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Download today. Hey, it's Francis. This week, we're going back to an episode from a few years ago featuring Carla Lawley Music and Kush Bouchard.
Have a listen. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
Okay, so full disclosure, I'm the editor on Carla Lawley Music's next cookbook.
And while I've been working on it, I got just a little obsessed with the chapter on grilling.
I mean, in part because the food looked great, the recipes are terrific.
But really, there's this photo of her. And she's standing in the backyard of her house.
She's got this gorgeous wood-burning oven. grill going and there's like adorable kid with a colander on her head like running around And it just looks like a life I want to live.
And with that kind of setup, Carla obviously knows what she's doing.
So we figured we'd ask her to talk summertime cooking with us.
Hey, Carla, it's great to talk with you.
Great to be back, Francis. I have not been to your backyard.
I'm not fishing for an invitation, but I've seen the photos.
And I am extremely jealous of not just your backyard and the big wood oven and the grill you have back there, but just like the lifestyle.
You know, just the whole Karla Lali Music summer lifestyle.
So what... are you up to cooking-wise this summer?
I mean, I have to say the outdoor grill, having a little... patch of a postcard with some fires burning in it is truly one of the great joys of my life.
But ironically, the hotter it gets, the less I feel like grilling, because it's like fire on top of fire on top of humidity.
So the greatest times to grill out there are actually like spring and fall.
The last thing I made on the grill was a recipe for these indoor barbecue ribs that are like spiced.
And then glazed. But like any good recipe, they start with like a low and slow.
And the way that I did that was by actually steaming them in a pot first. with this dry rub on them.
And they create like a delicious, porky, spicy liquid in the bottom of the pot after the steaming.
So very inspired by- So literally on a rack? with like water underneath?
Yeah, my pot isn't even tall enough to accommodate the ribs if they were on a steaming rack.
So I just put like an inch of water in the bottom and they're in this tiny bit of water, but it's still steaming.
They're covered. Very inspired by like the kind of steamed little pork ribs that you get at Dim Sum.
Like that texture, you know, not totally falling off the bone, but really, really tender.
And then you finish them, you reduce the liquid that they make in the pot And you can do this days ahead, which is exactly what I did.
And then on grill day, you just get a medium high fire going. the ribs are already spiced and cooked perfectly.
You've got this glaze and you just brush the glaze on and turn them until they're super caramelized.
Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, that was a fun little experiment I was working on.
Yeah, no, I love that. You know, it's funny because I totally respect...
The true art of barbecue and how barbecue is meant to be cooked low and slow over a fire or over coals or smoldering coals, not even over a fire, right?
Over smoldering coals. and like outside for, seven hours, 12 hours, whatever the case may be.
Five days, yeah. Yes, whatever. I 100% respect that art and craft.
But I remember one of my first restaurant jobs, I was like 19, 20.
We had quote-unquote barbecue ribs in the restaurant, and we would literally take racks of ribs and boil them. steam kettle so they were tender and then put barbecue sauce on them put them on the grill and sell them to people and i was like oh my god we're defrauding people But now, if I'm at home, I'm like, it kind of worked.
And no, it's not the real deal. I'm not going to be Rodney Scott, but...
Right. It can taste good. Yeah. I mean, I think the steaming, that wet heat.
One of my favorite recipes for ribs that I used to make were wrapped in foil. you still season them, you wrap them really tight, crimp them down in foil, and then stick them in the oven.
And I guess if you had a smoker, a big green egg, and you could hold it at like 250 or whatever, you can do it that way.
But I started thinking about it. I was like, well, they're steaming in there.
It's just a closed environment where the juices are getting... kept inside and it's a nice gentle heat because ribs are like those hard working muscles and they need time to break down.
And so then I was like, why waste the foil?
Let's try steaming. And it worked. Right on.
Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't.
But this one, it worked. So it takes an hour.
Right on. Yeah. And, you know, I totally feel you, too.
It's like, oh, when we talk about summer cooking, obviously, like, the first thought is going to be, like, what's on the grill, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, at some point. It's too hot to be outside.
Let's look beyond the romanticized version of like, oh, this summer.
It's like, no, it is hot, dude. And I'm going to be in here with a fan on.
100%. I want my toes in a cold lake. Yeah.
You know, like my big summer cooking revelation was I got an induction burner.
For a wedding gift? Cool. Oh, God. I'm going to expose the fact that I forgot when I got married.
But, you know, somewhere between seven and ten years ago.
And it's been sitting in my closet. Because why do I need an induction burner?
It's a great gift. I'm so glad to have it.
But I have a stove. And then last year, it suddenly occurred to me because it was so hot.
And I set up the induction burner and put a pot of water on it to boil for pasta, and the kitchen was 20 degrees cooler.
