Cookery by the Book

Tasting Italy
A Culinary Journey

By National Geographic & America’s Test Kitchen
Foreword by Jack Bishop

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cooking New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.

Jack Bishop:                  My name is Jack Bishop and my cookbook is Tasting Italy: A Culinary Journey.

Suzy Chase:                  You're the Chief Creative officer of America's Test Kitchen. How did the collaboration between America's Test Kitchen and National Geographic come together for Tasting Italy?

Jack Bishop:                  Editors were just chatting, believe it or not, at a publishing conference. We thought, wow, as we were talking, if we teamed up National Geographic and America's Test Kitchen we could create a unique book. You think about National Geographic photographs, maps, travel essays to take you there, and then to be able to bring Italy to life in your own kitchen with recipes from America's Test Kitchen, it seemed like a really unique way of bringing the cuisine of Italy to life in a book.

Suzy Chase:                  The beautiful photographs in this cookbook really transport us to Italy. Talk to me about your relationship with Italy and its food.

Jack Bishop:                  I have a very long relationship with Italy. It began as a child. My Italian grandmother, who is the most talented home cook I ever knew. I grew up eating a lot of Italian foods, Sunday suppers. I lived in Italy when I was in my early 20s. I've traveled throughout Italy. Could we just say, they have the best food on the planet in Italy, at least in my opinion.

                                                      The book is also just a personal passion because the food of Italy is really tremendously different than what we think. I still recall my first trip to Italy. I'd taken an overnight train from Germany and had gotten off the train in Florence, and went to the first restaurant, and there was nothing recognizable. None of the dishes that my grandmother had made were on the menu, which makes sense, once you think about it. Which is that my grandmother's relatives were born in Calabria in the south. Like many of the immigrants that came to the U.S., they came from the south and brought that cuisine with them.

                                                      The rest of Italy has very different dishes. The climate's different, the geography, the history. The cuisine is different. The food of Florence is very, very different than the food of Calabria.

Suzy Chase:                  How did you figure out the recipes for this cookbook. Did the locations dictate the recipes?

Jack Bishop:                  We decided that we were going to structure the book in three large areas. Northern Italy, Central Italy and Southern Italy. Then within each of those, do a chapter on the administrative regions in Italy. They're kind of the equivalent of a state in the United States. Tuscany would be an administrative region, which is the area where Florence is. For each chapter you begin with an essay and photographs that brings you there. Tells you about the history, the topography, the major ingredients, the food traditions.

                                                      Then we selected what we thought were the distinctive regional dishes. That was really hard. We ended up with a hundred recipes. The original list had 400 recipes. We really had to pare it down and say, "What are the dishes that really define Veneto or Liguria or Sicily? Most of the sections of the book have five or six recipes that really give you a taste of the unique, authentic local cuisine. Some of them are dishes that will be familiar to Americans.

                                                      In the Lazio chapter, where Rome is from, you see spaghetti carbonarra, which is a classic Roman dish. But a lot of these recipes are things that frankly I'd never seen because I had never been to that particular part of Italy. So I wasn't familiar with the dish.

Suzy Chase:                  So this cookbook is structured from north to south. Let's start off with northern Italy. The one word in the book you use to describe the food of Italy's northern region is rich. Why the word rich?

Jack Bishop:                  The climate in the north is more like the climate perhaps in the northern United States. It's cold and snowy. I think of maybe the great plains. In the summer it's very fertile, so there's a lot of dairy, a lot of cattle. There's a lot of cheese. The fresh pasta is made with eggs. The influences are really Germanic or Austrian, as a way of describing it.

                                                      So you see dishes with savoy cabbage, with speck which is a German ham. It is done in an Italian way, but it is a very rich, hearty cuisine. When you get to the far north, you're in the Alps, so it is hearty cuisine that makes sense in that cold weather. Buckwheat, polenta, they're used throughout this region. It is in many ways the most undiscovered part of Italy for many Americans because this cuisine isn't that well known in the United States, isn't really well represented. Most Americans don't end up going to this part of Italy. Lots and lots to discovery in northern Italy.

Suzy Chase:                  Moving on to central Italy, the most significant influence on foods in central Italy comes from the Etruscans. Talk a bit about them and the influences on the cuisine.

Jack Bishop:                  This is the region that sort of spans from Florence to Siena, further south down towards Rome. This is probably, for Americans that have traveled to Italy, the region that they probably spent the most time in. The interesting thing here is how many of these dishes really have their roots in the Middle Ages or earlier. One of the great shifts in Italian cuisine occurred in the 1500s after Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World and all of these ingredients that came back to Italy and then influenced the cuisine.

                                                      So, for instance, tomatoes didn't exist in Italy until roughly 1500. Older dishes that have their routes in Etruscan culture, which is really from nearly 1,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago, don't have tomatoes. They're spices. They're beans. They're lots and lots of ancient grains that end up influencing the local cuisine.

Suzy Chase:                  Almost every part of Italy grows olives. But a few locales are famous for the aromatic, rich, extra virgin olive oil. Tell me about Lucca's liquid gold.

Jack Bishop:                  Lucca is in Tuscany. I would say that Tuscany and Umbria, which is the region just to the south, make my favorite extra virgin olive oils. They're often very green and peppery. They're big, bold, exciting olive oils. There are a lot of small farms, which means that they're growing the olives, pressing the olives, and bottling the olives all on site. Which is really a premium extra virgin oil, that it is a boutique product, rather than the semi industrial product of a lot of the extra virgin olive oils that end up in the supermarket, where they're mixing oils from, it could be a dozen different countries. It's a commodity. They're really choosing oils based on price. In Tuscany and particular in the Lucca region, they're just some of the most beautiful olive oils that are made on the planet.

                                                      They've been growing olives in Italy for centuries and entries and they make amazing oils.

Suzy Chase:                  Now Samin Nosrat has her new Netflix show, and the fat episode was totally focused on olive oil in Italy. Does that surprise you that she chose olive oil over butter for her fat episode?

Jack Bishop:                  No. Let's say this, first of all, olive oil is 100% fat. Butter is fat and water. It's not that I don't love butter, but I think olive oil has way more flavor. You think about the cuisines of the entire Mediterranean basin, not just Italy but Spain, Greece, the eastern Turkey, north Africa. Olive oil is the fat of choice. Those cuisines are remarkably diverse and fabulous. Southern France it is olive oil. I think it is the fat of choice in my home, and certainly in most parts of Italy it is the primary fat that is used in the kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  Now onto southern Italy and the islands. The air is hotter, the conversation is hotter and the cooking is hotter. The three pillars of southern Italy's diet are oil, wine and grain. Talk a little bit about that.

Jack Bishop:                  The climate is more like it is in perhaps North Africa. It's hot and sunny. It's wonderful for growing olives. There's a lot of oil that is produced in southern Italy. It's more rocky, hilly, mountainous in places. Not great for cattle. So there really isn't a whole lot of dairy, and certainly not a lot of butter, and really not a lot of cheese in this region. It is the sunny south, the land of olive oil.

                                                      It is also where a lot of grains come from. Sicily has an amazing tradition of growing wheat, a lot of ancient varieties of wheat that we aren't that familiar with. The agriculture there is hard scrabble, but it is diverse and quite different than in central or northern Italy.

Suzy Chase:                  Despite the wealth of food in southern Italy, poverty has been persistent. Even after the foundation of the Italian nation, the south was neglected leading to emigrants to form little Italies all over the United States. As many of these Italian restaurants and various Little Italies cropped up, they put things on their menu that you never see in Italy like garlic bread, fettuccine alfredo or caesar salad. How did that happen?

Jack Bishop:                  It's funny. You can't find spaghetti and meatballs in Italy. They make meatballs, but they usually don't serve them on spaghetti. A couple of things happened. People who emigrated from southern Italia, Naples, Calabria, Puglia, Sicily were generally leaving because of poverty. They were hungry. While they brought their traditions with them, suddenly in the United States there was a wealth of ingredients. There was much more affluence. Meat which was scarce was plentiful. Many of the immigrants went from being quite poor to, in a matter of a generation or sometimes less, being fairly affluent.

                                                      There was the ability to afford things they couldn't afford. The availability of ingredients was different. For instance, many of the traditional cheeses would've been sheep's milk cheeses of southern Italy. 125 years ago, when my relatives emigrated from Italy, you couldn't really find them here. So there were substitutions. The fact that the ingredients were different in the United States, and suddenly the level of affluence had changed, meant that the cuisine changed. So you got things like the Sunday supper which my grandmother would prepare, which is a very traditional Italian-American celebration with pasta and meatballs and braised sausages and braciole.

                                                      They don't really eat that way in southern Italy even today.

Suzy Chase:                  Calabria, the rugged toe of Italy's boot is Italy's poorest region but finds respite in the joys of food. Bread has been the antidote for hunger for centuries. Describe the filling Calabria dish called mirstew.

