Eat Cho Food blogger and author of the new Chinese baking book, 'Mooncakes and Milk Bread', Kristina Cho shares with us what she'll be making for Lunar New Year. She also lets us in on the secret ingredient in her Pau Pau's (Fa Gao) steamed cupcake recipe.
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For 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. This week, I had the chance to sit down with Kristina Cho, blogger at Eat Cho Food and author of Mooncakes and Milk Bread, the first English language cookbook to celebrate Chinese bakery treats. That was so coveted after a launch in October that it sold out, and counterfeit copies started to circulate. Happily, real ones are back on shelves now. In this episode, we'll get to hear more from Kristina about mooncakes, milk bread, and shiny fruit celebration cakes. And some of her favorite things to make for Lunar New Year, including her grandma's beautiful steamed cupcakes that just so happened to share the same secret ingredient as my grandmother's biscuits. But first, here's Kristina on some of the most memorable genius tips that she picked up early in her making life.
Kristina Cho: Learning to bake in middle school was my way of finding independence in the kitchen because my family has a lot of cooks. My grandparents own Chinese restaurants, so there are a lot of good cooks around. If I started going to the kitchen and said, I'm going to make dumplings today, there would be many voices in the kitchen telling me what I should do. But no one in my family knew how to make a cheesecake. So I found someone, so I found peace and independence there. So I think that's what drew me to baking. It was something that I could learn on my own and teach myself and create my own opinions about what would go into a great cheesecake or cookies and things like that. And I was also drawn to these recipes because, as an Asian American kid, I would see all this stuff like other bakeries or at the grocery store. They weren't the ordinary things my family would make or buy for us. That made it exciting. I want to make what I see at my friend's houses or the grocery store been in the Midwest for so long. My family immigrated there in the late sixties. So, they spent a lot of time in America, and I think many Midwestern sweets are very fudgy, very sweet. And, it's a joke in the Asian community about how a lot of desserts, the best compliment that you can get is from your mom or your auntie saying, oh, that's not too sweet. That's the best thing you can hear because many Asian desserts, you don't want them to be too cloyingly sweet. Or feel like you need to go to the dentist after. And I feel like when I learned, oh, just adding some salt on top of chocolate chip cookies, this is what we're looking for. I carried on to how I bake now. Something a little sweet, a little salty, and that is something that. I might even be a little heavy-handed with the amount of salt that I like to add to my baked goods, but that is the flavor profile that I love that my family loves. And I genuinely think it enhances the natural flavors of anything you're adding to it.
Kristen: And they get your mom's approval, too?
Kristina: Yeah. Which is harder to do. A lot of times, she says, hmm, this is good. , she goes, oh, this is not too sweet and enthusiastic. That is what you want to hear.
Kristen: After this period of teaching yourself to bake, you didn't end up going into cooking right away. You started your career as an architect, but food drew you back. That's when you created your blog.
Kristina: I studied architecture and moved to the bay area to practice as an architectural designer. And I also worked as an interior designer. And during that time, I was always cooking. Even in college, I was always cooking. I was always baking. It was my way to expend any extra creative energy or relieve some stress in my life. I first created each show food as an actual blog and Instagram accounts during one of the moments in my architectural career where I felt very disappointed and creatively just unhappy. While I was at work, I brainstormed recipes or figured out my schedule to have enough time to shoot something on the weekend or after work. I was late to work a lot because, in the mornings, I would practice by taking pictures of my breakfast and eating it on the way to catch my bus to work. But I remember that I was just exploring a lot during that time.
I was trying to figure out my culinary voice because I love to do everything. I love to bake. I also love to cook. I started on a deep dive of making my homemade dumplings. I remember every Sunday, I just spent the afternoon by myself in my kitchen, making dumplings, tweaking my dumpling dough recipe, and experimenting with different fillings. And I still do that now, but it was a very dumpling-filled time of my life then. And it just taught me a lot about patience and just how much creativity you can have and use it as such a simple recipe. The dough is one of the most simple Recipes out there. A dumpling has so many infinite flavor combinations also different textures. Literally just flour and water and a pinch of salt, but any change, even a 10-gram change in your water content, change the texture of your dough, and different dumplings have different textures that you're going for. And so I just learned a lot during that time of making a lot of times.
