Radio MOFAD – Details, episodes & analysis

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/

MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink

55 Water St 2nd Fl Brooklyn NY 11201

https://www.mofad.org/

TRANSCRIPT:

00:00 Ivan De Luce (ID): Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from The Museum of Food and Drink. Hey, Bernadette.

Bernadette Cura (BC): Ivan! Long time no chat.  ID: Yeah, how's it going?  BC: Actually, I see you like four times a week. I'm sick to death of you.  ID: It's only episode two.  BC: I know. But it's good. I'm going great. We had a great couple of weeks here at MOFAD. So fun.  ID: Yes, we had our event with Muhammad Abdul-Hadi, author of We the Pizza.  BC: Yeah, we spoke with him during the last podcast.  ID: And he was in conversation this past week talking about his cookbook. And there were some interesting 00:35 recipes in there that I had not noticed the first time around. It was a great way to kind of get more in depth there. One of the most interesting recipes in the book came from Chef Mike Carter. When he was incarcerated, he noticed that inmates would get resourceful with the types of um dishes they would make with their limited resources. So they would actually take Cheez-Its and ramen and make pizza dough out of it.  BC: It is a striking recipe in it's really gravity 01:05 and humor at the same time somehow. The event was really wonderful. Yeah, we made strawberry lemonade from the cookbook as well. And we also served pickle lemonade because we had a pickle event the week before, so we were, the entire museum is obsessed with the pickle lemonade, including Nazli, our president. As a matter of fact, she made it, and so we ended up serving it alongside the strawberry lemonade at the event, and it was a hit.  ID: It gave sort of a thirst-quenching 01:35 electrolyte kind of flavor. Imagine Gatorade but good. And I would imagine it would be good with a bit of tequila so I'm gonna give that a shot at some point.  BC: Maybe vodka, tequila might be a little strong.  ID: We're gonna have to do a comparison.  BC: It's happening. Yeah. Okay so we have also some events coming up what do we have coming up on Thursday April 30th?  ID: Yes we have our event From Pushcarts to Po’ Boys: How Street Food Becomes American. We're going to have food historian and author Ashley Rose Young over here at MOFAD. 02:05 BC: She was an advisor for our current exhibition Street Food City, right?  ID: Yes.  BC: So I'm so excited to have her in-house and what are they gonna be talking about, who’s she talking to?  ID: She's going to be talking to NYU Food Studies Chair Jennifer Berg. Ashley Rose Young has a new book Nourishing Networks the Public Culture of Food in New Orleans. So she's going to talk about how everyday street foods in New York, New Orleans, and all around the country became American standards and influenced our diets today.  BC: That's gonna be so 02:35 amazing. I cannot wait. And I heard tell of a New Orleans cocktail that's going to be on the roster for that event. ID: Wow, okay to embody New Orleans in a cocktail the possibilities really are limitless.  BC: I'm excited. And then after that on May 1st, we have an amazing event coming up with Saeng Douangdara and he's gonna be in conversation with Jujubee who is a drag queen from Laos and they're fans of each other. 03:04 They support each other in promoting their culture. We talked about Thai food and how that's more comfortable for people. So a lot of people from Laos called their food Thai so it was approachable. Now it's going to have a spotlight shown on it with his cookbook. Excellent. Let's take a listen.  BC: Yeah.  ID: Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from The Museum of Food and Drink. 03:31 Saeng Douangdara is a Los Angeles-based personal chef and content creator. His new cookbook, The Lao Kitchen, explores traditional and contemporary Lao flavors told through family recipes. After moving to the United States with his family at the age of two, Saeng  grew up in Wisconsin, grappling between two cultures and learning recipes from his parents. After a month-long trip to Laos, Saeng discovered a deeper love of Lao cooking and founded Saeng's Kitchen. Saeng will appear at MOFAD on Friday, May 1st 04:00 in conversation with Jujubee, a drag queen and performer who has appeared on RuPaul's Drag Race. In The Lao Kitchen, she says, Saeng shares our Lao culture and food beautifully. 04:16 BC: Okay, just getting into the book a little bit. On the first page you described Lao Cuisine as funky. And I'm sure that has a lot to do with padaek 04:26 and the other fermented foods in the cuisine, is that mainly what you're talking about? Or is there like a metaphorical like other like funkiness?  Saeng Douangdara (SD):I mean, I just admire the word funky now. I think about my childhood and even the community back then, like you would hear stories about like a lot of the refugees coming in and we'd be talking with each other and it was all about hiding your food. It was all about like, oh, this is too smelly. This is too, the padaek is too funky. 