Jack Bishop:                  It's amazing what they're able to do with bread in Italy. Left over bread gets recycled in many, many different ways. For instance, bread salad in Tuscany gets created from basically something that we would throw out in the United States, which was stale bread and rehydrated with tomatoes and vinegar. In the south, there's a lot of flat breads in Calabria. They're more what we would call pizzas in a sense that they are lightly topped, perhaps with some tomatoes, some chilies. They love their chilies in Calabria. They might sometimes be folded and filled, more like what we would think of here as a Calzone.

Suzy Chase:                  Why does the tomato salad taste so extraordinary in capri?

Jack Bishop:                  The climate is great. The volcanic soil has something to do with it. The fact that it's a local tomato. The tomatoes that we generally eat most of the year in the United States are grown far, far away. Tomatoes really don't well with travel. I think it's mostly about the climate and the fact that they are local tomatoes grown and enjoyed within one region.

Suzy Chase:                  Now to my segment called My Last Meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper on Earth, what would it be?

Jack Bishop:                  I think I want my grandmother's lasagna. She made this beautiful lasagna, it was a tomato based lasagna that had teeny little meatballs tucked between the layers with a lot of ricotta cheese and parmigiano. I make it once a year. The smell of lasagna takes me back 50 years, 45 years, and I'm a kid again, sitting on a stool in my grandmother's kitchen. It's just an amazing way to bring family history back to life.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Jack Bishop:                  We're at americastestkitchen.com. You can come to our website and learn more about what we do here at America's Test Kitchen. You can learn more about Tasting Italy. You can also find us on Instagram, our Facebook pages and see the work that I do and that my colleagues here to on America's Test Kitchen.

                                                      You can also watch our shows on public television. America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country are both shown on stations all around the country.

Suzy Chase:                  Wonderful, thanks Jack for talking Italy with me. And thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Jack Bishop:                  Thanks Suzy, you have a great day.

Outro:                  Subscribe in Apple podcasts, and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review Cookery by the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram @cookerybythebook, Twitter is #IAmSuzyChase, and download your kitchen mix tapes, ‘music to cook by’ on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. Thanks for listening. `

Unicorn Food

By Kat Odell

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Kat Odell:                  I'm Kat Odell and my latest cookbook is Unicorn Food.

Suzy Chase:                  Kat Odell: Food journalist, former Eater LA editor, and the original pioneer of Unicorn Food. I am so happy to chat with you again on my podcast and catch up.

Kat Odell:                  Yes, definitely. Thank you so much for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Yay! How can we unicorn our food?

Kat Odell:                  Oh, my goodness, there's so many ways. What this book is largely inspired by is the natural colors that occur in foods, from purple sweet potato, to purple cabbage, to beets, to saffron and tumeric. There's so many ways to naturally add color to your food and the great part about that is foods that are naturally hued are higher in antioxidants and anthocyanins so they're actually more healthful.

Suzy Chase:                  What are anthocyanins?

Kat Odell:                  It's a form of antioxidants-

Suzy Chase:                  Okay.

Kat Odell:                  Commonly found in purple food, so you'll find that in purple cabbage and purple broccoli, purple sweet potatoes, blueberries, ingredients like that.

Suzy Chase:                  So you begin every morning with a drink. Talk to me about the inspiration behind this book.

Kat Odell:                  Sure. So I lived in Los Angeles for many years and then I relocated back to New York City, which is where I'm from originally. And I found when I moved back to New York, which was in 2014, the city was really behind in terms of health-conscious eating and so the foods that I was accustomed to finding readily in Los Angeles, I couldn't find in New York. So I started just making all of these clean foods for myself and it really started off with nut milks. And I don't have any dietary restrictions, luckily, but I personally love almond milk. I've always loved almond milk. It tastes like a vanilla milkshake if you do it properly. And so I started off just making these different types of milk at home, so I would make some with cashews and some with almonds and hazelnuts and then I would add different ingredients.

                                    So first, I added spirulina to almond milk, then I played around with Blue Magik, which is a blue algae, it's different of spirulina, adding ingredients like rose and tumeric, and I just created this like rainbow milk and I remembered looking down at at this, like I'd created four or five milks one day, and I was like, "I feel like this needs a name, what should I call it?" And it reminded me of the mane of a unicorn, so, I thought, "Oh, unicorn milk." And the milks are really, really tasty and you know, so they were sort of magically delicious, so I thought it was a very fitting name. And then unicorn milk turned into unicorn food, because I started making foods that were based around these milks. And that's kind of the providence of the book.

Suzy Chase:                  P.S. I had no idea that raw almonds were banned in 2007.

Kat Odell:                  Yeah. I think unless you're really paying attention, you wouldn't really know and it's not that easy to find almonds that haven't been treated in some way. And when you do find them, they're pretty expensive, which is frustrating.

Suzy Chase:                  How did you develop the vibrant colors, like, let's say, pink?

Kat Odell:                  I was thinking about ingredients I really loved and so, I love cardamom as a flavor in general and I love rose and, of course, those are really classic in Indian cuisine and Indian desserts. And I wanted to create like a pinkish milk and so I've learned that different flower petals have different ... Like, not all rose petals have the same rose flavor and so, anyway, I started playing around with rose as a flavor plus cardamom, and I was able to score some really high quality rose petals which gave the milk this really pretty pink hue. And I preferred it to adding like a rose extract, which you can still do, but when you add the petals, it adds a really pretty pink color, which just makes it more fun to drink.

Suzy Chase:                  Do you look at emotion as an ingredient?

Kat Odell:                  Definitely. I mean, for me, cooking, the whole reason I got into food and cooking is because of my family and mainly my grandmother. When I was really young, so my grandmother and my mom is from the Czech Republic and my grandmother still lives in Prague. She actually turned 100 this year, which is crazy. And so she used to come to New York and take care of me when I was really young and she's an amazing cook and we just used to cook all day together when I was little. And so food is very emotional for me and it reminds me of my childhood, so I have a lot of inspiration from her in everything I do. And then certain types of not necessarily entirely unicorn, but a lot of recipes I make are from when I was really young, but those are more like normal recipes, not really unicorn recipes. But definitely for me, cooking is really tied to family and emotions.

Suzy Chase:                  Describe chicha morada from Peru.

Kat Odell:                  So, yeah, it's this purple Peruvian corn. And I was actually, ironically, just in Peru and was able to try it again, but it's basically boiled corn and all these other fruits and spices are added and you get this really very fruity and spicy drink and it has this awesome purplish bluish color to it. And when I was in college, I used to drink a lot of alcohol and so my savior was blue Gatorade. I had this roommate my freshman year and she would drink the orange Gatorade and I would drink the blue Gatorade and it was like I didn't like any other flavor, except for that. It had to be the light color blue, because there are different colored blues. Anyway, it was like my one ... I've always been to healthy eating to a certain extent, but that was like when you're hungover and you feel like death, you'll kind of do anything to feel better and blue Gatorade was always the thing that would help me recover.

                                    And so I was thinking about how to make something, a drink, that was really good for you and could sort of satiate or sort of like cure a hangover remedy, to a certain extent. And, of course, coconut water is really high in potassium. It has a lot of electrolytes and other sort of ingredients your body needs when you're really depleted of, when you're really hungover. And so I came up ... Somehow, I don't remember. It just occurred to me that maybe using this Peruvian drink as inspiration to recreate a healthier version of Gatorade could work and because the blue Gatorade flavor is almost like a sort of tropical punch flavor which is also the flavor you get with this Peruvian drink and so it actually worked really well together. And it is time-consuming to make, but it's awesome. It's delicious and really, really thirst-quenching at the same time.

Suzy Chase:                  So do you just make a big batch of it and just have it in your fridge?

Kat Odell:                  Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yep.

Suzy Chase:                  So these recipes in the cookbook are almost vegan. What does that mean?

Kat Odell:                  So I hate the work vegan because, to me, veganism references like the '60s and '70s and that's when people were eating a lot of really processed food that were devoid of animal products like seitan and tofu. And I don't really eat those foods. And I'm more of plant-based eater so I pretty much for right now, for me, for my job, I eat everything. But at home, I'm a very, very healthy, very clean eater, so and I mostly just eat fresh, wholesome ingredients, fruits and vegetables. So for me, there's a big difference between technically you can still call this book vegan, but in my opinion, veganism encompasses a term which references another genre of food, which I don't include in this book very intentionally because it doesn't have any of those processed ingredients. And it's really just about clean, wholesome, healthful ingredients straight from the earth that haven't been treated or processed in any way. So that's the way that I differentiate the two in my head.

Suzy Chase:                  I cracked up when I read the little box that said "You'll notice the term 'superfoods' doesn't exist in this book."

Kat Odell:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  That made me so happy. I hate that term.

Kat Odell:                  Because, you know, everyone calls everything a superfood these days. It has no meaning anymore, so I just, rather than call everything a superfood or this is this, just describe why it's good for you instead.

Suzy Chase:                  You're right.

Kat Odell:                  You don't need to call it a superfood, right?

Suzy Chase:                  Right. Exactly. You incorporate bee pollen in a lot of these recipes.

