Chowder, Frittata & Marriage: A Love Story

This is Milk Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Today, Sola El-Wayley is here to take your cooking calls and confess to a few of her crimes. We used to have a mushroom guy. It was totally illegal. I don't know where he got him. We didn't ask questions. He showed up covered in dirt and sold us mushrooms. Also in today's show, we're joined by Itamar Srulavić and Cereed Packer of Honey & Co. They share their number one rule for home cooks. Please stop trying to cook like a restaurant chef. Don't chop it too fine. Has your mother ever chopped parsley like this? No. Okay, how does she chop parsley? You know, you kind of have to return people. Just cook it fresh. Don't do everything else. The secrets of home cooking with Honey & Co. that's later in the show, but first, we'll bake some bread. For centuries in Germany, communal bakehouses were common and most towns had one. A small village called Irdegen is now reviving this tradition. A few years ago, some of the villagers decided to save their bakehouse, which had fallen into disrepair. Reporter Emma Wallace went to the bakehouse one afternoon to meet them. As you follow the main road through Irdingen, uphill and away from the banks of the Rhine, you'll come to a small building set back from the road. Marie Therese arrives first to get prepared before the other bakers arrive. My name is Marie Therese from the Baking Society in Irdingen. We will get the fire started, but let's first go inside. Inside, there's a long wooden table, a gigantic bread mixer, a sink, some shelves with wooden breadforms on them and a big brick oven with a cast iron door. Around 55 families are part of the Bread Baking Society, and others join in for a day invited by one of the members of the club. The day starts with a cup of coffee and some snacks so that the leaders can explain the order of tasks. We have already prepared the sourdough mix. It has been maturing for three days, each day doubling the water and flour, so it's nice and sour. Marie Therese has lived in Irdingen for more than 40 years. She and her former husband ran a farm, but she didn't have any experience with baking when she started up the Baking Society. I have learned as we went along. The beginnings were pretty difficult. We had to learn quite a lot of stuff, but the joy you get from baking your own bread is so great that we persevered and didn't give up. Hello, Barbara, my name is Barbara. My name is Barbara. I have lived more than 45 years here in Irdingen, and I always loved baking. I initially wanted to build my own oven with my neighbor between our gardens. Then we heard that a group were going to revive the village oven here, and our ears pricked up. Bakehouses like these used to be found all over Germany and across Europe, up until around the middle of the 20th century. With the rise of supermarkets and industrial bakeries and faster-paced lives, most people didn't have the time to spend all day baking bread for themselves. But the Society's founders have noticed that in recent years the interest in making things for yourself and getting back to basics is growing once again. We need to go and chop some wood so we can build up a good fire. You need a lot of embers to bake bread. So let's go and chop the wood. Hello. My name is Trixie, and I'm very, very new to this. I find the whole process fascinating, even the business of building the fire for the oven. I love taking photos of the glowing embers. I love coming to these baking sessions. You meet new people, everyone joins in. There are never any disagreements about who needs to do what. Everyone rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck in. It really works well. Marie Therese shows us how to build a fire, crumpling paper, tearing cardboard and building the wood into the oven so she can get a good burn going. I think bread in Germany is really held in high regard. Some people say that we Germans bake the best bread. I need bread in the morning, in the evening. When I'm travelling, I need my bread. The Bread Society is keen to get as many younger members involved as possible, as a way of future-proofing their hobby. I particularly love the days when we invite the kindergarten children along. They kept asking, is there any more dough there? Is there more dough? It was such a lovely experience. I had a lot of fun baking with them. In the winter months, we normally have about six to eight people here together baking. In the summer, when the doors can be left open, we might have more joining in. We don't have a fixed programme of baking days. It just depends who has time and feels like baking. Marie Therese throws a handful of flour into the oven to test if it is up to temperature. She thinks we need to wait a few more minutes, but things are looking good, she says. On this occasion, the whole group forms the dough into loaves and pats them quickly into the wooden bake forms and into the oven on a flat wooden pallet, like the ones used for pizza. The group has baked all sorts of different bread, buns and cakes in the oven over time. Buttermilk, rye, sourdough and even the German Christmas speciality, Stollen, a sweet bread with marzipan and fruit. Unfortunately, we have lots of members from the village, but we are really pleased that we are attracting members from the villages around too and that people are starting to talk about us around the world. We feel like with our baking, we are venturing out beyond the village boundaries. I