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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
Fall unofficially came early this year, in my apartment at least.
For me it's fall again, when I can bear to get both a pot of water going for pasta and turn on the oven.
So it's been nice in my kitchen for the last few weeks.
I have not been concerned about layering on an apron over my shirt.
And when we put out a call for listener questions about fall cooking, it seems a lot of you are feeling the same way.
To help me take those calls.
Today we have my friend and deputy editor of New York Times Cooking, Genevieve Ko.
Genevieve has always been a pro's pro.
I remember, you know geez, decades ago now, when I was a writer for the late great magazine Gourmet.
She was in the test kitchen and our editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichel, would constantly be asking hey, have you tried Genevieve's new recipe yet?
And if you knew what's up, your answer should have always been yes.
I said, hey, Genevieve, so great to have you.
Hey, Francis.
It's always so nice to talk to you.
You know, I, you know this already.
I tell you this every time I see you, but I always love your recipes.
And I'm always so interested in seeing what you're choosing to write about.
And I guess you're working on a recipe right now for smoking your own salmon.
I am.
I am.
So, as you know I think I mentioned this to you the other day but I actually have relocated to Los Angeles and I'm working on the New York Times LA Bureau.
But one of the nice benefits of being out here is being able to actually grill again.
Have a backyard.
That i love yeah, so it's been super fun.
Um, and lately have been working on smoking salmon.
You know, it's really tricky to cold smoke salmon at home though, so i'm trying to figure out how to hot smoke salmon and make it taste like cold smoked salmon.
Oh wow okay, you know right, like just for like food safety, right like i want to make sure.
Obviously it's all good to go but um, but yeah that's, that's sort of what i'm experimenting with right now.
I remember, actually I remember when I learned the difference between hot smoked and cold smoked salmon.
I was like 19 years old.
But I think when most people hear smoked salmon right, they think of that beautiful, like translucent, you know, thinly sliced.
You put it on a bagel or you eat it with you know, sometimes with a dill and lemons.
You know that sort of like delicate thing.
And hot smoked salmon is actually cooked, right?
So that smoked salmon is cured and technically raw.
But hot smoked salmon is actually cooked.
And it is, I find, like a good hot smoked salmon is delicious but it's actually quite hard to come by.
Harder to come by, I think, than a good cold smoked salmon.
Yeah, I've seen it at some seafood counters, but it is a bit harder to come by.
And I think what I love about cold smoked salmon like really really, really cold smoked salmon that's been cured a long time too is this really intense, almost like chewy texture there.
Right, which is something you don't quite get with, like the cold smoked salmon that's meant for, like lox or you know gravlax, which isn't smoked at all, but where it's really tender and silky slices, and then hot smoked salmon, you get this sort of lovely flakiness there.
But a little bit of chew, like I love when there's a cold smoked salmon that's both somehow silky and chewy.
So not as far as jerky, right?
I don't want salmon jerky and I don't want like straight up salmon candy which, like you know, you really have to chew, like the kind you take on like camping trips.
But something with a nice chew that's not tough, right?
So you know, there are certain words that I know from my native Cantonese that I wish I could translate into English, but there isn't.
And it's this concept of none, which is like it's somehow chewy and tender.
It's often used to describe like perfectly cooked noodles, right?
So it's not soft.
There's chew.
There's a resistance, but it's still really silky.
And that's really what I'm achieving.
Yeah.
So it's a combination of trying to achieve the right... taste, right?
The balance of salt, smoke, and sugar, right?
That balance where it's, it's not, you don't want it super sweet, but you definitely want that sweetness.
And you definitely want the savoriness and you want the, the almost sort of like.
The smokiness I'm looking for is like when you feel the wisps of the smoke.
But not like you're in a cloud of smoke.
Does that make sense?
When you're eating something yeah, you either are tasting the like lovely gentle wisps of it, and other times you feel like, oh no, I might be like choking on a huge cloud of smoke.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So flavorful and delicate.
Okay, well, coming soon to New York Times Cooking.
Yeah.
Right on.
I'm excited for that.
Okay, so we have a bunch of callers lined up who really want to talk to you.
Should we go to them?
Yeah, of course.
So excited.
Terrific.
Well, thank you.
Okay, let's start with Artie.
Hi, Artie.
Hi, Artie.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you calling from?
I'm calling from Philadelphia.
Philadelphia.
I love Philly.
It's like the most underrated restaurant city in the entire country, I think.
What do you want to talk about?
My question is is there a difference between buying previously frozen fish from the seafood counter and frozen fish in the freezer case at the grocery store, besides the price?
Oh, okay.
I think about this all the time.
I do.
I don't sleep at night.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I lie awake in bed thinking about it.
Well, actually, okay, Genevieve, I want to hear your opinions on this.
And Arti, I think you have actually unveiled a little bit of a secret.
I think for a lot of people, which is a lot of the times, the fresh fish in the store counter, you know in the refrigerated case, has in fact been frozen.
It's not like, oh, we took it off the boat this morning and somehow it got to your supermarket.
Right.
So it has been frozen and oftentimes frozen at sea, frozen actually on the boat where it was caught.
And so your question is is there a difference between buying that and going to the freezer aisle and grabbing like blocks of frozen fish that you'll defrost?
Exactly.
You think about this a lot.
I do.
I do.
Cause I do think you know those individually quick frozen fish plays that you can buy in the freezer section, like that is almost as fresh as you can get it.
Right.