Exactly. So that was my revelation was like, get yourself a portable induction burner.
It was like 65 bucks. And like, I can have pasta again in the summer.
This is great. I have so many questions about the induction burner as a wedding gift and how did the person know?
Like, it's so niche that... That's a whole other... Yeah, we should do a wedding gift for the kitchen people who have everything podcast, but...
You know, summer is for, for me, toaster oven.
Like toaster oven and salads. Not having to turn on your oven.
Yeah. Not having to turn on your oven. And you can do all kinds of things in the toaster oven.
Yeah, I'm super in my toaster oven. I have a literal 30 year old toaster oven that I liberated from my parents house.
And I love it. It's just never going to go away.
It is the simplest technology. It's a tiny little oven.
Yeah. All right. Anyway, so I'm sure people are not tuning in to hear about my 30-year-old toaster oven.
No. so let's actually get to what people are trying to hear let's go to our callers and the first one is going to be Rafael hello Francis This is Rafael from Falls Church, Virginia.
I have a question about dishes to prepare during our beach vacation.
This July, I'll be traveling to South Carolina with nine of my in-laws and about... three children.
We were thinking about what are their meals.
It will be easy to make and enjoying during our beach vacation.
Thank you very much. Wow, thanks, Rafael.
I really enjoyed how he had to pause, and it sounded like he was sort of stealing himself to say the number of in-laws he was bringing.
He was like, I'm traveling with... Nine.
Right, so counting him and the children, we have 13 people.
This is going to be real. This is going to be a real beach vacation.
Okay, so probably a couple things to keep in mind for him, right?
That number of people in a beach house in July in South Carolina.
It's every bit of the heat we're just talking about times two.
So we're talking about quantity, probably ease of eatability.
And I gotta say, I don't know what style of vacation he and his family are going on, but In my experience, most beach houses, they have pretty... just functional kitchens, right?
Yeah. Like not super awesome cooking gear. for a few years we've gone on a vacation with friends of ours who rent a house and we just kind of tag along and it's, It's a house that can fit like 13 people and the stove is a 24-inch stove.
Classic. So, okay, with those factors in mind, Carlet, go.
Yeah, so that's really smart. I didn't even think about the actual kitchen.
I was so kind of mesmerized by the quantity of people.
And the first... I have some experience.
I've done family vacations like this and it's very intense just between you know, the grocery shopping alone is like kind of a thing you have to do every day. to fill the fridge up and then deplete it um so immediately my mind went to you know division of labor like uh love like a chore chart you know dividing this between cooking cleaning shopping I think that's like important so I think the breakfast Yeah, I feel like his breakfast program should be like a buffet.
So like cereals, granolas, put up bowls. fruit that you can just very easy grab and go like grapes and berries, maybe some charcuterie, And then, you know, boil a couple dozen eggs like every night before like that happens the night before and you've got a hard boiled eggs.
And I feel like people have to. fend for themselves.
There's no omelet bar. And then lunch, like sandwiches.
You got to just get baguette, go the long way down the baguette.
And we're talking about, you know... cucumbers and cream cheese, you got cold cuts, you got a veggie, like work it out, cut those crosswise again, you know.
To your point, no stove. Yeah. We're not doing that.
Maybe... Somebody can make a vinaigrette, you buy a bunch of bags of the baby kale, toast some nuts in the toaster oven, a nice big salad for everybody.
Yeah, bingo. And then dinner time. All right, Carla, hold the thought about what to make for dinner.
Okay. We'll be right back. We're talking to Carlo Lali Music, author of Where Cooking Begins.
We'll be back in a minute. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
And we're back with Carla Lally Music. She's the author of Where Cooking Begins, and she's the host of Carla's Cooking Show, available on an internet near you.
It's okay, Carla. We were talking about our dear friend Raphael. who's going on the vacation of a lifetime with nine in-laws, three kids, himself, and maybe a partner.
And what's he going to make for dinner? Dinner time.
It's got to be a little festive because you're getting together.
It's your one time a year. Yeah, you really want us to all sit down together at the end of the day.
And if there is a grill, that's a great way to kind of do the protein separately.
And I would do like whole side of salmon. skinned down, you never even have to turn it over, can grill that until the salmon is cooked. take it off and you know I would make like a delicious bean salad using canned beans Lots of olive oil and lemon zest and some pieces of feta, roasted red peppers. you know, just keeping it really simple, big wedge salads.
Yeah. I think they're going to get like. very familiar with the best rotisserie chicken supermarket in town.
Yeah. No shame in that. Yeah, no. I mean, look, it's vacation, right?
And like... Whatever you want to do on vacation is your vacation.
If you want to be the person who's going to sit here, I'm going to cook for 13 people all day long and that relaxes me.
Go do that. Please do. God love you. You know, if you're like, look, I'm here to like chill.