Kristen: And through doing it every Sunday, you had a lot of chances to keep getting better and better at it.
Kristina: Exactly. I started teaching dumpling classes, and I told all my students that making dumplings is all about practice. And the more you do it, you are absolutely going to get better at it. I don't expect anyone to know how to expertly make dumplings on the first try because so much of it is feel. Even though I encourage people to use a scale for their doughs to get the intended texture. But then there are so many outside factors, the humidity in the air, and so on. Then you start to develop intuition the more you do something. Because you know what it should feel like. And that's something you can't teach about doing it.
Kristen: I feel even in-expert dumplings are still going to be pretty great to eat, even if they don't look perfect. Or even if some explode you'll, you'll still end up with something tasty along the way.
Kristina: Luckily, even an ugly dumpling is a delicious doubling. I feel that should be a children's book out the pleating of everything. It's just showing. When you see the beautiful or expertly pleated dumplings on Instagram, it's just a show skill, but they all taste the same, and even a well-plated dumpling might not taste good. Has your filling been a little weird? I wouldn't stress about it too much. It's all about the inside, what's inside–in dumplings and people. The first dumpling I ever fell in love with was when I recreated my family's dumpling. Again, it's one of those moments that really. I never even tried to make my parent's version because they always did it themselves when I was home. But I was living in San Francisco, craving the food my family made her, my parents made. And I made my it's, the Cho family, dumpling recipe that it's a combination of pork and shrimp which is pretty classic combo is pork and shrimp and cabbage and a bunch of different seasonings. And when I tasted it, it was one of those moments, oh, I'm back home again. It's crazy how easy it is to recreate that flavor. And that moment of recognition that it's just right. how it should be,
Kristen: So even if you're at home here, in California, you feel like you're back home in Cleveland if you can make that dumpling.
Kristina: Yeah, exactly. Dumplings transcend location.
Kristen (voiceover): Hey, It's Kristen. If you're enjoying this chat with Kristina as much as I did, head over to The Genius Recipe Tapes and hit follow. So you don't miss out on other stories like this one and like our recent episode with Brian Hogan, Stewart host of the salt and spine podcast, who shared with us his favorite cookbooks from last year and what we can look forward to cooking in 2020. In the second half of this episode, Kristina tells us about the happy pivot that helped her book, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, come together during the pandemic. Plus, recipes for Lunar New Year, including one with a stroke of genius that both her grandma and mine happened to share. Can you guess what it might be? Stay tuned to find out.
Kristen: You've been doing your blog for a while, and then you get the idea for this book. Can you tell us about the decision to write your book and what learning moments happened along the way?
Kristina: I think "Mooncakes and Milk Bread" is really special. And as we were to say about my own book, but I think it's special because there's not anything out there like it, it's a rare opportunity to write the first modern or primary, English written book about a subject. There's no comparable Chinese baking or Asian baking book out there. So it's truly an honor to have that opportunity. But it also created a lot of exciting challenges that I had to face on my own creating the recipe list was oddly easy, yet oddly challenging to determine, because again, this is the first book that covered these things. Several recipes were absolutely required to be in the book because you can't have a Chinese baking book without pineapple buns. Also called bolo bao, cocktail buns. You need egg tarts. Those are the iconic things that absolutely need to be in there. But then, at the same time, personally, I love to share creative interpretations of things. I hate saying fusion, but it's just how I interpret this style or the techniques that I've learned from studying Chinese baking into creating something more of my own as an example; some of those things are in the bun chapter.