Kat Odell:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  How is bee pollen different from honey?

Kat Odell:                  I love bee pollen. For myself, personally, I feel like it's a really great energy booster, more so than honey. Honey, I really use as a sweetener. And I talk a lot about sweeteners in the book. I've always had a sweet tooth my whole life and so a large part of the recipes in this book were how can I create sort of desserty food items that are also good for you in some way? And so sweeteners are, at the end of the day, and I wrote this in the book: All sugar is sugar. But if you can incorporate a cleaner sugar with additional enzymes and nutrients, that's the way to do it. And also, the glycemic index is important. How it affects your blood sugar.

                                    But bee pollen is really, really nutrient rich and I love to take it before working out. I feel like it gives me a lot of extra energy and there's a lot of easy ways to incorporate bee pollen into your diet besides you can make a drink with it or you can put it on yogurt but or in coconut yogurt, but I like to make little kind of like protein balls and take almond butter and kind of mix it all up and sometimes add dehydrated fruit and whatever I have lying around at home and it's great, great source of energy.

Suzy Chase:                  What's the cleanest sugar that you use?

Kat Odell:                  So my personal favorite, which is a little bit expensive and hard to find, is something called yacón syrup. So yacón comes from a South American root and it's extremely low on the glycemic index, so if Stevia, which I don't like, is a zero glycemic index tax, and let's say honey and maple syrup are maybe in the 30s, 30s, 40s, yacón is a one. So it's really, really, really low. And what's also awesome about yacón syrup is it's a prebiotic fiber, which means it feeds the bacteria in your gut and it serves as food for them. You've heard about prebiotic versus probiotics. And then, also, the structure of yacón syrup is so complex that our bodies can't fully digest it, which means it passes through. So let's say honey has maybe 30 calories for a teaspoon and then this would have like 10 calories, so it's much lower in calories, as well.

Suzy Chase:                  You've built your pantry at home around ingredients like medicinal mushrooms or protein rich seeds. But the great thing is you don't necessarily need all of these wacky ingredients to make the recipes in the book.

Kat Odell:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk a bit about that.

Kat Odell:                  Sure. So the way that we structured these recipes was first and foremost, they're good for you regardless of whether you're able to sort of like spike them with these extra healthy ingredients, so they're gonna be really healthy and fun and delicious, but if you wanna seek these out, then you'll get an extra dose of nutritional benefit, but but the reason we did that is because they are, some ingredients more than others, are a bit esoteric and they can also be a bit pricey. For the most part, you can find all of those on at least Amazon, but if somebody doesn't wanna go out and spend 50 bucks on like a jar of chaga, then they can still make whatever this other recipe without adding it.

                                    Because more than anything else, a lot of these ingredients, like the medicinal mushrooms are not really imparting a flavor, they're just more adding a nutritional component. However, in the case of like matcha, that would be adding flavor. So the ones that are not necessarily adding a flavor and they're just boosting the nutritional content for a recipe, we added in for certain recipes like a little spoon that shows you can spike a certain recipe by adding these extra ingredients, but you can still make the recipe and have the same flavor without them.

Suzy Chase:                  Tell me about your homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Kat Odell:                  I always loved cereal. And I ate a lot of it, as a kid, growing up. And it's not ... Cereal is ... There are so many foods that are just loaded with sugar that you don't really realize, because they don't always necessarily taste incredibly sweet. Some do, some don't. And sugar is definitely one of those. It's also really high in carbohydrates and so, anyway, I was trying to think of a way that you could recreate a familiar, classic cereal but in a way that's better for you and that was sort of the origin of the recipe, so this is not coming out of a box from the store, but you're actually making it yourself and it's not that hard.

Suzy Chase:                  That's awesome.

Kat Odell:                  Thanks.

Suzy Chase:                  Mike Bagale, former Executive Chef, at Alinea, developer of Floating Food and the famous balloon course, is your boyfriend.

Kat Odell:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  I've heard him say that he manipulates food, because he understands what it's capable of.

Kat Odell:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Do you find that you share that philosophy with him, in terms of unicorn food?

Kat Odell:                  You know, Mike is a very scientific chef and he really understands ingredients. I think the way that I cook with unicorn food is much, much simpler and I think it depends how you define, like, the food that I'm making is just a little bit more streamlined and I think it's less manipulated because you're taking whole ingredients, just sort of blending them, and a lot of chefs around the world, chefs add other ingredients to create textures or basically to get an ingredient to function in a way that it normally wouldn't and I feel like I follow, my process with these recipes is just a little bit more straightforward. But I mean, everything he does is so amazing and delicious and really complex. This is a lot more simplified.

Suzy Chase:                  Are you guys collaborating on projects these days?

Kat Odell:                  Mike has, he left Alinea, and he started a consulting company, is doing projects around the world, and I'm helping him here and there with various things and it's a lot of fun, so for me, I've always, I've been behind a computer for so many years writing about food and working with him on projects gives me the opportunity to be a little bit more hands on, which I really, really enjoy a lot and we work really well together and just get along really well together and have a lot of similar ideas when it comes to food and also quite a similar palate. We like the same things. So yeah, we do work together sometimes and it's really fun.

Suzy Chase:                  Now your Instagram. Everyone should follow you on Instagram. Is chock full of my travel and food goals.

Kat Odell:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  Now, you guys are living in Dubai, right?

Kat Odell:                  Yeah. Technically, Dubai is our primary residence right now. We left the US back in August, but we're sort of bouncing all around, so there's a project in Dubai, there's a project in Hong Kong, and then a few more things coming up, so we're kind of homeless. We're free-basing it, is what I say. We're just like all over the place.

Suzy Chase:                  And you were just at Noma. Tell me about the Noma game menu?

Kat Odell:                  You know what, I've been to Noma a number of times and I think this was actually my favorite menu I've had so far. I like to look at Noma, more than anything else, as a culinary research facility that serves food, because it's so much more than a restaurant and René is really pioneering technique in fermentation and plant-feeding, different ways of plating, obviously, foraged ingredients. And I found this menu, in particular, I can understand why people say it's challenging, because the first course you get is a soup that has squirrel in it, right? When have you ever had squirrel? Toward the end of the meal you're eating duck brains out of the head of a duck and you're eating sort of this fried cube, this fried duck wing of sorts, but I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to food and dining, so it was fine. But I can understand for some other people that are a little bit more trepidatious about dining and certain ingredients that it could be a little bit more challenging, but it was delicious. I absolutely loved it. It was really wonderful.

Suzy Chase:                  Was that a real beetle that you ate? I saw a huge-

Kat Odell:                  Oh, so. Oh, so, so, it's not. It tastes kind of like ... It was made from more of like a fruit leather, but I thought when they dropped that course, I thought it was a real beetle, but when you look closely, it's not. But you know what, I can't even imagine how long it took for them to prepare that course.

Suzy Chase:                  I mean, it looked like a real beetle.

Kat Odell:                  Oh, totally, it looked like a real beetle. I was really impressed with that.

Suzy Chase:                  What was your favorite course?

Kat Odell:                  So there was a course where ... They had a lot of really good courses. They made this really beautiful feather that was out of truffle that was really, really nice. Honestly, the brain course was actually really delicious. Oh, so one of the first sort of sequences was a reindeer sequence and they had three or four different preparations of reindeer meat. That was really delicious. I liked that a lot.

Suzy Chase:                  Now to my segment called My Last Meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper, what would it be?

Kat Odell:                  It would be my grandmother's chicken soup. It's the most delicious chicken soup I've ever had in my life and it's something that as a kid I ate almost every day. She's an amazing cook and she would always say to me growing up, "Don't you want something else? Can I at least make you chicken soup?" And every day for years, she would make me just a very simple chicken soup. Sometimes they would have wild mushrooms that she would bring from the Czech Republic. There's like tweaks. But I wanted chicken soup every single day and it's still my favorite dish ever.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Kat Odell:                  So I am @Kat K-A-T underscore Odell O-D-E-L-L. And my byline is just Kat Odell.

Suzy Chase:                  You're always so fun to chat with. I cannot thank you enough for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Kat Odell:                  Thank you. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @cookerybythebook. Twitter's IAmSuzyChase. And download your Kitchen Mix Tapes: Music To Cook By on Spotify at Cookery by the Book and, as always, subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

Emily: The Cookbook

By Emily & Matthew Hyland

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Matt Hyland:                  Hi, I'm Matt Hyland. I'm the owner of Emily restaurant, and my new cookbook is EMILY: The Cookbook.

Suzy Chase:                  A huge congratulations for making the "Best 19 Cookbooks for Fall, 2018" in The New York Times. So take me back to that first meal you shared with Emily in your dorm room.

Matt Hyland:                  I believe that was in 2001. We were both kind of hanging out. Emily was actually my RA at the time, which-

Suzy Chase:                  That's funny.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. So she was my RA. We were just kind of hanging out. It was a weeknight. We were both hungry, and we ordered some pizza. And we're just sitting on the floor of the dorm, eating pizza, having a good time, and having a few drinks. And like, we really hit it off, and it went really well.

