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Hey, it's Francis. This week, it's a show we did a few years ago, a full hour with the chef who launched a million vegetarian lifestyles, Debra Madison.
Have a listen. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
It was sometime in the mid -80s when my mom sat us down at dinner one night and said that she wasn't going to eat meat anymore.
i was like eight or nine i think and i distinctly remember this moment because i remember being kind of worried like maybe something was wrong with her you know like suddenly my own mom was someone i didn't recognize anymore or wasn't going to recognize well anyway i don't mean to get too melodramatic about it because pretty soon mom was still mom who just happened to have different food in front of her every night at the table but i do remember how weird it was for her after that like she still liked the taste of meat for a while so she would get these canned fake meats that's all that was available
back then and she got weird soy hot dogs out of a can even though she never really ate real hot dogs or there were these tubes of fake ham that slid out of cans like cranberry sauce you know with the little ridges still on the side you know there were no veggie burgers at the supermarket or anywhere else really and at one time i totally remember remember us getting kicked out of a restaurant because they refused to cook for her.
And that was the world in which Debra Madison opened what was likely the first white table cloth vegetarian restaurant in our country.
She was the founding chef of Greens in San Francisco, and to hear her tell it, a lot of people really didn't know what to make of it.
Since then, Debra has written many books, 14 cookbooks on vegetarian cooking, So I am so excited to have you on for so many reasons.
But I think the thing that sort of the occasion that brought us together was the publication of your memoir recently.
recently and right in the beginning of the memoir um there's a there's a little anecdote you have that i think will surprise probably a lot of people and that you wrote that your first exposure to food that um was sort of a life -changing experience or certainly something you remember to this day you know into your adulthood was you were a child and you were with a family family um like a frankophilic family eating french food like chicken poached in wine and how you remember that so strongly and how that was this um transformative moment of you discovering food and yeah you know you're one of the great trailblazers
in popularizing vegetarian cooking in america even though you're not a full -time vegetarian and you don't pretend to be so So tell us how you went from discovering French chicken poached in wine to getting into vegetarian cooking.
Well, that's a long story.
I mean, there are many, many years between those two events.
I don't know that we have that much time.
But yes, I was farmed out to this family when my parents went to Europe, which was great.
I was so lucky because they really knew about food from having lived in France, and that's what they cooked.
And when people ask me, when did you become interested in food, I always say, when I was 16, when that event happened.
The vegetarian came much, much later, many years later.
I raised my hand at a house meeting when we needed a new cook, and I said, I'd love to do it.
And I didn't know I wanted to do it.
And, you know, we didn't grow up with a lot of meat in our family.
so to me i just thought it was going to be a nice event to cook vegetarian food for a while i didn't see it really made any difference um so i did that and little did i know i become branded for the rest of my life wait okay so you said you were in a house meeting tell us about the house where were you oh this was the zen center in san francisco 300 page street and it was a beautiful Julia Morgan building.
I loved that building.
I loved living there.
And we had just bought it a few weeks before and moved in, about 50 of us, and the house meeting was in fact partly to determine who was going to cook the food because we couldn't have everybody going into the kitchen any time they wanted and cooking whatever they wanted.
It was just too chaotic.
and so you studied buddhism for many years when did it start for you it started when in 1969 actually when i went to japan and then i came back and i sat my first session which is a week -long period of meditation tell me about cooking for you know your fellow zen students it was 50 people suddenly you're there now you're the person like you know you had these memories from childhood and now you're feeding 49 other people what was that like It was hard. People complained a lot.
There was nothing I could do to have a perfect meal that made people really, really happy.
We had no guidance the way we did later.
So in terms of developing a sense of care for the food and taking care of the food and the people who were eating it and the cooking and all of that, I just was on my own as a brand new student.
And really, Really, this position is normally given in a Zen do or a Zen monastery to a very senior person.
I was just figuring it out as I went along, and it was not very easy.
People would steal food, which is one of the reasons I wanted the job.
I wanted to be close to food.
I wanted to have access to it, but other people who didn't would steal it.
We started with a kind of macrobiotic menu.
And I changed that quite quickly because I realized if we're going to eat together, we have to have food that we like.
And the abbot had told me, he said, the question, what is that, should never occur.
It should never be raised when we sit down to a meal.
It just shouldn't. And he was right.
Right. So, you know, lotus root stew and that kind of thing didn't have much truck with people from Kansas or New York or some place that wasn't in the Bay Area.
