Layered & Light

A first issue assembles itself around a question. For Issue 01 the question is air: where it sits in a pastry, how it gets there, and what changes when a cook learns to keep it. The mille-feuille puts air between sheets of dough. The pavlova puts it inside a meringue. The macaron traps it in folded almond-and-egg. The takoyaki is the same trick on the savoury side — wet batter into hot iron, water flashes to steam, a sphere of crisp shell rises around an empty middle.

These aren’t recipes that share a region or a century. They share a habit: treating the void as the medium and the food as its scaffolding. We picked four pastries and one griddled snack to draw that line, plus a long-form guide on the dessert most identified with the trick — and one summer collection for cooks whose ovens are off until October.

Issue 02 will be on heat — the way fire and oil change something familiar into something unrecognisable. Until then.