Suzy Chase:                  I read in the cookbook that at that point, Emily thought, "Wow. He's the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with." Were you thinking the same thing that night?

Matt Hyland:                  Maybe she was looking at the pizza when she thought that. But no, I'm kidding. Yeah. We really hit it off right away. I mean, we just had a lot in common. We were in school in Rhode Island. And there wasn't a lot of people from the New York area, and we both were. So it was kind of nice to have a lot of shared experiences from the same area, and like, done a lot of the same things growing up. So, yeah. And I obviously loved her pizza, too. So, yeah. We hit it off pretty quickly.

Suzy Chase:                  Tell me about Luca Arrigoni, and how did he become your mentor?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. Luca really changed my cooking career. I was working as a line cook, and a sous-chef, and things like that, in New York City for about seven years. And then Luca opened his restaurant, Sottocasa, right across the street from where I lived. And I didn't really want to do cooking anymore; like kind of the line, sous kind of trajectory. So I walked in there. It was maybe like a day after they opened. And I was like, "I don't know how to make pizza. I don't know anything about wood-fired ovens, but I want to learn how to make pizza. And I have a ton of cooking experience." And he was like, "Okay, sure."

                                                      So like, every day, I'd go in there. And you know, he'd teach me to stretch dough, and teach me to use the oven, and things like that. And within like, hours of just learning how to do it, I really fell in love with it. It's very traditional, Neapolitan pizza. It's very beautiful; like simple, really good ingredients in a wood-fired oven. And the weird thing about the wood-fired oven was, I picked up cooking on the wood-fired oven extremely quickly, because when I was young, and all through high school, I played lacrosse. And like, using a peel in a wood-fired oven is very similar to using a lacrosse stick.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. These are very transferrable skills that made it really easy to cook in a wood-fired oven. I was like, "Okay." Well, I got this down in like a week or two. Stretching, of course, was a little bit harder, but using the wood oven, which usually takes a long time to master, was very quick for me to pick up.

Suzy Chase:                  When I think about tackling pizza, I think, "Well, I don't have a wood-fired oven or fancy equipment." But one of the first things you write in the cookbook is that no fancy equipment is needed. What are some of your pro tips for making pizza at home?

Matt Hyland:                  Well, I think having a good baking steel, or a good baking stone, a pizza stone, is really important because you can get a lot of bottom heat on your pizza. But also, there's a few tricks you can use, too. Like, if you heat up your stone or your steel in the oven, and then put it on the top shelf, right below the broiler, and then you put the broiler on; and you put your pizza on the stone that's right under the broiler, or the steel that's right under the broiler, you will create a lot of bottom heat with the steel or the stone, and a lot of top heat with the broiler. So it almost creates ... You can almost create your own little pizza oven in your home oven. So you have a ton of top heat and a ton of bottom heat, and it can cook the pizza really fast and really hot.

Suzy Chase:                  So you have restaurants in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, the West Village, the East Village in Manhattan, and I think you also have Nashville, too?

Matt Hyland:                  And Williamsburg as well.

Suzy Chase:                  And Williamsburg ... Oh, my gosh. You're everywhere. So the West Village restaurant is a few blocks away from my apartment, on a darling street. And Clinton Hill is another adorable, cozy neighborhood. Does the feel and vibe of the neighborhood play a big factor in where you're going to open a location?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah, definitely. I mean, these are all locations that I love. I mean, I live in Fort Greene; so you know, like a 10-minute walk from Clinton Hill. Williamsburg, I've always loved the neighborhood that we're in there on the South Side. That's just one of my favorite areas. I have family in Nashville, so that made sense. I used to also live in the East Village, or Lower East Side, a long time ago, very close to East Village.

                                                      And then the West Village, that location has a very special meaning to me. I mean, as a young cook, after work, I'd always go to Blue Ribbon Bakery, and eat a duck club sandwich, and just like go downstairs, and look at that oven. And then when I found out Blue Ribbon Bakery was moving, I was like, "Oh, my God. We've got to have this space." This is like a dream space to have for any restaurateur. It's so beautiful in there. It's really like, it's a trophy restaurant, I'd call it; just like, the way the face is.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, totally. That location is a bit of a culinary time capsule. Talk a little bit about that wood-burning oven.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. That wood oven, the Blue Ribbon guys think it's from the mid 1800s. I have a friend who's a historian, a food historian, who thinks it's probably more like early 1900s. But either way, the oven that they found, that the Brombergs found in the basement, was a communal oven. So people used to ... People did not have kitchens back in New York City, a long time ago. So they'd make their dough at home and then bring it to the communal bakery. And then the bakery would fire their homemade dough for them, and then they'd come later in the day and pick it up. So it's kind of a new thing, where like, that oven has been cooking food for the neighborhood for 100-plus years. So to get to continue using that oven to cook food for the neighborhood is really special. I mean, it's really amazing that you just get to keep feeding the neighborhood with that oven, like over and over again, for 100-plus years.

Suzy Chase:                  I read somewhere that the Blue Ribbon guys thought it was an oven, but the real estate agent said, "Oh, no, no, no. It's a heater." So they had to track down the plans of the original building to prove that it was an oven so they could redo it, or something like that. Have you heard that?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. I think the landlord thought it was a furnace of some sort.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Matt Hyland:                  So they called ... They had a friend, I think it was a friend in Brooklyn, who was building a wood oven. So the guy who was building the oven, he was from Italy, and he happened to be in Brooklyn while they called this guy. And he came over and took a look at it. And the story is, like once he took a look at it, he gave the oven a little hug. He was like, "Oh, my God. This is amazing." And then it took almost three years, I believe, to restore it. So he would fly in from Italy. He'd crawl inside of the small opening, and restore the bricks, and do all the restoration. It took a few years. So it's a pretty amazing story.

Suzy Chase:                  You identify the pizza at Emily as fiercely American. What does that mean?

Matt Hyland:                  Well, you know, pizza was invented in Italy, probably. I mean, no one really knows. I mean, there's that myth that it was, you know, it's a red, white, and green dish for the Queen, and blah, blah. That's not real. That's a fake story. So it's like, it was probably invented in Italy, but it wasn't very popular. Pizza was not a popular world food until it came to America. And then, you know, New York, and New Haven, and Detroit, and all these styles of pizza are so uniquely regional. And really, Italy just kind of has Neapolitan pizza, you know? So it may have started in Italy, but once it got to America, it really took off. And I feel like pizza is an American food. It's not an Italian food. We kind of made it our own thing.

                                                      So when I say it's fiercely American, it's like we make pizza here. We use our own ingredients. We do it our own style. We're not like a slave to tradition, where it has to be this; it has to be this temperature oven, it has to look like this, it has to do that. It's like, no, that's not what pizza is. Pizza is fun. Pizza is delicious. Pizza can be whatever it wants to be. I mean, a New York slice of pizza is nothing like a Neapolitan pizza. But you know, it's still pizza. So I feel that by having American ingredients, we use high-quality stuff, we don't have to adhere to tradition, that it is an American product.

Suzy Chase:                  What is your philosophy when it comes to pizza dough?

Matt Hyland:                  I think the simpler, the better, when it comes to pizza dough; not so much ingredients. I always like adding in whole grains. I add in some coarsely-ground rye into my flour for the wood-fired oven. That's also not traditional. I don't use 00 flour. I just think like, using local, high-quality flour is just the best way to do it. Don't overcomplicate it; just some water, some salt, maybe a little oil if you want, but just keep it easy; you know like, delicious.

Suzy Chase:                  What does the rye do for the dough?

Matt Hyland:                  The rye kind of gives it a nice, hearty, nutty flavor. It kind of breaks up just being a monotone, kind of white flour flavor. So it makes it nice and hearty.

Suzy Chase:                  It's funny, when you opened your new location, one of your new locations, you knew you wanted to serve square pies. And so you figured it out it was Detroit-style pizza that you were making. How is this different from the grandma or Sicilian pie?

Matt Hyland:                  Well, we originally were going to do a Sicilian or grandma-style pizza place. But then every time we were doing testing, the pizza was just like, "Well, what do we like about this pizza? We like that the cheese goes all the way out to the edge and caramelizes along the edge of the pan. It's called the frico crust. We like putting the sauce on top because it doesn't make the dough soggy. The cheese is like a barrier between the sauce and the dough. And we liked the size of it. Like, we take the 8-by-10, approximately 8-by-10 sized pizza are kind of a nice size for one person. And just, it really just sort of made sense.

                                                      So we ordered in a bunch of frozen pizza from Detroit, had it shipped to us, and tasted it. Our pizza tastes nothing like traditional Detroit pizza. So we were kind of doing an homage to the way it looks and the way it is. But like, it's definitely not traditional. We want to use our own local ingredients. We want to use our own, like higher-quality stuff on it. So it really just was like an evolution of different styles of different pizzas that we liked and put together. And it really is just Detroit pizza. I think it's a great style of square pizza.