Interesting. So I added baking powder, cheese, you know, things like that.
So in 1980, in San Francisco, you were the founding chef of Greens, which is the first fine dining vegetarian restaurant in the country, at least as far as I know.
I know. How did that happen?
How did you go from Zen student to now a chef of this restaurant?
Oh, that was so hard. I think I was chosen to be the chef of Greens because I was the person most interested in food in Zen Center.
And my experience was only cooking at one restaurant, which was Chez Panisse, which was really not a typical kind of restaurant at all.
so i was quite nervous about starting up greens you can be sure of that and i'd only i hadn't traveled at all except to go to france and to scotland and and those experiences weren't really that helpful but they were good and you know and seeing food firsthand um but it was it was a very hard transition to make and for me personally i worried a lot about what to cook about how to cook it not to use vegetarian cliches at all which got me into a fair amount of trouble with the you know with the staff who was angry about the fact that i would deconstruct the clumps of sprouts and oranges and things
from their plate because i i really wanted the food to read differently than it than it did in vegetarian restaurants at that moment and it did i think People were impressed and they liked it.
Yeah. Well, it was back in 1980, right?
So back then, fine dining basically meant French food and high -end French food certainly meant meat.
So how did you handle that?
How did you sort of bridge that level of expectation that diners would have?
well i i would study french recipes because they were the most that was the the epitome of high scale dining as you said high -end dining and um i would extract something that like a mushroom if something said a la forestier i knew it had mushrooms in it and that's how i came up with making a mushroom ragu you know i would extract a part of the meal that was meat oriented and um turn it into a main dish so in a way that wasn't so hard but at the same time other cuisines were starting to emerge a little bit Paul Wolfert and her Moroccan books had come out then Diana Kennedy was available as a teacher
they both were Marcella Hazan but it really was it was sort of before the time of Italian cooking being what it is today and or any kind of cooking being what it is today it was mostly French as you say yeah yeah yeah so walk us through like some of those early menus that you were putting together like when you walked in and and like you said you were trying to avoid vegetarian cliches so you know this was 1980 so you know we'd had the 60s we'd had the 70s you know there were um you know the cliches of brown food and and and you know that kind of thing already existed.
How did you construct meals?
How did you construct menus?
How did you make people feel like you're going to come in for a fantastic experience and it's going to be not at all what you expect?
Well, there was a difference between lunch and dinner.
I will say this. Lunch was very, very busy and hectic and wonderful in the way that lunch places are.
At dinner, we had tablecloths, we had wonderful crystal holders for candles, and people came in and they could enjoy a four -course meal, which I designed for them at first. It wasn't a la carte, the dinner, because I really wanted people to experience with some ease.
Of course, it wasn't easy for me at all, but I wanted them to experience what a four -course meal might be.
And I did worry a lot about the man whose wife dragged him in, you know, on a weekend night.
I'm sure he wanted a steak and, you know, a bottle of good wine or something.
Well, he could have the bottle of good wine, but we didn't serve a steak, obviously.
And so I worried about him.
What was the dish that would be the it dish that would signal, I'm what's for dinner?
No need to look further.
No need to wonder. ponder because I'm sure he felt that there was going to be a big empty place in the middle of the plate, you know, and where the steak would be and it couldn't be sloppy.
It couldn't be a stir fry, which would have been ridiculous anyway, because this was San Francisco where there were so many good stir fries you could have in any Chinese restaurant really that you went to.
but it couldn't be that it couldn't be pasta because it cools down so much maybe for a second course but not for the the entree so i did things with um i stacked i folded i layered i did you know that's what i did and when people would come into the dining room and say oh that was so good I forgot all about the meat.
I was so tickled. I was really, really pleased.
And that did happen quite a bit.
Yeah. I mean, you know, seeing photos of the food back then, it always did feel to me to be, you know, I come from a different perspective now, right?
You know, there are so many amazing vegetarian chefs.
chefs and i mean you can go into not you can go into restaurants that aren't vegetarian you know focused and have amazing vegetarian meals and and i think it's so interesting because it's not just the interest is there and the and the craftsmanship and the artistry is there but it's also so much about the guests and their expectations yeah i mean you said like oh pasta wouldn't have made sense at the time as a main course i mean for a practical reason in terms of the the pacing and and, you know, how much you could serve and how hot it could be.
But also, like, I think people didn't think of Italian food in that way.
