Welcome to Food with Mark Bitman. I'm Kate Bitman. Thanks for being here. We know how many of you are loyal listeners and we appreciate that so much. If you'd like to hear more from Mark and me and our small but mighty team, check us out on bitmanproject.com. When you subscribe there, you'll get access to our recipe database, which now has thousands of recipes, with more added weekly.

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Reach out to us with any questions, comments, or stuff you think should be featured on the podcast or on our site, food at markbitman.com. For today's interview with Baker Paola Veles, I enlisted my colleague Holly Haynes to join me as co-host.

Paola and Holly are both extremely experienced, extremely experimental, and extremely talented bakers,

and they already knew each other, so I was pretty sure it would be a good time.

And it was.

I'm sure that when I listen back to this interview, I'll seem like the dorky kid who's not in on the joke,

because these two ladies know baking, like I know my bed,

at 9 p.m. on a weeknight. Paola got her start working with both Jacques Torres and Christina

Tosi, but it was only a matter of time before she became a success in her own right. When she started

baking, she began trusting her instincts almost immediately,

adjusting classic recipes to make them her own, like a sticky bun with ripe plantains,

chocolate malta cake, and mango and brown butter blondies. You'll find all those recipes in her

cookbook, Bodega Bakes, a 2025 James Beard Award winner.

Paola is also the founder of Bakers Against Racism, which I trust most of you have heard about,

an organization that's raised almost $3 million for social justice causes worldwide.

We talked about that, and about baking, of course, and about Paula's husband, Hector,

who indirectly gave her her start as a baker. Here we are. Paolo, we've been trying to make this

happen for so long, and I'm so happy you're here. Thank you. Allie's going to kick it off.

So you are a baker and a community organizer, neither of which you planned on becoming.

And yet you are excellent at both. Is it true that you became a baker so you could date your now husband?

Yeah. Yeah, that is absolutely true. I was, I graduated culinary school and I was working

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