How bold, innovative pie art catapulted Lauren Ko to Instagram stardom
It's Pie Week! And the voice behind @lokokitchen—and her first cookbook—joins us to talk all things pie.
Hi there, happy Tuesday! And over here at Salt + Spine, that means a Happy Pie Week! We’re celebrating all things pie with three all-new episodes, featured recipes, and more.
How bold, innovative pie art catapulted Lauren Ko to Instagram stardom
Lauren Ko joins us today to #TalkCookbooks in episode 1 of Pie Week — you can listen wherever you get podcasts or below on Spotify:
You might be most likely to know Lauren from her now-famous Instagram handle: @lokokitchen.
Lauren’s geometric designs and stunning pie creations have taken the Internet — and really, the world — by storm. And as you’ll hear in this episode, Lauren fell into pie-making and her signature style by chance. Before long, she had more than 400,000 Instagram followers and her work was being featured everywhere from Vogue and O Magazine to baking pies alongside Martha Stewart. It all just fell into place, she tells me:
I always gravitate towards very modern design, I've always had an appreciation for art and good design. Things that have a lot of repetitive patterns and bright pops of color. And so it felt natural that that kind of ascetic would inform what I do here. And I initially kind of got into this "pie art" stuff motivated by the art of it. I loved creating; it felt like a really great creative outlet. And it just so happened that pie was my medium, or that my medium was edible.
And now Lauren’s sharing her tips and tricks in her first cookbook, titled Pieometry: Modern Tart Art and Pie Design for the Eye and the Palate, with 50 recipes for both sweet and savory creations. Plus, of course, there are step-by-step guides to recreating the famous stunning designs, like her signature Spoke or the Wave.
Lauren joined us remotely from her Seattle home for this week’s show as we discuss her rapid rise to success. But not everything has been a success, like two of the recipes she couldn't get right in time to make it into the book. She says in our conversation:
There were two kinds concepts that I really wanted to make in there. Frosé pie: something with like watermelon, it was going to be frozen, and I just couldn't get that to work. And I think with more experimentation, one day I might have some sort of Frosé tart. But that one just got crossed off the list.
And then I really wanted to do something with pear and hibiscus, and just went through way too many rounds of experiments where it just like didn't turn out. The pears were really mushy. I couldn't get that flavor balance right.
And then, we put Lauren to the culinary test in our game, drawing inspiration from global architecture paired with random ingredients.
Featured recipes from Lauren Ko:
Wave of Wonders
As a lifelong San Diego Padres fan, I grew up in the illustrious heyday of Tony Gwynn and Trevor Hoffman. I used to enter poetry contests sponsored by the local supermarket to win baseball game tickets, and then I’d scream my little heart out from the nosebleed section for love of the game and free admission.
In addition to the soft serve in a helmet and the seventh-inning stretch, doing the wave was a major highlight. I was always amazed that so many people scattered around a stadium could coordinate a movement so fluid, even when some individuals weren’t perfectly in sync.
This design, made up of many thin slices of fruit layered together, reminds me of that orchestrated effort. Even if some of your slices are a little thicker than others, or the placement of your rows a tad wobbly, the overall effect will still elicit wave reviews.
Happy As A Gram
I’ve never been very mathematically inclined, as my brain has always been more adept at arranging words than numbers. The amount of nights I’ve cried over frustrating problem sets I couldn’t solve over my lifetime is incalculable. That I’ve been able to contribute anything to the discipline of pieometry seems incongruent with my history, but as we know, life rarely moves in a straight line, and the thrill of this unforeseen angle has been acute.
Inspired by the tangram, a Chinese dissection puzzle made up of geometric shapes arranged in varying combinations to form other shapes, this design is one that has come to define the Lokokitchen aesthetic. While the concept is derived through coplanar placement of polygons and assorted angles, don’t get bogged down by the formula. Ultimately, the sum of its parts is simply a tart, and variables will translate, too.
P.S. – There are still some spots left for our Cookbook Club Virtual Dinner Party tomorrow night with Anna Francese Gass. Sign up here!
Best,
Brian Hogan Stewart
Host, Salt + Spine