Meat On a Stick, Black Coffee, and Bread: Kim Vallejo On Our local Grainshed

The Museum of Food and Drink 

MOFAD

https://www.mofad.org/

Wed June 10, 2026 : Kim Vallejo and June Russell in conversation about the past, present, and future of local grains.

https://mofad.ticketing.veevartapp.com/tickets/view/list/restoring-the-grainshed-reviving-regional-grain-in-new-york

https://www.mofad.org/program-detail-page/grains

MOFAD Programs

https://www.mofad.org/programs

Kim Vallejo 

She Wolf Bakery

https://www.shewolfbakery.com/

June Russell

Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming

https://www.glynwood.org/

Culinaria: Women Of Color Rewriting Our Food Stories

https://culinariastories.net/book

Dr. Willa Zhen

The Culinary Institute of America

Leah Eskin

Like Wafers in Honey

https://www.leaheskin.com/

Farmer Ground Flour

https://www.farmergroundflour.com/

Brooklyn Granary and Mill

https://brooklyngranaryandmill.com/

Bread Alone

https://www.breadalone.com/

TRANSCRIPT

(0:00) 

Ivan De Luce (ID)

Welcome to Radio...Take two. Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. How's it going, Bernadette?

Bernadette Cura (BC)

It's going great. We love the rain.

ID:

We love the rain.

BC:

It makes people want to scurry into a museum. Come here when it's raining. It's the perfect place to be.

And we're not going to give you a headache because we're too large. And also there are snacks to help you to fight off that museum headache.

ID:

We've got protein in the form of Nuts for Nuts honey roasted peanuts.

BC:

And also the halvah has a good amount of protein and fiber.

ID:

It's all good for you, really. The pretzel bites are tasty, too. Some simple carbs for some energy as well.

BC:

There's like a great burst of energy.

ID:

And you know what I will say about MOFAD? Your feet will never hurt after you get through it, because there's simply not that much surface area to walk across, you know.

BC:

It's just the right size.

ID:

I agree.

BC:

Absolutely. (1:00) And also the air in here is quite nice. Like, you know, like the air in museums sometimes it's just like, oh my, why am I dissing museums?

ID:

Take that, The Met.

BC:

No, stop. I love museums.

ID:

I love museums, even The Met.

BC:

So I'm not going to say another word about other museums. I'm just going to say this is a really great place to be. And oh my gosh, we are revealing too much about ourselves, I think.

ID:

Pay no attention to the podcast hosts behind the curtain.

BC:

We'll edit this out in post.

ID:

Yes, or will we?

BC:

I don't know.

ID:

Well, so we had a great chat with Claudette. We've also had some great events this past week here at MOFAD as well. One of my favorites was the one about Women of Color in Food Studies.

It was basically a book talk for this new book called Culinaria. And it basically has these chapters written by different food studies academics, both senior academics and junior academics, all about their food stories and their cultures. It ranges from autoethnography, talking about one's own family and family recipe history and culture, other kinds of ethnography, talking to people from other cultures, and just a really broad transnational look at Women of Color in Food Studies.

BC:

(2:19) Well, I know that Willa was here, and she is a professor at the Culinary Institute of America, of which I am a graduate. It was nice that she was here to be part of that program representing the CIA, yo!

ID:

Exactly.

BC:

We had food at that event. Tanoreen provided some delicious food.

ID:

Delicious Palestinian food.

Yeah, it was so delicious.

ID:

Yeah, so I really encourage people to check out culinariastories.net. It is the page for the book. The book is out soon.It's not out yet. But for any of you food studies people out there, it's a really unique look at these underrepresented topics.

BC:

I was at the event for Leah Eskin and her book, Like Wafers and Honey, which we called our book club, but nobody had to read the book beforehand.

ID:

But they probably learned a bit about the book while they were there.

BC:

The nice thing is that Leah read some lovely excerpts from the book. 

ID:

So what is the book? What's it about?

BC:

So that book was set in the town of Pitigliano, which is in Tuscany, which apparently we all learned was called Little Jerusalem because of the Jewish community in that town for centuries. And sadly also for centuries at different times the community was persecuted and kicked out. There were also times of you know where the community flourished and was supported, but not always.

And I believe this book was set in the last time that it happened during the anti-Jewish laws in the 30s.

ID:

(3:58) Right.

BC:

So Taylor, our program director, made some cookies from the book because it's stories and recipes. The cookies were called sfratti and sfratto means eviction. It's so dark and sad that they can make something delicious about something that is so tragic.

But when they would do these sfratti or evictions, they would use a stick to bang on the door or to bang to like let people know that they had to get out. And the cookie is in the form of a stick which is then cut into rounds. And they're made with walnuts and pine nuts and lemon zest and honey and they were so delicious.

A gentleman who also came to the program made them as well from the book and said he had the same experience.

ID:

It's just interesting to make this recipe out of a very dark time in your community's history. It shows the resilience of that community. Making the most of being evicted en masse just because of your religion.

BC:

(5:00) Anyway, it was a really moving event and we loved it.

ID:

Wow, very cool. Another event coming up relating to She Wolf Bakery.

BC:

Oh my gosh.

ID:

A lot of you might be familiar with this really amazing bakery here in New York that sources local grains from the New York and Tri-State area. We're going to be talking to Kim Vallejo who is the business director at She Wolf Bakery. About sourcing local grains.

BC:

I'm so excited for that. And she's going to be in conversation with June Russell who I know had a lot to do with building that ecosystem. Here in our area, she used to work for Grow NYC.

As a matter of fact, one of our volunteers MJ or Michelle Hernandez used to work for Grow NYC and knew her and speaks highly of her and is very excited about that program for that reason. Yeah. 

She's going to be back talking about what she built with She Wolf also.

ID:

(6:01) Right, right. So cool. Yeah, it's going to be great.

I can't wait.

BC:

We did talk to Kim about this upcoming event. Yeah, so here it is. Check it out.

ID:

Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. Kim Vallejo is the business director of She Wolf Bakery, a New York City-based bakery that sources its grains from local farmers. Founded in 2009, She Wolf helped to create the resurgence of regional grains resulting in breads that are healthier, tastier, and easier to digest while fostering a more sustainable food supply chain.

Kim will appear at MOFAD on June 10th in conversation with June Russell, director of regional food programs at the Glynnwood Center for Regional Food and Farming to discuss regional grain in New York along with a guided sourdough tasting. 

ID:

Kim, so you are the business director at She Wolf Bakery and I was wondering how you got your start at She Wolf and how you got connected with them in the first place.

Kim Vallejo (KV)

(7:06) That's a great question.  And also like everything in our story loops back to June Russell. So I had been working with the state of New York.

I was the head of the New York City office for the New York State Department of Agriculture based in Brooklyn, and I did that for about five years from about 2016 into 2021. Working with local ag or representing local ag in the city was super exciting and fulfilling work. That's where I initially met June and got really excited about the work she was doing at the grain stand.

And halfway through 2021, I decided I needed a career change. State service was wonderful, but just not for me. It was a great job while I had it, but I just I needed something more hands-on.

As we've sort of discussed, I grew up in food and I missed the actual hustle and bustle of being inside a kitchen or at the farmer's market or really working with ingredients with my hands, right? (8:02) And so I made the tough choice to make a career change then and took the summer off. I was doing a lot of baking and soul searching and trying to find my way and like what comes next.

And I just happened to shoot an email to June and I said, hey, you know the mission that that you're pursuing and this work with local grains still feels really relevant to me and like something that I want to pursue further. Do you know of anything? And there wasn't really a lot on the job market at the time for doing this kind of work, but June got back to me and said, you know, Andrew Tarlow is looking for someone to run She Wolf.

She Wolf is poised to grow. They don't currently have a business person or a business lead. It was just sort of that the founding head baker and the owner and maybe one other manager at the time and they needed to be thinking about the next steps.

He was slated to move the bakery into the Navy Yard, which is a city run entity. I had worked for the state and worked with city RFPs and I understood the process of working with the government agencies and the red tape and all of the licensing and all of the inspections and all of the fun things that we were going to have to to go through in our new home. (9:06) And so June put us in touch.

BC:

Yeah, right. All the fun stuff.