I'm going to go buy four rotisserie chickens every night and we're going to eat three of them.
And the fourth one I'm going to shred up.
And that's going to be part of the sandwich spread tomorrow.
You know, whatever. Exactly. I love the whole side of salmon on the grill idea.
Like, I think people get super intimidated by, A, the size of that, and B, you know, oh my god, what if it sticks?
But, you know, you get that grill... Nice and hot, but not like super crazy hot.
You make sure it's clean. You scrub it really well with a grill brush.
You take a paper towel, dip it in oil, doesn't matter what kind of oil.
To my mind, you might have a different opinion.
I don't really care what oil we use for this. and rub that grill grate until you start to see it like really like slick and salt and pepper your salmon or whatever seasoning you want. dry it on the skin side, lay it right down on those hot grill grates, then what do you do?
I like to turn the heat down to like a medium, maybe even medium low, and cover.
If it's a gas grill, I would cover. Exactly.
And just kind of let cook. And the sticking is not really that much of an issue.
It might stick a little. But really what you're trying to do is you're going to cook that skin enough so that it will – sort of tense up on its own and it'll release.
But you got to get giant spatulas, like big diner burger flipper spatulas.
Yeah. And for even for people who, you know, the fish does stick, let's say.
If you just keep it on the skin side, And it turns out either the skin burns or the skin sticks.
The kind of genius thing is you can in between where the flesh and the skin meet.
And the flesh of the salmon... will come right off.
It's almost like that skin just becomes your aluminum foil and you can just leave it behind and it's no big deal.
And then, you know, you can flake up the salmon if the filet doesn't come off in one big piece, no big deal again. flake it up, put it on a platter, lots of lemon juice, olive oil, lots of herbs, whatever, and it'll be great.
And then the next day you can make like a salmon niçoise with the leftovers.
Yeah, I love that. So, okay, sides and salads for this group?
What would you do? Do you believe in pasta salad?
Yeah, I like... You know what? I think that this year is going to be my year to embrace cold pasta salad. and not and not just like cold tortellini with pesto, which I would eat.
Don't get me wrong. But like there's really delicious cold pasta dishes.
And I think I think this is the summer to get into it. what made you turn or what in your mind, do you have like a thing where like, I'm going to make that this year.
I'm going to like, and that's exciting to me.
Yeah, I actually was forced to make one. with my friend Molly Boz who also has a cookbook that just came out and we did a cook along together and she chose the recipe and it was like a cold pasta salad with strips of mortadella and olives and pistachios in it and like a very saucy delicious vinaigrette something i would never make in a hundred million years And sometimes you just have to kind of step out of your comfort zone with some of the stuff and realize like pasta salad is a thing that a lot of people really like.
But what I liked about this one was that it wasn't mayonnaise-y.
There was nothing to get gloopy, even though the vinaigrette does absorb into the pasta, but it gives it a ton of flavor. bright flavor instead of just like, you know, fat.
Um, it was really good. And like everybody ate it, kids ate it.
And I was, I was into it. And how do you deal as a person, as a professional, as an Italian with the texture of pasta and a pasta salad?
Because that's always been my hang-up. Well, what?
That it's mushy? Yeah. Yeah. Yup. You have to undercook it.
But not as much as you would for like a pasta that you're going to finish in the sauce.
So you've got to make sure it's al dente. because it is going to absorb some of the liquid and then, you know, it feels really crazy and wrong, but you've got to rinse it and cool it down when it comes out.
Because if you just let it cool without rinsing that surface, yeah, it just gets gummy.
And then I think including something in the pasta salad that really has texture.
So like the chopped nuts were kind of key.
Um, You know, you want like a nice, coarse, crunchy thing in there.
Yeah, to give it like other kinds of texture that like will distract you.
Okay, cool. I think you should also not think about maybe Italian pasta salad, but get into the other world of All the great noodles.
So like rice noodles cold are amazing. And there's so many like Korean.
Rice vermicelli cold dishes that have soy sauce and vinegar and lots of ginger and tons of herbs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be like the pasta salad in the salad bar, which is like sort of its own universe of... Oh, yeah.
Scarred. Fully scarred. Yeah. Alright, let's move on to Chris.
Hi, Francis. This is Chris in Houston, Texas.
I've never quite known what to do with kohlrabi, but I found the recipe recently where you... braise it in clarified butter or ghee.
And then in the recipe, they had it sliced up in little steaks on a platter and it looked really yummy. but I'm thinking it needs something interesting drizzled on top, a light sauce of some kind.
What would you suggest? I love that. I love that recipe for the idea for cooking kohlrabi.
I mean, no one gives kohlrabi any love. If you've ever heard of it, it's the butt of a joke, right?