Because it's been frozen right after it's been caught.
And it's still like rock hard and it's so fresh.
And it is true that a lot of seafood counters that's essentially what you're getting, except that they've thought it.
So for me, oftentimes the huge difference is really in time, right?
Do you want to make dinner now?
Or have you planned ahead enough that you have bought and are keeping a stash of those frozen fillets, but you've had the foresight to take it out of the freezer to thaw in the fridge?
Because I really think that that's the most ideal way to thaw.
Um, those fillets, i have, in a pinch for sure, slipped one of those, you know, completely sealed packets in cold water to quick thaw, but the texture does.
Yeah, the texture isn't quite as good as when you, you know, have the foresight, either you know the night before, depending on how thick the filet is, you know, putting in the fridge the night before or um, in the morning.
So Yeah, the big difference is how much planning have you done to give yourself that time to thaw and to thaw it well and to thaw it properly so that it does so evenly?
And in an ideal world, most fish counters are going to thaw it really nicely properly.
But sometimes, you know, you want to take a look.
You want to see.
It should never look dry, right?
The surface of the fish should never look dry, but also shouldn't look mushy or like too like slimy at all.
So I think the main difference is really in the thawing.
Yeah.
And that's such an unsexy thing to talk about.
But it's so much more.
I love the – I mean, I do both.
I think I love from fresh fish counters, depending on where you live.
I mean, Philly, you're still pretty near the water, and I'm sure you have some amazing markets.
You know, if you can get fish there that's been caught like that morning –
That's amazing, right?
That is a whole different level of deliciousness.
But if you're choosing between frozen and previously frozen, yeah.
I don't want to be a hypocrite and be like oh, just plan ahead, because I can never find myself with enough foresight to do that.
But yeah, those frozen fillets are really great.
Great.
That's super helpful.
I think there's a little bit more that I think I would love to add to this a little bit, which is I have recently been – kind of amazed arty actually um in some of the quality of the frozen like the still frozen fish that i can buy yeah um yeah you know like there's there's really great technology on fishing boats these days to really freeze that fish very very quickly and very very well and this is getting into real nerdiness but when you freeze things there's actually a difference in quality depending on how you freeze them right so if you if you like You take something and you chuck it in your freezer at home, it turns into a solid block of ice sooner or later.
But if you freeze it at much lower temperature, ie freeze it much faster the freshness is actually preserved.
The quality of the food is actually often preserved.
And there's a whole sort of scientific reason for it.
And that is like, if you freeze something really quickly, then like the ice just kind of like the water content turns to ice immediately and it doesn't have time to like form crystals slowly.
And if you freeze it, you know um, at like a home freezer temperature, the long time it takes for the ice to form crystals means that those crystals have time to like really get big and they start to like poke, and they poke at the cell walls and they break the cell walls, and so when you defrost them, all those cell walls have already been broken, so like a lot of the moisture in those cells starts to come out, and so that's why sometimes, when you defrost something, there's a lot of water in the bag or something like that.
Um, and ships now have like incredible freezing technology where they can just really freeze it super fast.
And there's something actually to the idea of like keeping it frozen all the way through until it gets to your home and to your point right genevieve, like you're defrosting it slowly in the refrigerator, so the thawing is sort of the opposite situation, where you can like to thaw it slowly.
Um, then like it's truly almost as if the fish was caught, you know, moments ago.
So yeah, I think Genevieve's point too, like if you're looking at the store and you're buying the quote unquote fresh fish, much of it already has been frozen, but you want to take a look at there.
And also like the old saw of like, oh, go to a place where they actually do sell a lot of fish.
So there's a lot of turnover in the inventory.
You'll probably do pretty well either way.
Yeah.
And, to your point, Frances.
The other thing I do look for is in terms of that really high quality freezing.
Ideally, the supply chain it's that frozen all the way through.
But if you're looking at a bag of those frozen fillets and there's a lot of ice crystals or you know clearly it hasn't been super frozen all the way.
Yeah.
In that case, I wouldn't necessarily get that frozen stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, if you're seeing like snow.
You know, if you're seeing snow on the bags and stuff, you're like, oh no, this is at some point like not been as frozen as it should be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I would keep a lookout for that.
If you look inside those little frozen packets and you start to see like ice crystals inside.
On the exterior maybe it's just like oh, the humidity in the air froze to it or whatever.
But if you start to see ice crystals inside that frozen bag, I would maybe move on from there.
Okay, thank you.
That was really helpful.
Right on.
Well, enjoy your fish cooking.
And we'll talk to you later.
Thanks.
Take care, guys.
We're taking your cooking questions with Genevieve Ko, Deputy Editor of New York Times Cooking.
More with her and you in a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
Throughout human history, in homes and restaurants in every corner of the planet, kitchens have always been full of noises.
Okay, so long before the buzz of the fridge and the whir of the Vitamix, the story of kitchen noise started with the sound of fire.
Its crackle has been part of the essential kitchen soundtrack for over 1.5 million years.
With the Stone Age came essential kitchen tools like the mortar and pestle, rolling pin, the knife and even the humble spoon.
Skip ahead a bit, and we have the modern kitchen.
Following the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s, electricity brought a whole concert of beeps and buzzes.
First there was a dishwasher in the late 1800s, the garbage disposal in the 1920s, the electric blender in the 1930s and the microwave shortly after that.