KV:

But June put us in touch and Andrew and I met for coffee and he came with my resume with just like notes all over it and said, you know, you seem awesome. We should talk and the rest is history. I think we spent two hours in Marlowe & Sons just chatting about all things food and getting really excited about the work that She Wolf is doing.

And I came in, I met the team and completely fell in love with the work. We are so true to our mission and that's so hard to find these days that it just like it felt like home, like kind of immediately. And so here I am five years later, still very excited to be doing this work every day.

BC:

I was wondering, you were saying get your hands back into food. Do you actually participate in production at She Wolf? Because I know you're the business manager.

KV:

Yeah. (9:59) Yeah, you wouldn't expect me to do much in production, maybe less so now, but certainly in my early days. Running a small business means you do anything and everything, right?

And so I'm literally going to be the person at the farmer's market tomorrow. I'll probably have to cover a wholesale shift, you know, in the next week or two. I'm definitely pretty good at shaping bread at this point and like happy to get my hands in the dough whenever I can.

I jump into our pastry team and we troubleshoot our custard recipes together. Like luckily, I come with enough kitchen experience and enough of a love for baking that the team found me useful in those spaces, which was really exciting for me. It makes for a really exciting job.

Yeah, but it is a little bit of, you know, I've got the 30,000 foot view, but I'm also on the ground and inside every operational piece of what we do in a day and sometimes that does mean production. Yeah, and it's fun. I wouldn't change it.

I think it's hard to find the balance of time sometimes. You're splitting your time in so many different ways and I think we've gotten a little better about that as the team has grown. (11:02) We've had more people to delegate to and more people to lean on across all the teams, but if I go for too long without shaping a batard, I'm in a bad place and I need to get on the bench.

That's just a part of my reality here.

ID:

Because it's all about the bread. Absolutely.

KV:

It is all about the bread. Yes, exactly.

ID:

You know, our main topic here about this regional grain sourcing and that sort of landscape, we were wondering what that looks like and how it's evolved both since She Wolf was founded in 2009 and since you joined in 2021.

KV:

Yeah, I mean it's growing and evolving literally every single year, which is something that I find so exciting about working in this space. When our bakery began, there was no local flour to work with. Like our origin story, Austin Hall, our founding baker, he was hired at one of Andrew's restaurants.

He was hired at Roman's to just bake bread for the restaurant.  So he would come in overnight, mix the dough, bake it off in the morning for service, and then go home.(12:04) I think in the early days, they were just working with King Arthur, you know, organic flour, whatever you could find, because there were not other options until June introduced herself and came knocking.

I think she reached out to Andrew pretty early on in the grain stand days and was like, explained what she was doing, looking to bring local grains into the green market. She came in and met with Austin and Austin just immediately gravitated to that mission.  Like he just, he got it and was committed to, as a baker, figuring out how to do this well.

And from there, our niche was born. Our niche was the sole bread of She Wolf in the early days until we were a little further along and then we started making batards.  But even then, Austin could not find local grains.

So at this point, we're talking like 2014-2015, which is when the grain stand got its start. He was going to the farmer's market or sending someone to the farmer's market to get a 10-pound bag or a 20-pound bag. (13:00) He couldn't even get multiple bags of these.

So our production was really, really small, in part because the mill we were buying from had also just formed. I think that Farmer Ground flour was founded about the same time that we were. And so they're just new and growing and didn't quite have distribution into the city yet.

The grain stand was the only way to get your hands on some local grains. That, of course, has changed very dramatically just within the last couple of years. We have continued to buy a lot of our flour from Farmer Ground and what used to be one 20-pound bag a week has now turned into two full pallets of various grains every week.

4,000 pounds of local grains coming in and out just from one supplier.  We branched out who we're sourcing grains from as well because the market has evolved, because there's more people getting into this space.  And something that I have been really excited to do with Sarah Vitale, my pastry lead, she's having an especially big impact on this because we realized a couple of years ago, you know, Farmer Ground has grown to a scale that we can get pallets every week, which is great.

(14:06) But there's a lot of other smaller mills in our region who are now trying to come up on the heels of Farmer Ground. There's more consumer demand. There's people milling in Jersey. There's people milling in Pennsylvania. There's people milling in Massachusetts. 

BC:

There's people milling in Brooklyn.

KV:

Yes.  Oh, we'll get to Patrick. Absolutely. There's people milling in Brooklyn now. And all of this is coming from, I think, the original proof of concept that you can make beautiful, delicious things out of local grains and that people want them.  People come to the market to seek them out.

I know that Sfoglini Pasta and She Wolf are, I think, Farmer Ground's biggest customers at the moment.  But what we started to do maybe three or four years ago, Sarah and I, is look at our pastry program as an area for growth. And this was strategic in a couple of ways.

One, you can work with flours that don't make great bread in pastry. You can use a softer wheat. You can use something with less protein.

(14:59) You can use something like rye that is tricky to make a bread entirely out of or a good bread entirely out of. And you can start to buy from smaller mills and smaller suppliers because you don't need as much flour to make a couple of muffins as you do to make hundreds of loaves of bread. Or you can use something that's like einkorn that's quite pricey and really special, but you can use a small amount of it in biscuits that, again, you're not making these giant loaves of bread and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them at that point.

We're just making them at this point for our café, we could make six or 12.  And then if something is a hit and we want to scale it up, we have the option to do so and we can bring it to the green market. But through that, we have been a part of constantly keeping our eyes peeled. Anytime we hear that there's a new varietal, a new mill, a new way to get some local grains here in Brooklyn, we jump on it. That includes working with folks like Patrick. (15:59) As soon as we heard he was opening, we were like, what can we get from you that we can't get from someone else?

Let's build a product around it. We start with the grain first. That's how we're creating new products here.

Our brownies, our cookies, all of that is coming from not just we should have a pastry program, but looking at what the local grain industry needs and how can we support it. We can make something at smaller scale.  We can make these new items that require different kinds of specs than bread.

And between both our pastry and our bread program, now we have a home for pretty much anybody who's milling locally.

BC:

That's so exciting. When I was reading about June and the challenges of bringing these grains to bakers, I read that people would use the new flours from the grain shed and would say they just don't work because they had been baking with commodity flours and they act differently. I'm sure that's one of the challenges still since you're dealing with new varieties of flour all the time.

(16:59) That's just amazing that you're doing that education for people if they need it. On a numbers basis, what percentage of people in New York do you think, like this is a small percentage of usage, right? I mean, it's like a drop in the bucket.

Whmjķat are the numbers? I'm curious.

KV:

For perspective, we say that something that makes She Wolf really deferent from a lot of other bakeries that work with local grains is our scale, is our volume. It's one thing to make 25 perfect loaves or 30 perfect loaves from local grains and sell it in your local bakery. That's a beautiful thing. Every neighborhood should have a bakery that is doing that. That's not She Wolf's job. We're producing at a slightly higher scale. We're making 2,000 loaves on our busiest days, which is significant. But to your point, it's still a very small drop in the bucket for New York City. We're still, for the most part, we sell about half of what we make in the farmer's market. 1% of the population actually shops at the farmer's market. We really are serving a very small slice of the pie. (18:00) We are expanding our wholesale program. We have about 75 wholesale customers, mostly restaurants around the city. We are, in reality, serving a much wider audience beyond that. But again, it's people who have the income and the leisure to go to great restaurants around the city and enjoy local food there. So there's still a long way to go, I think, in terms of making these grains and the products that you can produce from them just very commonplace and more approachable or accessible to the general public.

BC:

Ivan, at your store where you get the She Wolf, do you see the Bread Alone bread there?

ID:

Yes, our ocal farmer's market is the Tompkins Square Park one in the East Village and we see Bread Alone and we see She Wolf. And She Wolf's right by our compost drop-off. I think that I'm lucky to live near this and anyone who's living near a farmer's market because growing up in New York, I was not living near one while I was in Washington Heights or Hell's Kitchen or things like that.

BC:

(19:04) Yeah, even within the city, it varies.