love working with the dough and I love working with everyone here. I think we have built a really beautiful community here. It is just a common and beautiful thing, and that is why it has become such a beautiful community. Between 50 minutes to an hour in the oven and the loaves are ready. The oven can get about 20 loaves in at a time. Marie Therese tests them with a knock of her knuckles. You can hear when they are done, Barbara tells me. They look good, she says, smiling, and they begin turning them out on the racks. Oh yes, the aroma, the aroma, that is so delicious. You just want to immediately bite into it. Outside, the skies are darkening and the crickets are calling. As the embers are left to gradually cool, everyone loads up their cars with freshly baked loaves. When you pick up the bread from here, you have your car full of loaves. As soon as we get home, we are biting into the bread. We just can't wait. You just need a little bit of butter and salt, oh it is heavenly. That story was reported by Emma Wallace. And now it is time to take your calls with our special guest co-host, Sola El-Waley. Sola is a chef and the author of Start Here, instructions for becoming a better cook. Sola, it is great having you on the show, at least now for the calls. I have certainly interviewed you, but now you actually have to work for your supper. Yeah, I am excited to answer some of these questions. Not all of them, just some. So I have to do some of the work too, great. Do you have a question? You are just dying to ask. What do you do for Mother's Day? Well, like new fathers a long time ago. I thought Mother's Day was celebrating my mother, who is no longer with us, but I then realized the hard way that my wife was a mother. And so I had to transfer Mother's Day to my wife, who is a mother. I didn't get that at first. Wait, how long did it take for you to get that? About five seconds, when I completely did not celebrate the day at all. My favorite thing to do is cook. There is nothing I would rather do. So Mother's Day, that is an opportunity for me to spend two days cooking. So I love those days, because it is one of those things where I get to cook and people will actually eat it, which is really good when you spend all day cooking. Everyone always tells me, wow, your kid must eat great, but she mostly eats rice. My two youngest kids, who are seven and eight, will not eat my food. That's so annoying. It's karma. Anyway, let's take a call. Let's do it. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hello, my name is Charlie. I'm calling from Oakland, California. Okay, how can we help you? Recently, I got into crabbing and I found myself in a position several times where I come home with 10 Dundanus crabs. And, you know, I try to give them away. I try to have people over for dinner to eat them with me. But I wanted to get your opinion on it. If you have any ideas about creative, good ways to make use of these crabs. This doesn't sound like a problem call to me, by the way. I just like to point out, it's like, what to do with 10 crabs? Well, yeah, I mean, you could steam them, right? Pick out the meat. I would vacuum seal them. My experience with vacuum sealing is the thickness of the bag. The plastic bag is really important. The thinner bag, sometimes any kind of ice that ends up in the bag can puncture the bag. Make sure you get rid of all the air. That's why I use the vacuum bag. It has fairly high water content, right? So it's a little tricky to freeze or you can make a lot of crab cakes and freeze those. If it were me, I would just have as many people over as you need to get rid of those crabs because I don't think that freezing is not ideal to crab meat. It's not perfect, but I would use a vacuum sealer. So first you're bragging. I'm jealous and you should throw a big party and you're providing the crab, so you should provide nothing else. Have your friends bring the beer, the sides, some bread, really good bread, really good butter. Cover every flat surface in newspaper and then just have a big party because picking through all that crab is not fun alone, but together. It could be like an annual thing. People will look forward to it. Yes. So here's the issue. I've kind of gotten really into the crabbing. So this is happening sort of on like a weekly basis. Oh, okay. Oh, no. Obviously crab cakes, that's a good one to burn through a lot of the meat. I've tried making crab salad, eating it by itself. Do you have any other ideas of recipes or other ways to prepare it to keep it fresh and fun? Risotto, just short grain rice. You could use chicken stock or if you have fish stock, you know, you heat up the stock ahead of time, add two cups at a time, stir at the crab near the end. Okay. You can make a huge amount of that fairly quickly. I guess the problem you have is you're going to want to steam and pick 10 Dungeness crabs every week or two. Right. It's almost like you love the fishing, but then you don't know what to do. So maybe what you got to do is find people to give them to, because I don't think anybody's going to want to go through that amount of work every week or two. Right. You could start an underground crab business. There we go. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We used to have a mushroom guy. It was totally illegal. I don't know where he got him. We didn't ask questions. He showed up covered in dirt and sold us mushrooms. Keep it like top secret because this is definitely illegal. You did not get the idea from me. Make a little cash on the side. Well, or barter. Do a barter deal. Right. Give them crab and they give you... Bartering is good. Yes. Grass-fed Angus in return or eggs or something, right? Or just like services. Yeah. Have people clean your car? Yeah. Yeah. Good idea. I think you want to distribute these outside of your home as quickly as possible. Yes. And the tricky thing is I live in a small apartment. So doing a bunch of crabs in a small space gets very messy very quickly. Yeah, but those are some good ideas and I do think it's mostly about finding people to trade them to and give them to. And it does always make someone's day to hand them a couple of dandanas. Yeah. You want to fish them. You don't want to cook them. Yeah. Stick to what you love. Absolutely. Right. Do you live near Manhattan? We can make a deal. No. California. Oh, well. California, yeah. Charlie, this is not the worst problem we've ever heard on the show. That's correct. Hopefully that helps. Take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye. This is Milk Street Radio. We're here to resolve culinary debates and answer your questions. Call us 855-426-9843 or just email us at questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? This is Victor from Philadelphia. How can we help you? A while ago you asked your listeners for stories about their kitchen disasters and I have one that's pretty unique. That was both a disaster and a huge success. So we're going back about 20 years. We moved into a new house in West Philadelphia. And my neighbor had some fruit trees that they wanted nothing to do with. And we realized that one of them was a sour cherry tree. And we had a holiday coming up. And I thought, let me bake a cherry pie. So I picked a bunch of cherries, brought my stuff with me to my cousin's house. And as I'm hitting the cherries, I realized that they have a little tiny white thing inside of them. I just go about my business because I've never picked cherries off of a tree before and pitted them to make pie. How big are these white things? Quite tiny. I mean, if you think about how small a cherry is, maybe a 20th, no, even less, a 30th of the size of the cherry. So much smaller than the pit. Oh, yes. Okay. I made the pie. Everybody raved about the pie. It had the best internal texture of any pie I've ever made in terms of how it gelled together. The texture was just perfect. And I've never been able to recreate it since. What I came to learn after that, and my relatives hopefully are not listening right now because they don't know this yet, is that these were larvae of some kind of book that is typically found inside of wild cherries. Great. If you're completely harmless, you can absolutely eat them. You just don't want to because it's kind of disgusting. And so what I'm wondering is, is it possible that the breakdown of these little tiny larvae somehow helps with the texture of my pie? And just more broadly, what can I do other than sticking bugs inside of my pie to ensure that I'm going to have a lovely texture? You're in the top three really weird questions. Calm on the show. I love this question. Well first of all, I go up to Granville, New York, not far from my place in Vermont every July. One of my kids and I picked 36 pounds. I think we won the biggest picking amount. I got the same pitter you probably have the Norco or whatever. We're whacking away. And there was nothing in them. If you go to an orchard where they do spray, you probably don't have that problem. Secondly, I really doubt that the larvae were adding pectin to your cherry pie. By the way, did you add pectin to this pie to help thicken it or flour or minnetapioca? Did you have a thickener in it? We're going back 20 years, but I do recall that time I was using the minnetapioca. Yeah. And you probably use a tablespoon for every cup and a half or two cups of fruit. The minnetapioca does a great job. You can even throw in the food processor if you don't like those little pieces showing up, if it's an open face pie. For an apple pie, I just use a couple tablespoons of flour with the apples and that seems to work and make sure the pie is cooled off at least four hours so it'll set it sliceable. So. Well, in terms of the pie being as good as it was, it's probably because of the qualities of the fruit. Making a consistent fruit pie is really difficult unless you precook the filling. In most wholesale pie manufacturing or restaurants, you do cook the filling in like a big batch, then you can test it before you put it in your pie, see if it needs more thickening or sugar. And I find like it's kind of cheating. Like I think it takes some magic out of it. I'm okay with occasionally having a runny pie because I just really like cooking it in the crust. But if you do want to have like a really consistent product with your pies, the best thing is to park up your filling, gelatinize it fully, put it in your crust and then bake it. Yeah, the only thing about that is then I don't think the fruit tastes as fresh because it's twice cooked. Yeah, yeah. Like with an apple pie. It's not as magical. Yeah. But you will have more texture consistency. But yeah, you're right. I don't think it was because of the larvae and I also don't think the larvae is that big of a deal. It just means it was really fresh fruit. It also means it was probably really ripe fruit too. Some of the problems when you go pick cherries or buy them is they're not quite as ripe as you'd like. They pick them before they're fully ripe because of transportation. They were definitely perfect other than a larvae. The problem is you've outed yourself on radio. So somebody, it's going to get back to these people, but you said it was 20 years ago, right? Yeah, some of the people are still alive though. So we'll have to see if they're avid listeners. Some of them. What happened to the rest? They did. The larvae didn't. That's what happened. Great question. I just really love that question. Victor, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming, man. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Special thanks to Sola O'Whaley for joining me on the phone lines. She'll be back later in the show. Coming up next, advice on marriage and frittatas from Honey and Co. This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Right now it's Edomar Sturlovitch and Cereed Packer. They're the couple behind London's Honey and Co. Restaurants, cookbooks and podcasts. Their upcoming cookbook is Honey and Co. Daily. Edomar, Cereed, it's great to have you back on Milk Street. Yay. Hi, Grace. It's such a pleasure. I'm so excited to be here. Well, I wish I was at Honey and Co having dinner. We wish you were at Honey and Co having dinner. We wish we would be all having dinner together at Honey and Co. So your latest book begins during what were obviously difficult days for anyone in the restaurant business. But you're right that you were dancing in the basement during COVID. Can you explain what that means? Because I just thought that was charming. I mean, it's literally what we do during everything, I think, is dance our way through. Go on the Instagram and mostly what you see is like two fat chefs prancing around a kitchen like psychopaths. No, but I think in the context of this book, yes, we do sort of prance around like a pair of psychopaths, but this book in our sort of latest place, Honey and Co. Daily came from the dark days of COVID, which were, you know, for all of us, really horrible time, actually, at these times, you know, what is the place that we go to for joy, for happiness, for soccer? And that was, of course, in our kitchen, you know, cooking and feeding people and each other. And this is the sort of origin of this place Honey and Co. Daily and this book. It's about sort of bringing everyday, joyful little things. Because the food that we always loved the most and the food that we always sort of craved the most, more than restaurant food, we never wanted Michelin style food, we never wanted anything fancy. We wanted, you know, the home food, the mama's food, if you know what I mean. But it's also, I think, this aspect that for us, our books reflect us and our lives and where we find ourselves, the two of us, and in our work as well. We want to enjoy a plate of food that's joyous, that's healthy, that's colorful, that's full of flavor, but we honestly, we don't want to spend like crazy amounts of time doing it. And I have this conversation every day with my chefs, you know, I show them a dish, I say to them, okay, we cook this like this. I want it to be like loads of flavor. Don't chop it too fine. And then they start chopping something like a chef, this kind of fine, fine parsley. And I say to them, please stop, you're not listening to what I'm saying to you. Has your mother ever chopped parsley like this? No. Okay, how does she chop parsley? You know, you kind of have to return people, because there's all these things that you get taught as chefs, you have to do it in a certain way, you know? Like it's all about trying to remind ourselves and our chefs and the people that we write these recipes for, our cookbooks for, is that there's like a joy and immediacy in food and if you buy good produce, it's delicious with hardly anything done to it, you know? Yeah. And the other problem is one solution to this problem of cooking simply is having perfect ingredients. And what I like about what you do is you're not depending on perfect ingredients to make this work. I mean, that's a good recipe for a home cook has to deal with the carrots you might buy in the supermarket, right? Which is a little different than what a restaurant has. I mean, we cooked all over the recipes from a supermarket because it's got to work for everyone at home. It doesn't help if I get an amazing like tomato from Sicily and I make a perfect dish with it, you know, and it's sun-kissed and full of sugar and deliciousness, but no one can get that tomato. But honestly, our grandmothers didn't get that either, you know? But there are techniques that you can use as the basis for good home cooking. So let's just talk about some of them. We talk about water versus stock. As you well know, many cultures around the world start with water. Yeah, we always start with water. So explain. I mean, I especially don't understand the whole stock when you're talking about cooking like shanks and then adding a stock or cooking meatballs and adding a stock. I don't get it. I don't get it. Like why would you need to do that? You are cooking a beautiful piece of meat, especially if you're cooking anything on the bone or you're cooking chicken for a tajin, whole chicken on the bone. Why would you ever think you needed to add stock to that as well? I completely don't get it. I'm very opposed to stock apart from in very, very small occasions of like a really nice kind of veg stock into, you know, like there's a spinach rice porridge kind of thing. Or if you're making lentils or whatever. Yeah, there's a few things where it can benefit. But the rest