Suzy Chase:                  When you decided to reach past pizza, how did you determine what other types of food would go on the menu and into the cookbook?

Matt Hyland:                  Well, cooking is very, very personal to me. I think childhood experiences and past experience shaped the way I cook. And like most New Yorkers, I grew up eating lots of Chinese takeout and lots of pizza, so that's what I feel like I cook. Made a lot of Indian takeout, also. So it's like, these are flavors. Like, this is comfort food to me. Like, I didn't ... You know, people who grew up in the South, maybe their comfort food is like biscuits and pimento cheese. But for me, it's really takeout food. Bagels are comfort food; like, you know, smoked fish and things like that.

                                                      So I want to ... You know, Emily was such a personal restaurant for me. It's like these are flavors that are very personal to me, and like comfort food to me. And that might not seem traditional, but it's sort of why I try to incorporate these kind of flavors into my cooking. And I'm also kind of tired of just having ... You go to a pizza place. It's like, "Okay, what's on the menu?" It's like a Caesar salad, and some meatballs, and some other not-very-well-made starters. So I was like, "Well, let's just try to up our offerings and make them more interesting. And even if they are something familiar, like meatballs, let's put a little bit of a spin on it, make them a little more interesting and fun."

Suzy Chase:                  I read a 2017 article in The Village Voice that called you and Emily the first couple of New York pizza. In a town where you can spot a pizzeria every few blocks, some decades old, how did you react to that title? That's crazy.

Matt Hyland:                  I saw that. Yeah, I was very honored. I'm not sure we necessarily deserve that. I mean, maybe by default, since there aren't really any other couples that are making pizza, I'll take it by default. But you know, there's a lot of great pizza places out there. And we're just really proud to be part of the pizza scene in New York City, and it's been so well-received. So I'm just happy that we're even talked about in New York pizza, since it's such a competitive area, and there's so much good pizza around.

Suzy Chase:                  Yes. Speaking of competition, when you first opened your West Village restaurant, I walked by it, and I thought, "Ugh, another pizza place? Really?" Were you ever daunted at all by the fact that you can't swing a dead cat in New York City without hitting a pizza place?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. I mean, within two blocks of the West Village Emily-

Suzy Chase:                  I know.

Matt Hyland:                  ... we have Joe's, John's, Kesté-

Suzy Chase:                  Spunto.

Matt Hyland:                  ... Bleecker Street Pizza. So like, we're just doing different style pizza. So that's really what it came down to, where you know, if I was trying to do some ... Like, one of my favorite pizza places in New York is John's, just two blocks away. So if we were trying to do something like John's, like a coal oven, like old-school New York pizza, yeah, I don't think I'd open there. But we were doing square pizzas, or we are doing square pizzas. And we just have a little more interesting offerings to start with than like the meatballs and things that I was talking about. But yeah, if I'm looking for a New York City pizza, like the John's coal-fired on Bleecker is like, I think that's one of my favorites.

                                                      So you know, if there was another Detroit-style pizza place on Bleecker Street, yeah, we probably wouldn't have opened.

Suzy Chase:                  With so many creative recipes and toppings in this cookbook, what would you say is the most inspired recipe?

Matt Hyland:                  Inspired or bizarre?

Suzy Chase:                  Well, let's go with bizarre.

Matt Hyland:                  I think the Pig Freaker is one of my favorites. We've been making kimchi and putting some queso on it. It's sort of a combination that doesn't sound like it would work, but it really does. I feel like a lot of Korean flavors and Italian flavors go well together, and we have that in a lot of our other recipes too. Like, our wings are the Korean wings with gochujang and lots of pecorino on it; like, two things that you might not think go together well, but they do; same with the Pig Freaker with the queso cheese and the kimchi. So it's just sort of like, you know, I'm not looking at what country, or just like trying to infuse different countries. Like, it's not strictly, "This country and this country go together." It's like, "What are these flavor profiles of these different kind of neat ingredients we can put together, that work well together?"

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. So I had dinner at your West Village restaurant on Saturday night, and let me tell you what we had. And it would be awesome if you could describe these dishes that are also in the cookbook. Okay. First, we got the Street Fair pizza.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah, I love the Street Fair. The Street Fair, that's another classic childhood memory of the sausage, pepper, and onion, like going down one of those street fairs in New York City; like, having a sandwich with all that. So that flavor combination's pretty classic. So that's not one of our more unique pizzas in the sense of flavor profile, but it is a very classic, a very familiar flavor that I think everybody loves.

Suzy Chase:                  And that crunchy bit around the crust is heavenly, and you call that the frico crust?

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah, the frico crust It’s when the cheese caramelizes along the edge. Yeah, it's really nice.

Suzy Chase:                  So then we got the For the Nguyen pizza, and you don't really miss the sauce on this pie. Describe it.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. So the For the Nguyen is a play on our hot wings that we have at Clinton Hill. We have, like I was saying, the Korean wings with the pecorino and the ranch. So we just do like a play on a buffalo chicken pizza, basically, which is a type of pizza that I love; if you want to get a little pizza-trashy. So it's the chicken, the blue cheese, scallions, wing sauce on top of it, with the radishes. So it's kind of like a fancy version of a buffalo chicken pizza, in a way.

Suzy Chase:                  Pizza-trashy.

Matt Hyland:                  Pizza-trashy.

Suzy Chase:                  We also got the Emmy Burger Double Stack.

Matt Hyland:                  That would be the complete and utter reason why we kind of went from a sleepy, Clinton Hill neighborhood pizzeria, to where we are now. I mean, the original Emmy Burger at Clinton Hill just, it started as me, just kind of being bored eating pizza every night after dinner. So I got some burger meat in, and I had baked some buns. And I was like, "All right. I'm just going to special a burger." And like, I kept special-ing it, and people kept ordering it and taking pictures of it on Instagram. And it went through a few different iterations of how it looks and what was on it. And then we finally settled to like, what it was. Like, people just went crazy over it. It was like, on pictures everywhere, and on Instagram, and this and that. And like, we had these two big reviews come out, one from New York Magazine and one from The Infatuation, both naming it the best burger in New York City. And Village Voice named it the best burger in New York City, and all this stuff started just coming in.

                                                      And it was like, "Oh." We're like, "This is like a thing now." You know, we kind of broke that barrier of like, kind of a neighborhood restaurant, to like a destination. So we put a limit on it at Clinton Hill, so we only have 25 a night there. But we knew, when we were going to open our new restaurant, it's like we want to make sure that people can get this burger. You know, the West Village restaurant is very large. Clinton Hill restaurant is very small. So we're like, we tried to figure out a way where we could make a burger that you kind of make in some volume, and feed our guests, and have them all be happy, and not have to turn them away. So the Double Stack is like a variation of the original. It's easy to make for us, and it's easy to just have a lot of stuff in-house, so everyone leaves happy.

Suzy Chase:                  The combo of the LaFrieda beef with the pretzel bun, and the Emmy sauce, and the bread-and-butter pickles, and the cheese was incredible.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. And again, it's really just some interesting ingredients. I mean, the Emmy sauce is the Korean wing sauce with some aioli in it. So it's almost like a Korean gochujang sauce, like on the dry-aged beef. So it's, again, a lot of things that you might not think go well together. But when you think about it culinarily, you know, it's like these flavors do go well together. And the pickles kind of cut through all the richness of the dry-aged beef.

                                                      And you know, if you think about a burger as like an actual dish, it's easier to kind of create a better-tasting burger than just like, "Okay. What comes on a burger?" It's like, "All right. It's lettuce, tomato, onions." You know, like, who cares? Like, put some thought into it, and put some ... Just like, it needs more acid. It needs more this. It needs more ... You know, if you think about an actual dish, I mean, it's not that hard to make a really good burger.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. So for dessert, we went over the top, and we got the S'moresby, your deconstructed s'mores. That pushed us over the edge.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. I like that one, too. We were doing a s'mores calzone for so long, so it's kind of a tradition to just have a s'mores dish on the menu. I mean, yeah, who doesn't love s'mores? I mean, it's chocolate, marshmallow, and graham crackers. It's a great combo.

Suzy Chase:                  It's pretty, too.

Matt Hyland:                  Yeah. It's really nice looking, too.

Suzy Chase:                  So I was looking around the restaurant, which was packed, by the way, at 5:00 on a Saturday, and it was so interesting to see. Everyone ordered a hamburger and a pizza or two.

Matt Hyland:                  Like I said, with the burger, I mean, it's just had such notoriety. And like, we just put so much work into making it delicious, that I think that, you know, I joke that we opened a pizza place, but we're actually secretly a burger restaurant, you know? I'd say the burger's the most successful special ever run. You know, so it was a special, and then goes on the menu. And then, you know, we don't really mention the burger that much when it comes to the branding of it, but it's there, and people love it. And like, I'm glad, in the West Village, we do have the space to make sure everyone gets one.

Suzy Chase:                  Now, for my segment called "My Last Meal." What would you choose for your last supper?

