Fried egg & ham salad, caramelizing your vegetables in cream, sourdoughnuts and pannetonuts—Kristen gets a peek into the collective supergenius brain of 'Ideas in Food' bloggers and Curiosity Doughnut shop-owners Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot.
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Genius-Hunter Extra-Credit:
A very special thanks to listeners Alyson (@dinnerswithinreason), Alex (@alexandraholbrook), and Pamm (@clancy.7) for your stories this week.
What are the recipes you repeat again and again during the week? Brag about them at genius@food52.com.
Kristen Miglore: (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, lifelong genius hunter. For almost a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves and we get to hear from you.
This week I'm talking with Aki Kamozawa & Alex Talbot, the minds behind Ideas in Food. Now, Ideas in Food was one of the earliest food blogs. They launched in 2004, 17 years ago. They're also a consulting company, and they've written a series of cookbooks, and they are still going strong, 17 years later. It also led them to launch a James Beard-nominated mini doughnut empire, Curiosity Doughnuts. I have always found Aki & Alex's work to be incredibly inspiring. They endlessly experiment with no fear of failure, and then they share it all with the world, along with where they might want to take those ideas next.
So you might remember them from Genius Recipes past, like their Korean style chicken wings that have a trick for extra crackly skin in the oven, not the deep fryer. Which, by the way, would be an excellent snack for a Super Bowl party of one. Or you might remember their cream caramelizing technique that broke the Internet in 2019. I talked about that one in last week's Play Me a Recipe episode. So in that one, you put eggs, or carrots, or whatever ingredient you want to cook in a puddle of heavy cream in a cold skillet. You stick it on the stove and heat it until the cream breaks into brown butter and buttermilk that steams away, leaving your food tasting just unholy good. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and it has completely changed the way I cook. And now, they're back to change how we cook forever again. They first posted this technique on their Instagram back in December for a faster and arguably better egg salad. Because it's not hard-boiled, it's fried—more on this technique to come. I thought it was genius to a tee unexpected, delicious, and simple enough that I could make it right away.
And then, even though I grew up a picky eater keeping my distance from all mayo-based salads, and I still harbor some definitely irrational hesitations about them, my husband and I just kept making it. We’ve had it about four times in the next week for last-minute dinners, and many, many times since. This recipe gives me energy for 2021 because my family has our ruts and our creature comforts that we keep turning back to when we just don't know what to cook and don't have it in us to come up with anything new. I'm guessing we all have some version of that, but Aki and Alex's recipe reminds me that there will always be new ideas out there that we can quickly fold into our lives. And suddenly we will have brand new go-to meals that our families will ask for by name, just like that. Fried egg salad. Fried egg salad. Fried egg salad. Sounds pretty great, right?
I am very excited to find more of those this year. And by the way, this would be a good time to mention that If you would like to add more of these to your repertoire this year, subscribing to this podcast-this very podcast right here is a great place to start so that you can hear about all the recipes as fast as I can sling them out. Now, here are Aki and Alex to talk about their career, their creative process, their wins, and fails. Plus, we will get to hear from some of you at the end about a few of the things that you are excited to cook for the first time this year. But first I wanted to know how Aki and Alex met.
Aki Kamozawa: Oh, do you want to tell her? Or do you want me to tell her?
Alex Talbot: It's going to be the same story with just a different tone.
Aki and Alex laugh
Aki: So we met at Clio in Boston and I was in for a stage because I was applying for an internship there in the kitchen. And Alex was working the line. And it was all boys. And Kenny was asking if anybody had anything for me to do and they all said no. And he was like, are you kidding me? Are you guys telling me that everyone's going to be ready for the service thirty minutes early because nobody has anything for her to do? So then Alex came around and showed me how to slice scallions and chop chives. Perfect little wheels, he told me. Make sure I back slice with my knife and cut perfect little wheels.
Kristen: And Alex, what's your version of the story, then?
Alex: Oh, no, it's probably about the same. I was pretty much an ass.
