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Matt Katz: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Alison Stewart. We continue now with our weekly series, Food for Thought, and we have two great guests for this segment. On their new podcast, professional home cooks Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman obsess over recipes and how to make them work, and sometimes how to make them even better. It's called The Recipe with Kenji and Deb.

The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, remember that title. You're going to want to subscribe to this podcast as soon as you can. We hear about what makes a perfect recipe, such as techniques, tastes, and of course, the ingredients for common homecooked meals such as stovetop mac and cheese, meatloaf, pancakes, but without the box. New episodes of the podcast comes out every other Monday. Joining us today is a creator and co-host, Kenji López-Alt. He's the James Beard Award-winning author of the bestselling cookbooks, The Food Lab, and The Wok, and the bestselling children's book, Every Night is Pizza Night. Kenji, welcome to All Of It.

Kenji López-Alt: Thanks for having me. How are you doing?

Matt Katz: Doing great. Thank you for being here. Also here is co-host Deb Perelman. She is the creator of the award-winning blog, Smitten Kitchen, and the author of Smitten Kitchen Keepers, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, and Smitten Kitchen Every Day. Deb, welcome to All Of It.

Deb Perelman: Hi. Thanks for having us.

Matt Katz: Of course. Listeners, we'd love to hear from you. What are some of your go-to meals to cook at home? How much time do you spend in the kitchen? Are you trying to improve your cooking skills? What's a dish you're hoping to work on? Are you an amateur chef? What new cuisines have you tried recently? Do you have any questions for our expert home cooks? Give us a call, or send us a text, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. You could also reach out to us on X or Instagram, @AllOfItWNYC.

Guys, you are both home cooks. Who came up with the idea to start a podcast? Was it something that you came up with together? What's the origin story here?

Kenji López-Alt: Deb, do you want me to take this? Do you want to take it?

Deb Perelman: You should take this.

Kenji López-Alt: Well, last year, Deb's book came out called Smitten Kitchen Keepers. As part of her book tour, she came to Seattle. Deb and I have both been writing recipes for over 15 years, almost 20 years each. We've moved in the same circles, but had never actually met each other. When her book came out, and she was coming on the Seattle leg of her tour, she asked if I would be her co-host, which I agreed to because I'd always wanted to meet Deb. We met in-person for the first time, basically, on a stage in front of 800 people. It turned out that when we start talking about recipes, we can just go on and on and on. We had a lot of fun doing it, and it felt like our audience had a lot of fun listening to us.

It developed from there. That was about a year ago. We spent the past year, working on concepts for the show and ideas for the show, finding producers. We ended up working with PRX and Radiotopia, who've been wonderful. That was the origin of it. It's still just as much fun for me. I don't know if it's as much fun for Deb.

Deb Perelman: It's been really fun, especially now that it's out in the world. Not just a bunch of text chains.

Matt Katz: You have one episode out currently. There's other podcasts about food history, food culture. This is a little bit different, Deb. It's sort of news you can use. You want listeners to hear what you have to say, and it's accessible to the amateur cook to somebody who's just trying to get meals together for their kids on a random Tuesday, right?

Deb Perelman: Absolutely. We're both really obsessed with writing recipes, with developing recipes, with the nuances of recipes. We like the idea of taking people under the kitchen hood to show them what our process is, and explain a little bit more about the decisions we're making to get to what we consider our ultimate recipes. We're hoping that we'll help people find their perfect recipes along the way.

Matt Katz: All right. Let's get some--

Kenji López-Alt: Did you just come up with that under the kitchen hood line? Is that one we've been--

Deb Perelman: I think it just came out of nowhere. [laughs] Do we find our new tagline?

[laughter]

Kenji López-Alt: Yes.

Matt Katz: That could be the tagline for season two. I love it. Nice. Let's get into it in terms of some advice here. Sometimes I go to the grocery store and I just might have a couple things written down on my phone that I want to pick up. Is there a strategy in terms of going to the grocery store and making the most of it in a sensible and cost-effective way?

Kenji López-Alt: For me, my primary rule is not don't go hungry, but it's know whether you're hungry or not before you go. For me, at least that plays a big role in how much I end up buying because I attempted by things when I'm hungry.

Matt Katz: Sure.

Kenji López-Alt: If I have an empty fridge, I'm like, “I can go and I'm hungry, and I'll fill it up with stuff.” If I'm just going for a specific recipe, then I make sure to eat a meal beforehand. For me, at least, one of the lessons I try and teach in all of my writing is that techniques are more important than specific recipes, because techniques are what allow you to become more adaptable and use what you have or what you find, as opposed to the strict list of things that are on an ingredients list. I know this is one of the areas actually where I think different home cooks differ, and where Deb and I differ, and I think what makes part of the dynamic out of our show fun because we understand that we have similar goals, but we have different means of getting there, and we have different audiences as well.