Matt Hyland:                  Oh, I'd definitely go get dim sum, lots of different, little dumplings, things like that. I like to ... I mean, dumplings are definitely my favorite food, even though you'd probably guess pizza was. But dumplings are something I grew up eating a lot of. I love dumplings. I go to Mimi Cheng's Dumplings all the time. I think they have great dumplings. Or you know, I'll go to like a dim sum place, and it's got a little variety of all kinds of things in wrappers, you know? That would definitely be my last meal.

Suzy Chase:                  So you'd get all dumplings?

Matt Hyland:                  All dumplings, that's it; different varieties, though, different varieties; not just one kind, just different varieties of dumplings.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find your restaurants and you, on the web and social media?

Matt Hyland:                  You can find our restaurants in Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, East Village, West Village, Nashville. And then we have a new one, called Violet, opening soon in the East Village as well, where we'll be going grilled pizza. You can find us on Instagram at PizzaLovesEmily, and www.PizzaLovesEmily.com.

Suzy Chase:                  I didn't think this was possible, but you have elevated the good, old pizza and the good, old burger, and brought it to a whole new level. Thanks, Matt, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Matt Hyland:                  Thanks for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookeryByTheBook; Twitter is IAmSuzyChase. And download your Kitchen Mixtapes: Music To Cook By, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. And as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Essential Tools, Tips, & Techniques for the Home Cook

By Michelle Doll

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room talking to cookbook authors.

Michelle Doll:                  Hi, I'm Michelle Doll and this is my new book, Essential Tools, Tips, and Techniques for the Home Cook.

Suzy Chase:                  As a home cook, I'm always looking for techniques and tips, so I was excited to see this book pop up in my mailbox. You graduated with honors from the French Culinary Institute and you're an instructor, plus you're a cake designer. But your true passion is educating the home cook. How did that get to be your true passion?

Michelle Doll:                  It's kind of funny. Yeah, I did the whole professional route and ended up in lots of restaurants, getting lots of tips and techniques, and then I started to teach at Sur La Table. As the resident chef there, everybody who was coming to class, occasionally you would get somebody in a chef's coat, but mainly it was people who were just passionate about food and wanting to learn more to do at home. Every class was different every week. The people we had there and the techniques that we were teaching were always evolving and changing, so it really kind of piqued my interest. It made my job super fun again to have to kind of relearn things and apply them to people who were doing this on a much smaller scale and at home.

Suzy Chase:                  How is this cookbook organized?

Michelle Doll:                  Each chapter is based on a technique and the tools you need to do it. So our first chapter is rolling pins, which sounds kind of weird I realize. But I start off with just talking about all the different varieties that are out there, what's worth spending some money on, what's worth passing on, how to fix it if you ruin it, proper technique and care, and then I jump into some recipes that are great recipes that will serve you for your entire life. How to make a quick puff pastry, how to make ravioli dough, pasta dough, how to make a really nice pate brisée or pie crust.

                                                      These are things that you can personalize too. So I don't just give the recipe out, but I also talk a little bit about what's happening on a molecular level, why does the laminated dough in the puff pastry rise like it does and what can we do to make sure that that always turns out for us. So kind of demystifying a lot of the techniques and then giving some great base recipes that people can then personalize if they want or just jump and use these forever.

Suzy Chase:                  This is the first cookbook I've seen that's talked about useless gizmos and thingamajigs and how we can clear them out. The problem is, I always think I'm going to need that gizmo. What's the process for clearing things out?

Michelle Doll:                  If I haven't used it in six months or so, kind of like a closet, you want to just clear it out. It's not worth it. That's what yard sales are for, pass along our junk to somebody else who might want it. But yeah, if you can't use it for more than one purpose, then I also find that it's kind of useless. Like a melon baller I use all the time for lots of different things. That's one of my favorite tools and it's super basic, but to have that and to know that you can use it for so much more than just melon balling makes it a great tool to have.

Suzy Chase:                  What are some different ways you use your melon baller?

Michelle Doll:                  I core all of my apples and pears. You can take the inside rib out of them. It's pear poaching season right now. Actually there's a recipe in the book for poached pears and it's done in a white wine and a lemon sauce. With the melon baller, once you slice it in half you get this perfect little sphere taken out, so you don't have to quarter it and remove the seeds that way. It's a super easy way to kind of pop it right out.

Suzy Chase:                  That's so smart. I used to have a melon baller. I don't know where that darn thing went, so I'm going to have to get another one.

Michelle Doll:                  That and Microplanes, I think I have multiples of because I'm always ... There's always one in the dishwasher.

Suzy Chase:                  One item I bet every home cook uses as least once a day is a saute pan. Go over the three types.

Michelle Doll:                  You've got a regular stainless steel, your All-Clad basic, the shiny ones. We have a nonstick, and with nonstick you really want to look for something that's not Teflon. There's a couple different varieties on the market that I talk about. There's also crepe pans, which are kind of considered saute plans. And then you could do a carbon steel saute pan, which is what they usually use in restaurants. They're not as pretty. They're super heavy. But they conduct heat like crazy, super fast.

Suzy Chase:                  What's your favorite saute pan?

Michelle Doll:                  My main reach-to is a nonstick pan. I like GreenPan a lot. SCANPAN's my favorite. They're from Copenhagen and what I like about it is it's not a coating, it's the actual pan that's nonstick. So you can use a fork or tongs on it, metal. You don't have to worry about little black flecks coming up. All you're going to do is scratch the pan, you're not going to release any weirdness into your food. It's green. There's no gases that come off of it like with a regular Teflon nonstick pan, if you heat it up with nothing in it, really noxious gases come off of it. It's kind of dangerous.

                                                      You want to definitely make sure that you're springing for something that's going to be safe to use.

Suzy Chase:                  Another frequently used item would be a sheet pan. What types of sheet pans do you prefer?

Michelle Doll:                  Kind of similar to our saute pans, you've got a couple different varieties. There's your heavy steel version. They tend to bow. They will pop up a little bit if they get over 400 degrees. So the heat actually changes how the molecules in the pan are moving and that's what you hear, like a loud bang sometimes when you're cooking something really hot. It's your pan buckling. So that's your heavy stainless.

                                                      There's a lighter aluminum sheet pans. Then there's also nonstick sheet pans. Nonsticks I actually avoid for sheet pans because they tend to be darker and that darkness attracts a lot of the heat. So it gets really hot in the pan so the bottom of your cookies get really dark, but the top is still totally raw and it's super frustrating. If I have to use those, if for some reason I'm forced to use a nonstick pan, I usually cover it with foil so that it deflects some of the heat and protects my cookies a little bit.

Suzy Chase:                  Now when your sheet pan bows, does that mean it's ruined or is that okay?

Michelle Doll:                  Sometimes it doesn't pop back. Sometimes it does stay like that. But usually you can push it back or when it cools back down, you'll hear that bang again and it's flattening itself back out.

Suzy Chase:                  I hate that bang. I feel like someone shot something through my window.

Michelle Doll:                  Scared to death.

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Michelle Doll:                  And if you put one ... At work I have these giant stainless steel tables and if somebody puts down a hot sheet pan on top of it, the whole table makes this loud shotgun bang and the pan sometimes will even bounce into the air. It's really dramatic.

Suzy Chase:                  Do we really need a pizza stone if we're making pizza at home?

Michelle Doll:                  I think so. Pizza stones and there's also pizza steels. It depends on who you talk to which is their favorite. I prefer the stone but ... What it does, you cook directly on it, but if you get it wet, it does crack. But you can still push it together. You could still continue to use it. It heats up and it distributes the heat really evenly. Any kind of oven that you have whether it's steam, electric, gas, whatever, convection, they all have hot spots. When you're baking on something, if it's really delicate, you don't want to be opening up the oven door over and over again.

                                                      If you're actually baking on top of a pizza stone, you put the pan right on top of the pizza stone, it disperses the heat much more evenly so you don't have to go in and constantly be flipping it around to get everything evenly baked. But as far as pizzas go, yes, a pizza stone, since it's so dry it'll take some of the moisture out of the bottom of the pizza crust so you get this really nice, crisp crust. If you're doing it on a stainless steel pan, it just doesn't have the same effect. You end up with a soggier pizza. It's not quite as crisp and authentic-tasting.

Suzy Chase:                  In addition to tips, techniques, and tools of the trade, you have a collection of really easy recipes. I made Mom's Mongolian Beef on page 183.

Michelle Doll:                  Oh good.

Suzy Chase:                  Now why is this called Mom's Mongolian Beef?

Michelle Doll:                  It was my mom's. I'm an Army brat and we would move every three or four years. What was kind of great about that, when we lived in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, it was in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest. We were in the middle of nowhere. Most of the population there was Army brats and they came from all over the world. It was such a wonderfully diverse community that we had ... My neighbor would make her own kimchi and bury it in the yard and then on the other side, they would make their own barbecue rubs and sauces. Food is just this great thing that brings everybody together.