04:54 And so I also heard a lot of those stories from like neighbors, our peers and 04:59 other Southeast Asian folk talking about Lao cuisine. So there was a very much of a big shift that needed to happen. And so that's when I saw, think in the 2010s, when Lao folks slowly started positioning themselves and reclaiming that word of funky. And so that's why I use funky now in a way, an empowerment word, acknowledging, yeah, our food is different and it is pungent, but if you know how to use it, if you know how to use the funk, 05:26 your food is gonna be incredible. So I'm reclaiming that word of like, it's time to shine a light, big old bright light on Lao cuisine and the unfiltered fish sauce and all that good stuff.  BC: I think it's so amazing that you have that recipe in there for the fish sauce.  SD: It took so hard to figure out, cause when you know moms, they don't measure. So I had to go and just watch her several times. Was like, Mom, how do you do that? And it takes at least a year to ferment good padaek. it's a long process. 05:55 BC: You know, after it ferments for that first three months or whatever, you add the aromatics, you add like the garlic husks. And the peel of the pineapple. You were talking in one of your videos in your Instagram about how, you know, like the fish and banana leaves is sustainable. I mean, there's so many things about traditional cuisines and old ways. Where including like those waste products, the husks of the garlic and the pineapple. 06:21 I think that's really exciting.  SD: I think that's a piece that I learned from my mom that, you know, she never wasted anything. And I think that's the generational knowledge that she carried on from Laos to America. And to be able to like... 06:34 first to see that I was like wow you really don't waste anything like everything was always used in the house every single grain of rice because you know Mom growing up was working in the rice fields to make every single grain so it's like that type of knowledge. BC: You know the work that goes into that rice. It's not just a bag that came from the store, like some abstract piece of food. There's also a flavor component to the husks, that idea that you could even get flavor out of some 07:04 like that. My dad, because there's, you know, when he makes his chicken adobo, which is like the national dish of the Philippines, sometimes people use peeled cloves, but my dad insisted on using the husk. 07:13 because it gave that special flavor and that like validated to me when I saw that recipe, I'm like, oh my God, my dad was totally right, you know, like there is flavor to be had in those things that are, that people consider garbage. So it's really interesting. And the fact that it's unfiltered, is that unique to Lao cuisine, the unfiltered fish sauce?  SD: Yeah, so I would say within Southeast Asia, there's other types of unfiltered fish sauce, but I usually like to focus on how Lao 07:43 people create our own padaek or unfiltered fish sauce because it is very much with the ingredients that are in the staple Lao cuisine. So like in padaek, we use the sticky rice husk. So when like you're making your growing sticky rice and before it becomes that shiny white grain, you get the husk, the brown husk around it. And that's what they use actually to make padaek. But in the book, I say, if you can't have access to it, you can still use lightly toasted sticky rice powder to kind of get that similar taste. But essentially, 08:13 I focus on that because I think of you think of Vietnamese food they use them more of like the see-through filtered maybe fish sauce that is clear we use some of that but mostly I would say padaek is like our salt in Lao cuisine. BC: I saw you on Instagram doing a tasting of fish sauces. Which is your go-to fish sauce and if like which is the most common one that you recommend? SD: I had to ask my mom this question because I was so she had you know several bottles of fish sauce and so there is depending on like 08:42 whether the dish is going to be cold like for papaya salad where you're not cooking it or if it's going to be in a stew where you are cooking it versus if you're going to make it put at it in padaek. So those are like three different variations but I would say like if you're cooking it one of my favorites is probably Red Boat and Three Crabs. I think those are really good middle of ground understanding like 09:04 for this recipe because some fish sauces can be a bit more salty. So I usually tell people with whatever fish sauce you're going to try, stick with it. And then because the saltiness is going to range, so you have to play with the saltiness.  BC; Yeah, the Filipino ones are really salty. And also, well, I think it's great that you said Red Boat because that one you can get at most mainstream stores. 