Deb Perelman: I love the idea of teaching techniques, and I'm hoping you're going to be taking a lot away. Also, I love recipes. I know how to cook without recipes and I don't want to. I love the framework of a recipe, telling me what to do, what to buy, how much life is full of decisions, days are exhausting, so many things are out of your control. I love the idea of coming home to a specific recipe that will definitely work if I just follow steps A, B, and C. I don't think there's a lot in life that's like that, so that's why I love the idea of recipes. I will even follow a recipe when I'm tired, even if I do know how to riff on it, I just don't want to.

Matt Katz: Wow. How about that? We have callers coming in. Henry in Highland Park, New Jersey. Hi, Henry. Henry, are you there?

Henry: Can you hear me?

Matt Katz: Yes, now we can. Thanks.

Henry: Hi. First of all, I just wanted to say, Kenji, I've been a fan for a very, very long time. I cooked your roasted potatoes yesterday-

Matt Katz: Oh, cool.

Henry: -and it came out as crispy as always.

Matt Katz: Nice.

Henry: My question was about cooking oil. I hear all the time, seed oils are potentially toxic. Canola oil, you shouldn't touch. Obviously, I know olive oil is a high temp. I cook with a lot of cast iron, so I'm always seasoning and making sure everything is nice and shiny as possible. Right now, I'm using safflower oil as my daily high temp all-purpose oil. I'm curious what you use and what you guys might recommend.

Matt Katz: Great question. Guys, do you have thoughts on oil?

Kenji López-Alt: Yes. Well, it depends on what you're doing. Generally, by my stove-top, I keep a few different oils. I'll keep my fancy olive oil, my finishing olive oil, the one that has the pepperiness and the bitterness that you're going to drizzle on foods at the end. I keep that on my counter. I also have a more generic cooking olive oil. I use the Costco brand olive oil, the extra virgin. When I want that extra virgin olive oil flavor on something I'm cooking, I'll use that. Then I also have a jar, a bottle with pour spout of my all-purpose, what I call my neutral oil. That one varies.

I personally have not been following along on the seed oil news issue too closely. I feel like a lot of health-related news reports at this point, it still feels like a lot of it is sensational. Maybe when things settle down a little bit, I will take another look. I figured I've been going through 44 years of life cooking with seed oil, so an extra six months to wait to see what the results are is not going to make or break the rest of my life.

Yes, I do generally use in there. It really depends on what market I've just been to. Sometimes it might just be generic vegetable oil. Sometimes it'll be sunflower oil or safflower oil. Sometimes grape seed. I've been using rice bran oil as well. Sometimes I go to the Asian supermarket, and their rice bran oil seems to always be on sale, so I'll buy that. I'm not too picky. When it comes to the neutral oil, the one that I'm just using to sear things in and just give you a non-stick surface on your pan, I'm not particularly picky about that. What about you, Deb?

Matt Katz: Yes, what about you?

Deb Perelman: I'm about the same with that. I've read some of the stories, but I'm not really sure where to go with them, and so I tend to switch around. I probably have used safflower. I've used sunflower. I've used grape seed oil. I've probably have some high heat avocado oil. I feel like I've got a little bit of everything, and I just switch around and sometimes just grab whatever the store has. I understand it's not we're going to be drinking a cup of it. That's not the goal. It's a means to an end, which is usually getting something crispy, or not imbuing it with flavor while you do it.

Matt Katz: We have a question via text. Do these expert cooks have any advice or ideas of things to prep for lunch to take to work? I've grown weary of sandwiches. Any take-to-work lunch suggestions?

Deb Perelman: I would say my favorite thing for work is actually leftovers. If you really liked what you had for dinner the night before or if you can have an extra portion available, I feel that's the easiest way to keep it fresh. How about you, Kenji?

Kenji López-Alt: Well, a couple things. I would say that one of my most popular articles of all time was making these little, they're basically like DIY cup noodles, where you have pre-cooked noodles. You have some specific ingredients, like you can put some shrimp in there, some herbs in there. You put a little tablespoon of a bullion paste or say a Thai curry paste or something like that. Essentially, you make a concentrated soup base inside a mason jar, and then at work, you just pour boiling water into it. You get a homemade cup noodle with whatever ingredients you want. Beef jerky is really good in those, by the way.

Matt Katz: Oh wow.