Parmesan and sambal buns in there, finding other ingredients, I would work within the same style and dough techniques. So it was a challenge to determine the 80 or so recipes that would fit in the book. And I wanted each recipe to highlight. Either a story a facet about Chinese American life. I wanted it to showcase a different technique. Maybe another way to pinch and pull the dough into various shapes and a different flavor profile that you might not think about before. So that was my mindset going into writing the book. And then when it came down to testing the book, I had about a month and a half, maybe two months of pre-pandemic life, where I was just carefree, testing recipes, having as many flours I wanted, and going to the grocery store every other day to pick up ingredients. And then March 2020 happened. And all of a sudden, everyone was making sourdough, and I couldn't find bread flour at all. It was challenging to go to the grocery store to find different ingredients. It changed how I approached my recipes and what the final ones ended up becoming. But for the better, I think they became a lot more efficient and streamlined. I had many other recipe ideas that were maybe a little more extravagant. Oh, I wanted to try all these flavors combos or find passionfruit or yuzu. But I couldn't find it. And I reminded myself that, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, there was a tough small Chinatown there, but I couldn't, I, when I go home, I can't find those things. And I should focus on making this book as accessible as possible. Because I just knew that that was going to be a critique potentially in the future that, oh, you might not need this baking book is not that accessible, but I think it is the majority of the buck you can make using the essential bake ingredients. So you can get it at a conventional grocery store. The primary milk bread, you don't need anything from a specialty grocery store to make it. And it's a foundational dough for a lot, a majority of the recipes in the book. So I think having that restriction from the pandemic of not being able to access a ton of ingredients made my book what it is today. And I think that is why it's a very bake-able book. That was one of the unexpected perks of writing a book during a pendant.
Kristen: So what did the yuzu and passionfruit recipes become?
Kristina: I wanted to do a yuzu custard stuffed milk bread donut. Still, instead, I made a milk bread donut with salted egg yolk, pastry cream, and that entire thing like salted egg yolks are a ubiquitous ingredient for both savory and sweet Chinese recipes. Again, it adds that salt, that nice salty umami, is baked good. And I want to make a donut. I can't get these tropical fruits right now. And instead, I was like, oh, I have salted egg yolks that I already made to make mooncakes and things like that. And I found that the saltiness, and of course the achiness worked well in pastry cream. And that doughnut became and still is one of my favorite recipes in the book. And then, for the sponge cakes, instead of it being super-specific, I just simply called the sponge cakes Shiny Fruit Celebration cakes. Instead of being passionfruit, I left it very vague and more encouraging. Use whatever fruit they have, and this highlighting fruit is one of the easiest things to decorate a cake with because you don't need to make sure your butter's cold or have different cookie cutters and stuff. Just have a sharp knife or literally just delicately lay berries to create a lovely pattern. So again, the recipes came, they became different and more adept.
Kristen: Well, this is an excellent segue to just talk a little bit more about your book and introduce our listeners to it. If they haven't already baked from it or haven't already picked up a copy. An excellent place to start, I think, would be to just talk about the two different treats that are in the title and why you chose to highlight those two. Was there a special significance to those two mooncakes and milk bread?
Kristina: Yeah, I so appreciate that question because there are a lot of subtle details in the book too. The chapter names or, of course, the book title. I picked mooncakes and milk bread because those are two very iconic items in a Chinese bakery, but they're different. In the sense that a mooncake I would consider to be a very traditional old school style of dessert, which is very rooted in Chinese history, even though a few other cultures out there have a similar pastry. Still, mooncakes are, I would say so very Chinese, and milk bread is also very Chinese, of course, but milk bread is a little bit more modern and came to be part of Chinese culture through Hong Kong. And there's a lot of British influence there from British rule over many, many years that brought fat, milk, and butter into their diet and the way they develop recipes. And so, I liked that dichotomy of something very old and something new. There are many traditional recipes in the book, but many modern interpretations of flavors and techniques are also used. In tradition, mooncakes and something a little bit more modern, but still is tradition, by way of milk bread.