09:26 I wanted to ask you a little bit more about kind of like how Lao cuisine has had to be categorized as Thai in this country just to be, you know, approachable by American standards. What's that all about?  SD: Yeah, no, please. I love that question. I love talking about it because that is the misconception that, oh, like Lao food is just Thai food or like it. 09:49 People don't even know about the country Laos. And so essentially when I hear that or when I tell them, it comes from a long history. So the first history is the piece that when Lao refugees came to the United States, they already weren't feeling, you you're coming as a refugee with little to nothing with you besides knowing how to cook. 10:08 And so at that time there was also this surge in Thai diplomacy through food. so at the same time, the country Thai was pushing this internationally. then so of course, know, Lao people were the neighbors and they kind of clung on to that because that was the most accessible and like instant like, I don't have to market anything, but I can still somewhat share my food. But my food is going to be on the secret menu. And then Thai food is going to be the public menu. Within the Midwest, you have several, hundreds actually of 10:38 Thai restaurants owned by Lao people. And then even going back a little bit further, that idea of like, oh, Lao food is here, Thai food is here. That also I came from because of the history of Thailand and Laos through colonization and just the wars back there. I think back then, if you were to talk to different neighbors within Southeast Asia, they always saw like Laos as almost second class citizen because they are eating padaek, unfiltered fish sauce. They're eating sticky rice, or eating with their hands. 11:08 So the cuisine became known as this second class option. But I think that hugely shifted because if not many people know, but now it's becoming popular. But Esan region of Thailand, that's where they're literally eating Lao food, but they call it quote unquote Esan. So it's this rebranding of the cuisine that almost wasn't as respected back then, but now they're loving it because it is being rebranded. And so I like to mention that.  BC: It's so annoying.  SD: It is so annoying. But that's why it was so important to write the book. 11:38 And so I write all of that in the book and I think it's so important that people understand history and context that food doesn't have borders but the people are in, you'll see noticeably. 11:48 I think of central Thailand, the curries, jasmine rice, the very light papaya salad, that is essentially what was marketed for Thai diplomacy. But it wasn't until this shift now that Esan is becoming popular. But I always try to tell people, look back in the history, the Kingdom of Laos, that was a huge part of it until the French divided the line through the Mekong and then all those Lao people, boop, and then here is boop. So there's a little history of it.  BC: Hug Esan, the restaurant, that's going to make food for the event at MOFAD, 12:21 I was wondering about that. Do you have a relationship with that restaurant?  SD: There were two Lao restaurants in New York City. Unfortunately, they closed down. I was good friends with them.  BC: Was it COVID?  SD: Yeah, COVID and after effects of that. I was reaching out to some of my friends in New York City. Is there any Lao place or what other options? They mentioned Hug Esan. They catered their wedding, so it was through mutual friends, chit-chatting back and forth. And even the Hug Esan website acknowledges the Lao history there, so I thought this was the perfect partnership. 12:58 BC: I saw that. SD: I think a lot of the time Esan people are kinda stuck in the middle. And so it's like, I feel for them. And I think for me, it's just being able to share and include when possible. So our Esan  brothers and sisters will be part of the New York City event. I’m really excited 13:18 for them to share their food as well.  BC: That makes me so happy that you connected with them through your friend. I'm gonna get a little political here.  SD: Yeah, let's do it.  BC: Because the reason that the Thai government does that kind of soft diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy is so that, you know, on a global level, people have a good impression of that country. I'm not really well-versed on the political situation in Thailand or in Laos. 13:48 Like what is the Lao government like right now, the regime and all that?  SD: Even going back to why Lao people are in the United States, we are in the United States because America bombed Laos, the most bombed country in the world even to this day because of the Vietnam War slash American secret war. That's no longer a secret that the CIA actually has kind of showed all the files. 