But all these sounds from across kitchen history the clank of the mortar and pestle, the buzz of the Vitamix, the click of the stove form the course of experimentation, nourishment and love that fill the kitchen up.
Kitchen noise is nothing short of the sound of joy.
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Hey, you hear that?
Exactly.
That right there is the sound of fall.
Now, you can't really hear the leaves falling yet, but you can hear kids coming home from school.
And when it gets closer to fall season, I start thinking about apple picking, with my kid stressing out, watching my team on Sundays and all the people who are going to be getting their PSL on.
That's right.
The pumpkin spice latte is officially here from Starbucks.
It is handcrafted with Starbucks signature espresso, steamed milk and real pumpkin, then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon and nutmeg for the perfect taste of fall.
And it's true, there actually are real pumpkins in the pumpkin sauce which is used in both the PSL and the pumpkin cream cold brew.
So fall is back, and so are the warm sips and comforting moments at your neighborhood Starbucks.
It's time for coffee lovers everywhere to grab their favorite drink soak in the autumn vibes, because when the leaves are falling, lattes are calling.
Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, get it while it's hot or iced.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're taking your fall cooking questions today with The New York Times and Genevieve Ko.
Let's get back to it.
Let's move on to Layla.
Hi, Layla.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you calling from?
How are you?
I'm calling from St.
Paul, Minnesota.
Home base.
Right on.
Okay, so what can we talk about?
Well, I wanted to talk about one of the challenges I find of being a solo cooking for one person who often finds that after I've made a large meal, I you know after two, maybe three days, start feeling a little tired of the meal and then think I should freeze it.
And so I will do that and then know full well that I'm not going to go back and ever eat that.
I'm so over you.
I'm just pretending to still care.
Yes.
It feels like you just have to at least make that, that attempt.
And yeah, it will then sit in my freezer.
I, you know, often, you know, will pull it out just to look at it and then start away.
Cause I see, I see it's, you know, iced over.
And so I'm just curious, like what suggestions you have regarding how to like truly freeze food in a way that makes it appetizing to eat.
I don't know.
Okay.
Okay.
Wait, we're talking about, so are you talking about, Like you're nervous about the quality.
I didn't know we'd get so much freezing today, so much freezer talk.
But are you worried about like the quality goes down after you've frozen it?
Or are you talking about like, I'm just so sick of this food and I just don't want to throw it out.
So I'm like staying in a relationship for appearances sake.
Yeah, I guess maybe some tips as to like what food actually does freeze well.
And if there are better strategies that I could take right.
Which interview do you want to talk about?
Like, what freezes?
Well, like the sort of technical aspects of that, Totally.
And this is something that I actually do love to do a lot.
But we were just talking about the way ice crystals form and which foods really hold up well and which don't.
And we were just talking about how well frozen fish holds up.
But that's a great example of something that doesn't freeze well, right?
Because once fish is cooked there actually is such a high water content, the flesh will end up mushy if you try to defrost it.
That's not true of all proteins, particularly those that were already long cooked to begin with.
So braises and soups and stews remain sort of the best types of things you can freeze that are fully cooked right.
Like, if you have a beautifully seared steak, you're not going to want to try to freeze and then defrost it because there isn't a great way to bring back that texture.
But if you have like braised short ribs in the sauce and you're packaging it in the sauce, that's a type of dish that you can make all the way through and then thaw it and it will still taste really great.
And one thing I do to get myself excited about that again.
If I'm then thawing it instead of thinking of it as a sad freezer leftover, I'll do whatever I can to add freshness to it at that point.
So you know that could mean like if you have a ton of parsley, or even like turning it into something else, right?
Turning it into tacos, turning it into a pasta sauce, like just simmering it with like tomato sauce, and you have an almost instant bolognese.
So any sorts of soups, stews or braises freeze really well.
You know another category of food that I love to prep and then thaw and eat are basically any sort of dumpling, like things.
So any form of dumplings where you're filling the wrappers um, and samosas are great for this to turn over savory turnovers and also sweet turnovers.
But savory turnovers right, you form them all and and freeze them all on a sheet pan so that they're not touching each other until they get rock solid.
And this is before cooking them, right?
So after assembling, but before cooking, and then you can just transfer those to an airtight container or bag and then cook a few at a time.
So that's not quite the same as what you're asking in terms of like, what to do with leftovers, but that is a great strategy to be able to then cook a few of something at a time um, from something you've kept in the freezer.
But yeah, you basically want things that have already been so fully cooked and are of such a texture that when you do reheat them, they maintain that texture.
And sadly most vegetables don't do well unless they're in a stew or in a soup, like a pureed soup holds up well.
Yeah, or anything too acidic, like anything with yogurt will break.
So you don't really want to freeze like a yogurt sauce.
Yeah.
And we had like, you know, a half gallon of milk that was still, you know, perfectly good.
And so I'm like, well, I just freeze the milk.
And I came back and I was like, what happened to you?
I don't know you anymore.
So yeah, dairy products will tend to break is the sort of nerdy word for it.
But, you know, the yogurt will split.
So it'll get like really watery and then become kind of curdy.
It just becomes kind of pretty unappetizing.
And even milk, when it defrosts, will do the same thing.
But but other than that, like i'm fully with genevieve on this, basically my guideline on it is if you've cooked something and it is like wet, it's saucy, it's soupy, you know like that will freeze beautifully.
Yeah well, thanks for the call.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, i appreciate your time.
Yeah, good luck um redeveloping your relationship.
Don't let them listen to this.