                                                      It was funny to be exposed to that in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. It's not where you would expect it. But we fell in love with Beef Bulgogi and this is kind of a riff on that recipe that she would do. The officers' Wives Club, they would always have a recipe book that they would put together once a year and sell. This was based on one of the recipes in there that she had done.

Suzy Chase:                  When I was in junior high, I went to a dance at Fort Leonard Wood. Isn't that crazy?

Michelle Doll:                  Get out. No way. That is amazing.

Suzy Chase:                  I used to live in Prairie Village, Kansas, outside of Kansas City. So funny.

Michelle Doll:                  That is absolutely amazing. Yeah, Waynesville is the town right outside of Leonard Wood. That's where I went to high school, so everybody went to the high school off post and then we would all go back on post at night. That was the whole town. It was crazy, but it was great. I loved it. I really love Missouri. It was a great place to live.

Suzy Chase:                  I live in the West Village in New York City and have a small galley kitchen, so I'm dying to hear how you've made more space after outgrowing your kitchen.

Michelle Doll:                  I lived in the West Village for a while myself.

Suzy Chase:                  You did?

Michelle Doll:                  And I had a half-refrigerator. It wasn't even like a ... It was like a hotel refrigerator. I had two burners and a tiny, tiny little dorm sink. It was hilariously tiny. So everything hung on the walls. I just had like Julia Child had those pegboards. So I adopted that technique of just hanging everything up. Now we live in Brooklyn. I have a little bit more space and it's kind of leached into another room, so I'm sort of taking over the adjoining room. Crock-Pots and Instant Pots and Dutch ovens, they're huge and they're heavy and they take up a lot of space.

                                                      You really want to pick one that you love, that you're going to want to have forever. Invest in a piece and just keep it. Don't start accumulating too many pots and pans. Just pick one or two of each. And then another space-saving technique is we've gone vertical. I have a shelf over the door, the entry door to the house. I'm looking at it right now. There's the Instant Pot on top of that, some giant stock pots, all of that stuff is up and out of the way. I mean it's a bummer in a way because you can't ... It's not super easily accessible. You can't just reach and grab something, but a little step stool keeps everything kind of straight and neat-ish.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah. Neat-ish. But so what-

Michelle Doll:                  Ish, yeah. I'm looking at it now going, ugh, I'm so glad you're not here.

Suzy Chase:                  What have you-

Michelle Doll:                  When you open the door, you hear the paella ... I have a giant paella pan hanging off of that shelf over the door and when you open the door too aggressively, it makes this giant gong sound. It's kind of funny. It's our security system.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, you'll know if you've been broken into.

Michelle Doll:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  So the holidays are coming up and your limoncello granita sounds like the perfect drink for entertaining. Describe that and what tools do we need to pull it off?

Michelle Doll:                  I love the limoncello granita. It's so good and it doesn't make any sense, but it tastes kind of creamy. The amount of alcohol that's in the recipe controls the size of the ice crystals. It takes a couple hours for it to get jellified, but it does. It gets jellified. You just scrape it up, you don't need any tools at all. Really just any sort of vessel to freeze it in. It's best if it's kind of shallow and flat, so a little lasagna pan or any kind of ... even a cookie sheet if it has tall enough sides.

                                                      You dissolve the sugar down, basically making a simple syrup and then mix that in with the limoncello. I did it once with orangecello, which is just an orange version of the same liqueur. It was fantastic too. I love it. If you want to get fancy and you want to have a little cookie portioner. You can scoop it up with that, that works really well. But otherwise just spoons is fine.

Suzy Chase:                  For my segment called My Last Meal, what would you choose for your last supper?

Michelle Doll:                  It changes day to day. It's cold out right now, so I would want a beef bourguignon and a bottle or two of wine if it's my last supper.

Suzy Chase:                  Why not?

Michelle Doll:                  Some roasted potatoes. I make potatoes with herbes de Provence. It's super simple, just some olive oil and herbes de Provence. That would be really nice. They crisp up really pretty on a sheet pan. And then for dessert, I would probably do a Pavlova with a passion fruit curd.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Michelle Doll:                  Sure. On Instagram, it's Chef Michelle Doll and on Facebook the same, Michelle Doll, D-O-L-L. My website is Michelle Doll Makes and I'm currently teaching at the New York Cake Academy in Manhattan. They just reopened and they have a big, beautiful teaching space, so I've been getting to teach there as well as still being adjunct at the International Culinary Center.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Michelle Doll:                  Thanks for having me. This was so much fun.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book, Twitter is IamSuzyChase and download your kitchen mixtapes, music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book and as always subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

Home Cooking

with Kate McDermott

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.

Kate McDermott:                  Hi, Suzy, and your listeners. I'm Kate McDermott, and I'm here at Pie Cottage today in Port Angeles, Washington on the beautiful peninsula. I'm here to talk about my new book "Home Cooking with Kate McDermott" that just came out.

Suzy Chase:                  The very first line in the cookbook is, "You can do this." I love it. What compelled you to make that the very first line of this cookbook?

Kate McDermott:                  I have taught so many people in pie-making in my Art of the Pie pie camp classes, and people come in feeling nervous that they can't make a pie. I learned the first thing you let them know is, "This is really easy. There is nothing to it," and by the time they leave the workshops, they're feeling like, "Well what was the big fear about this? It's so easy?" I felt that it's the same thing when you go into, my kitchen at least, when I'm cooking. This stuff is easy and delicious I feel, at least people tell me that it is, and that anybody can make these dishes. There's nothing hard about it, there's no exotic ingredients, it requires no special equipment, and pretty much anybody can make them.

Suzy Chase:                  Speaking of pies, talk a little bit about what is enough, how pie recipes are being tweaked to fill larger pans these days.

Kate McDermott:                  I had a very interesting conversation a few years back with an editor for one of the larger food magazines. She mentioned to me something that corroborated my experience over the years when I have been making recipes, older recipes from the '40s, '50s, sometimes even the '60s and early '70s, in cookbooks, pie recipes. The ingredients, following the recipes never filled the pie pan correctly; there was not enough dough, there was not enough filling. My solution to that, of course, was just to size the recipes up to fit the pie pans. Now, what she told me was that our recipes in older cookbooks, in decades prior to this, were sized for the size of vessels that we had at that time, which were substantially smaller than what we have now. A full-sized pie, the pie pan is very different. The size of a piece of pie that is cut now is probably one-and-a-half to two times the size-

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my gosh.

Kate McDermott:                  Of a piece of pie that we ate in, say, 1950. I think this is also true with many of the dishes that we make now, the serving sizes. It is not necessarily that, "Oh, we should be cleaning our plate" as our mothers told us to do. When our plate is so overfilled that really I look sometimes at plates of food that come to me at a table in a restaurant and I say, "This could feed four people."

Suzy Chase:                  Well, come to New York City because it's the exact opposite. It's like a tiny nugget.

Kate McDermott:                  Well there's probably a balance there somewhere-

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Kate McDermott:                  More than a tiny nugget but more than the whole casserole on your plate. "Less" than the whole casserole on your plate, sorry.

Suzy Chase:                  It's so hard to get your mom out of your head, though, saying, "Clean your plate."

Kate McDermott:                  Oh yeah, yeah. I know for me, there were things that she really worked hard to get me to eat. I was not fond of vegetables when I was young, so I spent many an hour at the table. I couldn't leave the table until my plate was clean, and I know she was just trying to get me to eat my vegetables.

Suzy Chase:                  For you, every morning is a different painting. Tell me about Duncan and his breakfast hash.

Kate McDermott:                  Well, my son Duncan has been in the kitchen with me since always. He loves to be in the kitchen. He does many other things also, but he's really competent over these years of being in there with me of now taking on kitchen responsibilities in his own house and when he comes over here. He loves to cook for lots of people. I remember at the home of one of his girlfriends one time, her dad says, "Oh we love it when Duncan comes over because he immediately goes in the kitchen and starts cooking," and many times what he's making is his breakfast hash, which started by just going in and chopping up pretty much whatever was in the fridge or [inaudible 00:05:52]. There always were potatoes. He loves bacon. Who doesn't love bacon? He likes to season things highly, actually. He would just chop and chop and cook and cook, and started making this hash. Usually when people would get up in the morning, if I had a house full of people, the house was already smelling like breakfast and Duncan was in the kitchen cooking.

                                                      When you get up and you smell something great like my son's cooking, or if I may be so bold, some of my cooking, it's just a wonderful way to start the day.

Suzy Chase:                  One photo in the book that I love is on page 28; it's a few of your cookbooks. You read cookbooks like novels. What was your first cookbook, and what's your favorite cookbook?