KV:

Yeah, access neighborhood by neighborhood is really different. And we can't leave Bread Alone out of this conversation. We have to shine the light on Sharon and her team there, too, because they have also been doing this work since the 80s. We're sort of the first ones on the scene. They're producing at a much different scale than we are and we're using a different percentage of local grains. But in terms of moving the needle and creating demand for sourdough and really highlighting the grains themselves, Bread Alone is a very important part of that story and we're very happy to sell alongside them at the farmer's market. We learn a lot from them. We're actually a very tight community. Most of the bakers who do this kind of work and we need to be because what we're doing is really tricky.

It is really hard and it's really helpful for us to be able to bounce ideas off one another, talk about sourcing, talk about equipment investment, talk about, you know, can I send my staff up to visit your bakery to learn because we're going to expand this kind of production. (20:05) We have colleagues like that around the northeast. Nora up at Mel, Randy at Red Hen up in Vermont.

We all have been a part of these trials where we're working with sort of unknown grains and working together to come up with a recipe so we can test how well they produce bread. And it really does take this sort of coalition of all of us to move the needle. It's how we've seen so much growth in the industry. And I think the more bakers there are like us who want to solve this problem, the more demand you're going to see for local grains from the general public. We just need to make it delicious and then everybody wants it.

BC:

It's funny that you just said that we just have to make it delicious. The stuff tastes so good. And when I talk to my own family, they are so resistant. It's like, why am I going to pay eight dollars for a loaf of bread? It's half the price for this. And I'm like, have you tasted it? Have you done a side-by-side? M Because that piece of spongy bimbo or whatever that I don't want to cut down anyone.(21:05) Dude, taste it.

It tastes so good. With it in my own family, it's so frustrating. Like you guys, please taste it. That's what matters.

KV:

It's taste and feel. This is something I hear from my customers and my personal networks all the time is people come to the stand and they say, you know, I can't eat other people's bread. I thought I was sensitive to gluten, but turns out I have no trouble with your bread.

 That could be because it's sourdough. It could be because it's organic. It could be because it's more whole grain.

All of these things combined, right? I have a very picky audience in my personal community.  I'm a boxer and I will sometimes bring unsold bread to the gym just because I hate to see it go to waste. We have a very robust donation program. We're always making sure that unsold bread finds a home. And they know our baguettes because we don't donate our baguettes the next day because they don't hold up.

(22:00) So I bring a few into the gym every now and again.  And I anticipated getting so much pushback from a gym community of like, don't bring us carbs, don't bring us bread. But as soon as people try it, they say this is the best bread I've ever tasted.

And because they're working with their bodies as their profession, they say I feel different. I don't feel bloated. I don't feel just full of fluff.

This feels nourishing.  My gut notices the difference.  And I think that's the truth with all of our breads and everyone who tries it.

It's taste and feel.

ID:

Totally, totally. It's really hard to go back once you try good bread. When I would spend a lot of my childhood with my family in Serbia, there's bakeries all over the place.

 I mean, whenever you think of it with the European bakery on every corner, it's like that in Belgrade. It was it was always disappointing to come back to New York and then suddenly not have that. So it's it's sad.

BC:

(22:57) How sad is it that it's disappointing to come back to New York because it's like so burgeoning there like and so part of a regular life. That even New York, which is pretty decent, is lacking. Wow.

KV:

We have customers that come to the green markets all the time and say I just got off a flight from France and put in any any European city. They're like I literally just got off a flight. You're the only bread I eat in New York.

I came straight here from the airport.Or they're going home to some other town in America and they're coming and buying bread and asking can I put this in my carry-on?  Like, yeah, I fly with bread all the time.

It's the only way.  But yeah, we get a lot of that people saying, you know, the French in particular, they come seek us out and they're like this is this is the only bread outside of France that I eat.

ID:

Well, I was also wondering how does one get involved in this community? Whether it be joining a grain supplier or a bakery or some kind of intermediary maybe some kind of city agency or something. How can people get involved in in this?

KV:

I think there's a couple of ways. (23:59) I mean, first and foremost, always as a consumer, the more business we can do, the more we prove the concept that this is something that should exist and there should be more of us and there should be more and more bakeries that operate like ours. If you're looking to take the next step, I think there are some of our colleagues are teaching classes.

It's not something we do yet, although I love the idea of it. I know that Patrick is hosting classes at Brooklyn Granary and Mill. Take any opportunity you can to get your hands on some of these grains and start working with it. Start experimenting. If people do come to our cafe in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we sell some of our sourdough starter as well as a collection of local grains that we work with so you can get a little starter, a little she will starter pack and you know, happy experimenting at home. I think that's a really a really important way.

The question that I think you raised though with like thinking about city agencies and sort of higher level, you know, agents of change. I would love to see some more support for better grains procurement. (25:00) This has been a tricky issue when I was with the state. I was there in the early days of COVID and a lot of our emergency response was about getting food to food pantries, right? And the thing that people wanted more than anything was grains and bread. In grains because they're shelf stable, they last a long time.

Bread because it's the base of so many people's diets, various kinds of breads across so many different cultures is relevant. And there was a lot of money that we were managing at the state front called Nourish New York. It was a governor's initiative to buy from local farms and get it into food pantries and we could find local beef, local milk, local cheese, local eggs, local fruits and veg. We had the hardest time finding any bread that met the local requirement that was going to be 50% or more of local grains because there's just not enough of it out there and there's not enough people making it. I think June again had a hand in finding one of our green market bakeries that could step up and produce for food pantries. (26:00) But that still feels elusive.

Schools don't serve the kind of bread that we make and they should. Kids love our bread. It's much healthier.

We know that it's better for you when it's organic. We know that when it's sourdough you're going to absorb more of the vitamins and minerals that are more bioavailable to our bodies. We know that good bread is actually the base of a very healthy diet and bad bread is not. M But there's not a lot of institutional support yet, I think, to prioritize grains.  I think it's much sexier, much easier to talk about, you know, we're in a dairy state.  We got to get New York state milk into schools.

Absolutely. Apples, we have a plenty. Let's talk about fruits and veg.

Those are more immediately coming to mind when people talk about the importance of local food.  I think staple crops get a little bit lost in that conversation and people just don't think about flour. With that level of intensity or interest that they do, you know, the heirloom tomato. And I would argue that it's just as important and just as interesting. (26:59) It's just not center stage yet.

ID:

Absolutely.  Well, keyword yet. I guess that brings us to the future of this and what a bright future it looks like.  I mean, where do you see these trends going in the next five years?

KV:

 I really don't know, but I'm so excited to find out. I think the more of us that are asking these questions and the more bakers that are putting their creative energy into coming up with new ways to showcase these grains, that's really the thing that's going to drive the progress forward. I think that everything that Nora's making at Mel looks stunning and she's helping reclaim rye in a really fun and exciting way.

We also love rye, but we don't work with it quite as much as she does. Except our brownie, our new rye brownie is hot stuff.  If you've not had it, that is like to die for.

It's 100% rye flour.  We've never had a brownie like it. But it is this sort of thing where people are taking this very familiar comfort baked carb and stuffing it full of heritage, local, organic, stone milled, you know, insert whatever descriptor you want for good grains.

(28:09) And making that the star of the item. That's where you're going to really see traction and that creative energy to just keep pumping stuff out that people want is going to get them excited. The number of people that come back to our stand and have all these questions about rye.

They didn't know what it was. They'd never heard of it.  They may have had like a deli rye slice at some point in their life, but thought they hated it because they actually don't like caraway seeds and that's a completely different conversation, right? That's the kind of thing that is going to help really the entire industry just find new people, find new customers and innovate and create new bakeries that we should just be, we should be in every neighborhood selling this good stuff to our neighbors one day.

BC:

Yeah, just as far as for my part, I'm going to do my part by doing what you did, which is bringing more bread to people. I'm not going to wait for them to decide to buy it. (29:00) I'm just going to start gifting people bread and flour.

ID:

Starting with me and our co-workers at MOFAD, you're going to bring us bread.

BC:

Yeah, and you know, we're going to get a little taste of it when y'all are in MOFAD for the program, you and June. Yes, but I'm just going to start gifting people breads. Come on.