of the time you're cooking any kind of meat or chicken or even fish. Just let the flavors come out. I don't get stock at all. And plus you take a nice piece of meat or fish and you buy canned stock. This I would never do. I would never do that. And then you completely destroy the protein. So I've been on this frittata crusade now. I just think a frittata is like one of the absolute best concepts ever, right? Oh, absolutely. It's like shakshuka. It's absolutely an infinite concept, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's not a recipe. It's a concept. It's a religion. So give me a few examples of frittatas, you guys. I mean, I have some here butternut spinach, goat's cheese and sage, chili peas, goat's cheese, fried eggs, zingy tomato and orange soup. There's quite a lot of them. Well, we do have really nice like sweet corn, chorizo, red onions. Oh my God. And then you pour on the eggs and you kind of just set it together. So delicious and actually extremely delicious like the next day on a picnic as well. The best thing about a frittata is you eat it hot, it's delicious. It cools down, you take it in your lunchbox, it's delicious. You have a bit left over, you slice it, you put it in a sandwich, it's delicious. It's such a nifty little thing to have. Yeah. Do you always finish them in the oven from the stove top or someone who just cooked on the stove? No, no. Loads that just cooked on the stove top. Usually stove top ones are better off without cream. Garnishing soups, you know, most of us don't think much about that. You obviously think a lot about that. Well, the garnish is actually the most important part. Isn't it though? How would you garnish a soup? I mean, I just want to sort of like just start the conversation acknowledging that the soup is just like a foil for the bits that go on top. The soup is only half the story and it's not complete until you sort of finish it because it needs an extra element, even if it's like a drizzle of olive oil or a dollop of yogurt or bettillette, sour cream. I mean, no, crispy shallots. It's the best crispy shallots is amazing. But then yes, we buy it ready made and we just sprinkle it on everything. You also buy pre cooked beans and jars. You know what? This is like that's an issue. No, we have an addiction like a serious addiction. That's an issue. We have an addiction. The kind of Spanish style beans. I don't know if you can get them in the US so much. But you know, the Spanish always sell beans in jars. We can get them here. Yeah. So like I opened this jar and literally you could eat the beans just with a spoon. You didn't have to do anything to them. And I was like, oh, this would save me quite a lot of time of like soaking and boiling and skimming and seasoning because they kind of slightly season full of flavor. And honestly, they beat anything in a tin like hands down. Then you did. You have a Jerusalem bean soup, which I love, which is just beans from a jar. Some tomato paste, a few spices, a little olive oil and some can of tomatoes. Yeah. And I just go, yeah. Do you know what? I made this for my friend. He's a Jerusalem boy like it is. And honestly, he almost started crying. Well, the story of the soup is this is the sort of the Sephardi community in Jerusalem. Friday is the big sort of cooking day for the Friday night meal. But you need to finish all your cooking midday because the Sabbath is is starting and you're not meant to be working. This is the soup that you would feed your family on Friday lunch. When you're busy with the serious cooking, you'd make this soup. And I was surprised that every time we make the soup for other people, the response is always so deep because it's there's something very homey in it. There's something very sort of, I don't know. Presses a button. It also has two onions diced, which is kind of interesting. But it's sort of, I mean, this is what I love about your cooking, which is it's kind of like it's not a finger in the eye, you know, Michelin chef cooking, but it's like, yeah, we got some beans, we got some tomatoes and we got some onions and it's going to take us, you know, half an hour to make this for 20 minutes and it's going to be delicious. So there. Yeah. But I feel there's there's a sort of, you know, I'm getting a little bit sentimental, but I feel that this type of cooking, there's an ancient wisdom to it. This is how people cook to feed their families and have done for years and years and years. And I think that as humans, we respond to that flavor and this type of attention. We want that. Yeah. But I think there's something else which I think you guys agree with is there was a point to this recipe. You know, it's the simple, easy launch on Friday before the bigger meal. And it had a purpose. It had to be simple and it was delicious. So there was a context to it. It wasn't so much of our cooking is totally without context now. Yeah, it has a context, but it's also about filling you up, keeping you satiated. You know, it's more than the sum of its parts. And it's kind of the ultimate comfort food. And sometimes that's what you want. And so I'm not saying you have this on a, you know, beautiful summer's day. If you're inviting push guests, that's not the soup you make. But when you're sitting on a winter's night and you just want to watch something on the TV and you want to have like just a beautiful, comforting bowl of soup, this is absolutely the one to make. I would challenge you on that. You would have it on a summer night. I would, you