Kate McDermott:                  Okay, well my first cookbook as it is shown in there is "Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls." I still do have my original copy and that is the copy that you see. All those cookbooks that are on page 28, those are my cookbooks. That was my first one, and I loved looking through the pages and picking out what I was going to make. I think that's translated now into continuing to read cookbooks as if they were novels, and picturing me in the kitchen, my hands chopping the vegetables, my hands making whatever it is. You kind of can read the recipe and imagine the smells and the textures. My favorite cookbook, oh my goodness. I probably would say, well I love Marion Cunningham's "The Fannie Farmer Cookbook." It's just like a good, old friend to me, but also one of my favorites is "The Tassajara Bread Book." Not so much that I bake out of it anymore, but just because it's like a talisman to me. It's how many of us in the generation that grew up in the '60s and the '70s, it's how we learned to make bread.

Suzy Chase:                  What year was that cookbook put out?

Kate McDermott:                  That cookbook was put out, I believe, in 1970-something. It was at least out by the mid-seventies I believe.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. Speaking of old friends, you also have various story time sections, and one was when you met Marion Cunningham-

Kate McDermott:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  The woman who revised "The Fanny Farmer Cookbook." Reading that piece made me feel like you hit it off immediately. Describe that.

Kate McDermott:                  We did. I was on the farm in California, at Frog Hollow. Great stone fruit orchard, wonderful fruit there, and I was there for a wonderful celebration of Alice Waters' edible food yard, her project. It felt like everybody in the world was there, including Marion, and of course I was just agog at like, "Oh my God, here's this person and here's that person," and there was Marion. It was a very, very hot summer day. There was going to be a tour of the orchard, and it was too hot for Marion to go out. I absolutely said to her, "Well I'll stay behind" because being now a north-westerner, although I was transplanted; I was originally from Santa Barbara, as a north-westerner now, anything above 60 degrees was hot to me and I was delighted to stay behind. We went up to the farm office, which was air conditioned, and sat together and had a wonderful, one-hour conversation one-on-one about things that we both felt were important: family, family at the table, the table, putting meals on the table, gathering friends and family. It was absolutely one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

                                                      I got to hear very interesting things about her too, that really what she had wanted to do in life was to have a garage and be a mechanic.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh wow. Really?

Kate McDermott:                  Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, after everybody came back, then we went out into the orchard where the big table was set in-between the rows of peach trees. She just motioned and said, "You sit right over there." It was just such a magical evening. I saw her after that when she came up to Washington to speak. She greeted me like I was her long lost best friend. It was so amazing.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh wow. You'll always remember that.

Kate McDermott:                  Oh totally, and I have a picture of that day. Actually, I have a picture of myself at the farm on that day, but the one that I love the most is when she was in Washington and I have a picture of her signing my very dog-eared copy of her cookbook, "The Fanny Farmer Cookbook." She looked at it and said, "I think this would take the prize for the most used."

Suzy Chase:                  What an honor.

Kate McDermott:                  Oh yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  How old was she when you met her?

Kate McDermott:                  Oh, she was I believe in her eighties at this point.

Suzy Chase:                  In the High Noon section of "Home Cooking," you have the "Good Old Butter Sandwich," but your spin on it is that you have re-imagined it in 10 different ways. Describe the one with peppers and arugula.

Kate McDermott:                  Oh, this is one of my favorites. So you're going to take some bread, and if you like, my mom used to spread an extra layer of butter on our nut butter sandwiches. That's optional, and then I like to put almond butter on mine. Then I place on there the arugula, a nice little bit of arugula on one side, and on the other side I place my favorite red peppers. My favorites are Mama Lil's Picked Hungarian Goathorn Peppers, and I liberally put those on. Sometimes maybe I'll put a little sprinkling of salt if I feel like it too, and then I put it together. You can either eat it like that, or some people I think grill these things too. It's just delicious, and I was inspired to do this when I realized when I go to restaurants, many times there'll be peanuts in a dish or nuts in a dish, and peppers. I thought, "Well why can't I be doing this with a peanut butter sandwich?" I just tuck this stuff in, and it's really good.

Suzy Chase:                  I can't even imagine it in my head. That's how crazy it sounds.

Kate McDermott:                  Give it a try. Some of the peanut sauces that we have, like with spring rolls, sometimes those will have a little bit of sweetness to it. If you like, this is not mentioned in the book; this is just for you, you could also take a little tiny pinch of sugar and put that in the sandwich also just to bring it up a little bit.

Suzy Chase:                  Fall is hearty soup season, and I love a good bean soup. What are your three ways to cook beans?

Kate McDermott:                  Okay.

Suzy Chase:                  Hit it.

Kate McDermott:                  You got it. The first way is to soak the beans overnight, the long way. Actually, you bring them to a boil and then soak them overnight, and then the next day you cook them until they're soft. The second way is to bring them to a boil for five minutes, then let them sit for a little bit, and then you cook them for another couple hours. That seems to work just fine too, so that's the medium way if you have forgotten to soak your beans overnight. The third way is to get out the can opener and open the can. That works really well too.

Suzy Chase:                  That's my favorite.

Kate McDermott:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  I just got a ham hock from my butcher too. You just put it in some white beans, and-

Kate McDermott:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my gosh, the best.

Kate McDermott:                  I was just visiting some friends. We had a lovely meal of black-eyed peas, which they did in the same way of soaking the beans and then they did a ham hock, but even if you didn't have that, I think pork belly's always good.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh yes, totally. So I'm not sure why, but one thing I hate to make is salad. You have the perfect answer to my disdain for salad-making-

Kate McDermott:                  I do?

Suzy Chase:                  The Make-Ahead Layered Salad. Describe that.

Kate McDermott:                  Well, that salad is a very retro salad from the '50s and '60s. You really just shred lettuce, you chop pretty much whatever vegetables you want, and make sure that you have different textures in there so that there's some crunch as well. Then, you kind of seal it all in with a mayonnaise topping and let it sit in the fridge overnight or for some hours, and it's ready to go. You just sort of toss it all together if you'd like, and that's it. It's made its own dressing pretty much, and it's like salad ready to go.

Suzy Chase:                  What do you put in the mayonnaise part of it?

Kate McDermott:                  So, the dressing for the Make-Ahead Layered Salad is super easy. You take a couple cups of mayonnaise, which sounds like a lot but remember that this is a big salad and it's going to be spread out quite liberally. Put in some sugar for sweetening it up a little bit, some seasoning salt. One of my favorites is Spike, and some garlic powder. You can either mix it together or you can spread the mayonnaise completely over the top and then sprinkle all of those dry ingredients over the top of the mayonnaise. It'll kind of seep in there and flavor it, and then also you put some Parmigiano-Reggiano on top of that. It's quite good. Now right before you serve it then, sprinkle it with some crumbled hard-boiled eggs and bacon. It's always better with bacon, right?

Suzy Chase:                  I'm going to make that for Thanksgiving.

Kate McDermott:                  I think you'll like it.

Suzy Chase:                  I can do that the night before.

Kate McDermott:                  Yes you can.

Suzy Chase:                  Well there you go. On page 204, you write about how to roast a chicken. I made that chicken the other night, and I always forget how easy it is to roast a chicken.

Kate McDermott:                  That is so true. When I was a young cook, I was petrified of roasting a chicken for some reason. When I finally just took the bird by the legs and decided to do it, I found that it's very, very simple. The recipe that I have in "Home Cooking" really requires nothing more than a vessel to put the chicken in. Just salt and pepper it both on the inside and the outside. If you want to stuff it with whatever fresh herbs you have; it could be rosemary, oregano, sage, whatever you have. If you want to put some garlic on the inside, you can do that. If you don't anything other than salt and pepper, that's fine too, and you toss the bird into an oven that is at 350. 90 minutes later, it comes out and it's done. You can baste it if you want; you don't have to baste it. It comes out every time.

Suzy Chase:                  I made little slits and I stuck roasted garlic into the slits.

Kate McDermott:                  That's a classic. That is so yummy.

Suzy Chase:                  It was so good, and then the next day I made ramen for my little boy, so it's great.

Kate McDermott:                  So you had the chicken to be able to put in it.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Kate McDermott:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  So good. For my segment called My Last Meal, what would you choose for your last supper?

Kate McDermott:                  A simple piece of bread hot out of the oven slathered with butter would be right up there, and a perfect peach with juice with juice that would be dripping down my chin that we could all share and pass it around, and maybe some home-pressed cider. I would want to be sharing this with lifelong friends and of course my son, and hopefully I would have some grandchildren at that time. Hint, hint, Duncan if you're listening.

Suzy Chase:                  No pressure.

Kate McDermott:                  No pressure at all. I think that last meal is more who you're sharing it with and the memories. Quite frankly, I hope I go out laughing.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Kate McDermott:                  You can find me at artofthepie.com. I am on Instagram @KateMcDermott, and I am on Twitter @KateMcDermott. On Facebook, you can either find me at Art of the Pie and then my personal page is Kate McDermott.

Suzy Chase:                  You and Marion Cunningham agreed that the kitchen table is one of the most central places in the home. That is so homey and comforting just like the recipes in this cookbook. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Kate McDermott:                  Thank you so much, Suzy, and to your listeners, just cook. It's easy.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @CookeryByTheBook. Twitter is @IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mixtapes, music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. As always, subscribe on Apple Podcasts.