And normalize gifting bread. Yes.  What you said about it feeling good and not just tasting good because I was always coming from a taste perspective, but people, you know, that just like freaking blew my mind now, like I'm going to pivot and start talking about feeling because that's a priority to people, you know, getting enough protein, like the bread has protein because it sure does, you know, like, absolutely.

ID:

I'm really craving some bread now. Oh, I love this.

BC:

I'm glad to hear it.

But so just to wrap up, we're going to ask you the questions that we ask all our podcast guests. 

Okay, question number one. What is the one food that brings you right back to your childhood, like at the table with your family? 

KV:

Apple pie, man.

I am from upstate New York. There is nothing happier in my world than New York State apples and a good apple pie. It's the thing that I could never get on the West Coast when I lived out there unless I made it. I think I may be like, in all seriousness, like partially moved back out east because I miss the  apples. They're just different. They're just better.

I love a New York State apple and you got to put it in a pie. 

BC:

Yes. New York State apples are the best. I had a cousin visit me from Washington state and she had the gall to bring Washington apples to my home. Sorry, Washington. 

KV:

No, sorry. I can't do it. 

BC:

Are you…? Anyway, 

ID:

We're all in agreement today. 

BC:

OK, so question number two is, since we're the Museum of Food and Drink, what is the drink thatl you can't do one day without?

KV:

Black coffee.

I'm so old school. I don't need any sugar. It just needs to be good beans.

I love our coffee. Pipe and Tabor is making some really beautiful beans for us. And I love just like a simple hot…I make a pour over every morning. If I don't, my cats are so mad. We need our time to like sit together and have the cup of coffee. I would not be me without a cup of black coffee in the morning.

BC:

Ivan, you’re a black coffee guy, right? 

ID:

Absolutely. I know it depends on the day. You know, if I'm feeling a little more gentle, I'll throw in some oat milk. I need that ritual.

I need that quiet moment before the day really starts.

KV:

Absolutely. Same.

BC:

You're the first person to say coffee, actually, like we asked other people and they said other things. And Ivan and I were like, what the hell? 

KV:

The obvious one. I'm here for that.

BC:

Thank you. Okay. Question number three is, since our exhibition is about street food, what is your favorite street food right now?

KV:

Oh, man, I don't eat enough street food in New York, but I did live in South America for a long time and I have a spot for Anticuchos.

I love a heart on a skewer over open flame on the street at 2 a.m. There is nothing better. 

BC:

I wonder if anyone's making those here in town. 

KV:

They must be.

I'm sure somewhere out in Queens. I'm going to go find it now that now that we are talking about it. I'm going to go hunt for the best Anticucho in New York City, but I have not not ventured out to find them as of yet.

BC:

You know who puts stuff on a stick and grills it? Filipinos.

ID:

Absolutely. 

BC:

Maybe check out the stuff in, you know, Woodside.

Question number four is kind of related. Just like if you were going to make a street food, what do you think needs to be out there in the street? 

KV:

Yeah, I think about this a lot. So my partner is South Asian and we recently built a tandoor oven in our backyard because we have dreams of just like kebab and pita coming out of the same oven.

We have not perfected this dance just yet, but I think I want I just want to basically I'm a simple girl: meat on a stick, black coffee and bread. I don't need anything else. That and apples, right? That's all you need to know about me.

But I want a little mobile tandoor cart where I can make some really delicious flatbreads and grill some meats alongside it. I that's my happy place. 

ID:

That sounds really good.

All sorts of cravings I'm having today now. Wow. We have had a lot of great guests on the podcast so far, but this is the first one: She Wolf is technically street vending out there on the streets of being part of a farmer's market right there on the sidewalk. So, yeah, we're kind of happy to incorporate Street Food City, our current exhibition, however we can. So it's wonderful that you really are just out there bringing it to people in the street, being out in the public.

It's hard. I got to tell you, vending on the street is hard. It rains.

The bread doesn't like it. It's cold. It's hot. It's all the things. But it's beautiful. Like we love being a part of the seasonal change.

We love seeing the sun rise as we're loading out the van. Like there's a lot of beauty to it, even though the work is really tricky. So, yeah, I'm happy to be your first, you know, street vendor.

ID:

That's great. Yeah. And was there anything else you wanted to add? 

KV:

No, I think that's great.

I'm excited to to take today's conversation and flesh it out a little more for our event on the 10th. I'm really looking forward to that. And we're going to bring so many good things for you all to try.

So I hope you buy a ticket, buy a loaf and come for the grains. 

BC:

It's going to be great. Awesome.

KV:

Well, thank you guys for your time and for the invitation to join you all today. 

ID:

Great. Thank you so much, Kim.

What a great talk. Thank you so much. Thanks.

KV:

Thank you guys. 

ID:

All right. We are here at the Farmer's Market in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village where we have a She Wolf Bakery stand.

So let's get some bread. 

ID:

OK, could I please get a rye brownie and can I get the mini miche and can I also get the classic batard? Yeah, thank you very much.

ID:

We’re back at the museum with our volunteer Owen and with Bernadette and we're going to try the She Wolf bread. 

BC:

I see there that there's a

like a baked good bag that's different from a bread bag. Were you able to find the brownie with the rye flour in it that Kim was talking about? 

ID:

Yes, I was actually able to find the rye brownie and I'm super excited. So the rye brownie looks a bit like that. Looks like a regular brownie.

Owen Yaggy (OY):

Yeah, it does.

ID:

Yeah, but it's got some rye flour. Yeah. I've only ever had rye bread and I've only ever had rye bread with caraway seeds like Kim mentioned.

We've also got two kinds of bread here. We've got the classic batard loaf sourdough. And then we've got we've got the classic miche.

This is the first bread that She Wolf started out with. It was called a mini miche, but the loaf is over a foot long. So I don't know what's so mini about it,

OY:

They're beautiful.

ID:

Yeah. So let's, I don't know. Let's just rip off a piece.

I just want to go for it. I just want to grab it. Right.

Isn't the French way to just rip it off?

OY:

I think so. We'll certainly act like it is. 

ID:

Oh, man. Oh, that's good. 

OY:

That's good bread. 

ID:

It's got a really soft sort of gooey sort of inside of the bread.

And then the outer crust is so nice and hard and it's got a great golden color. It's so nice. It's such a great contrast from the inside to the outside.

OY:

Oh, this part in the middle where you have the divot in the crust is like a softer crust, too. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Like two different parts of the bread in one.

ID:

Totally. That must help it expand in the baking process.

And then we have the mini miche, which the large size of the loaves contributes to the keeping quality, but necessitates a long bake, which results in a darker crust. I'm trying the miche and it is so good. It's got this kind of flour on the outside that reminds me of semolina or something.

It's a bit softer on the outside, a bit darker, maybe more of a sourdough taste to it. 

OY:

And this has a stronger flavor to it. 

ID:

The miche has a stronger flavor.

I kind of like it even more. I like the hard crust of the batard. I love how floury the outside of the miche is.

Should we go to the brownie? 

BC:

Yes. Okay. Yeah, I'm very excited for this brownie.

ID:

Okay. So the She Wolf rye brownie. Let's try it.

BC:

All right. Do it. You have the first piece.

ID:

All right. I'll grab a little corner here and let's see. 

BC:

And what other flour is in here? Is it just rye flour or is it other...

Your face!

ID:

I went into another plane. It's incredible.

It's amazing. It's creamy. It's soft.

It's got a wonderful crispy top. It's so good. We're all having convulsions.

It's incredible. Stop the presses. 

BC:

That's a freaking good brownie.

OY:

Wow. 

ID:

Holy moly. It's moist.

BC:

I love that moist fudgy brownie, but it's cakey on the outside. 

ID:

This could be the greatest brownie I've ever had. It is so good.

It's not too sweet. I'm just wondering, I'm not getting an overpowering rye. It's kind of subtle.

BC:

Chocolate is very strong. It overpowers most flavors. 

ID:

Which is what you want in a brownie anyway. Yes. So I think they didn't compromise on the browniness of it just for the sake of the rye. But I think the rye really comes through at the beginning  of the bite.

And the rye gives it a thickness.

BC:

It's got texture. It adds texture, crunchy texture.

ID:

It's like a fullness that's really satisfying. 

BC:

Dang. It's so good.