Aki, Alex & Kristen laugh
Kristen: Can each of you describe then what exactly your perfect version of this egg salad would be?
Alex: Warm toast with butter, egg salad on top. You are good.
Aki: I like it on soft bread.
Alex: But that said, I really like egg salad.
Aki: He loves egg salad, and he doesn't get enough.
Alex: I do not get enough, and part of it is because-
Aki: He won't make it.
Alex: I won't make it for myself. Because I don't want to peel eggs. Whether you steam them for thirteen minutes or you boil them and turn the water off or do the hokey pokey. You still have to peel the eggs. So no thank you.
Aki: I just wasn't making it enough to suit him.
Alex: I had to convince my daughter to peel the eggs. It’s either feast or famine. We had some onions and I thought, I’m going to make something really quick. A little oil, onions, ham, and then cracked the eggs on top. We’ve always made a slowly steamed egg. Aki usually does it on top of angel hair pasta. So she should make angel hair pasta, and then you put these butter steam eggs. Slide them right on top of the pasta, it's phenomenal.
Aki: The yolks are still runny, but the whites are completely set.
Alex: Here I took the same principle, and then once everything was cooked full and the yolks were just cooked. I dumped it right into a bowl, grabbed a pair of scissors, and started cutting everything up. I added mayonnaise, a little mustard and we were done. It wasn't like, hey, I'm making a recipe. But the funny thing is, once I did it, the person I thought of almost instantly was you [Kristen]. I was like, she's going to love this. There's no doubt on Earth. Once I'm done with my fourth egg salad sandwich, I'm going to shoot her a note.
The funniest thing is, now you have me remembering. You've seen the semi-fancy Japanese take on egg salad sandwich that you see everywhere, right? It's egg salad with an egg on the inside of it. We made fun of it. We made the really fast egg salad, dumped it on toast, and then put a fried egg on top of it
Aki: And then halfway through eating, he’s like, take a picture!
Alex: It was a hot mess but it was delicious. My perfect version has the yolks just cooked, so they've still got an orange hue as opposed to like that chalkiness to it. And the whites are tenderly cooked as opposed to fried with the caramelized bits underneath.
Aki: It mimics the tenderness of a hard-boiled egg.
Alex: Scissors were key. How else were you going to cut up a pan full of eggs? I'm not going to put it on the cutting board, start cutting it up! But we've used scissors for years, Scissors are their own Genius Recipe.
Kristen: (voiceover) This is the Genius Recipe Tapes. We'll be right back.
Kristen: Well, just to take a quick step back, for any of our listeners who aren't familiar with your whole journey, would you mind just sharing how you got started and decided to start a blog, and then how that led to cookbooks and the doughnut shop?
Alex: Aki and I met in 1997 in the kitchen of Clio working for Ken Oringer in Boston. 24 years later and we have not stopped cooking next to each other in so many ways. We have a tendency, a uniqueness, to be probably five years ahead of our time, But by being five years ahead of our time, we're not always understood at the time. And people like, wait a second. But from Boston, we then got a job out in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, running a boutique restaurant and hotel on a 4000-acre elk ranch. The hotel had eight rooms. It was gorgeous.
Aki: Hunting, their big thing was hunting.
Alex: Yes, the owners of the property were into hunting. They also have an elk preserve on the property for hunters. And it was kind of this yin yang thing going on, but it didn't wasn't nearly as yin yang. The hunting and the fine dining just didn't want to mesh. That's and that's where we started the blog. So the first general manager ended up leaving and a new general manager came on. He had a blog (and this is about 2004) And he saw what we were doing in the kitchen and said you guys should start a blog, and we're like, what's a blog? And he showed us what it was and so then Aki signed up with Typepad, which is a paid blogging service. Everyone was trying to get a free blogging service but Aki signed up for a paid one, And I asked why pay? And she's like, well, because if you pay, you will actually do it. If it's free, then you're not going to sit down and do anything. And that's when we started. Now, if you look back to the first thing from December of 2004, we haven't changed much. Originally, we were going to write in different fonts so you could tell who was who. It was sporadic at first and grew.