Kenji López-Alt: It comes up in the hot water, but you know what, I've been into more recently because I have a daughter going to school every day and I pack her lunch every day, is getting a bento box, like a Japanese-style bento box, which has dividers in there, because I feel like when you have dividers in your container, that automatically makes you feel, "All right, I need to put something with different colors in each section." It gives you an array of things. One of them is going to be a snack, but the little one's going to be maybe a piece of chocolate or a cookie. It gives you the framework for full meal. Deb, what you were saying, it takes some of the thinking out of it. It's like, I'm just going to fill up these five little slots with things I pull from the fridge.

Usually 3 out of 5 of them are going to be some raw fruit or vegetable. Then the other one is going to be a leftover. It could be a sandwich. It could be some leftover pasta, something like that. I like having the bento box, and taking the thought out of how I'm going to arrange everything and making sure that I have a selection of things for my daughter. Well, I work from home so I'd have to do that, but if I was going to work and packing my own lunch, I would do the same for myself.

Deb Perelman: I use that, too, for my kids when I pack them lunch, because they love grazing and it just makes it really easy. If it's one thing they can just reject that whole thing and change their mind, but it's a bunch of things. Eat something from everything usually.

Matt Katz: Totally, and then you get a well-rounded meal. Let's talk to Julia in Mashpee, Massachusetts. Hi, Julia.

Julia: Hello. I just recently changed grocery stores to a different one on the Cape. There are yards of different types of canned fish, salmon, tuna, sardines, anchovies. I do use some, but there's got to be a whole culture that's using it. How do other people use different types of canned and tin fish as the basis of a protein meal?

Matt Katz: Wow. Tin fish is hot right now, right? Tin fish is everywhere.

Deb Perelman: Yes, I feel Spain is the land of tin fish the most.

Kenji López-Alt: At least a high-end tin fish, it feels like.

Deb Perelman: High-end. For lunch yesterday, my husband got a Niçoise salad, and I thought that was, like, I was reminded of how it's such a great all-purpose salad, and I feel you could swap in almost any tin fish there. I know authentically you won't have all these things in it, but the way we eat Niçoise in this country where you have a little bit of green beans and some boiled potatoes and maybe a halved cooked egg and some lettuce, it feels a really great all-purpose, well-rounded lunch salad, and I feel you could try any of those tin fish in there, and it would be a nice addition. What were you thinking, Kenji? [laughs]

Kenji López-Alt: Well, literally just last night, I was trying to come up with dinner, and I went into our pantry and looked at our tinned fish collection for dinner. We keep sardines and anchovies. We keep a few different types of tunas. Last night, actually I ended up using ventresca, which is tuna belly in a can. What we did was I toasted some sourdough bread. I made a quick salad by soft boiling some eggs and combining that with the ventresca, with some scallions and herbs and radishes, chopped up radishes, and basically made like a tartine. Put that on top of the toasted bread. Put a little bit of halved cherry tomatoes on there. Then I put a six-minute egg in the middle.

Right now, Oeufs mayonnaise is a popular thing, like soft-boiled eggs covered in mayonnaise. I made a very thin mayonnaise, which you can do just by taking store-bought mayonnaise and thinning it out with extra virgin olive oil. I like doing that all the time, but I put the egg on the middle of this tartine, coated it, napped it in mayonnaise, and then served it straight like that. You break the egg over this tuna salad, and you get all the yolk over the tuna salad and you eat it, and it's messy, and it was really delicious.

Matt Katz: Oh, that sounds fantastic.

Kenji López-Alt: It would've worked with sardines. It would've worked with any kind of can tuna, I think, or any kind of canned fish.

Deb Perelman: Threw it together on a Tuesday night.

Matt Katz: I don't know if listeners literally heard my stomach grumble just now [laughs], explaining that meal. We are going to have to go, but I want you guys to tell me real quick, what to expect this season on the podcast The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. What kind of meals will we be hearing about?

Deb Perelman: Right now we're focusing each episode on a different dish, and we're going through some comfort food classics right now. We've done tomato soup, we've done buttermilk pancakes, stovetop mac and cheese. We've got a meatloaf episode coming up. It's really fun, and it's stuff where we have a large range of recipes available to us, and there's a lot of history and interest to the dishes. I think it should be really fun to listen to.

Kenji López-Alt: Great. Our goal is for listeners to come away feeling empowered, feeling that they can go into the kitchen with a bit of extra knowledge and a little bit more comfort. That's our goal. We want to empower people to become more comfortable and better home cooks.

Matt Katz: Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman are the creators and hosts of the podcast, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. New episodes come out every other Monday. Thank you, guys. Bon Appétit.

Kenji López-Alt: Thank you.

Deb Perelman: Thank you.

 

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