They didn't think that Italian food was a quote -unquote nice thing to go out for.
And you're talking about the stir fries as well.
Like, it was a very sort of monolithic and kind of a monochromatic expectation of what food could be.
So it's so interesting to hear you say, Oh, like if people are expecting a centerpiece of the meal, if they're expecting a steak or a chicken breast or something like that, well, you could stack and fold.
You can give them an object that they can use a knife and fork for.
And that kind of signaled to them that they were now eating an entree.
And I think that's so interesting how our mindsets change.
It is. And our mindset is still changing, of course.
I mean, there's so many plant -based food cookbooks now that there didn't used to be.
And if you do go to a restaurant and somebody does a pasta primavera, for example, and the chef has had exposure to ramps and fiddlehead ferns and other spring verdure, you know, it's very different than having a pasta primavera, which I hate.
It always has red peppers and things like that in it that don't come in until, in our case, the fall for about three weeks, and that's it.
Yeah, primavera actually means spring, and so they have all these.
It does mean spring.
But I understand when chefs are out of their comfort range, you know, in cooking vegetarian food.
And those that do cook it, especially if they don't put a label to it, I love it.
It's fine. It can be really good, and I'm so glad that it is.
We're talking to Deborah Madison on this episode, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, The Greens Cookbook, and her latest, a memoir called An Onion in My Pocket.
Coming up, she answers your cooking questions with us.
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 spending this episode talking with the legendary vegetarian cookbook author Deborah Madison, and she's helping us with your vegetarian cooking questions today.
If you have questions for us for a future show about anything you want, record those voice memos on your phone and email them to contact at splendidtable .org.
All right, let's get back to Deborah.
Well, I think one thing for sure over the past 40 years that's made vegetarian, vegetarian, just vegetable cooking much easier in some way, but also just more delicious and pleasurable.
You know, the ingredients that we have in our country now that we didn't have that, the produce.
And that's something I know you've always cared a lot about.
Can you tell us a little bit about your work in growing and bringing back seeds and introducing varieties of produce?
produce. Well, I'm not sure that I get to take very much responsibility for introducing varieties of produce, but when I went to France, I did go to Ville Morin, which was a wonderful seed house then, and I brought back seeds for lots of vegetables that our gardener, Wendy Johnson, planted.
And so these were the plants I was so excited about that I could introduce to our our customers.
Lots of kinds of cucumbers, the blue soles leeks and arugula and different kinds of lettuces, marvel of four seasons.
And Seed Savers Exchange didn't start until about the time the restaurant did.
And it took a while for them to get seeds out into a catalog form.
Tell us about Seed Savers after you did get going and they did get going.
Seed Savers was a wonderful exchange, actually.
Seed Savers Exchange is a wonderful organization.
And it began with the thought that why don't people exchange seeds?
So there's a yearbook, the Seed Savers Exchange yearbook comes out every year in which people list seeds that they have. Things that have been passed down to them or things they've grown in their family.
And Seed Savers was really responsible for the whole heirloom business that cropped up so well in this country and and we were able to benefit from it um people who are younger um who say oh well what's the big deal we can get all these vegetables at trader joe's we can get triple washed arugula baby arugula we can get pumpkins golden beets this that and the other thing i say yes but there was a time when you couldn't get any of that None of it at all.
Yeah, not in 1981 you couldn't.
No, you couldn't. And it was just starting then.
And it was wonderful once we had those things.
But until we did, vegetarian food was pretty boring, you know.
There were two kinds of apples and one kind of lettuce, basically.
And there wasn't a lot of variety to choose from.
And it's so, and you don't have to go into the whole sort of history of it here, but to think, oh, like this is such a huge country with so many climates and so many different growing seasons and soils.
And, you know, obviously we had incredible history of agriculture and local agriculture and heirloom crops.
And, yeah, it's funny to put my head back in that place of even when I was young, you know, I was born in the mid 70s.
So like when I was a kid, like, you know, vegetables, you know, you go to the store, there's, that's what you got.
And that's all you had, and that's all you had to work with when you weren't going to focus the menu on bacon and steaks and things like that.
It's, you know, the palette was so limited.
And so to expand that palette, I'm sure must have felt amazing.
amazing? It was amazing.
And I think a lot of people were involved with it in one way or another too, not just Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm.
But it was a time when people were discovering recipes and different modes of cooking and as well as the produce itself.