ID:

Yeah. Even though we weren't jumping up and down on the floor about the bread, that's because brownies are a sugary treat and they do that to people. But the bread is just as good as this.

BC :

Kim, girl, you were right. Wow. Who's got last bite syndrome? Eat that right now.

ID:

Owen, go for it. It's all you. 

BC:

Owen deserves it.

OY:

I did just eat it. 

BC:

I'll just lick this bag. Okay.

I licked the bag. You didn't see it, but I did it. Oh damn, Ivan.

ID:

All right. A little more ASMR there, folks.

ID:

Kim will appear at MOFAD on June 10th in conversation with June Russell of the Glynnwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.

Purchase tickets at mofad.org. RadioMOFAD is by Bernadette Cura and Ivan De Luce for the Museum of Food and Drink. Thank you for listening.

The Museum of Food and Drink 

MOFAD

https://www.mofad.org/

Wed June 3, 2026: Claudette Zepeda and Francis Lam in conversation about her upcoming book Cooking the Borderlands

https://mofad.ticketing.veevartapp.com/tickets/view/list/cooking-the-borderlands

https://www.mofad.org/program-detail-page/borderlands

MOFAD Programs

https://www.mofad.org/programs

Claudette Zepeda

https://chefclaudettezepeda.com/

Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and the States

https://sites.prh.com/cookingtheborderlands/#preorder-the-book

Tacos La Poblanita

Corner of Jay St and York St

Brooklyn, NY 11201

Mon-Sat 10-5

Jasar Castillo

929-245-3098

Michael Szczerban

https://www.instagram.com/foreverbeard/

The Talisman of Happiness

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ada-boni/the-talisman-of-happiness/9780316577991/?lens=little-brown-and-company

TRANSCRIPT

Ivan De Luce (ID): Welcome to RadioMOFAD, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. Hey Bernadette, how's it going?

Bernadette Cura (BC): Hey Ivan, it's rainy at the museum today. It's a rainy Saturday. We had quite a good crowd because people love the museum on a rainy day.

ID: They do. I know I do.

BC: Yeah, me too. People do a lot of photoshoots here in Dumbo. I don't know if you knew this. I mean, you know. I don't know if you all know this. People come for their weddings and their quinceañera photo shoots in all their finery and are taking beautiful pictures. There's a whole entourage of people right behind us now taking pictures.

ID: Yeah, there are about four or five five-year-olds running around in dresses and tuxedos chasing each other. We do see that everyday. But yes, we've had a lot of fun at MOFAD lately. We've had some great events.

BC: Yeah, you know, we talked with Michael Szczerban last episode. You were on the Zoom for that event.

ID: Yes, I attended the Talisman of Happiness event with Michael Szczerban over Zoom just to get a different sense of what it's like to attend a MOFAD event. It was great. It was a wonderful talk. Michael Szczerban talked with Deb Perelman from Smitten Kitchen.

BC: Sweet, sweet. 

ID: They talked about the 1929 cookbook by Ada Boni called The Talisman of Happiness, and it was a great talk, I mean, we had a great talk with him last episode, but Deb was asking about kind of how the book compares to other books. It's not your typical cookbook in so many ways, not just because of the 12 minestrones that you can choose from in it, out of the 1600 recipes in there, it's a huge book, but also because it's not full of fancy, glossy photos. Cookbooks in the 20s definitely weren't. Michael was comparing it to the Silver Spoon cookbook, which many of us are familiar with.

BC: Yes

ID: It's a beautiful book, much like the fancy Silver Spoon that sits in the kitchen, and maybe isn't touched every day, whereas Michael sort of compared it to Nonna's worn wooden spoon that's been in the sauce all day on a Sunday, chipped and worn, but full of love, and has made so many things, and is used every single day.

BC: Well, I know that for me, as far as like The Joy of Cooking, which is what it was compared to a lot. I definitely use that book a lot, and there's no room for pictures. You want the words, you want the solid recipes.

ID: Yes, and Michael had said that he wanted it to stick to 1000 pages and not go beyond that.

Well, I think I'd rather, for a book like that, that's really useful in the kitchen, I'd rather not have pictures, and like we talked about in the podcast, that illustrations are really additional information that's helpful, and they're really cute. So I'm glad, I'm glad they stuck to that formula,

and I cannot wait to get this book. I get excited about all our cookbooks that we have in the museum, but this one seems really special.

BC: Definitely. So, as far as events, that one was great, and we have more coming up.

ID: In June, we'll see Claudette Zepeda and her new book, Cooking the Borderlands.

BC: Yes, she grew up in San Diego, and also in Tijuana. So, the foods that she grew up with, she's going to talk about it. What are the elements and the ingredients and the influences that came together to make that very special cuisine there, where she's from? And we're excited to host her here. And you know, I'm from Fort Worth, Texas, and there's Tex Mex cuisine there, and I'm wondering, like, what the similarities might be, since it's Mexican American, so I'm curious about that, and I think you told me, Ivan, that you're not that well-versed in Mexican food to begin with, so there's a whole world for you to discover

ID: When it comes to Mexican food, I know Mexican food in New York really well, and I love it, but when I meet people from California, they say you gotta have California Mexican food, it's totally different, and it sounds like this border area, you know, between Tijuana, San Diego, and these other towns there have some kind of distinct thing going on, like a lot of regions do, and I would imagine that the Texas Tex-Mex thing is super different as well.

BC: Definitely, definitely. And that's what's so great about regionalism in cuisine, is that we do have things in common, but they're also unique. So I'm excited to discover all that when she's here and during our talk with her on the podcast,

ID: Yes, let's take a listen to that interview with Claudette. 

ID: Welcome to Radio Mofad, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. Chef and author Claudette Zepeda grew up on both sides of the California-Mexico border, a first-generation. Mexican American, where the mixing of vibrant culinary traditions informed her food. Claudette has served as executive chef at El Jardin, appeared on Top Chef as well as Iron Chef Mexico, and now has a new cookbook, Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and the States. Claudette will appear at MOFAD on June 3 in conversation with editor Francis Lam to discuss borderlands culture, migration, and the stories behind the recipes that shaped Claudette's life growing up between Mexico and the US

ID: So your new book, Cooking the Borderlands, centers around the mixing of these cultures that you grew up with, you know, between California and Mexico. It's a unique blend of cultures in this particular area, and I guess I was wondering what you love most about this kind of food.

Claudette Zepeda (CZ): I love that there's, you know, on the border, I should say, as a chef, especially cooking Mexican food in the United States, people always want to put us in a box of, like, well, where's this from, and where's that from, and you know, is this tradition to use words like traditional or authentic Mexican food? It's hard to receive when you're a creative and you just want to create, and as a border kid, and that sensibility that I learned because of being on the border and living with one foot in both countries, I learned that the sensibility of the food in the borderlands has no borders. It does not answer to whoever set the barrier of does it go this way or that way. Food is so fluid, as a border kid, because I mean, the book trespasses the entire border, from San Diego, Tijuana to Tamaulipas in Texas. The dichotomy doesn't change between any of those regions, it changes geographically, and the food changes, but the sensibility is the same. I was like, we don't care what barriers you put up, food doesn't answer to those.

BC: Yeah, that's a tricky question to answer, and kind of annoying, like, what is traditional? Because I'm from the Philippines, I know what my parents cooked, and it has a lot of elements of traditional, but it also has a lot of elements of, like, what you can get in Fort Worth, Texas, as a Filipina,

CZ: Yeah

BC: you know, like, and it wasn't a lot, so it creates its own authenticity, and I think, as Americans, we have to go through that a lot in different parts of the country. People want that authenticity, and I, a lot of it, I'm not sure, has to do with being PC. Is that true? I mean, I don’t know.

CZ: I think a lot of it has to do with their most people are uncomfortable in the, in the uncomfortable, so they think to they need something safe, and I hate the word approachable, but they need you to be palatable, Right, and I feel like sometimes I'm just like, just let me be weird, authenticity is very personal, and tradition, you could have one neighborhood block in Mexico, everyone's making albondigas, and every single one will taste different, because every single family has their own traditions, and they're not static.

BC: Yeah, I love that. Let me be weird. You want me to be weird! I promise it's gonna taste better.

