Chowder, Frittata & Marriage: A Love Story

I've never had the chance to speak openly and frankly about the food world recipes travel

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to home cooks, including my own personal recipes, cooking, food science for Mont, as well as what I'm watching and reading. Plus, I will be interviewing culinary stars to find out what they are really like. Paying subscribers get exclusive recipes, some from my travels, others from my own personal repertoire, founding members get those recipes plus, direct access to me personally, plus a tote bag and a sign copy of the Milk Street cookbook.

So go subscribe at Christopherkimble.substack.com, one more time, Christopherkimble.substack.com. This is most to your radio for peer acts of your host, Christopherkimble. Today, solar alley 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 you got him.”

We didn't ask questions. He showed up covered in dirt and sold his mushrooms. Also in today's show, we're joined by Eta Mar's Rula Vitch and Suri Packer of Honey and 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, as your mother ever chopped parsley like this. No, okay, how does she chop parsley? You know, you have kind of have to return people just

cook it fresh. Don't do everything else. The secrets of home cooking with Honey and Co,

guys later in the show, but first we'll bake some bread. For centuries in Germany,

communal bakehouses were common in most towns had one. A small village called Irrigan 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 Erdingen, uphill and away from the banks of the Rhine, you'll come to a small building set back from the road. Maritarez arrives first to get prepared before the other bake is arrived. Yeah, look who's such a beautiful Maritarez from back as fine. My name is Maritarez from the baking society in Erdingen. 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 bread forms 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.

Fang will gleich an intake to two varieties and let's get on and prepare our dough. We have already prepared the sour dough mix. It has been maturing for three days each day doubling the water and flour so it's nice and sour. Maritarez has lived in Erdingen 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. In English there was this one for one so unspoken. 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. I have lived more than 45 years here in Erdingen and I

always love baking. I initially wanted to build my own oven with my neighbor between our gardens.

Since we heard that the group were going to revive the village oven here and our ears pricked up. Bake houses 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 pace lives, most people didn't have the time to spend all day baking bread for themselves. But the societies founders have noticed that in recent years the interest in making things

for yourself and getting back to basics is growing once again.

So we can build a good fire. You need a lot of embers to bake bread. So let's go and chop the wood.

“My name is tricksy 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.

Then never any disagreements about who needs to do what. Everyone rolls up their sleeves

and gets stuck in. It really works well. Marry Teres shows us how to build the fire, crumbling 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 dove there? Is there more dove?" It was such a lovely experience. I had a lot of fun baking and they lived with us. I had a lot of fun baking. In the winter morning, we met Maxie Maisex, which was 8 p.m. in the winter months. We normally have about 6 to 8 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. Marry Teres, there is 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 pat some quickly into the wooden baked 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, rice, sour dough and even the German Christmas speciality stolen, a sweet bread with marzipan and fruit. Obviously, 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. That is actually very nice and”

very nice and beautiful. Between 15 minutes to an hour in the oven and the loaves are ready. The oven can get about 20 loaves in at a time. Marry to raise, test 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. They're toft, they're tofts on a line. 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 call, 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,

oh, it tastes heavenly. That story was reported by Emma Wallace.

“And now it's time to take your calls with our special guest co-host, Sola Elwelli.”

Sola is a chef and the author of Start Here, instructions for becoming a better cook. Sola, it's great having you on the show at least now for the calls of certainly interview you, but now you actually have to work for your supper. Yeah, I'm excited to answer some of these questions, not all of them, just some. Sola, I have to do some of the work to have a question, you're 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 from celebrating my mother, who's 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's a mother. I didn't get that at first.

“Wait, how long did it take for you to get that?”

Well, about five seconds when I completely like did not celebrate the day. My favorite thing to do is cook. Nothing I'd rather do. So Mother's Day, I mean, that's an opportunity for me to spend two days cooking. So I love those days because it's 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 hand-bondered ass crabs and you know, I try to give them away. I try to have people over for dinner, so you end 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 called 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 you 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 the freezing is not ideal to crab meat.

It's not perfect, but I would use a vacuum sealer. Salt. 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 and use paper, 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. Yeah, so here's the issue. I've kind of gotten really into

the crab end, so this is happening sort of on like a weekly basis. 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? Resado, just short grain rice, you could use chicken stock or fish stock. You know, you heat up the stock ahead of time, add two cups at a time, stir or add the crab

me or the end. Okay. I could 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 dutchiness 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.

got him. We didn't ask questions. He showed up covered in dirt and sold us mushrooms. He bit like top secret because this is definitely illegal. You did not get the idea from me. Make a little cash on the side or barter. Do a barter deal. Right. Give them crab and they get you a barter and it's good. Yeah. Grass fed angus and return or eggs or something. Right. Or

“just like services 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 do you eat a bunch of crabs in a small space? Yes. Very messy, very quickly. Yeah. But those are some good ideas. I do think it's mostly about finding people to

trade them to and give them to and I does always make someone data and a couple of down to that.