14:10 And President Obama was actually the first president to actually go back, acknowledge and support and fund like, hey, it's our bad, we're going to remove that. So I think for me as a diaspora from Laos living in America, it's very complex emotions, I would say. You you can feel gratitude and you can feel pain and suffering all at the same time. It's not exclusive, but I would say within those political realms, there's always neighbors, right? So like Thai and Lao. 14:38 both countries haven't always seen eye to eye because of the wars that have been through the decades and the back and forth 14:48 wars within each other. So I think with Thailand, I would say very smart of doing, you know, food diplomacy, like you said, make sure that, you know, they're in a good position within this world. And I think for Laos, it is much more underdeveloped and, you know, the people are still trying to heal from all the wars, the attacks. I look back in history and I see there, Laos has always almost been the punching bag in terms of like wars and what's been going on. So I think finally, to be able to even acknowledge these pieces 15:18 of history is so crucial because it often gets bypassed through our textbooks. I would say, I think it's more of survival. Southeast Asia, Thailand, doing what they need to do for their people, I understand. And at the same time, I think to Lao people, I think finally finding their voices, whether through this book, through their art, um through the diaspora, it's finally uh kind of shifting the history a bit. 15:47 BC: I know that you took your trip to Laos for a month to get to know the food a lot better and that you're planning to also travel more there with groups in the future. But what is the current government situation there now? Like what is the regime like in Laos?  SD: Yeah, I forgot to mention, but yeah, so like even for me growing up, my parents, you know, they fought with the US, so they were scared that I was going to go back to Laos. I grew up with all these stories of their trauma. And so even for me, 16:17 was passed on to me and I was so scared to go back to Laos. I thought I would never go back, but it was through actually connecting with friends in Laos and like that network that really helped ease my nerves and my anxiety. And it since going for the first time in 2019, it has been such a eye-opening experience. I would say the Lao people over there and the government is very much open and accepting of people coming back to understand their roots. You know, we, like to think that 16:47 You know the past is the past but we definitely need to learn from it And are now like you said I bring since 20 It's this will be the fourth year of my Lao foodie tour that I bring people 15 to 20 people with me to experience Laos and it can be people from the diaspora but we've also had so many people that just are so interested in Lao cuisine and want to learn more and it's a beautiful way of connecting with travelers that have like minded of wanting to eat food and travel through three different cities in the north for nine days 17:17 And so I would, I always encourage the diaspora to go back and visit because they, we're very much connected. We still have our aunties or uncles or grandparents that are still living there. So it's that bridge finally that, that we're connecting again.  BC: That's exciting that you go back a lot and help people to reconnect with their roots. Speaking about roots, maybe growing roots here in this country, you're talking about your mom made her own fish sauce and that your dad grew herbs. 17:46 That must've been really hard for them to replicate these recipes from the book I have it here.  SD: It took them time. So right now in this moment, they have all the right herbs and the padaek that's filtered for two, three, five years. And my mom is actually the padaek lady. Everyone comes to her house to get the good padaek. Exactly. So I think that took years in the making in terms of sourcing the plants and the herbs. ‘Cause for my family, we still have to drive an hour away to Madison, 18:16 Wisconsin to like hoard our sticky rice because we eat my mom buys pounds and pounds so she has it ready for the winter months, I would say in the beginning it was hard But my mom was able to find those substitutions and I think that shows the resiliency of immigrants, of refugees like you were able to make it work. I am at the last chapter Lao American Fusion because that shows actually what my mom also did when she she was raising us like I Remember memories of eating sticky rice a spicy dip we call jeow and then like Johnsonville Brats 18:46 and I thought that was like, oh, is that Lao food? But it tasted so good. I still have such wonderful memories of that. And so I think it's the accessibility, like they'll make it work. If you really want to eat it, you'll make it work.  BC: Well, you said that she's the padaek lady, does she have like an actual business, like a license and everything?  SD: So of course not. It's under, low key. I mean, it's not low key now, but like it's no, my mom loves like her friends. It's usually 19:16 networking through the community, the friends, like, oh, you have padaek? Can I buy some?  