perfectionism — places where I could just let that shit run rampant and do a perfect thing, like detailing the car.
That shit was spotless.
But I also used to seek out places where I could practice failing in a low- or no-stakes scenario. Like playing a video game and dying a million times, or baking a key lime pie.
During Covid, I became obsessed with the YouTube series Gourmet Makes with Claire Saffitz. Gourmet Makes was part of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen series, which imploded after it was discovered Condé Nast was paying chefs of color substantially less than their white counterparts. 🙁
That sucks, and it left a bad taste in most people’s mouths (ba-dum tssss), but I’m still recommending Gourmet Makes to you today, and I’ll tell you why:
Claire is a fancy pastry chef who challenges herself to make popular treats from scratch — like Choco Tacos, Cheetos, Skittles, Bagel Bits, Combos, Warheads, etc. (Viewers submit the things they’d like her to attempt.)
Every episode starts with Claire dissecting the actual product, and doing as much research as she can about how it’s made. She tracks down videos of factory assembly lines, reads everything she can get her hands on, and susses out the texture and taste of each individual component.
As someone who used to nibble the chocolate coating off my KitKat bars, take apart the layers, and eat each wafer separately, I very much dig this.
Then she comes up with a working theory of how to make the thing, and she gives it a try.
Sometimes she has to build new equipment to do what she needs to do, or repurpose an existing contraption into something else — like the time she used a rock tumbler to get the color on the outside of her Skittles.
Inevitably, she does not succeed the first time. Or the second time.
And here’s where the show got me hooked.
Claire never responds to this as a failure. It’s all one grand experiment to her, a gathering of information. The Cheeto batter disintegrated when it hit the oil — why? Perhaps it needs more cornmeal?
It’s all trial and error, with random drop-bys from the other Test Kitchen chefs, who laugh with (at) her and sometimes help her troubleshoot.
Rarely does Claire get frustrated with her progress. Mostly, she seems to be having a swell time, solving a mystery, figuring shit out. She does get discouraged sometimes, but hey, she’s only human.
Gourmet Makes showed me how to be a detective in my own life instead of a dictator.
(And, Claire encouraged me to keep baking! Her first cookbook, Dessert Person, is the perfect balance of approachable and challenging; it’s organized by difficulty.)
At this stage of my life, I’ve outgrown the need for anti-perfectionism content. There’s a Peloton yoga teacher who’s constantly going on about the mean things we say to ourselves, and I always want to reach through the screen and tell her I DON’T DO THAT ANYMORE, PLEASE MOVE ON.
However, having a creative job can get way too serious, way too often, and failure hits different when your publication pitch gets rejected or you lose a big client.
It’s good to remember to make it fun when you can. To be a detective.
Also, gourmet Cheetos!
See you next Tuesday,
Sam