Bye.
All right.
Let's go to Ines.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you?
What do you want to talk about?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Um, so, uh, hi Genevieve.
Um, so, um, uh, I had a question.
So I'm from Venezuela and in Venezuela, we don't have four seasons, right?
So when I came to the U S I was met with the joy of, of eating things that are specific to the fall.
And one of those things is pumpkin pie.
And initially, I super fell in love with it.
But as years have gone by, I feel like it's become kind of boring to me.
And I feel like this has happened to me a lot with like sweets in the U.S.
It feels a lot of times overly sweet.
And it feels like oftentimes it tastes a lot just like cinnamon.
And so I was wondering if you had any tips on how to kind of elevate a pumpkin pie and kind of like find like new ways to enjoy it.
And I kind of want to find that spark in it one more time.
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
All these colors.
It's either frozen food or trying to rekindle lost love.
How are we going to make her fall back in love with pumpkin pie?
Oh, I think one of the greatest things about pumpkin pie is that it actually can take so many different seasonings and flavors.
So it's actually a wonderful canvas for you to work with.
And I would actually even just start with a concept of like, what dairy you're using or maybe that's not quite the right word, because a really traditional way is to use evaporated milk or canned milk, but you can try actually just going with straight heavy cream for really creamy flavor and shifting that proportion.
Coconut milk is another one of my favorite things to blend into pumpkin pie.
And if you wanted really to get the richness of the coconut flavor, you could actually use coconut cream and then reduce the sugar.
And that is one big thing about pumpkin pie.
You can absolutely reduce the sugar or swap in different sweeteners.
So you can definitely do maple as a really natural fall flavor, but honey works really well too.
If you're into.
I don't really love agave, but if you're into agave, that would give you a different sweetness.
And cinnamon is, it can get pretty boring.
But I think there are a lot of other really warm and interesting spices you could do aside from the usual, like cinnamon nutmeg.
You can definitely try cardamom, which I think is a lovely warm spice.
And then, if you want to even play with the idea of going a tiny bit savory in those spices, I think coriander is lovely.
The sort of bitter edge of turmeric is really nice.
Even a little grinding of black pepper gives it a kick.
And to that end too, like I think, pumpkin could take well to a little bit of heat if you want to like infuse, you know, whatever dairy or cream you're using with, like maybe a habanero or another chili, just to infuse it, not to make it spicy, but just to give it that little bit of spice and warm heat in there.
And yeah, you can definitely play with all these different seasonings and flavors.
Oh, that's amazing.
Thank you so much for the advice.
I'll definitely be trying, especially the coconut.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that sounds super cool.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for the call, Ines.
Thank you so much for everything, for responding.
And thanks, Genevieve, for your time.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure.
Enjoy pumpkin pie season.
All right.
We have Gratia with us.
Hey, Gratia.
Hi.
What do you want to talk about?
Well, I've been getting a CSA box throughout the summer and I have a lot of cabbage that comes in it.
And I really try and use up my box and I've been trying to come up with new ideas and I'm really striking out.
I've made salads.
I've made slaws.
I've made spring rolls.
I've made fried rice and i am coming up empty at this point.
You know i, like everyone always talks about, like the cliche of like the summer garden, the summer csa box, and like there's so much zucchini, what do i do with all the zucchini?
But i think hitting on the cabbage problem is uh, i think a lot of people are being seen right now or feeling seen right now.
Yeah yeah, I happen to be a lover of cabbage, so I don't often find myself being like there's too much.
But they're also huge.
Like when you buy them, they can be like, here's six pounds.
Here's a bowling ball of cabbage.
Good luck.
So Genevieve, what you got?
Well, this is something we think about all the time at NYT Cooking, because we also love cabbage and know that there's so much of it out in the world.
And so we have.
Yeah, so our very creative sort of huge team of recipe developers have come up with so many ways to use it.
And one of the things that's come up lately is to you know, instead of being sick and tired of it, is to really lean into it and celebrate it.
And so one of the things that one of the styles of cabbage dishes we've been doing a lot of are really deeply roasting big wedges of the cabbage.
And then once you have that, you can sort of do so many different things with that base.
One of our developers, Hedy Lou McKinnon, turned it into this dish that had like a garlicky caper oil all over it.
So, instead of just trying to turn it into a side dish, like turning it into this big main dish, We also have turned it into a Caesar, like using that same method.
We also have a version with like miso brown butter.
But just that concept of like, instead of slicing it thin or chopping it up to really lean into the hugeness and ubiquity of it and to roast these really deeply roast, big wedges, which just transforms them.
But the other thing, you know, but of course you can only do that so much.
So I know in summer, I often, I love to turn it into chow chow, which is a condiment from the South.
And it really uses up all the summer veg.
So I'm not quite sure what else you have in that produce box, but for sure it includes peppers.
If you have green tomatoes, but it's a type of relish or pickle that is easy enough to make and actually keeps for a nice long time.
And It's so good on hot dogs.
I mean, it's good on everything, but that time of year.
It's like a chopped up, sweet and tangy pickle relish, basically.
But without cucumbers, you use every other kind of vegetable in it.
Yeah, so those are some of the ways that aren't salad or slaw.
Yeah.
And then the other is really just to use it as a bed.
So I don't know if you eat meat, but use it as a bed to roast, especially chicken on top of it.
But, you know, sort of any sort of roast.
All of those sounds so delicious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know the old, like apparently Mark Twain thing about like eternity is two people and a ham.