So, you know, the tendency in the 80s was for everything to be very rich. And, you know, it wasn't just us, you know, I was very nervous, of course, offering vegetarian food to people who weren't used to having it.
And the tendency was for everyone to use lots of cream and butter and fresh pasta.
And mesquite grills were de rigueur in the Bay Area.
And, you know, there were certain things that you had to have in order to have a restaurant.
And they were some of them.
Greens wasn't alone in that.
yeah I mean it's amazing to think of what you were able to accomplish then um in such a different time uh you know I think we're in an incredible uh time of for vegetable cooking even that boy that's a geeky thing to say but but I I love vegetables I love the cooking of vegetables and I think the creativity that people show that people have shown um in the culinary world with vegetables is so exciting now.
And I think that so many of us owe you a debt of gratitude for kicking us off in that way back then.
So speaking of people who owe you a debt of gratitude, we have so many callers, so many listeners who called in with questions because they want you to help them, you know, navigate their gardens and navigate their pantries.
I'll do my best. Yeah.
So let's turn to them and maybe we'll start with a very basic one.
but an important one Hi Debra, this is Amber from Fort Collins, Colorado My question is, how do you respond to someone who tells you that they don't like vegetables Oh That's interesting I've never been asked that before Really?
I just, I never believe in making people do something that they don't want to do whether it's eat vegetables or hear flute music or whatever it is So I would just say, OK, not a problem.
And then I might ask them how they've had them before.
But normally I would be accepting of them.
And I would also be curious to know what they do eat if they don't like vegetables.
I think personal generosity is always a nice move.
Yes. Good. OK, cool.
Let's go to Brandon.
Hey, Splendid Table.
This is Brandon calling from Houston, Texas.
Alexis, I was wondering what were some common misconceptions or mistakes we make when steaming our vegetables?
I know everyone has their own way of doing it, but I also know not every vegetable steams in the same way.
Thank you again for taking my question and thank you so much for all the great work you've done during quarantine.
You guys have been just an absolute mental health lifesaver.
Wow. Well, thank you, Brandon.
I have to say, first of all, what an incredible voice.
i could hear brandon just talk at me for you know the next 20 minutes and just like go into like a meditative trance um i don't know maybe that's one of the reasons people some people who don't like vegetables maybe they don't like them because they've had them too often steamed and not steamed well particularly um do you what are your feelings on steamed vegetables well i almost never steam a vegetable except sweet potatoes for my dog and beets because I prefer to do that on top of the stove than heat a great big oven to do them in the oven.
My thoughts on steaming vegetables is they're pretty boring, you know, if you're just going to eat them as a steamed vegetable.
I would want to put a sauce with them.
I'd want to do something.
I'd also want to make sure that, you know, that they're really cooked through and and things are going to take different amounts of time which i'm sure brandon you know um and i do think that this whole business of somewhat raw vegetables that are still crunchy well if you like them fine but i personally like things a little bit more cooked but not as much cooked as a southern chef might you know do it i'm married to a southerner so i'm i'm aware of that yeah i mean i think vegetables are beautiful in all states from raw to fully cooked um but i do think you're right i think one of the problems
that people run into when steaming vegetables is is often textural i mean steaming doesn't add a lot of flavor unlike a you know a nice saute where you're adding you know hot fat to it or you know roasting where you're getting caramelization your steaming doesn't add in that way so i think what you want to do if you do want to have steam vegetables is is to season them well so like good use of salt and you know pepper if you want it but i'm i you know i'm often very simple and pure as i just like salt and or i might you know steam them and then season them with a dressing or a sauce like you said
but i also think i don't know i think one of the problems i see with steamed vegetables is when you just get steamed vegetables often it's a mix and to get, like you said, vegetables all cook at different rates.
So if you're putting in carrots, which are hard and take longer to cook, in with tender peas and you're steaming them, well, either the carrot's going to end up raw and the peas will be done or the peas will be, you know, steamed into oblivion by the time the carrots are done.
So I would say if you really want to steam vegetables, steam them one type at a time.
And I would say probably don't overcrowd your steamer so the bottom layer isn't getting super cooked before the center does.
And I would say like – I learned this thing from the chef Ashley Christensen, a wonderful, wonderful chef in North Carolina.
And I was always taught season everything before you cook it or season while cooking with salt.
And she taught me that things, especially vegetables, can absorb salt really super well as long as they're still hot.