I know. And I actually have an author, Hugh Atchison, who literally wrote a whole book on produce and Because people kept coming up to him in his local farmer's market and be like, hey, you're a chef.
What the hell do I do with kohlrabi? I know.
It's so true. I get stopped about kohlrabi more than anything else.
It's like you pick it up and people are like, oh, miss, miss.
What are you going to do with that? And it's like, oh, I'm going to ride it into space.
I don't know. I'm going to eat it. It's like, yeah, like, basically, it's like cabbage, but without leaves, right?
It's like, if you imagine like a solid block of cabbage, that's kind of what it is you can shred it you can saute it well it does have beautiful leaves and so if you get it at the farmer's market it will have and I think that's part of what throws people off is like a very long extension of, you know, very leafy branches.
And it is a cruciferous. It's in the brassica. family, so thinking of it as like a really big radish kind of. with those kinds of radishy greens.
I love the greens like sauteed like you would any other green that you like, but...
The texture reminds me of like cauliflower stem or daikon.
Yeah, like a turnip. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you can have it raw or cooked. I've never had this like ghee or clarified butter poached preparation.
And it doesn't feel that summery, I have to say.
No, but it does sound delicious. Sounds really good.
And you are a master of... putting something on top of something that's been cooked in butter.
I kind of feel like that's very much in your wheelhouse.
So what would you tell Chris? What should she put on top of her?
Butter braised kohlrabi or really butter braised, like any vegetable really, I think.
Yeah, so when you cook any kind of brassica like that, kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli, turnips... takes whatever that spicy raw kind of nose-tingling property of those greens. and really makes them sweet.
So they're totally, the flavor really changes.
Any sourness or bitterness will become really nice sweetness.
It's going to be really tender, but not mushy.
And then the butter again is just kind of like more fat and sweetness.
That's what I would want. Yeah. necessarily more fat because you've got all the butter.
So like a salsa verde, you know, hold the oil.
So would you like chop like parsley? Yeah, I love any, all the herbs. combined and even greens.
I think you could use some of the kohlrabi greens combined with any basil, cilantro, chives, mint, All of those tender herbs are going to be really tasty.
Maybe capers or olives for more salt. Maybe smash up an anchovy. sherry vinegar, white distilled vinegar, like really any vinegar and just enough oil to like loosen it up.
I think that would be really nice on top.
You could throw chili flake in that to make a little spicy.
It sounds great. Yeah. And that's just like an awesome all purpose.
Like you can put that on. chicken. It would be amazing on any kind of grilled fish, any really simply grilled protein.
You can do that with pork chops. You can do it with steak.
It's just... That brightness, that freshness of herbs.
Yeah, totally, totally. Just get a bunch of herbs, chop them up, get them in a bowl with Like you said, a little vinegar, a little lemon, maybe some capers, olives, and just a little bit of olive oil.
And just have that on the hand for everything all summer long.
That is such a great thing also for using up your herbs, which are just very abundant in the summer, especially if you have a little vegetable garden or garden. windowsill garden, but it'll work with greens like Swiss chard also or, you know, tender spinach, carrot tops if you're into that.
And you can use it to dress a grain salad, too, or to fold into, like, canned white beans or chickpeas.
I love any kind of green sauce like that.
Yeah, actually, I love that. And that's a great side.
You crack open a couple cans of beans, drain that liquid out.
Mm-hmm. Taste them. Maybe you want to salt them a little bit.
Maybe you want to add a little bit of grated raw garlic.
And then that's also your stuff that folded in.
And that's like a fantastic side for anything all summer long.
Yeah, that's a good heatwave dish. No cooking.
Totally. All right, let's move on. Actually, while we're on the subject of greens, let's go to Harrison.
My name is Harrison Vijay Choy and I'm calling in from New York City where I go to college.
I've been trying to stay away from eating a lot of processed foods.
So I've been buying leafy greens like, you know, bok choy, kale, bag spinach, all that good stuff.
But I didn't realize how fast everything can wilt and brown.
Oh, yeah. pre-cook everything to kind of like preserve my vegetables or is there a better way to store them in the fridge?
This would be super helpful to know. Thank you so much.
Such a good question. Yeah. And I guess right now, like when I go to the farmer's market now, there are just so many greens and like, oh, I want that.
I want that. I want that. And I do come home with a ton of them and I get lazy about cleaning them, you know.
I have a very not advanced fridge. And if I put it too far in the corner, they freeze.
I put them over here. They, you know, they, they turn bright.
Like, Storing greens is a problem. And I end up just braising a lot of them.
If it's not in the best shape in the world...
When you braise it down, it's fine. I don't know.
