Tasty challenge
Flour Craft founder gives rise to her first cookbook
There doesn’t seem to be anything connecting garden design with equestrian sports to culinary training to starting a gluten-free empire, but Heather Hardcastle sees it. Each has been a welcome challenge.
Now Hardcastle, who co-owns the gluten-free Flour Craft bakery in San Anselmo and cafe in Mill Valley with her husband, Rick Perko, has taken on a new challenge — writing her first cookbook, “The Flour Craft Bakery & Cafe Cookbook” (224 pages, Rizzoli, $35), which was published last week.
She’ll be in conversation with former IJ food writer Christina Mueller for a free virtual event at 7 p.m. April 14 through Copperfield’s Books. Register at copperfieldsbooks.com/event/heather-hardcastle-conversation-christina-mueller.
“Since working with food, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” says Hardcastle, who attended Napa’s Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in 2008 after a decade-long career as a garden designer.
After opening the Mill Valley cafe in 2018, the time seemed right to give it a try.
“I had quite the education about how a book comes together,” she says with a laugh. “All these skills that I learned as a cook and business owner, they certainly come into play when writing a book. … But I loved it. I love challenges and learning new things. … I’m somebody who enjoys the things in life that one cannot master.”
The cookbook features 75-plus recipes, some that will be familiar to fans of Flour Craft, which features gluten-free goodies, both savory and sweet. But some were created just for the cookbook, including many vegan recipes.
Hardcastle is not vegan; she calls herself a plant-forward eater, which means she’s mostly a vegetarian but eats the occasional fish and seafood dish. The recipes she provides can easily been customized to add proteins or not.
“As the business has developed, I’ve seen the evolution of how people eat and the sort of things people want to eat, and I’ve definitely seen in the past few years more of an interest in plant-based food,” she says. “So I’ve had to push myself to develop a handful of vegan recipes that we do offer daily at our stores. I mean, being gluten-free is its own set of challenges, but then baking vegan gluten-free is a whole other set. Because we don’t have gluten to hold things together, we rely a lot on eggs.”
But always one for a challenge, Hardcastle includes recipes for such treats as vegan baked donuts, vegan tahini and halvah brownies (“These brownies have become a cult favorite at our bakeshops,” she writes), and vegan fruit crumble bars.
Hardcastle discovered she was gluten intolerant more than 20 years ago — it was still the “dark ages of gluten free,” she writes — after years of suffering from all sorts of discomfort and digestive issues after eating. That was a gamechanger, she says.
After graduating from the CIA, she threw herself into baking and began selling gluten-free granola at the weekly Civic Center farmers market, which quickly developed a following. Then she began adding
gluten-free pastries one at a time until she and Perko, who live in San Rafael, knew they were ready to go bigger. They opened their San Anselmo bakery in 2013 and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Her food, she says, “is an expression of who I am as a cook, it’s how I’ve grown as a cook, it’s really what I’m good at, how to combine things in a way that people don’t feel they’re missing something.”
Hardcastle says the way she blends various flours in her recipes sets her bakeshops and cookbook apart from others. “I really want to create a unique texture. I don’t really feel these allpurpose gluten-free baking mix things, I don’t really understand that,” she says, although she sells her own version that’s good for some things, like muffins and cookies, but not for breads or scones. While she goes into depth about mixing flours in the cookbook, her recipes are “very approachable.”
She hopes her cookbook inspires readers as much as
she has been inspired by the recipes of others and experimenting on her own. And, no, it’s not just for people who can’t eat gluten.
“I hope it will inspire people to bake. I hope that it draws interest in what we’re doing because I feel we’re really good at what we do and that people will appreciate that,” she says. “One of my gripes with gluten-free is that it comes off as very exclusive, and I feel if we’re doing our job well, the food should stand on its own. The fact that it’s gluten-free is kind of a bonus. I want our brand to be an inclusive brand, that every member of the family, regardless of what you like, there’s something for you there.”