Kristen: Would you also mind just describing how mooncakes factored into your life? What your experience was of eating them and similarly for milk bread too.
Kristina: So mooncakes are traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival, which happens end of September and early October. The mooncakes that I grew up eating are primarily Cantonese-style cakes. Different parts of China have different styles of mooncakes. There's typically some sort of crust. And then a dense, almost fudgy, filling in the middle. Sometimes it's savory filled with pork, but I grew up with the Cantonese style ones that I would like a fig newton. The dough is soft, a little true. It has some give to it and so many different filling options. The classic ones are red bean paste and a light Lotus paste. Often, you find nuts mixed with honey or some type of syrup in there. And then my favorite ones have always had a salted egg yolk in the middle because I like the flavor of that saltiness compared with this one. Fudgy filling around it. And they're typically stamped with a gorgeous, beautiful, intricately carved mold. Traditional ones are made out of wood, and then I prefer to use the newer ones. I find them a lot easier to use are just plastic plunger-style mooncake molds. And they are one of my favorite kitchen tools. I use them a lot during the holidays to make cookies too. So they're not only for.
Kristen: They seem like they would be really challenging to make. But I know that you have said that they're not. Do you have any words of encouragement for home bakers to try them out themselves?
Kristina: Mooncakes get a bad rap for being an unattainable recipe to me, just because they're just so beautiful. You get taken aback; how can I ever make anything so beautiful, but you just think about how all that comes from the mold you're using. It's just, it's created in there. All you're doing a stamping. It. My grandma told me that only a true master can make Nin cakes, but she doesn't make them. And so when I started to make them on my own, I realized, oh, it's not that hard; I've done so many other types of recipes that were much more labor-intensive. If anyone has ever tried making a French macaron before. I never want to do that ever again, but moving mooncake's you can. There are two styles of mooncakes in my book; there's a traditional red bean mooncake of a salted egg. And that's a much more if you want to make all the components from scratch, you can, you can feel a true mooncake master, but then the honey pistachio mooncakes, you can make all of that within an hour. It's not that hard. I wanted to create a delicious filling, somewhat traditional using nuts, and something sweet in there has a little bit of a block of all flavor vibe in there, but still, the use of nuts and sweetness is very Chinese for mooncakes. If you have a food processor that takes A few minutes to whiz up. And the most challenging thing about making them cakes is just coring, a mold. Although you can just make them round, it's finding a mold and then finding the golden syrup to make sure your dough is nice and supple, but you can get that online or at a specialty grocery store. So that's the only challenging part making them as very, very. And my family, during or after dinner, you would have a platter of mooncakes, and the intention is to share mooncakes. You rarely ever eat an entire mooncake tier itself. One, because they're pretty rich, especially a big mooncake, it's hard to eat the entire one. And then the second part is just for a tradition, a mooncake, you should be splitting with your family. Because it symbolizes gathering and togetherness. So you cut it into different wedges, sample the flavors, have a cup of tea, and that's how you end your family meal together.
And then for milk bread, I ate a ton of milk bread as a kid. Because I was just obsessed with it. I think milk bread appeals to children, especially kids who don't eat the crust on their sandwiches. You always ask your parents to cut it off because milk bread is so soft. Even the crust of milk bread barely exists. It's just a thin little layer. It's still very, very smooth, and I eat it all the time because it's the base for essentially all of the big buns that you find at a Chinese bakery. Many readers have told me, oh, I never realized that it was the same dough. That's the magic of milk bread. It's so versatile.
You can form it into a loaf and cut it to me turkey clubs or grilled cheese sandwiches or peanut butter just sandwiches, or you can use it to make cinnamon rolls. It is just an enriched dough that would take the place of brioche or challah in any other type of situation. And then, of course, it's a great dough to twist and form into different designs because it has an excellent light elasticity. It stretches nicely. And so the buns styles in the book teach you how to create it into a spiral flower, or you can roll it up and make it look a coil, or you don't have the form it at all. You can treat it like a pizza and top it with corn and cheese. It's hard not to resist eating a slice while it's still warm and putting butter on it so that it melts a little.