know, I would not be. I would be honored if people came to my home to serve the soup. Well, we do serve it. Yeah, and we do. And people love it. Corn and fennel chowder with coriander and green chili. Do you have an origin story there or just it came to you in the middle of the night or what? It came to me in the middle of the night because I was having this conversation with my chefs about corns and cobs and stuff like this. So then I thought, wait, why don't I ever make a stock from corncobbs from the cobs? Yes, from the cobs themselves and use that because there's so much flavor there. The first time I made it with celery was nice. Second time I was like, I need something else. Then the fennel comes in and the fennel in the corn works so well together. This is this. I was going to say that fennel and corn are just two things that work together all the time. And this soup is is heavenly, is delicious. Last week I did a posse. And you have a pink grapefruit posse. You want to explain what posse it is. It's just a great concept. Honestly, posse it is the one trick you should have under your sleeve all the time because people love them and they have no idea how easy it is to make. So a posse it is basically you set a cream with acidity. You add acid to cream and sugar. And basically you could do it with the limes or lemons. And here I do it with pink grapefruits, which also kind of makes it slightly pinkish, which is beautiful. And then it sets to this most delicious creamy thing. And this is kind of like this is a dessert. Like I would put my hand up and I don't make desserts. But you do need to have like three or four desserts that you can make. And this for me is the ultimate dessert for people who don't make desserts because it's so easy and it's so delicious and very few things in life. I like that. The only thing I would tell people is don't use ready made lemon juice. Like grapefruit juice, lemon juice, lime juice, any of them have got to be from the fresh fruit. So the two of you cooking a quick supper together, what would each of you say would be the thing to cook? Let me stop you right there. Never will the two of us be in the kitchen together at home. It's not good. It's not it's not happening. It's not happening. It's yeah, no, we we've we're not going there anymore, Chris. We have been married for more than 20 years. Very happily. And this is the reason why. Well, you know, that's one of my rules of marriage is never cook together. That's it doesn't really work out very well. I think it works for some couples and at work when we need to, we work really, really well, like when we focus. But at home, it's kind of like I have my groove, you have your groove. Let's not de groove each other. De groove, de groove. But there's definitely like the things that we would prefer the other one to cook for us. Do you know, I mean, like I always want it to want to cook a steak for me because he cooks a beautiful steak. How do you cook a beautiful steak? What do you do? I'm a new convert to the reverse sear method. Oh, yes. So the low oven and finish it. Yeah, completely. It's changed my life. I love that. My biggest tip for cooking a steak at home is make sure that all the bedroom doors are closed, all the windows are open and that the smoke alarm is covered because the smoke needs to happen without the smoke. The steak is not good. I can give you an example because it was my birthday last Saturday and I got she got a steak and I got a beautiful steak. But when I came down on Sunday morning, there was like a frying pan on my plant window sill outside because it was smoking so bad. He put the frying pan outside of the window. The steak was delicious. And what do you want Sarita to make it tomorrow? Oh, my God. I mean, she has a little bit of magic in her hands. So whatever she touches is good. Now I know how you guys have been married for 20 years. I mean, you know that she's one of the best bakers in the world. She's also one of the best cooks I think that ever lived. You know, we have this conversation that she'd say to me, oh, do you want me to cook this? Did you want me to cook this? I was just like, whatever you're going to do, it's going to be perfect. You do your thing, darling. What he actually says is cook something that will make me happy. You know what that is. Look inside you. The answer is inside you. Inamar, Sarita, I don't know why we haven't done this more frequently. Maybe we should, but we should do this like at the end of every day, we should just hang out for a chat. Well, I was going to say, I need to get on a plane and go over to London and do this in person. You need to come ASAP. It's been a while. You need to come, but also feel like we've achieved so much. Like we've sorted so many things out. Like nobody's using stock anymore. Everybody's eating eggs all the time. We just kind of like sorted it out. Well, we sorted out marriage too, which may be the greatest achievement of this last hour. Just cook something to make me happy. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. It's the simplest thing. It never cooked together. Never. Inamar, Sarita, it's been an enormous pleasure. I've learned so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for having us. It was such a pleasure, Chris. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. That was Ina Marsurlovitch and Sarita Packer. Their upcoming book is Honey and Co. Daily Easy Food for Your Everyday Pleasure. You're listening to Milk Street Radio coming up Adam Gopnik on the most essential tool in your kitchen. I'm Christopher Kimball. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Right now it's time for another call with my special guest cohost, Sola El-Waley. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Bridget LeBlanc calling from Mill Valley, California. Hi, Bridget. What's your question? Well, I have always loved mushrooms and I've never had a chance to find a device that I guess is my own way of preparing them. If I'm prepping white or criminy mushrooms for sauteing, I take the cap off and I pull back. I peel the caps and I feel like the mushrooms saute much better. I'm not sure if I'm going to find a way to do that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think they saute much better and I think they're dry so they're able to absorb flavors better. If you wash them, they exude a lot of liquid into the pan. My husband and my friends all think I'm crazy because I've spent a while prepping a pile of mushrooms, but am I crazy? I don't think you're crazy. When I worked in fine dining, we did peel our mushrooms and it's maybe just a subtle difference in flavor. I think it's mostly a difference in color, but I feel like if you love peeling mushrooms, no one should stop you. I have things like that. I like to peel grapes and I spend hours doing it and I think it's so delicious and I don't care how long it takes and I find it meditative and fun. If peeling mushrooms makes you happy, it's not ruining your life, right? No, not at all. It's a minor point of attention and I guess I'm just looking for somebody to tell me I'm right. Sola peels grapes for hours and you peel mushrooms with nobody since Shakpa Pan, the sixties have done probably. I don't know. Wait, did you know Jose Andres peels his strawberries? What? Huh? Right? I don't even do that. I don't know. He said it tastes better when the seeds aren't there. Well, I think Sola was being kind. She said, if you enjoy doing it and it's meditative, don't let anyone tell you not to do it, which I agree with, but you don't need to do it. What you're telling me, it makes no difference. No, I'm telling you. Is this what you're saying? Yeah, you don't have to do it. It's not going to make, if you're doing a stew or you're doing something else, whatever it's sauce, it's not going to make any difference, right? Sola, I mean, you're never going to. Let me tell you though, if Jean-George comes over for dinner, he will be thrilled with your mushroom peeling. Or Danielle? Well. Balood? Yeah, well, or Joe Robichon comes back from the dead. As long as I've got you in line, what are some of your favorite mushroom dishes? Honestly, my favorite thing is just to do like simple, like get a really nice, like meaty mitake or something beautiful from the market. Give it like a little bit of a sear, butter based it with herbs and roast it like a chicken. And I feel like it's just so delicious when it's simple and you just get the flavor of the butter and the herbs. I don't know if it needs more than that. Yeah, I agree. I was in Bologna four years ago and I went to a local place and the guy came out, he does wild mushrooms. So he just sauteed a big plate of wild mushrooms, salt, butter. I don't even think he had herbs on. It was just absolutely delicious. See, we agree sometimes. Yeah, we do occasionally. I mean, I would say one thing though. Everybody's so intent on getting the water out of a mushroom and sauteing, which for some things you want to do. But I just did beef shanks, sort of also boku, but with beef and that feel. You know, I sauteed some onion and then I threw the mushrooms in just cut in half for like two minutes. And then I added some wine and some stock and everything else. But then they kept their texture, right? They didn't cook down. And sometimes I think you do want that whole mushroom texture in something. So I don't always want to get all the moisture out. That's kind of what I'm talking about, getting the moisture out so you get that texture. Okay, so maybe I'm not... You're not crazy. You found a sisterhood of people who like to peel stuff. If you're like so into peeling mushrooms that like your life is falling apart, you're not returning people's calls, there's laundry piling, then maybe you don't peel the mushrooms. I don't know how bad this is. No, no. Simply now I've got to go home and tell my husband he's mostly right. You don't need to tell him that. Sola! You never have to tell him that. Never ever tell your husband he's right. Oh boy. Okay, those are words to live by. Treat yourself sometimes to some peeled grapes. I shall. Bridget, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye. This is Moe Street Radio. If your cooking needs a little help, give us a call 855-426-9843. 