What do you like to do? Same. I mean, I do the same exact thing, especially in the spring because we're so – we've been so starved for like – anything coming out of the ground and they're so abundant they look so beautiful and then you get them home you're like oh first of all i can't even fit these in the fridge so that's like problem number one But I think, you know, just talking about storage first, I think he's on to something, and you mentioned it too, like...
If you can force yourself to remove the leaves from the stems, if you're going to use the stems like that's awesome. and wash them, like fill the sink up with cold water, get them in there, dunk them. drain them, clean kitchen towels if they're not all gonna fit in a salad spinner, roll them up, do the windmill with your arm, you can be your own salad spinner.
I do that all the time. And they're clean and they're dry.
They're going to store like so much better.
So from there, I usually put them in any kind of reusable vegetable bag.
Um, if there's residual moisture, like, put a piece of paper towel in there with them.
Yeah. And they should hold. Like, if they're not being smashed down by... a watermelon in your crisper drawer.
Which is a thing. Or a whole ham? No, I've never seen that happen before.
Right. they, you know, you should get three to five days out of them.
And then, and it's also like so much easier to then be like, oh, I'm going to use these because they're, They're clean and they're RTG.
Braising is super smart. I do the same thing.
Lots of dry spices. Look up herb jam. Do you know that recipe for herb jam?
No. So it's a legendary recipe from legendary Paula Wolfert, slow Mediterranean cooking.
And essentially you can take. Any greens, any herbs, chop them up, steam them.
And then saute them really low and slow until it just becomes like a paste almost.
Like a black paste. Yeah, it gets really, really, really, really dark, really a lot of olive oil, lots of spices, and it just concentrates it.
You can use it kind of as a condiment. You can use it as a side.
You can stir it into yogurt. You can loosen it up and make it into a dressing for pasta or for grains. um it's just like a really when you just find yourself in urgent like I have a green problem and I
I really don't want to waste them. It's just a kind of a great big batch thing to do.
Another thing I've been doing has been like a cooked pesto.
So we've been doing this with Swiss chard, just really simply sauteing again, like sound like a broken record, but olive oil and garlic. whatever other spice you want to put in there as though you were just making sauteed greens, but then put them in the blender. with lemon juice, lemon zest, you know, all the things we would put in a regular pesto.
Parm. almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, whatever, and make puree.
Yeah. And it's surprisingly like yields a lot.
Even like one bunch of Swiss chard will yield like two or three cups of this pesto. which again, you can kind of use as a, as a dressing for pasta, but you could also use it as something to like, you could even poach eggs in it or something. like serve it with meats.
So it's a good way to take a big thing and make it into a small thing that then can store.
That's super cool. It literally never occurred to me to do that because like pesto was like, it's always got to be about like, the most beautiful fresh basil and you're trying to preserve the basil flavor and no, but why not just do it with cooked greens?
Because parm, garlic, olive oil, those things are never not delicious. with anything, let alone anything green.
So that's super rad. It's a fun one. It works.
I think I did it kind of by accident one night because I was just going to make pasta with sauteed greens, but my younger son can sometimes... be really into the greens but sometimes can be a weirdo about texture so I was like uh why don't I puree this and then you know we won't have a texture thing with the leaves And it kind of just turned into a pesto.
Yeah. It's green and it's in the blender.
Oh, whoop. That's right. Oh. How'd the barn get in there?
Yep, one thing leads to another. That's Carlo Lali Music, host of Carlo's Cooking Show.
We'll be back with more of her and me and your cooking questions.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're taking your questions today with James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Carlo Lali Music.
Let's get back to it. Okay, let's take one more from Karen.
Hey, Splendid Table. This is Karen from Rhode Island, and I have a question about knives.
So my family has two main knives. The first one is a Williams-Sonoma child's knife that we bought when our oldest child was about five and wanted to learn how to and the second knife we have came with our $12 cutting board and was kind of like a freebie that was packaged along with it.
So the child's knife is actually the better knife of the two that we have. pretty serious cooks and are really struggling with working with these tools and are wondering what a good choice would be for us if we were going to buy just one or two knives and want that to basically cover all of our needs.
Thank you. Right. First of all, I think I'm not sure what a child's knife is.
I think it's just one of these like little mini like five inch chef for kid hands.
Right. Yeah. I love that that's the better of their knives.
I actually bought one for my kid when he was like four and it's everything you just said except the front of the knife that would normally come to a point is rounded.
So they can't, you know, kind of accidentally stick themselves.
Poke, yeah. But... This is a tough question.
This is basically, basically this question is like, what are your two kind of desert islands? knives on the knife block like if you had to just have two and so i'm asking you francis like in your own collection what would you what would you go down to And first of all, I want to say that I actually really do appreciate the question.
And I think it's a good reminder for me to know all kinds of people do things all kinds of ways.
Yeah. I 100% believe Karen when she's like, hey, we really love cooking.
We're serious cooks. We just don't happen to have this particular tool.