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. 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. 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 [email protected].

“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 fir 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 getting 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 the tree before and

it is 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, you know, 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 jelled together. The texture was just perfect and I've never been able to recreate it since.

When I came to learn after that and my role to 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. 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 question. Come on, show.

I love this question. Well, first of all, I go up to Grandville, New York, not far from my

place in Vermont every July. What am I kids and I pick 36 pounds? I think we won the biggest picking amount. I got the same pity you probably have the Norco or whatever. We're whacking away. And it was nothing in them. If you go to an orchard where they do spray, you probably don't have their 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 minute tapioca?

Did you have a thickener in it? You were going back 20 years, but I do recall that time. I was using the minute tapioca. Yeah. And you probably use a tablespoon for every cup and a half or two cups of fruit. The minute tapioca 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-faced 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 and making a consistent fruit pie

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 the magic out of it. I'm okay with occasionally having a running 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 pie, 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. 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 your biome is they're not quite as ripe as you'd like. They picked them before they're fully ripe because of transportation. They were definitely perfect other than a larvae.

The problem is you've outed yourself already. 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 at the listeners. Some of them, what happened to the rest?

“I think it was the larvae I did it. That's what happened. Great question. I just really love”

that question. Victor, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. You're listening to Milk Stream Radio. Special thanks to Sola Awaili for joining me on the phone lines. She'll be back later in the show. Coming up next, advice on marriage and fatata is from Honey and Co. This is the most great radio I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Right now, it's Edom R. Strulovich and Serite Packer. They're the couple behind London's

Honey and Co. Restaurants, Cookbooks and Podcast. Their upcoming Cookbook is Honey and Co. Daley. Edom R. Serite, it's great to have you back on Mel Street. How great is it? It's such a pleasure. Yes, so excited to be here. Well, I wish I was at Honey and Co having dinner. We wish you weren't 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 we're 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 fetchups, prancing around a kitchen like psychopaths. No, but I think in the context of this book, but yes, we do sort of pranceron like like a psychopath. 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, but 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 in this book. It's about sort of bringing everyday, joyful little things,

because the food that we always love the most and the food that we always sort of craved the most,

more than restaurant food, we never wanted Michelin Stafford, we want it, never wanted anything fancy. We, we want to, you know, the home food, the, 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 play to 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 said to them, please stop, you're not listening to what I'm saying to you, as your mother ever chopped parsley like this. No, okay, how does she chop parsley? You know,

you had 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

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 home cook has to deal with the carrots you might buy the supermarket, right? Which is a little different than what a restaurant has. I mean, we cooked all all of the recipes from a supermarket, because it's got to work for everyone at home.

It doesn't help if I get an amazing 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 grandmother didn't get that either, you know? But our techniques that you can use as the basis for good home cooking. Yeah. 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. Right. Oh, cooking meat

“bowls and adding a stock. 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. Are you cooking chicken for a regime? Hold 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 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, spinach rice porridge. Or if you're making lentils or whatever, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's a few things where it can benefit.

At 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. Then you're completely destroyed the protein. So I've been on this frittata crusade now. I just think frittata is like one of the absolute best concepts ever, right? It's like shanks. It's absolutely an infinite concept, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's not a recipe. It's a concept.

It's right. It's a religion. So give me a few examples of fatata as you guys. I mean, I have some here butternut spinach, goat cheese and sage, chili peas, goat cheese, fried egg, zinghi, tomato and orange soup. This is quite a lot of them. Well, we do have really nice like sweet corn, chorizo, red onions, 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 an effective

little thing to have. Do you always finish them in the oven from the stove top or something? No,

no. It's cooked on the stove. Loads are just cooked on the stove top. Usually stove top ones are better off without cream. Gardishing soups, you know, most of us don't think much about that. You obviously think a lot about that. Well, they've got the garnishes, actually the most important part. Isn't it though? How would you garnish the soup? I mean, I just want to sort of like just start with a conversation acknowledging that the soup is just like a foil for the bits that go

on top, like 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 buttiette sour cream. I mean, no, crispy shallots. It's the best crispy shallots is amazing. Then yes, we've already 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. They 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 seasoned 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 a 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

of the Sephardy community in Jerusalem or 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 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 every time

we make the soup for other people. The response is always so deep because it's something very

homey and that there's something very sort of, I don't know, it 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 and 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 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 too. This is how people cook to feed their families and have them for years and years and years. And I think that as humans, we responded 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. There was a point to this recipe, you know,

it's the simple easy lunch 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, yeah, 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 safe, 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. 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 it. I would challenge you on that, sorry. 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 deserve it. Yeah,

and they do, and people love it. Corn and Fennell chowder with coriander and green chili. Do you have an origin story there? I just, it came to you in the middle of the night or what? It, it came middle of the night because I was having this conversation with my chefs about corn and cobs and stuff like this. So then I thought, wait, why don't I ever make a stock from corn cobs? 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 a neat something else,

then the Fennell comes in and the Fennell and the corn works so well together. This is, this I was going to say that Fennell 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 possit and you have a pink grapefruit possit. You want to explain what possit is, it's just a great concept. Honestly,

“possit is the one trick you should have and they're usually all the time because people love them”

and they have no idea how easy it is to make. So a possit is basically you set a cream with the cidity. You add acid to cream and sugar and basically you could do it with the lines 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 happening.

