Guest post today by a dear friend and adventurous baker.
By Tim Vollmer
I’ve been baking my way through the Tartine No. 3 cookbook, mostly experimenting at home with the natural fermentation breads, but also trying my hand at some of the sweeter things in the book. It was my friend Cristina’s birthday last week, so I decided to turn to the back of the book and take a look at some of the desserts that would be good to make for a birthday picnic at Lake Merritt. Originally, I’d wanted to do a buckwheat and rhubarb tart–having had an incredible version of this the week before at Camino. However, the farmer’s market yielded no rhubarb at this time of year (Camino either had gotten early access to fresh rhubarb or had used some preserves from the previous year). In any case, I decided to go with one of the recipes straight from the book: a buckwheat apple tart.
Buckwheat tastes good. Like earth. You start this recipe by cutting the butter into cubes and chilling it in the freezer for 15 minutes so it’s nice and cold. Then, measure the buckwheat flour and spread it onto your surface. Sprinkle the very cold butter onto it, dust the top with some of that buckwheat flour, and begin rolling the butter into the buckwheat flour.
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The world was too much this week. The world is too much most weeks, but this week in particular the string of disheartening events has felt particularly unrelenting. It’s hard to think of warm and rosy things to say about a frilly baked good when the realities of the world are as dark and seemingly hopeless as they are. What good are a few more photos of a fatty, sugary treat to a world with problems as deep as the ones we’ve got in our own backyards? Continue reading 
the patron saint of pie 