So what you can do is steam them, and then right when they're done, season them then to taste, and they'll absorb that salt quickly.
And you can just really get the seasoning that you want.
You won't have to be worried about, am I over -seasoning it before it's cooked or under -seasoning it before it's cooked?
You can season it right when it comes out and it'll absorb the salt.
But I'm with you, Debra.
I would say, after that, I would add a sauce or a little bit of fat or vinaigrette or some soy sauce or fish sauce, you know, something like that to really kind of spark it up.
Something. That's interesting about the salt.
I didn't know that.
I mean, I've always seasoned things as I cook.
Yeah, same. But I didn't know that about the salt being integrated so much so.
and so quickly with a steamed vegetable, with a vegetable that's hot.
But even beets, if you're doing whole beets, which I often do with my beets, and then I have them to use, you know, I can cook them agrodolce, I can put them in a salad, I can do whatever I want.
You know, even with beets, there's going to be a difference because they're never the same size.
Some are big, some are little.
So, you know, you have to make sure that they're done, but not overdone.
You know, after a while you get to know what to look for and, I think, what you like.
Yeah. And sometimes I do kind of like a little bit of variation.
It's sort of nice when the center of the beet isn't, you know, exactly the same texture.
And you can dice it up and, you know, you do it as a salad and some bites are a little more tender and some bites have a little more bite, and I think that's actually quite nice.
That's interesting.
I like that, too. Yeah.
All right, let's go to Oklahoma.
Hey Splendid Table, this is Marie from Oklahoma I am so excited for your episode with Debra Madison as a home gardener and we love to cook, I am so interested in what she would recommend that we always buy fresh or what could we buy frozen and what vegetables does she like to grow herself, what is best straight from the garden.
Looking forward to the episode Thanks Well, that's a wonderful question Marie Um, I usually use the EWG guide for the best vegetables and fruits to buy and the worst because they have to do with the pesticides and whether they're systemic or not.
So the EWG, the environmental working group?
Yes. Thank you. I hesitated because I was going to say that I always think of it as the eating well group, but I know it's not the environmental working group.
um and i seldom buy frozen vegetables i might buy them for my husband if i see okra or something like that that's hard to grow here i'm at 7 000 feet so we have a very very short growing season and especially for things like tomatoes and eggplant and those those kinds of hot weather their vegetables.
What I like to grow in my garden are things that work, and so I've gone to the goosefoots mainly, chard, spinach, beets, orac, which is also called mountain spinach, and these are all the chenopods, and they're a subfamily of Amaranthaceae, and so I like the amaranths too, and I grow a lot of those, and I eat them, the leaves as a salad green, or as a cooked green, and and um what else do i do with those and i eat the seeds of course if i can harvest them i know that next year next year i i have my seed catalog right next to me and i plan to to grow a lot more winter vegetables and try something
i've never tried before like parsley root which i love and um i really look forward to having that do you experiment a lot in the the garden like do you do you say oh this year i'm going to try growing this i've never done that before or do you just go back yes i always do and i it's usually with a grain i've grown millet oh wow i've grown sorghum um i've grown different kinds of ancient wheats um i always do that but i didn't have a garden till fairly recently actually and i finally figured out i need sun even even here in new mexico where it's sunny all the time not shade so i moved my garden
to a place out back which is really very sunny and has nothing to shade it at all.
And I find I can do a lot more.
However, things like tomatoes, as I said, are really, really hard here.
And especially now we have a drought and we live in the desert anyway so water is always an issue.
The Kenan pods take some water but they don't take as much as other plants do.
do. Yeah. If someone was starting out gardening, and I know you just said you haven't had a garden for very many years, but I think you've spent plenty of time growing throughout your life.
What would you recommend they start with?
Well, I think I would start with lettuce.
And the quinoa pods are really easy.
I mean, they like to grow, especially if you have an alkaline soil like we do.
I think that that's important.
Lettuces are always fun and if you just let them go to seed they'll come in much much earlier than if you buy seeds.
There are different kinds of lettuce that you can grow.
I would just go with the heirlooms from Seed Savers.
They're gorgeous and they're so beautiful and they're so much more beautiful than anything you can get in a store.
