WHO IS SARAH PHILLIPS? sarah@baking911.com
New York City, New York
Sarah Phillips has been an innovative force in the food business for over 25 years. She is Founder and CEO of the popular website baking911.com, started in 2000 and one of the top baking sites on the internet.
Baking911.com informs bakers what cookbooks are too often remiss in explaining: “what is room temperature butter”, “what is a prepared pan?” Prior to that, she founded the baking mix company, Healthy Oven Baking Mixes (“Bakes with Applesauce instead of Butter”), that were distributed nationwide from 1989-1999 in top grocery store chains, Wal-Mart and natural food chains (Whole Foods).
Before starting Healthy Oven, Sarah was a gourmet and specialty food broker in the Northeast. While demonstrating and promoting these food products and her own product line in such stores, people would ask her these very questions, and she found there was no place to look for answers. baking911.com was born.
The baking911.com site contains thousands of pages of unique content and research, and a growing base of hundreds of recipes for PREMIUM Paying MEMBERS – for cakes, cookies, candy, chocolate, pies, yeast breads, quick bread, pastry, fillings, frostings and glazes, custards and more – developed by Sarah, many of which provide answers to vexing baking problems such as, “How come my chocolate chip cookies are flat?” - Sarah developed a Thick-with-a-Chew Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, the dough which needs no refrigeration prior to baking. She developed the recipe so it bakes puffy every time! She believes that the recipe should do most of the work within its formula – instead of the baker doing the work (such as special chilling, special ingredients to make it work or having to form it into special shapes prior to baking). Her recipe results have proven that it can be done with everyday ingredients.
Another example are recipes for cakes which do not dome and require little trimming – “the way layer cakes should bake if properly balanced” – with moist textures. Sarah advocates the use of ingredients right from the fridge for baking, because she has proven that the friction from today’s electric stand mixer attachments quickly warm the ingredients to the proper batter temperature during mixing; she feels that cookbook’s instructions for use of room temperature ingredients for baking is old-fashioned and no longer necessary.
Most of the recipes are presented in step-by-step fashion, accompanied with up to over a hundred color photographs, with detailed and the hows and whys of baking information included.
Sarah, a baking expert, is constantly quoted, the website mentioned or her recipes published worldwide in magazines, newspapers and books, for her expert knowledge, such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Gourmet Magazine, Saveur Magazine, and many others. She was named last year by The Guardian Newspaper in the UK as one of the 30 of the world’s greatest bakers! "baking911.com, home to some of the best baking know-how on the net..." Sarah was a regular contributor, for two years to the New York Times microblog on the topic of “Cake: The Essentials”.
Sarah teaches and lectures. She wrote Baking 9-1-1, Simon and Schuster, 2003, advocating the use of ingredients cold from the fridge for use in baking, and recipes which solve common baking problems.
Sarah specializes in creating new innovative techniques and working on specialty baking recipes for food allergies, sugar-free and special diets – she is currently working on gluten-free recipes, having recently been self-diagnosed as gluten-intolerant – and, she could not find any suitable baked goods that were not gummy with a bitter aftertaste.
Sarah found she had to develop new gluten-free mixing methods to be able to provide great texture and flavor in cakes, cookies, brownies, recipes etc; because she discovered that” the traditional mixing methods used just do not work as well in the absence of wheat flour and gluten”. Sarah believes that there is room for gluten-free products, which taste and look good, for the everyday mainstream person with celiac disease! The recipes can be further substituted with other allergy-free ingredient replacers, if necessary. She hopes to publish a book on the subject.
Prior to that, she wrote the Healthy Oven Baking Book, Doubleday, 1999, and pioneered low-fat and fat-reduced baked goods with new mixing methods using fruit purees as fat substitutes; she expanded the use of the muffin mix method in reduced fat and low-fat recipes by combining the sugar with the wet ingredients for better aeration of ingredients in the absence of fat.. Her recipes and product line have appeared in magazines and newspapers with rave reviews.
Sarah also solves baking problems from baking911.com and serves as a consultant to industry. On her ASK SARAH FORUM, she answers baking questions from over 60,000 (and growing) registered members on her current, three- year-old forum, on a daily basis. Before that, she has estimated that she has answered hundreds of thousands of baking questions from home and professional bakers on earlier discussion forums.
Sarah has developed recipes for and has consulted with Chicago Metallic Bakeware, Clabber Girl / Rumford /Davis Baking Powder, McCormick Spice Company, to name a few.
Sarah's mother was a great baker and cook, who served as an early inspiration and teacher. At a young age, Sarah started collecting cookbooks and using recipes from them, plus inventing her own. Sarah has augmented her at home experience with numerous classes in baking and cooking at the Culinary Institute of America, the French Culinary Institute and the Institute for Culinary Education, in New York. She was granted an honorary PhD in the Humanities from Marymount College, New York, 2000, for her extensive research and contributions to the baking industry.
