Hi, I'm Bear.

Where I am coming from

I have never worked in a professional kitchen and I never went to culinary school. Everything I know I learned by doing it badly at home until it got better. Ricotta Bear started with naturally leavened sourdough pizza, which turned into small events and workshops for friends, and then friends of friends.

That is the honest starting line for everything on this site: a self-taught home cook with a good pizza dough and a lot to learn about pastry.

Why I am training for a baking show

I love the show. At some point watching it turned into wondering whether I could actually do it, and the only real way to find out is to train for it. So before baking anything, I went through all 461 challenges from 16 series to work out what the tent really tests. That list is my syllabus. My wife Jana is the judge, and she is not easy to impress.

The series is called Tent Ready. It runs as long as people keep showing up, and it gets harder as the audience grows. If it ever reaches a million followers, I will apply to a baking show. I would love for that to be the real tent. I honestly do not know how possible that is from Los Angeles. I am not going to give up on it.

A nod to Julie and Julia

This whole idea owes a debt to Julie Powell. In 2002 she set out to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year and blog about it, which became her book Julie & Julia and then Nora Ephron's 2009 film. She showed that learning in public, one dish at a time, with all the failures left in, is a story worth telling. This is my version: a different kitchen, a different canon, the same stubbornness.

The rest of the site

Beyond the series you will find recipes of all kinds, written in metric with US conversions and scaling built in. I still do pizza events, workshops, and partnerships on the side. Say hello at garrett@ricottabear.com.