855-426-9843 or just email us questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. Special thanks to Sola O'Whaley, author of Start Here. You can find her on Instagram, YouTube and on her sub-stack, Hot Dish with Sola. Now Adam Gopnik is here with his latest bit of culinary insight. Adam, what's going on? Oh, so much is going on, Christopher, but among the countless things, probably the single biggest in my life of philosophical reflection on the meanings and comforts of eating is that our food processor broke. So I found myself doing what I am sure you do anyway by sheer virtue, Christopher. I had to do all the things I normally do in the food processor by hand. So I started off doing pesto and salsa verde, which is relatively easy to do and everyone tells you you ought to do it that way anyway. And it turns out to be both easy and terrific. Pesto done by hand is a little less smooth and homogenized than perhaps we are wrongly accustomed to its being, but is more delicious. You know my favorite food fact of all food facts. That our national motto, Iplora basunum out of many one comes from a Roman recipe for pesto believed to have been written by Virgil originally. Well when you make your pesto by hand, you sort of disappoint the Roman poet because you don't get quite that same one homogenous flavor. You still get the little tingle and sparkle of different flavors on your palate. And then I walked to the very top of the ladder of the handmade. I made a pie crust, Jacques Pepin's famous pate brisee, which I'm sure you have made a million times. So I needed the butter into the flour with my hands, added the ice water, rolled it out. Not very well. I'm not very good at that. Patched it together with apples, with some cardamom and sugar sprinkled on them. And to my amazement in a very long history of making crostata or rustic tart, this was by far the most successful and delicious that I had ever made. But the problem is I'm older than you. So I remember cooking before the food processor and back in the 60s and we were all using our hands or a manual pastry blender, which has those wires, those tines. Yes. So yeah, it's so depressing. I'm talking to someone who doesn't remember the pre-food processor world. It was a revelation to me. I honestly did not know that you could make pate brisee by hand, kneading it together by hand. And it would come out not just competently, but better than any that you could make with a machine. Apparently, hand mixing leaves those little small pieces of butter. And this, I am told at least by experts, creates steam pockets within the crust, which creates the maximum flakiness. Certainly it's true that machines tend to over mix, regularize and homogenize. So I have found myself becoming obsessed with using my hands as the primary tool in my kitchen. And as you may know, there's a whole school of philosophy that talks about the importance of embodiment for cognition, that we don't really think or experience with our minds. That's not the source of our consciousness. It is the totality of our doing things in the world that makes us actually aware. We think in a very real sense better with our hands than we think with our heads or even with our hearts. And there's no way to make us more aware of the fullness of ourselves than making something with our hands. Using the machine left me at a distance from my own pie crust. And somehow, and this is the thing that interests me most, Christopher, somehow the distance from the thing we make is detectable by others through their own sensory experience. That sounds crazy or sort of mystical. Here's a fascinating thing that every actor learns. If when you are on stage and you are fictitiously in Central Park, if you picture Central Park or anywhere else in your head as you play the scene, the audience will feel your presence there. And if you don't imagine it, if you just say the words, the audience will sense the absence of an imaginary connection in you, how they deduce it. I don't know, but they do. And in the same way, the audience at the table knows when you have literally had your hands in their food and when you have not. So from now on, I intend to use my hands as the primary instrument and everything I make. You sometimes walk out on a very thin philosophical limb. So today, I would say, I would summarize this as I cook, therefore I am. And for me, that pretty much summarizes my entire life. So thank you for giving me purpose and meaning and clarifying why I get out of bed in the morning. Mine too. And I don't, of course, do it professionally. I do it every night for a family. But I think that's true. I cook, therefore I am, but also I cook, therefore I know I'm thinking. That's exactly in the act of cooking that we pass from self-conscious overthinking, meditation in that way, into just doing. You know, there's a lovely Zen saying that I think about often. It's before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. And the secret of it is it's the chopping wood, carrying water, making the pie crust with your hands, that carries enlightenment within it. And I think that that's profoundly true in all of our experience. I still love the t-shirt we ended up with I cook, therefore I am, which is about as good as it gets. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. That was Adam Gopnik, staff writer at The New Yorker. That's it for today. You can find all of our episodes at MilksTreatRadio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And right now, I'm on Substack. And I'm worried about cooking, recipes, travel, food science, Vermont, as well as what I am reading and watching. Please subscribe at ChristopherKimbal.Substack.com. One more time, ChristopherKimbal.Substack.com. You can also find us on Facebook at ChristopherKimbal's Milk Street on Instagram at 1-77 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions. And thanks, as always, for listening. ChristopherKimbal's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH. Co-founder Melissa Baldino, executive producer Annie Sinsiboth, senior editor Melissa Allison, senior producer Sarah Clapp, producer Caroline Davis, assistant producer Mari Arosco, additional editing by Sydney Lewis. 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