Yeah no we we're not going there anymore Chris. We have been married for more than 20 years. Very happily and this is the reason why. That's what a my rules of marriage is never

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 where you have your groove. Let's not de- groove each other. 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 amount 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 sea of metal. Oh yeah so the low level and finish it. Yeah completely it 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 a beautiful steak and I got a beautiful steak but when I came down on Sunday morning it was like a frying pan on my plant window sill out. Because it was smoking so badly but the the frying pan outside of the window the steak was delicious though. And what do you want? Sorry 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 I want 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 that I think. Well 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.

In a Mar seri I don't know why we haven't done this for 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 Blondon and do this at

“person. You need to come. You need to come. But I also feel like we've achieved so much like we've”

sorted so many things out like we have. Nobody's using stock anymore. Everybody's eating eggs all the time. We just kind of like sorted it. Well we sorted it out marriage too. Which maybe the greatest achievement of this last hour. So it's cooked something to make me happy.

That's it. Yeah. It's the simplest thing. It never cooked together. Never.

In a Mar seri it's been an enormous pleasure. I've learned so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It was such a pleasure Chris. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. That was Enemars Relevich and Surrey Packer. They're upcoming book is Honey and Codalee. Easy food for your everyday pleasure. You're listening to Milk Street Radio coming up at Omgopnic 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 co-host Sola Elwalee. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?”

Hi. This is Brigitte LeBlanc calling from Know Valley, California. Hi Brigitte. What's your question? Well, I have always loved mushrooms. And I from years back, and I've devised what I guess is my own way of preparing them. If I'm prepping white or criminally mushrooms for sauteing, I take the cap off and I pull back. I kill the caps. And I feel like the mushrooms sauteed 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 little while prepping a pile of mushrooms, but, you know, am I? Am I crazy? I don't think you're crazy. When I worked in fine dining, we did peel our mushrooms. And like, 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. Like, I like to peel grapes. What? 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. And if peeling mushrooms makes you happy,

And I guess I'm just looking for somebody to tell me I'm right.

Like, solar peels, grapes for hours. And you peel mushrooms with nobody. But it's a jackpot pan. The sixties have done probably. So I don't know.

“Wait, did you know Jose Andreas peels his strawberries? What? Huh? Right?”

I don't even do that. I don't know. He said it takes better when the seeds aren't there. Well, well, I think solar 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. But you're killing me. It makes no difference. Oh, I'm telling you. 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? So I mean, you 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 will balloon. Yeah. Well, or Joe Roby Sean comes back from the dead.

“I feel like you'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 meeting my talkie 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. Yeah. And I feel like it's just so delicious when it's simple and you just get the flavor of the butter in the herbs. I don't know if it needs more than that. Yeah, I agree. I was in

Belonia 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. 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 mushroom and sauteing, which for some things

you want to do. But I just did beef shanks, sort of also a bokeh, but with beef and I 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 don't peel the mushrooms. I don't know how bad this is. No, no, definitely. Now what now I've got to go home and tell my husband he's mostly right. You don't need to tell him that. So you never tell him that. Never tell your husband. He's right. Oh boy. Okay, go to work to live. Treat yourself sometimes to some peeled mushrooms. I shall. Bridget, thank you so much. Thank you, bye, bye.

This is most street radio. If your cooking needs a little help, give us a call 855-426-9843-855-426-9843 or just email us [email protected]. Special thanks to Sola Awaili, 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 it's being, but is more delicious. You know, my favorite food fact of all food facts. It's that our national motto, Eplora Bisunum, 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.

Jacques Pepan's famous Pete Brise, 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 crostotters 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 the times. Yes, so yeah, 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 Pete Brise by hand,”

needing it together by hand, and it would come out not just confidently, 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 crost, which creates the

maximum flakiness. Certainly it's true that machines tend to over mix regularize and to

marginalize. 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. If 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, 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 in a very thin philosophical limb. But today, I would say, I would summarize this, is I cook therefore I am. And for me, that pretty much summarizes my entire life. So thank you for giving

me purpose in meeting and clarifying why I get out of bed in the morning. My two, 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. It's exactly in the active 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, chopwood, carry water. After enlightenment, chopwood, carry water. And the secret of it is, it's the chopping wood, and 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 to get thank you. Thank you, Chris. That was Adam Gopnik, staff writer at the New York. That's it for today. You can find all of our episodes. It melts to your radio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And right now, I'm on Substack.

I'm worried about cooking recipes, travel, food science, Vermont, as well as what I am reading and watching. Please subscribe to Christopher Kimball.substack.com when more time, Christopher Kimball.substack.com. You'll also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen

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