Aki: It was really helpful in Pagosa Springs because we had so few customers coming through. It gave us someone to cook for because people were reading and looking at the pictures of the food and asking questions about the food. And so it really helped us feel like we had an audience when there weren't as many people in the hotel as we wanted.
Alex: After our daughter was born, we moved down to Pennsylvania. That's where we ended up writing our books and creating the workshop and did more of the classes. We have more space there. We were looking for houses and we stopped by this local market called the Stockton Market in New Jersey. We used to go there when we were living in Levittown, Pennsylvania. It was a cute indoor market with different stalls and vendors. From pizza to barbecue to macarons to crepes to ice cream. We popped in there, just reliving old times, and I saw an ice cream machine for sale in the back of the market. So I found the market manager and asked how much is this ice cream machine for sale? I was thinking, I’m going to buy this ice cream machine for cheap out of the back of this market. It's going to be great. It's going to be a steal. And she's like, the ice cream people are leaving the market, but they're selling their stuff. They only want $28,000. And I was like, well, that's not going to happen.
Aki: It's like the most expensive ice cream machine ever.
Alex: But that said they're leaving, so there's going to be a space open. Well, we're moving back in the area, I'd love to do something. I'd love to do frozen custard. And she looked at me and she said, you're going to need a little bit more than that. Because obviously, the ice cream people just went out of business for not selling ice cream. What else are you going to do? And was like, I don't know, what about doughnuts? It literally fell into my mouth that way. The funny story is…
Aki: We had a conversation about it on the drive down to Pennsylvania that he does not remember.
Alex: I don't remember this conversation at all, but Aki says, no, we talked about it in the car.
Aki: Because we were talking about wanting to change lanes, to do something different. We had Amaya now. And we couldn't really be so fluid with our approach to working and waiting for people to call us for consulting and things like that. And I was like, if we were going to do something, maybe we should try something retail. I asked him what he wanted to do, and he said I'm going to do doughnuts. I didn't see that coming! And they had a doughnut robot.
Alex: A doughnut robot is a conveyor belt of dropping doughnuts. It drops the dough into the oil, it moves along the path, and then falls into sugar. And you watch it from the window. The doughnut robot is a magical device, right? Battered, fried, doughnut at the end.
Aki: People would stand in front of the window and watch the doughnuts being made and then run into the store to get them.
Alex: So the funny thing is, we started writing about this doughnut shop on the blog that we're going to open up. The week before we opened, we got an email from Tejal Rao and she was working for Bloomberg at the time. She had been reading the blog for years and we didn't know that. She asked, do you mind if I cover the opening? She pops in and we talk and we show her the whole thing and she runs this amazing piece. I still smile every time I look at it. It’s a great piece about our doughnuts and what we were doing.
But in my haste to get everything opened, I cleaned the doughnut robot and turned it on, and saw that it heated up. But I didn't cook doughnuts in it. So the morning of the opening. I'm supposed to make doughnuts, I turned the doughnut robot on and I tried to fry it and my doughnut didn't cook. Apparently, the high limit switch on that doughnut robot was bad. Thankfully, there's another frier in the kitchen and I turned that on and fried doughnuts that weekend. But the batter that I was going to use in the doughnut robot was supposed to come out of a cylinder deposit. So I threw it into a pastry bag and just started piping it. Churro-esque, Long John-esque. And we had these drop doughnuts. They were ugly as sin.
Aki: They were good though.
Alex: They were absolutely delicious but ugly as sin. Over time, we now make 16 different doughnuts on a daily basis. We call our new fashion base, which started as a buttermilk doughnut. It then became an apple cider doughnut, after somebody asked why you don’t make an apple cider doughnut.
Aki: Oh my gosh, that was such a struggle to get him to make apple cider doughnuts.