Yeah.
I kind of feel like the vegetable version is like it turns out there's two people and a large head of cabbage.
But I'm totally with Genevieve, like, you just got to go for it.
So like if you have the big wedges, I love.
I started making this like we vacation with another family every year.
And one year, we got a cabbage.
And so I'm like, oh, we had the grill going.
So I just grilled them instead of roasted them, but like same idea wedges of cabbage seasoned with a little salt and oil, threw it on the grill, got nice and charred on two sides and tender on the inside.
And I did a nuk cham, which is a Vietnamese.
You know it's like the table sauce in Vietnamese restaurants of fish sauce water sugar, little garlic, sometimes some grated carrot and lime juice.
And like my friends every year are like, when are we going to have that again?
When are you going to make that again?
So that's a delicious combo.
And there's also this very super simple dish that my old friend Molly Weisenberg wrote about once.
And it's basically you can finely shred some cabbage, get a pan like it could be cast iron skillet, it could be a wok, it could be whatever, but like ripping hot oil it nicely, throw like a few big handfuls of this cabbage in there and then don't touch it and basically let the bottom get like really nice and browned and then you can stir it like you're basically like sauteing or stir frying to cook it through, and then a little soy sauce, a little bit of salt and then hot sauce like sriracha or something like that, and have that hot sauce.
The sriracha works really nicely because it um, There's a sweetness in it, so it's sugar, so it caramelizes a little bit too.
So it's spicy, it's savory, it's a little tangy.
And that on some rice, fry an egg on top.
And they're like, oh my God, when we're tired home from work, that's our dinner twice a week.
And it's great.
It sounds so good.
Well, thank you for the call, Gratia.
Yeah.
Thank you guys so much.
I love those ideas.
It's such a pleasure.
And Genevieve, thank you so much for coming by.
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Francis.
Genevieve Ko is the deputy editor of New York Times Cooking.
Back when she was on our show talking about her cookbook Better Baking, she left us with a recipe for cinnamon toast graham crackers.
She also sent us a bunch of links to info with more ideas for cabbage and freezing leftovers, because that's the kind of person she is.
You can find it all at splendidtable.org.
You know the five tastes, right?
Sweet, salty, sour, umami, and bitter.
That's the whole palette of the tongue, no pun intended.
And life literally would not be the same without any of them.
But I'm sure people are more or less fans of each of them.
And if salt can build a country and sweet can fill a stadium, bitter can...
I don't know, have a few people show up on a two for one happy hour special, which is why I was so delighted when Alexina Anatole wrote a whole cookbook on the beauty of bitter tasting foods.
Alexina is a London based cookbook author whose obsession with taste and flavor led her to ditch her career as a Cambridge educated investment banker to appear in the competition MasterChef, where she placed as a finalist.
It was a massive gamble, one matched only by her choice to write her debut cookbook on the deliciousness of things like grapefruit, kale and putting coffee in your cake.
So hi, Alexina.
So nice to have you.
Thank you for having me.
Such an honor.
It's a pleasure.
It's a pleasure.
So, okay, you're very busy though.
So I'm glad you're making the time because you are in the midst of writing a five book series, which is incredible.
All about the fundamental tastes.
So salty, sweet, sour, umami, and bitter.
But I'm so interested in why you started with bitter first. first.
Yeah.
So to tell you about that, I need to tell you the context of how I even started working in food, because I used to have a previous life and a very different life.
And then I went on MasterChef in the UK.
And this is obviously a cooking competition show, high pressure, high stakes.
And there are a lot of ways that you can make food delicious.
I think, you know, I think time's really powerful in the kitchen.
I think Knowing who you're cooking for is really powerful.
But when you're in a competition setting, you're really limited in a lot of ways on what you can do.
But you have to make sure that your food has impact.
So when I didn't have, I didn't have the luxury of being able to slow cook a ragu for six hours.
That would be delicious by the end of it.
I didn't know what the judges like favorite foods were, because I think tapping into that, or nostalgia, is really powerful.
So I knew I had to make food that was memorable, and the way that I thought about doing that was through the five tastes and I was like well, I think bitter and sour foods can make food really sing, it can make it zingy, it can make it memorable, and so that was something that the judges really started to pick up on as I went through the competition and that took me to the final was like you love these bitter flavors, you play with them and it makes food.
We don't expect it to work, but it does.
And then when I came off the show and I knew that I really wanted to write a cookbook, I spent a while thinking about what I was going to write about.
And that just that feedback kept kind of looping in my brain.
And I was like, no one has really talked about this.
Like bitterness is this thing that we just kind of avoid.
We think of that bitter just has all these negative connotations.
And I mean, it's literally it's literally synonymous with disgust.
I know.
And upset.
Yeah.
But you're a fan. but I'm a fan.
I love bitter flavors.
So and and the thing I just think what kind of struck me when I started thinking about this was there were just a lot of contradictions.
I was like, okay, cool.
So we think bitter is really like bad and negative.
It's also associated with like toxic foods.
We think of bitter foods as potentially being poisonous.
And I was like, but wait a minute.
What about, like the way, we're all obsessed with coffee and espresso?
And How about dark chocolate, which is becoming increasingly popular?
And I was like, we like alcohol.
We like beer.
These things are quite bitter.
So I was like, maybe, maybe it isn't as obvious.
You know, maybe it isn't just we dislike it.
Maybe there's something more going on.