CZ: Exactly, and I'm also not an 80-year-old grandmother cooking over wood fire, and like, with you know, I would love that one day. I want that, but currently that's not where I'm at. 

BC: Oh man, yeah. 

ID: And Bernadette, you said Fort Worth, Texas. I mean, that's Tex-Mex food that you were kind of growing up having as well, right?

BC: Well, yeah, and I really, I'm not really sure about, like, what the roots specifically of Tex-Mex are, but I know there's a lot of that ranch cuisine in Texas food because of the beef industry, and you mentioned that earlier. I wonder if they have, if there's anything similar there, but no, it really is much different from the stuff in San Diego and Tijuana.

CZ: Yeah, and you mean Texas all the way to El Paso, you have the Chihuahua border, you have the Nogales, you have Juarez, you have all these...I mean,Texas is a huge state, so within that one state, and you have the Native Americans that live, you know, the Tarahumara people, the Rarámuri that are on the other side in Mexico, on the Sierra Nevadas, and the Sierra Madre is like that, is very different climate, very different adaptability that those first people have had to really familiarize themselves with the land. But also do without a lot, you know, like how do you feed a family with very little resources? And sometimes like the climate is really uninhabitable to a lot of people, but they, that's their, what they know, and what they're raised in. So 1000’s of years of generations.

BC: Where you were in Tijuana and San Diego, what were the products like?

CZ: Well I'm so spoiled, you know, fortunate enough to travel to six of the seven continents cooking food. Making tortillas in the craziest corners of the world, but I am always very hesitant to, like, send - you got to send an ingredient list when you're going to go cook somewhere, and I try to take to remove my San Diego, California, Southern California chip from my brain, because I understand how spoiled we are. Everything grows here, it's, you know, the 76 and sunny is a true statement. There's pockets of not 76 and sunny, but I'm also on the border, so if I need a Mexican ingredient, I cross from five minutes, I'm in Tijuana and atthe Mercado, and then I cross another five minutes with Global Entry. So I understand that my circumstances are unique as a border human being, and Tijuana, being where I grew up, it's very familiar to me. I don't see it as going to another country, I see it as the

“other side” is what we called it growing up, but I do have ingredients from all of the Republic of the entire country of Mexico end up in Tijuana because most people migrated to Tijuana.

ID: And speaking of that sort of exchange of ingredients, your book starts by mentioning the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the drawing of the border between the US and Mexico, you know, at times following geographic features like rivers, and at times just an arbitrary straight line, you know, and then you talk about San Diego today, where you have access to pretty much whatever you need. How was that exchange of ingredients back then versus today? You know, what did that look like?

CZ: Well, I mean, I can't speak to the chefs in the 1800’s and how they were cooking, but I can speak to the sensibility that Tijuanenses have, and I think it's more - it's more on the mindset and the way we think about food in Tijuana - is everything's welcome at our table. I don't think there's any country that can say that doesn't have some sort of ugly past and ugly history, and we have it. There's, you know, racism that is really prevalent to this day in Mexico, but no matter what, Tijuana has become home to so many different human beings and accents and cultures that it changed the landscape of the culinary quilt of that is Tijuana, and for I mean, I just see it as like the ingredients that were in my pantry were not different. They weren't quote unquote different, and or weird, but I had, you know, soy sauce, and I had a lot of Asian ingredients, which Chinese and Japanese cultures that are, you know, really prevalent in Baja. Those were always in my, in my pantry, and going out to Chinese food every Sunday was not weird, and my dad emigrated to the states in the 60’s, so he had a little bit more of a gourmand’s, so to speak, palate, because he, you know, was able to go out and eat in restaurants in LA that weren't, you know, available in Tijuana, or in Mexico, or in Jalisco, where he's from, so I think overall Tijuana, Tijuanenses have a sort of fluidity to them, nothing's a big deal, everything is figure-outable, and it's like, oh, you don't have this either,

you have this, you know, it's like, oh, I don't have salt, but I have soy sauce, and you know, it's adapting and overcoming over every single obstacle, because the entire city of Tijuana was built on, now especially, built on people that wanted to follow the pursuit of the American dream, and then couldn't, and had to land in Tijuana and make it their home. So it had the resilience of Tijuanenses, it’s very special, and that translates to starting as a ranch, Rancho Tijuana, to what Tijuana Baja California is today. I mean, it's the promise land for a lot of young, talented chefs, even in San Diego, that they can't open a restaurant here, so they go to Tijuana, and they’re earning Michelin stars. It is such a foundational, pivotal well of creativity. I mean, and we, I feel like we all love it in that way.

BC: I had no idea that Tijuana was like that. I can't wait to check it out the next time I'm over there.

CZ: The media does a really shitty job (Sorry, pardon my French) does a really sad job painting it as, villainizing the border. And as someone who's lived here my whole life, there's a lot of pretty and beautiful things about it too.

BC: Well, just getting back to the book a little bit, your second chapter talks about matriarchs. How did the matriarchs in your family influence you to become a cook? How did they influence who you are growing up also?

CZ: It was really important for me, you know, as I was talking to Francis about what, how the book was going to shape up, the original 100 recipes that I've written down, kind of. I mean, I would say maybe half of them made it, half of them changed, and the biggest part was like the “cooking off my matriarch’s hips” was because as a child I was the only girl in a house full of boys, go figure, I picked the most like boy-centric career, but it's it. Was understanding, like, the role of nurturing. It was really bestowed on me by my matriarchs, and because my family, on both my mom's side and my dad's side, are from Nayaritan Jalisco, both of them, and understanding that Tijuanenses, most of them migrated to Tijuana, because it was not - it was a ranch that everyone went to for vacations, those were casinos, where it wasn't a place where a lot of people lived, and my matriarchs, my mother, my grandmother, my mom had 16 kids, and they were all born in different parts of Mexico, and as she was going to the different states, because of where work was available for her and my grandfather, they would pick up dishes from the regional, you know, Mexico has seven regions of cuisine. Every region has multiple states, multiple cities, and a lot of dishes in them. She started collecting these dishes, so by the time she got to Tijuana, and she was raising her grandchildren, we grew up eating chongos zamoranos from Zamora Michoacán, we grew up eating sopa de lima from Yucatan, we grew up eating birria, because we're from Jalisco, but it was all these flavors that I was really spoiled to have, and not every family did that, you know, that some people never leave their pocket and then migrate, so all they know is, you know, Sonorense food, or all they know is that region, and my family, since they were a little nomadic by me, by socioeconomics, it really, I needed to talk about those recipes, because they might start from somewhere else, but they taste different, and they tasted different to me.

BC: So, when you were talking about your dad being a gourmand and being somewhere where he could enjoy a lot of food, your mom also enjoyed a lot of food because of her work and how she had to move around, and that's why you're traveling the globe and exploring, that's really interesting stuff.

CZ: Yeah, I was, I was, have a gypsy soul, and I obviously it has a little to do with my family, but my mom learned how to cook when she met my dad. Funny enough, because my mother did all the cooking, my mom, by watching PBS, because again he had been living in the country for 20 years, he gifted her, and when they met in Tijuana, The Joy of Cooking, and a couple of Julia Child's volumes of her cookbooks. So I remember growing up, my house, my kitchen was a nightmare. It was just like I remember a pressure cooker exploding, but the magazines, and like, the thoughts of my mom trying to please my dad, and being like, oh, I made this, and I made that, and him having a craving, and her going, “Shit, how am I going to do this?” Okay, and so she learned, and we were the benefactors of that learning process.

ID: It's so interesting, you've got all these great influences, you know, Julia Child included, like that kind of influencing your childhood, you know, before you even realized it. 

