Other People's Kitchens. Q&A with Martin Sorge
Martin is a winner of the Great American Baking Show and lives in a 100 year old Chicago bungalow.
Hello Martin. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your success at winning The Great American Baking Show?
As you have mentioned, my name is and my substack publication is called Great Bakes.
I’ve loved baking ever since I set the microwave on fire, making a “biscuit” as a wee youngster.
Luckily, I’ve learned a lot since then. I am a home baker and cook, taught by dozens of blogs, a vast cookbook collection, my local public library, the people around me, and what grows around the Great Lakes. I used to be afraid of baker’s math, measuring, kitchen thermometers, and latticing pie crusts. But now I’ve figured out how to do it…and I’m still learning.
Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana—a nice, very average, mid-sized city—I grew up in a loving family surrounded by cornfields, Amish farms, and a distant relative’s apple orchard. As Hoosier now based in Chicago, my baking combines my Great Lakes roots, my multicultural urban home, and my goofy, think-outside-the-box attitude.
I was a huge fan of the Great British Baking Show, so I decided to audition for the American spinoff and got the wild opportunity to be on the show’s sixth season, which aired on The Roku Channel in May 2023. They flew us to England, where we baked in the iconic white tent for judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith. To my surprise I managed to come out on top! That win propelled me to keep on baking and follow my dreams.
I’ve always relished writing and talking about food, especially baking, so I took this opportunity to share my recipes with the world. I started here on Substack just over a year ago, and I’ve also written for the Chicago Tribune, Food & Wine, and other fantastic publications.
Can you please describe your kitchen lay out and how much of a role it plays with your family and when writing and testing recipes for your ‘Great Bakes’ newsletter?
I live in a 100-year-old Chicago Bungalow, but I have a decently sized kitchen for a small older home like ours. It’s a simple U-shaped counter with a sink, a slide-in range, and a full-sized and decent storage. Of course, I need more storage.
There are two cupboards where I keep some ingredients and a spice-rack cupboard next to my oven, but no actual pantry. The basement has one closet that serves as my pantry, stores many of my baking supplies, and another with more baking-related stuff (my grain mill and dehydrator have to live somewhere).
My kitchen is somewhere between very organized and mildly chaotic. Yes, I have some drawers stuffed to the gills, but I always completely tidy my workspace and get out all of my ingredients before testing recipes (or cooking dinner).
This utilitarian kitchen got me through the preparation for my turn on the Great American Baking Show. I would block off part of the countertop so that I only had as much space as I thought we would have while on set. But during practice, I dirtied so many dishes that I would pile them on the floor in another room.
Nowadays, my kitchen is calmer and more organized, but still busy. It’s my office. Because of my wretched handwriting, I always type up recipes. I’ll print them out (yes, on paper), and take them to the kitchen to test them and edit them. During Chicago’s too-brief summer and fall, I buy way too much local produce, so there’s always some sitting on the counter, plus probably some jars of homemade jam cooling and maybe a loaf of bread rising.
What are your favourite and most used kitchen gadgets?
My kitchen scale: No contest. It lives on my counter and is used to measure everything. I gave up using volume measurements for anything less than a Tablespoon. You want volume metrics from me? Sorry.
My stand mixer: Although I love a one-bowl, stir together recipe, I use my stand mixer for anything that it works for. Whipping cream, kneading bread, making cakes. It gets so much use that it just lives on the counter.
My (new!) oven and stove. It’s the most important appliance in my kitchen. My old oven just kicked the bucket, so I got a new stove. I switched from a gas oven and stove to an electric oven with an induction range and couldn’t be happier.
How did your passion for baking come about? Did anyone or anything in particular, play a role in this?
I was raised to enjoy good food and I was a curious and adventurous eater. My folks aren’t pretentious eaters, but they raised their kids to know good food and try new things. We always bought our sweet corn from the roadside stand and got the best apples from a distant relative’s orchard. When on vacation, we tried to find the best local fare and rarely went to big chain restaurants.
My mom says that I always “played with my food,” whether that meant sprinkling a sliced pear with ground nutmeg or adding garlic and parsley to her chicken soup without permission.
I was always a decent cook but not a great baker. I didn’t like to follow directions or measure things precisely. Then, about ten years ago, I thought: I bet if I actually followed the recipe and measured things, I could be a good baker. That strategy worked, and I got hooked. I started by making simple no-knead bread, then branched out to practically every baking discipline. Name a type of baked good, and I’ve probably made it before. Yes, I have made phyllo pastry. (And I won’t be doing that again any time soon.)
How has winning The Great American Bake Baking Show influenced the way you cook and bake now?
It mostly gave me confidence, both in my abilities and in my flavors. It honed my baking voice and told me that I’m good at this thing that I love to do. I knew that I was a better-than-average baker and an adventurous one, but I didn’t think that anyone might want to bake one of my recipes or that I had much to teach home bakers. But I do! I love to write recipes and nerd out about things like grains, fruit varieties, and techniques.
