Cooking with Kent and Vidushi: Bake Talk with PJ Hamel

In this edition of Cooking with Kent and Vidushi, we are pushing back against the mid-winter-term rut and trying something new. 

A few Saturdays ago, we had the extraordinary chance to interview PJ Hamel, a James Beard award-winning cookbook author and a recipe developer for King Arthur Baking Company, which was King Arthur Flour until 2020. We sat down with Hamel, who lives in Norwich, Vermont to talk about her journey from baking in her college house to cookbook stardom. 

Hamel told us she began baking during her sophomore year at Brown University while living in a large house of students.

“I very quickly found out … if you baked brownies or cookies that boys would come into the kitchen,” Hamel said. “So it was a good way to bond with the male members of the house.”

Hamel described initially buying baking mixes before deciding to branch out. 

“Pretty soon I said, ‘I don’t have to just do mixes’... I went into the store and was looking at this wall of flours, and I saw the one with the horse on the bag, which was King Arthur, and I said ‘Oh, that’s pretty.’ So I bought the bag of King Arthur Flour, and that was over 50 years ago, and I haven’t bought another brand since,” she said.

After college, Hamel moved to Maine and worked at a small weekly newspaper where she did “everything.”

“I was a photographer and a writer and all of this stuff,” she said. “It was a small staff. It was about 16 people.”

On the newspaper’s busiest day of the week, Hamel began cooking lunch for her colleagues. With the staff lunches she prepared as inspiration, Hamel then started writing a food column in her newspaper.

In 1990, Hamel’s husband got a job in Vermont, and their family moved. It was during the moving process that she took note of something on the bag of her pantry staple, King Arthur Flour: the company was based in Norwich, Vt.

“I said ‘huh! I wonder if they need someone to come write for them!’” Hamel said. “As it turned out, they were just starting [their] catalogue at that time.”

Despite having never written for a catalogue before, Hamel was hired, and became King Arthur’s sixth employee. She dove into writing the catalogue and recipes.

“We put out a series of print newsletters that had really good writing,” she said. “I mean, they were very cerebral. Lots of recipes but also lots of good writing.”

Hamel reflected on working at the company as its catalogue began to grow.

“I remember there were 12 people, and we could all fit into a big van. We would go to the [flour] mill in New York and see how they were doing, or we would go to Panda House in Hanover and have dinner,” she said. “It was just very homey and comfortable. And it was a family.”

King Arthur Flour became a fully employee-owned company in 2004, and Hamel said, “that family atmosphere has prevailed for the whole time.”

“You feel like you’re working for the person next to you, not some shareholder someplace far away,” she said.

Hamel was the lead author of “The King Arthur Baker’s Companion,” which was published in 2003 and was recognized by the James Beard Foundation as the Best Cookbook of the Year. Hamel also contributed to King Arthur’s two later cookbooks, “The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion” and “Whole Grain Baking.”

In 2007, Hamel started the company’s blog and began posting recipes online. She has now published more than 1,000 recipes on the blog.

When writing recipes, Hamel says the key is being encouraging and not assuming too much prior knowledge.

“It’s like you’re taking someone by the hand and drawing them into your kitchen and saying to them — ‘you might not know how to do this, but we’re gonna do this together. Here, let me help you,’” she said.

What unites everything she has done as a food writer is enthusiasm about sharing her love of baking with others. Sharing recipes will never go out of style, she added.

“Baking is a language we can all speak over generations, over cultures, over the world,” she said. “Why not make community that way, based around food?”