BC: That's so awesome. I love that. Just to share something with you, like we had actual aunts or uncles who 19:30 opened a store, uncles, because they weren't really related. You know how it is. I had an uncle who opened a Filipino store in town so that our community could get our stuff. Because otherwise it was an hour drive to find the Asian store that had, and they weren't even always Philippine products. They were Vietnamese. The idea that your parents actually grew their own plants. Like I didn't even think about that. Oh my gosh. That is so brilliant. But nobody in your community, like, 20:00 opened their own store? SD: I mean later in the years there were other like Cambodian communities in Janesville and so we started getting pockets of like smaller markets but they wouldn't have like the large markets that you could find all the ingredients so when you needed certain things you could find them in Janesville but then those started like closing as well because you know they didn't do well in this type of town. 20:22 BC: Speaking of Lao cuisine in America, were there any cookbooks in this country that you looked at? Did you like them? Were they good? Were they bad?  SD: Ah I mean, Lao cuisine in mainstream cookbooks, they're very limited. So I'll go backwards in terms of. 20:37 The recent one within at least the US was in 2018 Hawker Fare, but that was a Lao slash Thai Esan. So it wasn't like, for example, it wasn't Lao centered, like just the focus. So it was that one. And then you look back even before then there was a lot of self-published books. 20:54 One of the more recent ones that was self-published but was a really beautifully created one was Chef Noi’s in Vientiane. So she passed away last year, but she was able to keep her legacy through the book. And so that's also one book I recommend because it is a huge 500 page book, but  beautifully photographed as well. Only available in certain spots. I think in Europe it's actually available, but in Laos. And I would say the first one in 1975 or so forth 21:24 was actually The Traditional Recipes of Laos by Pia Singh and I call that as like the Bible of Lao cuisine because that was like the first that was actually published and written down because a lot of these recipes are word of mouth and so that recipe wasn't published by the chef but it was published by the British ambassador because during the war the chef had already passed but the British ambassador asked his wife if it was okay that he take these recipes and publish it and that was the last wishes of the chef and so 21:54 because he published these recipes in the book, a lot of the proceeds were able to help the Lao refugees around the world. And so I think that is such an impact of recipes, of cookbooks. It is not just a physical thing, but it is this bridge that kind of connects all the people together. And so I hope The Lao Kitchen opens more doors to having more Lao recipes because there are a lot more, there a lot of more stories. And actually I had to cut down the recipes, but I have so many more recipes I'd like to 22:24 share as well.  BC: To talk a little bit about the event coming up at MOFAD next week. So excited. You're going to be in conversation with Jujubee and I didn't and I know that they also did an intro into for the cookbook. How did you guys meet? Like how do you guys know each other?  SD: So Jujubee, oh my gosh, I'm a huge fan of Jujubee so I can't wait for the event as well. But Jujubee has been a rising star for Southeast Asia, the community within the drag scene, but also just 22:54 a really incredible person. So Jujubee is a Laotian American drag queen, actress, singer, and they were on RuPaul's Drag Race a few of different seasons and just so beloved within the fan base. And so for me as a kid, I watched like, also queer, watching these types of shows like 23:14 I was like, wow, there's a Lao person on there. Like we are accepted. We have to be a drag queen, but we're accepted. And for me, it was more of like, okay, I need to, it was very inspiring and like. 23:27 I want to find my own path and journey on what that looks like. so actually Jujubee, I've never met Jujubee in person, but we've connected online on Instagram. So that's my connection of what we've always talked back and forth and within the like community base of like different Lao events, Jujubee has always, you know, supported in various ways and like showed up. And so this is another thing that Jujubee is showing up for. And so I'm so grateful.  BC: Wait a minute. You guys are meeting in person for the first time at MOFAD?  