So that was kind of what piqued my interest, I guess.
That's so interesting.
Okay.
So, so again, like the word bitter is quite synonymous, right?
Like almost literally, with oh, you were talking about something, a bitter person or a bitter feeling.
You know like um yeah, it's.
It is like it's synonymous with this negativity, but yeah, right.
There are these things that like, not just people love, but like actually rely on, right.
People rely on their coffee.
And I guess you could say some people rely on chocolate.
Yeah, for sure.
Guilty.
Yeah, those are truly naturally quite bitter.
So what's the story here?
Is it just that it's more complex?
Is it like oh, we're just not thinking of the ways in which we are interacting and enjoying bitter things.
What's the deal?
I think we don't realize that having some bitterness present can make food more interesting and more delicious and more compelling, and I think sometimes we don't realize the bitterness is there.
Doing that?
Because I always say I mean obviously, if you really love bitter flavors, go to town like you can have some.
There are some very bitter ingredients out there um, but actually it's not necessary about eating a dish and going wow, there's loads of bitterness in this, but it's the fact that the bitterness is a kind of base note of flavor that is creating something more interesting to eat.
And I always think it's useful to think of, like the world of chocolate, because we have three types of chocolate.
We have white chocolate, which isn't really chocolate.
It doesn't have any cocoa mass in it.
The cocoa mass is the bitter part.
So there's no cocoa mass, there's cocoa butter, there's milk and vanilla often.
Like sugar or whatever.
Right, and sugar.
Milk, chocolate, you've got cocoa mass, cocoa butter, milk, sugar.
And then dark chocolate is the one that doesn't have any milk in it.
It's just cocoa mass, cocoa butter and a bit of sugar to balance it out.
And so white chocolate is the one that has no bitter matter in it.
None at all.
And in terms of which chocolate is most popular or sells the best, which would you guess that it is?
I would assume it's milk.
Right.
It's milk.
And what would be the second bestseller?
Well, then it'd have to be dark chocolate because it's not really chocolate.
Right.
And white chocolate is actually the least popular of the three types of chocolate.
And white chocolate is the only one that doesn't have any bitterness in it.
I think that kind of tells us something like the presence of bitterness does something and it produces something that is more kind of compelling and more addictive to us, because i don't actually think that many people are that fussed about white chocolate, but we all know that i mean me included.
I love my dark chocolate, and dark chocolate is really catching up to milk chocolate too.
It's not far behind now sales.
Oh cool, i didn't know that.
That's interesting.
Yeah, alexina anatole is the author of the cookbook bitter.
More with her in just a minute.
I'm francis lamb and this is the splendid table from american public media.
We'll see you next time.
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I'm Francis Lam and you're listening to The Splendid Table.
We're talking about the magic of bitter flavors with Alexina Anatole.
Let's get back to it.
You said, you know, bitter foods, sometimes we associate with toxicity, right?
And like, yes, in nature, many toxic things are bitter.
And so I think there's some evolutionary biological theory that's like oh so we learn to avoid those toxins by, you know, learning to just avoid bitterness.
You know, I don't know if that's how true that is or not.
But interestingly you write in your book too, that foods are also becoming less bitter.
Like we're maybe breeding.
You know, plants and so on differently so that we're reducing the bitter compounds in that.
Tell us about that.
Yeah.
So there's this woman called Marta Zaraska who is a science journalist and she writes for the New Scientist, amongst other things publications, and she wrote this really interesting article explaining that food producers have been breeding bitterness out of our vegetables and our fruits.
And this kind of rang true to me as soon as I read it, because I thought to myself I feel like spinach these days is pretty mild, but when I was a child I don't remember it being quite this mild and maybe it's a sign of my changing taste buds, but it also could be a side of the changing ingredient itself.
You know, and um, and I now, you know, I eat grapefruit a lot.
I'm a big fan of grapefruit, but I don't ever put sugar on it now because I actually find, I mean, there's bitterness to it but there's also sweetness and it's fairly balanced.
I would say yeah yeah yeah, I remember trying grapefruit as a child and being horrified yeah, and so it's not just me changing now, I don't know.
It could be a combination of both.
But she basically wrote that it was, you know, it's been happening.
Like they've been deliberately breeding bitterness out of vegetables.
Also, have you noticed how people have changed about Brussels sprouts?
When I was a child, again, Brussels sprouts were like, everyone hated them.
And now everyone's kind of like, yeah, Brussels sprouts.
Yeah.
It's on every menu.
It's on every menu.
And I don't think it's just because we've learned how to cook them.
I mean they're obviously nice and butter with bacon and stuff, but it's been proven.
There is something in this.
They are changing food to make it more palatable, to make it milder, sweeter.
You know, those are kind of the.
We all know that sweetness is particularly addictive in terms of all the tastes.
And so that's what they've been doing because it sells better, I guess.
But it's a shame because...
At the same time.
What she explained in the article was that we're also reducing the nutritional value of these things.
Because some of those kind of compounds that produce the kind of bitter flavor are also the kind of polyphenols and things like that that are actually really good for us.
So that feels like a shame, I would say.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
Okay, well, say we're converts to the beauty of bitterness, right?
Mm-hmm.
How do you develop a sort of cooking instinct for it?
Like we hear chefs all the time, right?
They taste something and, oh, it needs more salt.
I remember when Tony Bourdain wrote about this in Kitchen Confidential 25 years ago.
