Ask Yourself "What If?" with Milk Bar Founder Christina Tosi

A Bit of Optimism

The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek

Education, Business, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if this podcast turned into a baking show? For Christina Tosi’s third visit to A Bit of Optimism, we decided to find out. So we headed to Milk Bar to make compost cookies from things in my own pantry and my favorite beer bread from scratch! Christina’s not just my best friend—she’s the founder of Milk Bar, host of Bake Squad on Netflix, a cookbook author, and a fan favorite on this podcast. She lives by one simple question: what if? In this experimental episode, we dug into some big ideas about creativity, uncertainty, and the magic of trying something new. Recipes below! This...is A Bit of Optimism. You can watch the video version of this episode on YouTube here. For more on Christina and her work, check out: christinatosi.com ---------------------------- Simon's Compost Cookie Recipe (makes 15-20 cookies): 16 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature 1 cup granulated sugar 2/3 cup tightly packed light brown sugar 2 tablespoons glucose syrup 1 large egg 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon kosher salt Maltesers 85% dark chocolate Optimism Coffee grounds Granola Space/Astronaut Ice Cream Kettle Corn Pop Chips For the full step-by-step recipe, visit Milk Bar's website! Beer Bread Recipe: 3 cups self-rising flour 1 teaspoon kosher salt 4 tablespoons honey (or to taste) 12 oz beer (Samual Smith's Organic Chocolate Stout is Simon's preference!) 2 tablespoons butter (and save a little for the top) Mix ingredients slowly together Bake at 350 for 45-60 mins until baked through ---------------------------- This episode is brought to you by True Classic! I really love True Classic T-shirts, so we called them up and asked if they wanted to work together. And they said yes! Check out their clothes at: trueclassictees.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by True Classic.
0:03.2	The way they became our sponsor is because I loved their t-shirts.
0:07.5	And so we just called them up and asked them if they wanted to work together.
0:11.5	And they said yes.
0:12.8	So check out their clothes at trueclassic.com.
0:16.7	What's funny about this is I always have this in my pantry.
0:20.5	Always.
0:21.6	Space ice cream.
0:24.6	Always. There's always a space ice cream in my...
0:27.6	I love you so much for that.
0:29.6	This is a hundred percent going, like, over my dead body, is this not going to your house of cooking?
0:35.6	I don't know how that will bake.
0:36.6	Me neither, but we're going to find out. But hey, what if?
0:38.3	What if?
0:39.3	So a bazillion years ago, I went for dinner in New York City at a place called Sombar, which
0:45.3	was a David Chang restaurant.
0:46.3	And in the back, they had a little thing called milk bar, which was there, basically
0:50.3	the dessert place for the restaurant. Well, I fell in love with one of the desserts called cereal milk ice cream, and yes, it is
0:58.0	the most nostalgic ice cream you could ever eat.
1:00.0	It tastes exactly like the milk from the cereal bowl from when we were kids, that sweet
1:04.0	milk that we would drink.
1:05.0	Little did I know that the founder and owner of milk bar would later become one of my closest,
	...

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