SD: Exactly. First time. 23:58 BC: I'm so pumped for that. Oh my gosh. We have sold so many tickets for this event. I'm telling you, it is one of the most popular events on our roster this spring. Partially Jujubee, partially you. The book is beautiful. Like the pictures are so great. So just to finish up, I'm going to ask you the four speed round questions that we ask all of the people that we talk to for the podcast. Um, so let's start with that, with those. What is the one dish that takes you right back into your childhood? Like transports 24:26 you back to the table when you were a kid? SD: It is gang nor mai Lao bamboo stew. It is so good. That's the forage, my mom foraged for everything and then she foraged and then it was just in that bowl of soup gang no mai.  BC:That's in the book right?  SD: It's in the book yep.  BC: All right gonna make that. Since we're The Museum of Food and Drink we got to talk about dranks. What is the one beverage that you have to have during the day that you can't live without? Not water. Because everyone wants to say water. 24:55 SD: I mean, oh, okay, this is what, okay, just thought, oh, this is a good one. So pandan water, it's not just water, it's pandan scented water. And it's naturally flavored. So pandan is a leaf, you see a lot of extract that's used in desserts, but this one, if you can have access to a real pandan leaf, you let it steep for a couple of minutes, it's like tea, and then you put it in the fridge, and then when it's cold and ready, add ice, and it's one of the most refreshing things you'll ever experience. 25:25 It’s wild, I would highly recommend.  BC: So you make your own?  SD: Yeah I have a pandan tree right outside so I make my own.  BC: Oh dude! So there's not a brand that you can recommend like for us people that can't grow pandan?  SD: I mean yeah so there's not a brand but there is like if you go to Southeast Asian or Asian markets and go to the frozen section usually they're in the frozen section so just de-thaw it wash it and then use it the same way just boil it. That's amazing! Okay I love that. So as far as street food, 25:53 because the current exhibition at MOFAD is Street Food City, which talks about the history of street food vendors in New York City since the beginning of the city up until now. What's the best street food that you've had?  SD: I mean, street food is iconic in Laos. I think that is like the main spots to eat. One of the things is probably a papaya salad. Like every corner will be making their own version of papaya salad,  26:19 the funkiness, like, oh, it's so good. So I would say it would be papaya salad. And actually living in Los Angeles, I started my own street food cart. It was called Thum and Thum. And I was on the streets making a lot of papaya salad next to like the taco stands.  BC: Oh my God, when did that happen?  SD: That was in like the 2019, 2020. And I retired it, but that was a period of time. 26:40 BC: What do you want to see more in street food? Like if you were going to see anything on the street out of a cart or a truck, what are you looking to get? It could be Lao, it could be something else.  SD: I love the play, like California food is always like, you know, some type of other culture mixed in with like the seafood. So I love like a taco, but like different meats and mixtures, like a Korean taco or a Lao taco. So those types of things. I love the play with food. 27:09 BC: Well, I saw your fusion taco at the end of the book that's used with made with, is it a fried rice paper?  SD: Yeah, you mold it into a rice paper, the rice paper shell. And then once you deep fry it, it just stays in that mold.  BC: It's, oh, I love that recipe. It's so good. That looks so good. I think maybe you and I need to start a truck. I think so. Maybe we'll do a pop-up while you're here in New York.  SD: There we go. Jujubee, pop-up. That's all we need.  BC: Oh my God, it's gonna be so good. 27:39 Alright, well thank you so much for hanging out with us at Radio MOFAD.  SD: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. 27:53 ID: We just got some ice cream from the Cocoboys and what do you think?  Brittany Wyche (BW): You know it's really good. I've never had Thai milk tea before so it's like a different flavor than how like a boba tea or something like that. But yeah, no, it's really good. I really enjoy it,  Dustin MacKay (DM): And would you like some roasted peanuts, some coconut shavings, some condensed coconut milk, some sprinkles? What do you want?  BW: Let's try the condensed coconut milk. 28:22 DM: It's blue with butterfly pea flour, condensed coconut milk, add a little salt to it to make it salty. ID: Wow, that looks incredible.  Aidan Gelber: I would like kid-sized Thai coffee and condensed coconut milk.  ID: The coconut shell sounds really cool.  DM: You scrape out the inside of the coconut shell, but we leave all that meat in there. 28:46 And as you're eating, the ice cream is melting and it's mixing with that young fresh coconut meat. And it's really delicious that way. So that's like a nice little treat at the end.  ID: We should probably do two different flavors, right? Because it's two scoops, right? Yeah. Yeah.  