When people get curious about baking with a sourdough starter and I explain how it works, I can tell they are a little freaked out by this idea of keeping the culture alive, day in, day out, for ever and ever.

“This is too much responsibility,” they say, followed by variations on “This is why I don’t have kids!” or “Houseplants all die under my care!” and “What about my trip to Marrakech?”

I understand the sentiment, so I’m always quick to point out that a sourdough starter can be kept in the fridge for a little while without the skies caving in, and that if “a little while” becomes “indefinitely”, you can always dehydrate the precious blob into a dormant matter that won’t require regular attention.

This is a handy procedure if you’re about to go through a period of time when you won’t be able to care for it consistently or bake with it, but also if you’d like to share your sourdough culture with a friend who lives far away, and also if you’re smart and want a backup copy to restore in the event that your live starter has a disk failure (i.e. dies).

It’s very easy, and requires no special equipment.

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I was recently interviewed for the website of French publisher Larousse, and one of the questions was, “What is it that appeals to you in a recipe?” I replied that I was drawn to recipes that a) were simple, b) featured flavor pairings that were sure-footed (and optionally unusual) and c) gave me the opportunity to learn a new technique.

All three qualities are united in today’s recipe, originally found in Yves Camdeborde’s fantastic little book Un Dimanche en famille, which I’ve written about in glowing terms before. It is a recipe for salt-crusted chicken, a chicken that is wrapped in a heavily salted dough before it’s baked in the oven.

The all-important wow factor is at play here: breaking the salt crust open to reveal the golden chicken nested inside never fails to elicit a few gasps and squeals in the audience.

The salt crust thing is a classic technique I had long ambitioned to try — I’ve even amassed a handful of almost identical recipes for it in my clippings file over the years — but it had always made me feel two parts incredulous and one part intimidated, so I’d never acted on that ambition.

Camdeborde’s recipe (which I found reprinted here, if you want to take a look) must have shown up at just the right time in my maturation process as a cook: it was laid out in a way that seemed very straightforward, and if his take on sablés was anything to go by, he was a trustworthy recipe writer.

Maxence and I hardly ever eat meat or fish anymore when it’s just the two of us, but I still cook some on occasion when we have company, so I first gave the salt-crusted chicken a try last spring, when our friends Braden and Laura came over for dinner. It was so successful, the chicken so flavorsome and so perfectly cooked, that I’ve made it half a dozen times since then, which is a freakishly high rate of repetition for me.

The brilliance of this recipe is so manifold that I need bullet points:

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Meet my current favorite quick and easy dessert: a tapioca pudding made with oat milk and flavored with vanilla.

Tapioca pudding, for those not familiar with it, is not unlike rice pudding, except the texture of cooked pearl tapioca is estimated to be seven hundred and eighty three times more enjoyable than that of cooked rice, as each tiny pearl rolls off your tongue like the word “pearl” itself.

Pearl tapioca is made with the starch extracted from cassava roots (a.k.a. manioc or yuca). It’s a pre-cooked product that can also be used as a thickener in tart fillings, or to add textural variety to broths and soups. In France, Tipiak sells it under the name perles Japon — it’s anybody’s guess why they call it that — but actually offers two distinct varieties under that label: one made from potato starch, and one made from manioc starch, which is the one I use. I can’t recommend any particular brand outside of France, but you should be able to find pearl tapioca in the baking aisle of your grocery store, or at Asian markets.

For this recipe, you’ll want to use small pearl tapioca, which comes in miniature beads (do not, I repeat, do not, spill the contents of the package on the floor, or you’ll be finding them in absurd places for years to come), rather than the larger pearls, also called boba, that add chew to Taiwan-style bubble tea.

I first made tapioca pudding at the request of Maxence, who’s always a good customer for this kind of humble, comforting dessert, and who spent a happy childhood eating his grandmother’s. I myself am not normally drawn to soft, milk-based preparations, but this one quickly won me over with its delectable creamy-bouncy texture.

My recipe is completely effortless, and uses pantry ingredients only, making it a fine emergency dessert option. You simply heat oat milk (my non-dairy milk of choice) with a vanilla bean, simmer the pearl tapioca in it (mine cooks in fifteen minutes), before adding sugar and a bit of salt.

You then let it cool, and as the pearl tapioca continues to swell, it absorbs all the liquid and becomes all mochi–like and wonderful. (Wait, could this be why it’s called “Japan pearls” in France?)

You’ll perhaps notice that it is one of those handy ratio-based recipes (see Ruhlmann’s book on cooking ratios) that relies on a 10:1:1 ratio of milk, pearl tapioca and sugar (measured in weight). This means you can commit the recipe to memory easily and scale it up or down, as I often do when I have an open carton of milk that needs to be used pronto.

Tapioca pudding requires little embellishment, and we usually just lap it up from a little bowl with a spoon, but when I serve it to friends, I like to offer a side of crisp butter cookies, such as these or these, just to amp the sophistication a notch.

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Today’s salad could be seen as a winter alter ego to this tomato and einkorn wheat salad from half a year ago, and it is proof that my love story with einkorn wheat wasn’t just a summer crush.

Today’s salad mixes the ancient grain (see my previous post for more on the back story) with chunks of spiced and roasted potimarron (a.k.a. Hokkaido squash, my very favorite of all winter squashes), shallots, chopped fresh herbs, and walnuts.

It’s the kind of salad of both substance and grace with a good balance of textures that I am content to eat on its own for lunch, or serve as a side. It travels well, too, so it’s a fine option for a packed lunch, or when you have to take a dish somewhere.

In fact, I first made it to bring as my dinner contribution to our dear friends Derrick and Melissa’s apartment when they were visiting during the Paris snowpocalypse in early December, to go with the duck magrets that Derrick would be roasting.

Maxence liked it so much that when we got home that night — after a vivifying Velib’ ride across a snow-ridden city because we’d long missed the last métro — he specifically requested I write down how I’d made it, so I wouldn’t let it fall down the rabbit hole of good but forgotten ideas.

I followed his advice and scribbled the broad strokes of it in the little cooking notebook I keep, the cover of which makes me smile every time I pick it up. And I made the salad again with the next potimarron that came my way, and then with an unsuspecting butternut squash, and again with a potimarron for our New Year’s Eve party, where it did not quite outshine the guest magician who made our evening so special, but close.

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