CZ: Oh yeah, she taught us how to speak English. We're ESL, we were only speaking Spanish, and all my life we only spoke Spanish at home, and PBS is how we watched, you know, Sesame Street, all the BBC shows, Are You Being Served, Mr. Bean, all those characters, including Julia, were pivotal in, like, understanding one, the culture in the United States, and two, and British humor, which was fantastic. I learned how to have a really smart ass sense of humor, but Julia, I mean, when people talk about your heroes, unbeknownst to me, she left a big imprint, not only in, you know, us observing her and watching her cook, but the sensibility of it's okay to make mistakes, that kind of stuck 

BC: Being a professional chef as you are, and you were saying before, it's boy-centric, it's just ironic how, you know, most of the cooking happens in the home by a woman, and then when it becomes a profession, it's like all dudes, and I went through exactly same thing. I was a line cook when I was 15, and I was like, why? Like, because I started as a waiter, and there were no ladies in the back, and I'm like, why? This is like so fun, and we all cook at home. It's just bizarre. It's definitely challenging, you know. It's definitely testosterone driven still, I feel like. 

ID: Do you feel like that's changing at all, or is it still just completely boy-centric?

CZ: You know, I think post-pandemic it was really scary. I opened a restaurant, a hotel property in in 2021. It was like we were still mid-pandemic, technically. Any other restaurant I had built before that, I was about 50% women, 50% men. I had a male sous chef, I had a female sous chef. It was very balanced, and post pandemic, I think the industry hit this kind of speed bump where there was a lot less women willing to put up with a bunch of kind of toxic environments in restaurants, and they found other ways to make a living, and it made me sad, but it was definitely an awakening. I think there are definitely like all the women that are cooking and making kind of rattling the cage and making noise, are incredibly talented, and I hope it changes. I hope it's an upswing back again to where it was before. I say 20 BC, before COVID, but I don't know, I can't say that I'm noticing a crazy shift. If I'm going to be honest.

BC: So we have a few questions that we ask everyone who we talk to. The first one we normally ask everyone is, what is the first food you could think of that brings you right back to your childhood? But I believe you've answered that question a bunch of times, like albondigas and arroz con leche. So we wanted to switch it up with you and say to you, what is your favorite food-related song or music that you like to listen to while you cook?

CZ: Do you remember the movie Mermaids? With Cher?

BC, ID: Yes, yeah, yeah.

CZ: That whole soundtrack. I love it. The scene where she, they're making the, the marshmallow chocolate kebabs. The basic of the sentence is like, “if you want to be happy for the rest of your life”, marry an ugly woman, and it's hilarious, because it's like the Motown 50’s, like dancing, but the lyrics are so twisted, but something about like 50’s Motown, that era of Winona Ryder, of Cher, of Christina Ricci. I listened to that soundtrack. I, it depends. It also depends on my mood. Music is such a big part of my creative process. I've written an entire, I've written a menu listening to 36 Chambers. I listen to like Vicente Fernandez when I'm feeling like I'm an emotional like sufferer. When I'm feeling down, I listen to Vicente Fernandez, like the music that you get drunk with, but I guess it depends on the dinner that I'm doing that require like it calls for a different creative at that point in time, but I really love Cher era, I guess 80’s movies, but place in the 50’s, but that era of music, something about like the doo woppy music gets me happy

ID: I love it too,

CZ: If you listen to it, watch that scene, you can Google, like, if you YouTube it, it is kind of hilarious. The first time it like dawned on me on what the guy was saying, I was like, oh, I'm slightly insulted, and also this is hilarious.

BC: My name is Bernadette, so my, my song, this name, that's named after me, is a Motown song, so I really, really like, have you ever heard Bernadette by the Four Tops? 

CZ: Yes, yes, yes.

BC: It's good, and it's happy, and my husband learned all the line, all the lyrics, you better know all those lyrics,

you're married to me.

ID: And there's Bernadette, right, like the Ronettes, Claudette, yeah, we were joking that I could just be Yvette instead of Ivan, and we'll have our own band.

CZ: All the “dettes”. Roy Orbison has a song called Claudette, and I just, someone sent it to me, and I had no idea. So, another ID: great song.

BC: So, the next question that we normally ask people is, since we're the Museum of Food and Drink, what is the drink that you can't go without a single day drinking?

CZ: I drink Legal instant coffee, which is an instant coffee that has caramelized sugar, piloncillo in it. I make it instant coffee, and it's coffee doesn't really, I have ADHD, so it doesn't really keep me up, or it doesn't do anything for me. It's a ritual for me, but this is when I was little. I would go to my, you know, my grandma would be in the kitchen. I would go to my grandma, and she would offer me pan dulce or some sort of bread, and she would make leche con cafe, so a latte, essentially, with instant coffee. So this coffee every morning I can't do without it. 

BC: It's funny that you

have it with you when we asked you, because you can't live without

it. 

CZ: I can't live without it. Yeah, and Legal is, yeah, that's the brand. I thought it was Nescafe, and then when I saw it, something drew me to it. And then my mom goes,”funny, and your grandma drank that every single day when I was growing up.” So, unbeknownst to me, this is a generational love

BC: That's amazing. And you know, like, where I live now, where I am now, there's a lot of snobbery around coffee, and for some reason, like, instant is looked down upon because it's not, whatever, served to me by a surly Brooklynite, but it, I freaking love instant coffee.

CZ: There's really good instant coffee.

BC: Yeah, I mean, like, actually, a lot of the Nescafe is really good. I'm gonna try the one, your brand, I'm gonna go look for it, but I also always have instant espresso in my house for baking, and I'm sorry, that hits the spot in a different way from my brewed coffee, which I do in a French press. But instant coffee, come on. ID: You gotta give it up for instant coffee. I agree, it's my family is Serbian and Nescafe instant coffee is a staple in Serbia.

CZ: I have every single coffee machine known to man, I have an Aeropress, the Breville, I have a Moka pot, I have the Japanese siphon coffee machine, like I. Yeah, and I still go to this. It’s what makes me happy.

BC: I love that. Oh my gosh, and a lot of it is that childhood, you know, snap

that childhood connection. As far as the third question that we ask people, since our museum exhibition right now is called Street Food City, it's about street food. Mexico is no stranger to street food, but what is your favorite street food right now? Like, right now, if you could go.

CZ: I mean, you can't miss an elote man or the frutero man, the fruit in a cup with chamoy and Tajin, and or my daughter, right now, is currently obsessed with elote en vaso. In the north, we call it elote en vaso, in the south, we call it, or central part of the country, we call it esquites, but that, like, cut corn with mayo, butter, chile, that is our current weekly revisitation. Sometimes we make it at home, and there's a spot in San Diego that does it, so we'll do that too.

BC: Yeah, I just, I was just in LA, actually, and there was a lot of futeros. There are none here. It's kind of weird. Well, I guess maybe because there's more better fruit in California. I mean, that makes sense. What are you gonna do? Apples, actually, that doesn't sound bad, but, but, like, what do you think is missing in the street food scene? That's our fourth question. Like, if you were gonna have a food cart, or what would you like to see out there when you're getting a craving in the street?

CZ: You know, it's funny, because San Diego, being a border town, actually lacks in the street vendors, the street vendor, or capital of like Mexicans really hustling out there. I don't know if it's because we're so close to the border, I don't if it’s a sense of fear. I don't know, really, what the reason is why we don't have street vendors. So, I would just say more street vendors in general. Let's just get the hot dog guy in the corner, like you do in a corner in LA. You know, you walk out of a venue, you're like, hot dog guy, cool.

BC: Well, how awesome work was it for me? Because it was the first time I really looked, you know, how you, when you get an orange car. All of a sudden, everyone has an orange car.

Yeah, so I was always looking at all the street vendors, and the hot dog dudes wrap them in bacon.

CZ: Yeah, it's in a cart on a full sheet pan over a fire, and they're roasting their sautéing peppers and onions, and then the bacon wrapped hot dogs, and it's completely different from like our dirty water dogs here in New York. I was like…

CZ: Well, that's a Sonora dog. It started in Sonora, and we talked about it in the book.

BC: I love that. I love that. So we got to get more of that kind of stuff in San Diego. I wonder what the laws are like. That's something we'll have to look into.

ID: Yeah, I wonder. I wonder why that is, because sometimes street vendors vend in the streets, despite the law, despite not necessarily being quote unquote allowed to, they do it in spite of that, because they need to make a living.

CZ: Yeah.

BC: Well, thanks for answering those questions. And yeah, is there anything else you want to say that maybe we didn't cover today?