DM: This young coconut meat, I cooked it down with some sugar for a while until it gets soft and sweet. And then we have some roasted sweet corn and a salted coconut milk caramel that is swirled throughout.  ID: What are your influences here? You've got this sort of Thai 29:16 thing going on. Then when I think of coconut, I think of all sorts of backgrounds and cultures and food.  DM: Yeah, so I got the idea for the business living in Thailand for a couple of years where they eat a lot of coconut stuff, coconut water, they have coconut ice cream. And so that's where it started. And at first I was kind of leaning into more Asian-inspired flavors, but then... 29:43 Gradually I started doing all sorts of different things. So we could be doing like a Mexican hot chocolate one week or... 29:51 You know, like a Bahamian rum raisin or something like that. It kind of goes in any direction in the world, you know what I mean? But a lot of people do still think of us as being like a Thai ice cream place, which that's fine. But like really, I don't want to be boxed in in any way, you know what I mean? I could do... 30:14 a Scandinavian specialty tomorrow if I wanted to.  ID: Right, right. Man, I wonder what that would be. Maybe some pickled herring or something. Oh yeah. But I love this concept. And so how long have you been out here?  DM: This is going to be our third summer in Dumbo, fourth summer in total, and started as a very, very modest... 30:43 can't even call it a cart outside of McCarren Park in the summer of 2023. Really I had two Yeti coolers and I would have the ice cream inside the coolers and I would work off the top of the cooler. And you know, we started building it up little by little over time.  ID: Yeah, what was it like to build it up from just that little tiny bit?  DM: Well, I used to put the two coolers on the back of, on a trailer on the back of my bike and I would ride that. But I had a couple of like pretty scary 31:13 incidents where like the trailer like tipped over and you know it's kind of dangerous and I told my mom about it and she she was very concerned so she helped me subsidize a it's called an icicle tricycle which is like a three-wheeled bike that has a like a big cooler attachment on the front of it and it's specifically geared towards 31:35 selling ice cream or sometimes people you know do ice coffee on it and they install taps and stuff on it. So I had that for a while and that was good. Using the icicle tricycle, using that cart, I had to use dry ice to keep everything cold and that could be you know considerably expensive if you're using 10 sometimes 15, 20 pounds a day in the middle of the summer and not to mention every morning I would have to go and get it and there aren't so many places 32:05 that you can get it anymore. So I would have to go to this one place, shout out Big Freeze in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where I’d pick up my dry ice every morning. But I thought, look, if I could just get a generator to power this freezer, then I wouldn't have to bother with that anymore. So now we have the freezer and it's got a big Jackery battery down here. And yeah, charge it up overnight and then you can rock all day long.  ID: And then do you drive your stuff here in the morning?  DM: No, no, we actually 32:35 are licensed inside the Red Coffee Stand. So we make all the ice cream in there. But I have a partnership with the Red Coffee Stand, so they operate during the day. I make the ice cream in the night. And of course, I keep everything inside. So we're basically two businesses sharing the space.  ID: Yeah, it sounds like a symbiotic relationship, because when you want coffee, maybe later in the day you want ice cream. It works. And I've been to the Red Coffee Stand many times. Shout out, Red Coffee Stand. 33:04 Awesome coffee. That's so cool. So you started out really in the streets, really on your own. And now you're kind of, you were able to get a partnership and you were able to stay out on the street and kind of keep that vibe. 33:20 And so you've actually been to MoFAD before.  DM: I have, yeah. I did an event two summers ago where it was me and Kartik who owns Doosra snacks. They make like a spicy chickpea puff with peanuts and chocolate. It's really delicious. So we both were there serving and actually we did a collaboration on our products. We mixed his chickpea puff snack into the ice cream with some vanilla and it was really delicious actually.  ID: Wow, that sounds amazing. We're gonna have to do that again sometime. 33:50 DM: Gonna have to do that again sometime.  ID: I agree, that sounds amazing. 33:56 ID: Saeng Douangdara will appear on Friday, May 1st in Conversation with Jujubee to discuss The Lao Kitchen. Purchase tickets at mofad.org. Radio MOFAD is by Ivan DeLuce and Bernadette Cura for The Museum of Food and Drink. Thank you for listening.   

 

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/

Moon

Drive Change

https://drivechangenyc.org/

Street Food in DUMBO:

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/