Let's go back to cooking Okay Because I have the blackest thumb So I hear that I just I'm filled with jealousy And I want to get back In the kitchen Well you're in New York So what can you expect Let's go to Daniel Hey everybody This is Daniel From Portland, Oregon So I got a problem That comes up When I'm roasting something With a sauce Or a glaze Let's say that a recipe Says I should coat Or toss my vegetables With a sauce Before I roast Well invariably Some of the sauce gets on the roasting pan and then it burns.
Those little burnt pieces are frustrating not only because it's a waste of the flavor but because the charred bits get stuck on the good food when I'm turning it midway or if I'm removing to serve.
It also means that there's some frustrating cleanup afterward because my baking sheets are covered in a thick burned crust. And the problem is even worse if I'm using high heat or if the sauce uses sugar like when I made miso maple glazed carrots the other night.
So since so many recipes call for a roasting with a glaze but none of them seem to acknowledge this as an issue or direct me on how to avoid the problem.
Is there anything I can do to keep it from burning?
Thanks for listening.
You're welcome. Well, gosh, what a question.
You know, I roast vegetables very simply, usually olive oil is what I put on them, but I would think anything that has sugar in it is going to stick and burn.
It just is. And any form of sugar, whether it's maple syrup or granulated sugar or molasses or whatever you put on it, that is going to happen.
And it seems to me rude that the recipes you've used haven't pointed that out.
So maybe just use some of the sauce.
Wait, 14 cookbooks in?
You haven't told anyone to roast anything with the sauce on it?
No. It's been a while.
But you might add the sauce just closer to the end of cooking so it doesn't have the whole entire moment to caramelize.
That might be one thing you could do or serve it as a sauce on top at the end.
Yeah. What do you think, Francis?
I would say exactly that too.
I think if that becomes a problem, you know, you really want to get the thing mostly cooked through and then you, yeah, would toss it with the sauce maybe halfway or three quarters of the way through.
through because i think what you want the sauce to do in the oven is you want basically you you want the sauce to reduce a little bit right and you want it to you know cook off some of its moisture and yeah so it's fine to do that for you know five minutes ten minutes have it cling and stick to the to the food but um but yeah if it's if it's burning in there then it's not doing anyone any favors so yeah i would cook the vegetable most of the way through or if even you know this this is the same technique for me too.
Cook it most of the way through and then you can give it a little of that sauce, cook that so it glazes and then serve the rest of the sauce on the side and I think that would be delicious.
There you go. We're spending this episode with Debra Madison whose latest book is her memoir.
It's called An Onion in My Pocket.
We'll take a quick break and be back with more with her in just 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.
We're spending this episode with Debra Madison, author of many vegetable -based cookbooks, including Vegetable Literacy and The Savory Way.
We're going deep on your vegetable cooking questions.
I want to take you into the soy world right now.
The soy world. Okay.
And we're going to talk, we're going to hear from Nathan.
Oh, okay. Okay. Hello, Francis.
This is Nathan calling from Lovely Little Hickory in North Carolina, and I have a question for you about tempeh.
Now, I have been making tempeh for a little over a year now, and I've always gotten results that I'm really happy with.
Tastes great, and I haven't even poisoned anybody yet.
But I'm afraid to experiment with the base recipe for fear of poisoning people.
people. Now, whenever I prepare any other bean, I always first soak those beans in a brine.
And at least from what I can tell, that seems to make the beans taste a lot better and everything like that.
But every single recipe I've come across for making tempeh has a rather conspicuous lack of salt.
Just soak the beans in plain water and go from there.
And what I would love to know is can i salt my soybeans before cooking them and then fermenting them into tempeh or does that mess with the fermentation process in some way i would love to be able to experiment knowing that i'm not going to inadvertently hurt myself or anybody else so any advice would be greatly appreciated thank you all so much for what you do you have not only gotten me cooking over the past couple the years but just excited to cook so thanks again take care all right thank you nathan so nathan um i have to tell you that the first tempeh i had that i really liked was actually
made by somebody um who i met later in north carolina but this was in santa fe that he made it and it was so delicious and usually i just buy it and i i don't really like it but i did get your question a little earlier so I asked two people about it and one is now Sadowick who lives here she's Japanese and I've taken some fermentation classes from her and she wrote that she didn't know much about tempeh but she thought a little salting should not affect the fermentation and that lacto -fermentation happens with a two percent brine which is about two teaspoons of salt to a quart of water.
So as long as the salt doesn't make the beans hard, it shouldn't ruin anything.
Salt slows down fermentation and protects from harmful bacteria.