And if you were to ask... Any chef that taught me in culinary school this question, they would say you have to have a chef's knife and you would have to have a paring knife.
And you know what? I use my chef's knife every day.
I'm not a huge paring knife user. And I don't know why the rule was you have to have these two.
In my mind, I use a serrated slicer, like a bread knife.
Yep. way more than I use my paring knife.
Like that's my favorite knife in a lot of ways because they're long.
I don't like a huge chef's knife. It doesn't fit well with my hand.
I don't have big hands. Like an eight-inch knife is kind of all I can do.
But a nice long slicer, like... I can actually do a lot of vegetable prep with that.
If I have like a big cabbage, I'd rather use my big slicer than my eight inch chef's knife, you know, and obviously slicing tomatoes and obviously slicing bread, it's better for, so I love that knife.
And when I was a prep cook in a restaurant, I reached for that way more than I did.
Even my chef's knife and my paring knife always just stayed in my bag.
All that said. I have to say I'm reminded of an interview we did a couple of years ago with a historian named Tim Hayward who wrote a history of knives, kitchen knives.
And he said this thing that blew my mind.
And that was that basically the chef's knife exists.
Because men professionalized cooking. And this is in France, this is in the Western world, you know, like different cultures, different traditions have different knife traditions too.
But in the Western... European-based cooking world.
Men professionalized cooking. And so they made cooking something you do standing at a workbench like you would if you were a carpenter, right?
So the chef's knife is designed to be standing up cutting down but people like specifically women have been cooking forever With small handheld knives or other tools you use sitting down.
Like my mother-in-law has cooked three meals a day, every day of her entire life.
She grew up in Portugal. I don't know if she's ever used a chef's knife.
You know, she always used a tiny three inch knife and she cut everything in her hand.
She would hold a potato and she knows how to dice a potato in her hand with that knife.
And, you know, it's like. Why is it the dude's version of holding the big knife is the proper way?
When my mother-in-law has been an amazing cook for literally half a century.
And she's only used a paring knife. So anyway, I guess what I'm saying is...
Karen, I do love my chef's knife, my Aiden chef's knife.
And I like a nice heavy one. A lot of chefs like a nice, like light Japanese one.
I don't mind the heaviness because I'm not using it eight hours a day.
But you might find... A knife the size of your child's knife is what you like and just get a nice sharp version of that.
You might find the paring knife in your hand is what you like.
Yep. And so your chef's knife, Francis, is it like a French-German style with a very curved blade?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I 100% agree with you.
And I think the knife that's best for you is the one that feels the best in your hand.
And I always tell people to like, go to a good shop and hold the knives and get a sense of the weight.
And like you said, the size of your hand is so important for how the knife feels, the way it's weighted.
Is it weighted in the handle? Is that weight kind of more evenly distributed?
And I also love my five inch kind of petty knife.
Sometimes they're called utility knives.
They can kind of do it all. They can slice and dice, but they have a precise enough tip to kind of do the things that a paring knife can do.
And I pick that one up like all the time, way more than my long like eight inch straight edge slicer.
But I use the serrated same every single day.
Yeah. Another pitch for the serrated slicer is you don't sharpen them.
You don't have to sharpen them. You can't sharpen them.
Good point. The one thing I would suggest you do if you do get like a chef's knife or something like that is –
You either buy a sharpener, which is different than your steel, or you buy a sharpening block or a stone, a sharpening stone, and you learn how to use it.
Because a good knife can hold an edge for a good long while, but sooner or later it will get dull, and it's no fun to cut with a dull knife.
For sure. I think having a knife that you like and that works well will completely change your relationship to the ingredients.
It's just going to be like a joy to cut things up.
Yeah. All right, Carla, this is all the time I will take from you from this beautiful summer day.
But I hope to get to see you soon. I hope so, too.
We'll have to do a backyard hang. I wasn't fishing for that invitation, but thank you for it.
I will talk to you later. Have a great summer.
You too. Carlo Lali Music is the author of Where Cooking Begins and hosts Carlo's cooking show on Patreon.
You can find that recipe for her indoor spiced and grilled ribs she talked about on our website, splendidtable.org.
In my opinion, one of the greatest things to eat in the world is a halo-halo.
It's a Filipino dessert. It's a bowl with shaved ice with...
Bits of young coconut and fruits, jellies, and sometimes things like sweet plantains or chunks of sweet potato.
It's splashed with milk or condensed milk. maybe a scoop of ice cream.
One of the favorite versions I've ever had in my entire life was made by Chef Dale Taldy, who did all that and then threw a handful of Captain Crunch cereal on top just to keep it extra classy.
Anyway, it's perfect, it's amazing, and there's this whole genre of this kind of cold fantasia all over Asia.