He's like oh, one of the two differences between restaurant cooking and your home cooking is I use a lot more salt and that's why my food is more delicious.
Okay, so you always hear chefs say, oh, you need more salt.
Yes.
And close behind it, this other cliche of chefs taste something, oh, it needs acid.
Oh, it needs more acid.
Like if you've ever watched cooking competitions, like every judge is like, oh, it needs more acid.
So I get that.
But how do you taste something and develop an instinct for like, oh, this needs something bitter?
I've never heard anyone say that.
I've never heard a chef say, oh, I need a bitterness in here.
So the way I think about kind of flavor in food and developing it is, I think, of saltiness, umami and bitterness as kind of base notes of flavor, often things that you want to develop from the beginning of your cooking.
Because one thing that's talked about a lot is salt, make sure you salt your food.
But I think the timing of when you salt your food is really important.
So you actually want to front load your kind of use of salt to the beginning of the cooking process, because what that does is enable the salt to make everything else taste better, rather than adding it at the end.
So I always think of those three as like the base notes of flavor.
And then I always think of like acidity and sweetness as the kind of the, the things that you add more towards the end that give you like the zing at the end and bitterness.
I think it's really about like i i think a good way to start.
There's two things i'll say is one is there's just like quite a lot of swaps that you can do.
So, for example um, you know, when you're making a ragu or something, next time, rather than using red wine, try swapping it for like beer, which is just a, and see what that does.
So I have like a ragu in the book which I think is really really delicious and it uses a porter instead of the traditional red wine.
Similarly, with all the kind of green leaves, you could obviously use a lettuce in your salad or you could swap that for, like chicory or radicchio, which are bitter leaves.
You could swap, if you love, using peanut butter in your cooking.
You know it's delicious and obviously you can make it into kind of satay sauce or in dressings, swap that for tahini, which is kind of like a subtly bitter version.
You know it's got that same nuttiness but also bitterness.
And I also think that bitterness really comes into its own when you're dealing with food that is either quite fatty or food that is quite sweet.
Because there's something about bitterness that really cuts through those things.
And you know, I think something like a tiramisu, which is a really classic dessert, is a perfect example of that, because you've got rich, creamy mascarpone cheese that's kind of fatty.
You obviously got some sugar.
And the reason it's so delicious.
I mean, I'm obsessed with tiramisu.
It's my favorite dessert.
The reason it's so delicious is it's got those things balanced out by coffee and some booze, which is also bitter.
And that's what makes this amazing harmony.
And that's why I can eat a whole tiramisu by myself.
Like, no problem.
I can just keep going.
Like, that's why.
You should see some of the sizes of the tiramisu I've eaten.
Just outrageous quantities.
But yeah, you're totally right.
It's crazy.
With all that sweetness.
And to be honest, the very, very good ones to my mind are not super duper sweet.
I agree.
I totally agree.
But yeah, the primary taste really is bitterness.
Yeah.
You're right, because of the coffee and the liquor.
And often, you know, usually there's some cocoa powder on top.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
So there's a few different sources of bitterness in a tiramisu.
And there's a reason that that is one of the most famous desserts in the world.
And actually, there are a lot of good desserts that have chocolate or coffee.
So I think that's no coincidence.
Yeah.
Well, actually, let's go to some of the recipes in your book.
And since we're on this subject of the element that coffee brings to tiramisu, I know that one of your favorite recipes is the coffee pecan banana bread.
Yeah.
It's a very simple to make banana bread and you just add a tablespoon or two of espresso powder into the mix and bananas are very sweet, you know.
They're delicious and that's what makes banana bread so good, but they are quite cloyingly sweet and pecans are also sweet nut, you know.
So they really are.
They are.
Yeah um, walnuts are like pecans, bitter cousin, you know, and they and the addition of coffee, i i think is just one simple tweak that will transform banana bread.
I'm sure you could do it with any banana bread recipe um, and it just balances, it just adds that like slight additional depth of flavor in the background, And so you don't taste the coffee per se.
I think you taste it, but it's not, it doesn't knock you over the head.
It's not like, oh, this is a coffee loaf with some banana and some pecans.
It's very much, this is banana bread with a coffee hint and a bit more depth of flavor.
I love that.
There's also another dessert.
There is.
You mentioned porter before.
Yes.
But this is stout.
So sticky toffee pudding.
I mean sticky toffee pudding in my mind like I just.
You know, we just proclaimed our love of tiramisu.
Sticky toffee pudding is almost right up there.
It's a great top five for me.
Yeah, it's an amazing dessert.
Great for doing um, those like caramel notes.
And yeah um, obviously it's sticky.
And i know, you know, you're british, so you have a totally different definition of the word pudding than we do.
Yes, oh gosh yeah, it's a cake.
Yes, i don't know why you call cakes puddings.
It's a whole broad category.
No no no, you guys are wrong for sure, But this is a very sticky, caramelly cake.
But you make it with stout.
Make it with stout.
So tell us about, and that's your own addition.
That's not typical to it.
That's not typical.
Because you've got this kind of cake that's made with dates and it's got a very toffee quality to it.
And in my version I brown the butter as well, because I always think that can add some nice toasty notes and dimension.
But in every other respect that cake in mine is very similar to any other sticky toffee pudding cake.
The real difference is in the sauce that gets poured over, the toffee sauce that gets poured over the top.
And typically that sauce is made with, you know, butter and brown sugar and a bit of cream.
And in my case, what I do is I add some stout and it's not a lot of stout.