But if it's too much salt, it could discourage tempeh bacteria, so she wouldn't put too much in.
And that's something a person has to experiment with.
And the other person I wrote to was Kristen Shockey, who is is the author of Miso, Tempeh, and Natto, in which she discusses a number of experiments with tempeh substrates.
And she said that she thought the main question here is, can I salt the beans before making them into tempeh?
And she says that's not advised, and the thing is to have a safe batch, and for that she suggests mycelium growth, and the stronger the growth, the better.
The mycelium doesn't grow well in salt.
She also suggested for safe tempeh, you want to add to the beans, either in the cooking water or the soak, some acid.
So as far as experimenting, there are so many ways to experiment with the process.
And so I don't really know because I've never made tempeh, but I share your fear of poisoning people or distressing people over fermentation.
It's a fear we should all share.
And I actually made myself read Sandor Katz's latest book to get over that fear and to find out what it was based on.
So I think that Nathan's question is excellent.
And I'm sorry I don't have a more concrete answer for him, for you, Nathan.
Well, Debra, can you tell us what tempeh is for those of us who don't know it or haven't worked with it?
Well, I mean, it is a fermented soybean usually.
And it comes in a package, and it can be many kinds of beans or grains or combinations of them.
And it looks rather daunting.
And like I say, I don't usually cook it very often.
I buy it every now and then so I'll have something for a backup for a real source of protein, which is what it offers is a very high -protein, chewy kind of food.
And it's usually fried before you eat it.
Yeah, it's sort of like a firm tofu, but a little bit more like a cake, right?
You can see the grains, if it's made with grains, and you can see the beans are sort of brought together, and I don't know.
I just don't know how to use it, really, honestly.
Well, I always steam it first, and then I fry it, and I often add one of those kind of sweet marinades, which I think is very good with.
I've had it in North Carolina in Chile, actually, and it was okay.
I'm not crazy for tempeh.
It has a very singular taste, at least the commercial variety does.
But I'm sure if it's homemade, it's going to be much, much better.
Right on. Okay, well, let's move on to Stevie.
Hello, Francis. I have a question.
I'm hoping you can be my life guide in this.
It will make the rest of my family very happy.
if I can figure out some vegetarian breakfast options with staying power.
I have metabolism of a hummingbird in the morning, and no matter what I eat in the morning, I'm starving by 10 a .m. and grumpy.
So I would love some ideas that aren't overnight oats or avocado toast or please no chia breakfast pudding.
I try to stay away from soy as much as possible.
So I would really love some creative breakfast ideas that are relatively easy while we're working and schooling from home.
Thanks. All right, Debra.
Okay. You are back feeding people in the Zen Center.
And it's 49 people coming down for breakfast, and you've got to get them satisfied until lunch. What are you going to do?
Well, actually, I'm just like you because I'm starving by 10 or 11 unless I have an egg or some other form of protein for breakfast. And I actually do like avocado on toast, and I have it almost every day.
I just had some this morning.
But I also like vegetables for breakfast. I know that sounds weird, but leftover soups, stews, gratins all work for me.
Or sweet potatoes, potato cakes made from leftover roasted potatoes, which we'll have on Friday nights.
Black bean cakes Or a frittata Vegetarian cooking For everyone has a lot of ideas So if you're open To different kinds Of foods for breakfast There are lots of those For example you could do Eggs and you could do A stuffed green chili omelet Or roasted chilies And scrambled eggs with corn And I love that With chilies and corn and so forth.
You could do Dutch babies, which is an oven -baked pancake with mushrooms or on the sweet side with apples or you could do a frittata.
Breakfast parsnips and vegetarian cooking for everyone are delicious.
Elliot Coleman and I did those together once and the person we made them for was horrified at how much butter we used so you might want to change that.
But what do you do with the parsnips?
We just fried them and then we had them with pecans, I think, or some sort of a nut.
They were delicious.
They were so good. And they have so much sugar in them already that they caramelize quite nicely.
You could do curried quinoa with peas and cashews from vegetarian cooking for everyone.
Or leblebi, which is chickpeas with spicy condiments.
That's a dish I learned in Tunisia where it was served as a hearty breakfast food.
or maybe you just have to eat when you're hungry I do that I have to say I'm not a super duper breakfast person but when I was growing up breakfast in our house which we would really only have on weekends was actually often stir fried rice noodles and I think the whole idea of what foods are for breakfast And what foods are for lunch and for dinner?