Khushboo Shah is the restaurant editor at Food & Wine, and she just wrote about three of her favorite masterworks of the genre.
Hey, Kush. How you doing? Hi, Francis. Good.
How are you? I am well, thank you. I am sweating.
I'm living summer like the way it's supposed to be.
I mean, same, same. Can I ask you a personal question?
Sure. Is ice cream a summer food to you?
No, ice cream's a year-round food to me, 100%.
Thank you. Actually, I think ice cream might be better in the winter is my controversial theory.
Yes. Okay, thank you. Because I don't know why people think ice cream is a summer food because it's cold and it's rich and buttery and creamy and like... Yes.
That's not what you want when it's 95 degrees, right?
Yeah, it's like too thick sometimes. It's too much.
It's thick. Yeah. With seas. With seas. So many seas.
All the seas. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, thank you.
So what I want to talk about is the cold treat of choice for people who are hot most of the year.
So when I opened Food & Wine and saw your piece about three of your favorite Asian people, I don't know what you really call them.
Like drinks, desserts, soup treats. They're like, yeah, they're not quite soups.
They're sort of meals. They're not quite drinks.
Yeah. I don't know. There's something that's magical.
There's not like a specific term for them besides just being really delicious.
Yeah. But there is this genre of snack or treat or drink throughout.
South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indo-East Asia, where basically you're talking about a thing that comes in a glass.
There is a liquid, a drink usually as part of it. or ice, but lots of little chewy, crispy, chunky, soft, gooey, puddingy bits.
Yeah. Textural wonderland. Yeah. It's a textural wonderland.
It could come in a bowl. It doesn't have to be in a cup.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the three that you featured in your story.
Okay. One comes from Vietnam, one comes from various places in South Asia, and one comes from Indonesia.
Correct. And maybe let's start with the Iced Teler, which is the Indonesian version.
Iced Teler, man. I wish this was something I had growing up.
It looks... It's like so colorful and really fun.
There's so many desserts out in the world or just dishes in the world where so many people claim to have invented it.
But it's one of those things that was either invented maybe in the 60s, maybe in the 1980s.
There's a lot of folklore surrounding it.
But the idea is... that teler is like a slang phrase in Javanese that means getting high.
And apparently someone like ate this dish and like, said the ice is getting me high and like basically that translated to like ice to layer um that's so you know the supposed origin story of this dessert So Laura Lee, who is the cookbook author behind Coconut and Sambal, one of my favorite cookbooks that's come out in the last couple of years, developed this recipe for us.
And what she told me is that Iceler always has six key ingredients.
That's what makes it Iceler. Always like cold shards of ice.
There's avocado. You know, I think a lot of Americans get surprised or like are put off with avocado or kind of more savory items. in desserts, but they're actually really common in a lot of these iced Asian textural concoctions.
And then, so there's avocado, there's young...
Exactly. And there's a lot of tropical flavors in these.
So I actually think avocado makes a lot of sense. like um ice tiller also has jackfruit it has young coconut meat and like those flavors to me make a lot of sense with avocado.
There's also cocoa pond on syrup, which I don't know if you haven't had it yet.
It's sort of coconutty, vanilla-y. I feel like it's hard to nail down the flavor of pandan sometimes, but it's like an Asian vanilla to me.
And then there's condensed milk, which I think is very common in a lot of these.
You know, just a lot of... the dishes have condensed milk, which I feel like is very underutilized in American desserts.
And then you can put other things on there, you know, for a pop and color.
You could put like basil seeds that have been soaked for some crunch.
You can put like colorful tapioca, which is what she likes to put.
There's squares of nata de coco, which is like a coconut. gel basically coconut jelly um for you know something a little slippery you know an added texture i don't know it's a lot of fun you know it can't go wrong And it's like basically a mixture of these things with the crushed ice.
Yeah. Right. And you scoop it up with a spoon and you're like crushing through. cold crushed ice and then you get this little like pop of like a little coconut jelly and then you get another bite that has like that coconut pandan syrup that's like vanilla and coconutty and And then here's like a chunk of avocado that's a little more bland and mellow.
Exactly. No bite is sort of the same, but that's sort of the magic of it.
You know, it's not quite a drink. It's not quite a soup.
It's not quite a dessert. could kind of be lunch if you wanted it to be, you know, it is whatever you make it.
You're like Willy Wonka. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, when you're living in a place that's constantly hot, I feel like That's exactly how you want to nourish yourself.
Ice and frozen fruit and jelly things. Refreshing your body.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, let's go to the Vietnamese version, Che Hu Bac.
Yeah, this one's really cool. So Doris Hokane, who is on Bay, it's a Vietnamese-American bakery pop-up. situation right now.
I think she has a permanent space that's opening soon.
She's a Vietnamese American baker and pastry chef and super talented.