And when I do kind of events for the book or events around flavors and helping people to understand them, sometimes what I'll do is I'll serve them the sticky toffee pudding and I'll make the cake and I'll make two sauces.
One sauce will be, you know, as I've written it in the book, with the stout included, and the other one is the exact same recipe but I just leave the stout out and it's a tiny amount and I fed it to people and you know both of them and said which you prefer, and overwhelmingly people prefer the one with the stout because When you eat the one that doesn't have the stout, it's nice.
It's delicious.
It's, you know, a sticky toffee pudding, great.
But actually it's pretty sweet and just kind of a bit one note sweet.
And I couldn't keep eating it.
I like enjoy the first spoonful or two.
And then after that, I'd be like, I'm actually good.
Whereas that tiny addition of stout means that I could eat the whole bowl.
No problem.
Because it just does something to it.
It just makes it more compelling.
Your brain's more entertained when there is more going on.
There's a really great thing that I came across called the salted caramel effect.
It's a set of scientists at the University of Florida were trying to understand why salted caramel was so popular and so addictive.
And they worked out.
It's because actually, salted caramel hits a lot of different taste notes at the same time.
So there's saltiness, there's sweetness, there's bitterness.
And what that does is it makes it very addictive.
And what they said is that it brings on hedonistic escalation.
It's the idea that you can just keep eating something because you never get bored of it.
And part of not getting bored of it is there being enough interest and enough flavor variation that it keeps your brain engaged when you're eating it.
That's why... That's so interesting.
That's why we can eat such massive amounts of tiramisu, Francis.
That's why.
It's called hedonistic escalation.
It's just because of science that I ate a...
16 ounce container of this.
We're powerless, you know, like i don't have no responsibility, there was no way, there was no, there was no agency, there was no agency.
Okay, so we've talked about coffee, we've talked about, you know, porter stouts, these like sort of bitter beers um, But there's also this, another recipe, and we've also talked mostly about desserts and obviously, sweetness and bitterness.
You know, I think even people who aren't bitter fans, you know, we have bittersweet.
That's actually its own word, right?
Dark chocolate.
We understand that um, but getting to savory food yes, there's one um recipe in particular that i thought was really interesting, and it's the moots bell, the burnt eggplant dip.
Yes, eggplant itself can be a little bit bitter.
You're burning it so that that burn flavor is kind of bitter.
Yes tahini, as you mentioned, and some olive oils, actually can be quite bitter, for sure.
Talk about why this dish is not just oh my god just getting like hit in the face with bitterness.
Yeah, so one of the things when I was writing this book and I was trying to understand the relationship between the different tastes, so like, how do bitterness and salt work together?
How do bitterness and sugar work together?
How do bitterness and acid work together?
One of the interesting phenomenons that I came across was the fact that when you incorporate more than one form of bitterness in a dish, like logically you'd think okay, if I double the bitterness then that's going to result in a more bitter experience when I taste it.
And actually I found it to be kind of the opposite, that if you introduce more than one bitter kind of flavor or ingredient into a dish, often it kind of ends up balancing itself out, and actually there are a lot of kind of quite classic combinations that are kind of what I call bitter on bitter.
So just even things like a gin and tonic gin is bitter, tonic is bitter and somehow together they make a really nice bitter but not overly bitter drink.
And so the mutabal with those three different types of bitterness you would think might be sort of unpleasant, and it's actually the complete opposite.
It becomes sort of well, the tahini also helps emulsify, it becomes kind of creamy and it's it's got so much complexity of flavor for something that has like four, maybe five, tops in green five.
If you include the salt i think It's just five ingredients and it tastes like you spend ages trying to create something super complex.
Like it's just, it's magic.
I don't know how it works, but yeah.
And there's also a fantastic, really classic French salad which is also in the book, because I grew up in Paris is a French chicory and walnut and blue cheese salad.
And again you've got kind of bitter chicory, bitter walnuts, very umami, kind of blue cheese, and again it's so delicious together they just just works.
Yeah, bitter on bitter, surprisingly they balance out.
Yeah, i mean i i love that you brought up the university of florida study, because they have this really incredible um center there that like works on taste and flavor i'd love to visit one day.
Yeah, they do amazing flavor research at the University of Florida.
Well, Alexina, this has been such a blast.
And I think you've made some converts.
Oh, good.
I hope so.
I feel like it's, I always say that, you know, bitterness is like the hidden flavor ninja.
You shouldn't be able to see him, but he's there.
And he's doing and he's, you know, he's making your food more delicious and more addictive.
I love that.
Or he might kill you.
Or he might go, well, you know, yeah, don't choose the wrong one.
Suddenly you're dead.
Yeah.
Sorry, guys.
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
And good luck with your book.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
It was such a blast.
Alexina Anatole's book is called Bitter.
There's a new one coming out shortly called Sweet.
She left us with a recipe for stout, sticky toffee pudding.
You can find it at splendidtable.org.
Well, that is our show for the week.
We hope you enjoyed it.
We'll talk to you again next week.
Oh, hey, one more thing before I go.
I know you hear this all the time, but The Splendid Table is supported by listeners like you.
And we and all of public media need you more than ever.
Thank you for supporting your local public radio station.
Head to their website to find out how you can help.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lim Rizzotto-Casper and was made this week by technical producer Jennifer Lubke, producer Maria Wartel, senior podcast production manager Lauren Humpert and managing producer Sally Swift.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM.
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