This always seemed so arbitrary for me.
I didn't understand why breakfast had to be eggs and toast or it had to be cereal of some kind.
Like, I don't understand why, oh, that's a dinner food.
That's not a breakfast food.
Like, I always feel like food is just food.
But that might be because I was, you know, my breakfast experience was informed by, wow, I thought the most delicious thing you could have on a Saturday morning was, you know, like a big honking plate of stir -fried rice noodles with shredded vegetables.
vegetables and um i know she asked for vegetarian food you know when i was growing up often there would be like some ham that we would just sort of uh shred and put in there as well um maybe a little bit scrambled egg in there and you know hot sauce different chili sauces chili crunches um and yeah i always just felt like oh to have that not just the sustenance of the noodles and the vegetables but to have that flavor of um that hot stir -fried flavor the hot oil flavor the um you know to have that kind of flavor that very savory uh experience i always thought was like i don't know just made me
like happy for the rest of the day that sounds wonderful francis i'm like you i'm not a very big breakfast person when i first get up but but if i don't eat something that's sustaining then it's a disaster for me i'm really hungry by 11 o 'clock um or 12 o 'clock i feel hollow even if i have had breakfast i feel hollow by then so with like becky i i agree that i understand her because i'm also starving by 10 or 11 but i'll eat all kinds of things and And actually, I find eggs kind of unusual because we didn't have them growing up.
We had shredded wheat for breakfast no matter what, and it was horrible.
But now I make a fruit salad or I'll have a fried egg on toast or, you know, avocado or something like that.
But I also love gratins and soups and vegetables and leftovers.
And, you know, to me, anything can be breakfast. Yeah, same.
And I would just say one more thing.
If Stevie wants to try the, you know, a quick stir fried noodle or something, it sounds like a lot of work to do right when you wake up.
But you can definitely, you know, pre -shred your vegetables.
You can – if you're using rice noodles, you can pre -soak them and then just put them in the fridge.
And then so in the morning, you know, you can like mince garlic and scallions and ginger, which is a classic flavor combination.
Just like start your oil hot.
hot you get oil hot and throw that in so you can just pre -prep all that stuff and you take it all out in the morning you get a pan doesn't have to be a wok could just be like a saute pan get some oil nice and hot get an egg scrambled and then put in a bowl and then you get um more oil uh heat up your aromatics heat up your vegetables throw in the rice noodles a little salt tiny touch of sugar um and then you sir eggs back in and i don't know and have a nice bottle You can put a bottle of chili oil on the side and there you go.
It can be ready in five minutes.
I have a question, Francis.
What kind of oil do you use when you do that?
You know, like I usually just keep basically two oils around.
I keep a nice olive oil and not even like a super nice olive oil.
Usually I keep an olive oil that is broad enough a range where like I don't, it's not too expensive where I feel bad cooking with it.
But it's tasty enough to dress salads, and that's kind of it.
I don't have a whole olive oil luxury collection kind of fetish, although it's nice that you guys are here.
So I keep a bottle of olive oil, and I usually keep a pretty neutral high -heat oil.
It could be a peanut oil.
It could be a grapeseed oil.
Honestly, just whatever was on sale at the store that's a decent quality.
So you're not using a toasted sesame or a peanut oil?
No, I wouldn't usually cook with sesame oil.
But that's a nice thing to add at the very end to finish it.
And all you need is really just like three drops.
And it gives a really nice, nutty sesame aroma.
Yeah. But yeah, I do keep sesame oil around that, now that you mentioned it.
Okay. Sounds good. Yeah.
So that could be a real breakfast adventure.
adventure. Well, Debra, it's been so great to have you.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Francis.
It's been wonderful to be here.
Yeah, I'll talk to you soon.
Okay, I hope so. Debra Madison's latest book is a memoir.
It's called An Onion in My Pocket.
And you can find that recipe she talked about, breakfast parsnips, on our website, splendidtable .org.
And that is our show for the week.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk with you next week.
APM Studios are run by Chandra Kavadi and Joanne Griffith.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lin -Rosito Kasper.
And it's made each week by technical producer Jennifer Lupe, producer Erica Romero, digital producer James Napoli, and managing producer Sally Swift. And hey, we want to hear what you think.
Send us your thoughts, your story ideas, and your cooking questions anytime.
Get to us on social or email, contact at splendidtable .org.
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I'm Francis Lam and this is APM Studios.
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