It also taught me that I prefer simple, flavorful bakes. Yes, I can make an opera cake, a croissant, and a croquembouche. But I’d rather make a seasonal fruit galette, a hearty loaf of rye bread, a no-bake cheesecake, or a glazed lemon loaf cake. It was fun to be pushed to bake wild, extravagant creations, but I want something that won’t take all day or require me to pile up dirty dishes in another room.
The show also pushed me to question my baking style in another way. I never thought I had much of a baking or food heritage, but then I fell in love with German baking which taps into a strong German family heritage. I think that Germany has the best bread in the world, and I recently took a two-week crash course in German bread at the Akademie Deutsches Bäckerhandwerk.
How would you describe the regional cuisine where you live in Chicago? Are there fresh food markets or farmers’ markets available? How much does it differ from where you grew up in Indiana?
I adore Chicago because it’s both Midwestern and global. Unlike what many people say, Chicago is more than meat-and-potatoes cuisine. I can walk to restaurants that serve Serbian, Vietnamese, Thai, German, Mexican, Kyrgyz, Korean, Ethiopian, and much more. I can hit fine-dining spots and innovative new eateries. Most of all, I have access to so many glorious bakeries. My hometown had some great food spots, but not the array of choices I have here. I also adore the various grocery store options in Chicago. I can find almost any ingredient I can think of within a 20-minute drive.
I can walk to a farmers’ market and buy the most gorgeous fruit from Michigan (tart cherries, beautiful peaches, perfect apples, and more), cheese from Wisconsin, and all sorts of fresh produce. We also have fantastic local grain farmers and millers, and I buy a lot of locally grown-and-milled organic flour. The produce here is similar in Indiana, except the Hoosier sweet corn is better and fresher. I still ask my folks to bring up corn from the roadside stand when they visit in the summer.
What is the one thing your kitchen is missing that you would love to have?
I’d love more storage space in my kitchen! I have to walk down a flight of stairs to the two closets I use for my pantry and baking-stuff storage, which are both overflowing. I took up a ceramic hobby a couple of years ago, so my collection of handmade ceramics (by me and others) has ballooned. For almost a decade, I only owned one cake plate. Now I have four, including one that I made!
What tips can you give us to help keep our kitchens neat and tidy and easy to manage?
Tidy up before you start. Before you embark on a recipe, clear away the clutter, put things away, empty the dishwasher, and calm your mind. I think about my time on the Baking Show. We always started with a clean bench (a huge thanks to the folks who cleaned up after us), and our ingredients set out for us. A tidy station helps avoid chaos and stress, which, for me, means fewer mistakes.
After baking, you can use the residual heat in the oven to dry some of your dishes. After you wash your dishes, instead of drying them off, put anything oven-proof, especially baking pans, into a turned-off oven that still has a bit of heat left. If the oven is still warm, they’ll dry out quickly.
Don’t buy a new gadget/pan/etc. unless you think you’ll use it at least three times. If I see a recipe that calls for an odd pan or gadget that I don’t have, like a mini-muffin pan, then I won’t make it right away. I’ll wait until I come across (or think of) two other recipes that use that item, and then I'll make the purchase. That way you don’t have a kitchen full of single-use items.
You describe yourself as a ‘huge nerd about food and baking’, with a large cookbook collection. Do you have any favourites? Have you written any cookbooks?
Absolutely! I have a huge collection, and I’ve read even more. I read cookbooks and other food books cover-to-cover. I’ve read Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking thrice. Some of my most-reached-for baking tome books are Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet, Stella Parks’s Bravetart, and Jeffrey Hammelman’s Bread. I’m in love with fellow Substack-writer ’s new book Sift. I usually have a handful of cookbooks from the library sitting on my side table.
I’m a big fan of German bread, and I have seven cookbooks on that subject that I brought home from Germany, in German. (And I don’t speak much German.) To keep my cookbook collection manageable, I’ve even started buying digital copies of cookbooks.
I’m excited to be working on my first cookbook with a Chicago-area publisher, Agate Publishing. Stay tuned for more on that. I’ll be writing about writing that book in my newsletter, Great Bakes. I have ideas for at least two other books, too!
I also write regular columns for Food & Wine, where I nerd out about topics or ingredients that interest me.
Do you have a favourite recipe that you would like to share with us?
I just adore this simple, ultra-fluffy, one-layer Whipped Cream Berry Cake topped with a lemon verbena whipped cream and a mess of fresh berries.
Thank you for sharing your kitchen with us,
. Visit and subscribe to Martin’s substack publication Great BakesAll images are copyright of Martin Sorge.
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I love these peeks into kitchens! So fun!!🤩
The tip about drying dishes in a warm oven is GOLD!!