Alex: I am headstrong and stupid.
Kristen: Wait a minute. I'm just putting together that you didn't want to make an apple cider doughnut. But when I reached out to you about Genius Desserts, that's what you sent me, and I fell in love with it. And it's in the Genius Desserts cookbook.
Alex: Yep, that’s the one!
Aki:That's usually what happens. He's super stubborn. Then once he finally decides to do it, he'll do it right.
Alex: I knew I didn't want to do one until I got pushed off the cliff. And then I was like, let's do an apple cider doughnut. And then, how do you make it really great? It’s borrowing ideas. The apple cider doughnut uses the starch paste in it, which I stole from Aki because Aki was working on milk bread at the time. And I was like, that would be really good for a doughnut.
Kristen: What can we expect to see from Curiosity Doughnuts coming up in 2021? Or do not know yet?
Alex: I don't know. When we started this whole thing off, Aki asked, what do you want to do? I was like, I just want to change the world of doughnuts.
Kristen: That’s all.
Alex: But I think we are. Again, we started the doughnut shop five years ago. I didn't plan the doughnut shop to begin with. But I don't plan any of it. It is like, hey, this looks neat. Let's try that or we'll experience something or see something and say, hey, another thing to try.
Kristen: So all along the way Ideas in Food, the blog has never been like the main thing you do. But it has always kind of facilitated all the other things you do?
Aki: Yes.
Alex: Yes.
Aki: Absolutely.
Kristen: And it still does.
Alex: And It still does. 15, almost 16 years later. That’s crazy.
Kristen: And now here are some of the things that our listeners are looking forward to cooking this year.
Listener Alison: Hi. I'm Alison from Cary, North Carolina, and the thing I'm most excited to make this year is the Bo Ssäm from Momofuku. I used to live in New York City, and I loved going to those restaurants with my core group of friends. And it's actually funny because Bo Ssäm has been on my bucket list of things I want to cook for a long time. And a friend of mine sent us the Bo Ssäm dinner from Momofuku this year to celebrate the new year and the inauguration. So I actually got a refresher course in what it should taste like.
Listener Alex Holbrook: Hi Food52, my name is Alex Holbrook from Hanover Mass. And in 2021 I'd love to learn more about baking with tahini. Over the past few years, I have experimented with different brands of tahini, different roasts of tahini. And I've just fallen in love with its complex, nutty, bittersweet flavors and the depth of flavor that it adds to so many of my savory dishes. I would love to translate that into my baked goods. Also. I've taken so many great classes at Sofra Bakery in Cambridge, Mass. They make a delicious tahini brioche, date orange brioche, tahini shortbread and hopefully they could give some tips. Thanks so much.
Listener Pam: Hi, my name is Pam, and I'm calling from Way, Northern California. This year, I'd like to try my hand at making a Persian rice dish called Shirin Polo. It's a type of jeweled rice with fruits, nuts, candied citrus peel, and spices. I've never eaten Shirin Polo, but in photos from cookbooks, magazines, and on Instagram. It always looks so delicious. My daughter's father is from Tehran. He came to California as a young adult in the late seventies, just before the Iranian revolution. It's through this connection that I was first introduced to Persian food, including Ghormeh Sabzi, Abgoosht, and Fesenjan. I love Persian rice. Persians make something called Tahdig, which translates to the bottom of the pot. And it's this bottom layer of rice or potatoes or lavash or other bread that's done to create a golden crisp as it cooks. I always say tahdig is life. Anyway, back to Shirin Polo, It's perhaps one of the more intricate rice dishes, so I thought, with its complexities, that I'd like to give it a go.
Kristen: (voiceover) Thanks for listening and for sending in your stories. Our show was put together by Coral Lee, Emily Hanhan, and me, Kristen Miglore. If you have any hot leads on the next recipe that I will be making four times a week, I want it. Email it to me at genius@food52.com or tag me on Instagram at miglorious. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes, please do take a minute to rate and review us. It really helps. See you next time.