And this one is very cool. The original version of it is all white actually, like every element is white.
So it's like an almond panna cotta, condensed milk.
It translates to white chunk dessert soup, according to Dorit, which is like...
It loses something in the translation. Yeah, she goes, it doesn't sound quite as beautiful in English as it does in Vietnamese, which I think is... fair um but she actually likes to add pops of color to it um and usually the panna cotta is made with gelatin but she likes to make it with agar agar just so that it's, you know, more friendly to every kind of diet because a lot of vegetarians, et cetera, you know, don't eat gelatin.
She also likes the texture better. So she basically, Chez Kubach, Che is a Vietnamese term for kind of these like dessert soup type stuff.
So there's like several types of Che in Vietnamese cuisine.
And this just happens to be one of her favorite ones.
So... There's the almond panna cotta, there's piles of coconut cream, shaved ice, pieces of lychee, soaked basil seeds.
And she likes to dye the panna cotta actually with beet juice, butterfly pea flour and coffee to kind of give it a lot of contrast and flavor.
Yeah, it's super beautiful. She likes to drizzle some condensed milk on at the end.
And then also what's really cool is like in the Vietnamese kitchen, there's a wavy knife that's really common.
It has like wavy edges. And so she uses that to cut the panna cotta, which gives it a really cool like textural edge.
Like a squiggly noodle kind of lasagna noodle kind of edge.
Yeah, and I feel like those ridges are probably really great for helping to kind of soak up the condensed milk or bring the basil seeds along with it.
Um, in the bite. Yeah, I really, this one is really fun texturally.
Cool. Love it. Okay. Now let's move to Faluda, which I noticed in your story, you didn't quote anyone.
And this one, so, is your Faluda sui generis?
Yes, I do occasionally recipe develop for the magazine.
So I grew up eating a lot of falooda as someone who is Indian American.
So, falooda is so popular throughout all parts of South Asia.
I don't think just India can claim it. It's really popular in Pakistan.
You can find it in Bangladesh. kind of, you know, throughout the Indian subcontinent.
And so it actually comes to India and the, you know, South Asian subcontinent Persia from Iran.
So there's a Persian dish called faludeh.
That's a very common dessert there. And that is more... just like the vermicelli noodles, some rose water, a scoop of ice cream, maybe a dusting of pistachio.
So this one, of all the desserts, does involve some ice cream, but ice cream is not the center. focal point of it.
And so the Mughal Empire, when they came and took over India, In the area, they brought a lot of the dishes with them.
You'll see a lot of Mughal influence throughout Indian cuisine, especially when you look at North Indian food.
So Faluday evolved into Faluda, which is in India, like this kind of crazy layered concoction.
Everyone layers it a different way. I kind of prefer to put the seeds at the bottom so you can bloom either chia seeds or basil seeds, which give you a really nice crunch.
And then you put in vermicelli. which I know people are surprised to see noodles in Indian cuisine sometimes.
Never me. I'm never surprised by noodles.
And, you know, and then there's rose water, rose syrup and milk, like rose milk is kind of like a real. central element to this.
It's such a good flavor. Yeah, I love floral stuff. find it with other flavors too like pistachio and other fruity flavors or this one called couscous actually which I wish was just couscous because you know, vein like that, but it's more like a poppy-ish flavor.
So you can actually find them in different flavors, but rose is like the most common and most popular.
I made what I call is like a royal faluda.
So I made some rose jelly too for an added textural element.
I took Ruafsa, which is the rose syrup. It's like one of the most popular rose syrup brands throughout India and Pakistan.
And I just added some agar agar to set it to make it like a chewy, you know, jelly, cubed it and like put it in.
And so, yeah, then you top that all off with rose milk and then like a scoop of ice cream and like pistachio and like rose petals on top if you're feeling like fancy.
And then the idea is you kind of just take a long spoon and kind of just go through and scoop from bottom up.
Or you can stir it with a straw, let it all kind of melt.
I don't know, you know, you do you. Yeah.
That's cool. That's like the coolest ice cream float ever.
Yeah, it's definitely an ice cream float taken to the next level.
Right on. I am so psyched to get my hands on one of these because it is going to be serious summertime.
All right. Thank you, Kushboo. Thank you, Francis.
Kushboo Shah is the restaurant editor at Food & Wine.
You can find her recipe for Royal Faluda at splendidtable.org.
And that's our show for the week. I hope you get to spend some quality time with friends and family in a grill soon.
And hey, after, cool yourself down with some shaved ice.
Thanks as always for listening. We'll talk with you next week.
The Splend Table was created by Sally Slift and Rosetta Casper.
It's made every week by technical producer Jennifer Lukey, producer Erica Romero, digital producer James Napoli, and managing producer I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM Studios.