CZ: No, you know, I think this book I was talking to every time I talked to someone about it, like I have it here, like this book is mine, and it has like all these post-its on it. I'm doing this like feature of like behind the behind the shot, and I just hope that everyone sees this, and it is by design a very unorthodox Mexican cookbook, where I don't play, you know, the chili, I don't plate the chile relleno the way you would see it, and I don't do every thought, everything the top down, and so I was just, I hope that people see this and see a different version of what Mexican creativity can be. Why there's a header of, you know, a note saying about the pictures of why, why they are a little weird as a Mexican kid that you know had to become a cinephile to really understand American culture. Yeah, that's my takeaway. That the whole love letter to the Borderlands is really for everyone to see themselves in it, not just be for Mexicans, but for every, you know, weird kid living in the seams can feel identified and like also follow that, that you know that itch to be a little different, that it's okay to be different, and it's celebrated in my, in my case it's celebrated, but yeah, I'm excited to have a conversation with Francis about all things borderlands, and to meet you guys, and to actually like spend time inside the museum.

ID: Yes, it's going to be a great event, and it really seems like a book unlike any other, so I can't wait to get my hands on it.

CZ: Thank you. 

BC: Same. All right, so we will see you then. 

CZ: I'm like super excited.

ID: All right, yes indeed. Thank you so much for taking the time. Take care.

CZ: Bye.

BC: Do you remember in the first podcast episode I mentioned the taco truck over near the F stop in Dumbo? It's called Tacos La Poblanita. Well, I finally got a chance to talk to someone there. One of the folks in the truck, named Araceli, was kind enough to speak with me. She was so sweet. She just started a couple of weeks ago, and despite that, she was willing to chat with me about the truck. 

BC: So I'm here today with, ¿como se llama otra vez?

Araceli: Araceli.

BC: Y queremos preguntarle algunas preguntas. Primero, cual es la comida más popular aqui en Tacos La Poblanita?

Araceli: Los tacos de birria, el especial de tacos birria que trae tres tacos y un consomé pequeño. El consomé viene gratis en la compra de tres tacos o la quesabirria. También los tacos: carnitas, bistec, pollo, y nachos. 

BC: Wow, nachos? Me sorprende!

Araceli: Tortas, tacos, quesadillas. Quesadillas, es mucho, todo los días. 

BC: Turns out the most popular item is the birria taco, which is super trendy right now, as far as tacos are concerned in New York, and her personal favorite is also the birria taco. So she said that tacos in general are super popular, and that also tortas and quesadillas and nachos sell a lot. I've eaten there about four times, and everything I've ever gotten has been tasty and fresh. I got some tacos today for myself. There were al pastor tacos, they were nicely seasoned. The green salsa was good. It came with little chunks of pineapple. They were nice and sweet and salty at the same time, super yummy. I got Ivan an order of vegetable tacos too. They had nopales in them, as well as onions and peppers, and they were fresh. And along with that green salsa they were tasty too, so I definitely would recommend that spot to anyone in the neighborhood here in Dumbo.

BC: Cual es tu comida favorita en el camión? 

Araceli: Los tacos de birria.

BC: De birria también. A mi me gustan los del pastor, or tacos al pastor, sí.

BC: I also called Jasar Castillo, who is the owner of the truck, and she gave me a little background about it. They've been open for more than 10 years, starting in Red Hook over at the ball fields at Red Hook Park. They were all lined up there on the weekends for the soccer games, lots of people hanging out, playing, and chatting in Red Hook. Those ball fields have closed. They closed in 2019 for renovations, she said. It's been hard for them to find a new spot that is as busy and successful as the ball fields. They set up in Dumbo, and it has changed a lot since they started selling there. Luckily, it's become more populated with residents, and more visitors have come there every year. So now she really likes

it!

BC: Cuales días viene el camión aquí a Dumbo?

Araceli: Venimos de lunes a sábado en horario de 10am a 5pm.

BC: Gracias por tu tiempo.

Araceli: Ok, gracias a ustedes por probar nuestra comida.

ID: Claudette will appear at MOFAD on June 3 in conversation with editor Francis Lam to discuss Cooking the Borderlands. Purchase tickets mofad.org. Radio Mofad is by Bernadette Cura and Ivan De Luce for the Museum of Food and Drink. Thank you for listening.

MOFAD Program Director Taylor Early chats with Bernadette in the afterglow of two wonderful programs this month. They introduce Ivan and Bernadette’s conversation with Michael Szczerban about Voracious publishing’s recently published first full English translation of The Talisman of Happiness by Ada Boni.

As MOFAD continues to explore street food vendors in Dumbo, Brooklyn, we learn about the owner Hamdur’s experience with city inspectors.

Priyanka Poddar, Knead Some Love NY Indian Fusion Desserts

https://kneadsomeloveny.com/

Smorgasburg

https://www.smorgasburg.com/

Ashley Rose Young

https://ashleyroseyoung.com/

Nourishing Networks

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/nourishing-networks-9780197794036?cc=us&lang=en&

Saeng Douangdara

https://www.saengskitchen.com/

The Lao Kitchen

https://www.saengskitchen.com/cookbook

Jujubee

https://www.instagram.com/jujubeeonline/

Michael Szczerban 

https://www.instagram.com/foreverbeard/

The Talisman of Happiness

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ada-boni/the-talisman-of-happiness/9780316577991/?lens=little-brown-and-company

Marcela Hazan

https://marcellafilm.com/

Mario Carbone

https://www.carbonefinefood.com/about

Paul Bertolli 

Fra’ Mani

https://framani.com/pages/about-framani

Deb Perelman 

https://smittenkitchen.com/

Esther Choi

https://estherchoi.com/

Dumbo Grill

Corner of Front St and Jay St 

Dumbo, Brooklyn 

Friday - Sunday

Episode 2

We speak with food content creator Saeng Douangdara about his new cookbook, The Lao Kitchen, and an upcoming event May 1 at MOFAD with drag performer Jujubee.

We also continue exploring the street food in our Brooklyn neighborhood, DUMBO. Ivan and volunteers Aidan and Brittany visit and chat with Dustin at Cocoboys.

NOTES:

Muhammad Abdul-Hadi

Down North Pizza 

https://www.downnorthpizza.com/

Out West Coffee https://www.outwestphilly.com/

We the Pizza: Slangin’ Pies and Savin’ Lives

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739586/we-the-pizza-by-muhammad-abdul-hadi-with-michael-carter-and-david-joachim/

Kalilah Moon

Drive Change

https://drivechangenyc.org/

Paul Van Ravenstein, Monique Mulder

The Pickled City

https://papress.com/products/the-pickled-city

Ashley Rose Young

Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans https://ashleyroseyoung.com/dissertation-research/

Saeng Douangdara

The Lao Kitchen

https://www.saengskitchen.com/cookbook

James Syhabout, John Birdsall

Hawker Fare

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hawker-fare-james-syhaboutjohn-birdsall?variant=32130063826978

Ponpailin 'Noi' Kaewduangdee 

A Child Of The Rice Fields: Recipes From Noi’s Lao Kitchen

https://doikanoi.com/book/

Jujubee

https://www.instagram.com/jujubeeonline/

Dustin MacKay

Cocoboys

147 Front St (on nice days)

https://www.instagram.com/cocoboysnyc/

The Museum of Food and Drink

55 Water St 2nd Fl Brooklyn NY 11201

https://www.mofad.org/

00:00

Bernadette Cura (BC): Ivan! Long time no chat. 

Episode 1

Meet our hosts, and hear their conversation with upcoming MOFAD program guest Muhammad Abdul-Hadi of Down North Pizza in Philadelphia.

NOTES

Muhammad Abdul-Hadi

Down North Pizza 

https://www.downnorthpizza.com/

Out West Coffee https://www.outwestphilly.com/

We the Pizza: Slangin’ Pies and Savin’ Lives

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739586/we-the-pizza-by-muhammad-abdul-hadi-with-michael-carter-and-david-joachim/

Drive Change

https://drivechangenyc.org/

Thai Sidewalk

https://www.seamless.com/menu/thai-sidewalk-jay-street-and-front-st-brooklyn/4965712

MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink

55 Water St 2nd Fl Brooklyn NY 11201

https://www.mofad.org/