Kristen: Wow. Do you find yourself making it often?
Kristina: Yeah.
Kristen: I noticed in your book, your Pau Pau's recipe for Steamed Cupcakes (Fa Gao), her secret ingredient is precisely what my grandmother always used to make her biscuits Bisquick, which is impressive. Please tell me more about that recipe, how it showed up in your life, and what it was like recreating it.
Kristina: Growing up, I would go to my grandparent's house, and when you walk into the kitchen, I would always see a box of Bisquick on top of their refrigerator. Multiple containers of Bisquick, actually. Why have I never questioned anything? I'd always just noticed that there was this box of Bisquick. Oh, maybe they got it years ago. And they were so frugal that they reused boxes for things to hold other stuff. I bet there's something else. And then, when I was writing the book, I absolutely wanted to make sure I had Pau Pau's Steamed Cupcakes in the book because there's such a staple and simple Lunar New Year for my family and for a lot of other people. (I call my grandmother Pau Pau.) And I couldn't fly back because I was very independent. I couldn't fly back to see my grandma. So I asked my mom to record her. Making her cupcakes. And that's when we realized, oh, she uses Bisquick. She uses this quick in her cupcake recipe. And I got there, I figured out the ratios with Bisquick.
And then, I did keep an option in there to not use Bisquick for a time. I tried to figure out an option that way, but it just never, it just never turned out the same way, even though this clinic, the significant differences between this quick and just regular flour or self-rising flour. Is the addition of baking soda. I can't remember baking soda, some leavener in there. And then there's some hydrogenated oil for tenderness, but there's also probably some other chemical in there that just means whatever you add so much better. I'm just not going to add a non-Bisquick option in there because it's just not as good. So I took that out and then just tried to reignite the use of Bisquick for people if they want to make these cupcakes. But it's a simple recipe. It's Bisquick, but also some all-purpose flour in there, water and brown sugar, and you just mix it up. It's a batter you can pour it, and then you pour it into individual tart molds or cupcake molds with a paper liner, then you steam them, and they grow taller. So when you steam it, that cake bursts and blossoms. Sometimes they divide. They are sometimes divided into three segments, or four or five if you see the picture. And the bigger and taller than they bloom, the more prosperous your year is going to be. So that's where the symbolism comes from and why many people make them for Lunar New Year.
Kristen: When you were testing them, did you have, was it tricky at all to get the Bisquick ratios, right? Or did the problems only come up when you tried to go away from the Bisquick? And the reason I ask is that even though it is a pre-made mix, I still have struggled sometimes to make the biscuits the way that my grandmother makes them with this.
Kristina: Between making my grandma's version and also trying to make the non-Bisquick version was a handful. Because my grandma's recipes are non-existent. She has a specific mug that she uses for measuring anything. And her genius tip to me was, hey, you should invest in a measuring cup. And yeah, I should. But that was creative to me. But otherwise, she just uses a mug to measure everything. So the proportions are just are; they ended up being equal to flour and then just finding out the proper water and its consistency. Just took a lot of trial and error. It just seems some of the most straightforward recipes that only have three to four ingredients are the most difficult ones because they're so reliant on just those three pillars to make sure that the formula is successful. And I had a bunch of trials where my cupcakes did not blossom. And I felt very like, am I cursed now? It just did not bode well that my cupcakes didn't bloom. But then I eventually got there. I hopefully redeemed any negative vibes I got from non-blossoming cupcakes.
Kristen: Yeah. I hope that it's where you land. Not the first ones.
Kristina: Yeah.
Kristen: It's about to turn your prospects. My grandmother just would pour the milk in until it looked right. She didn't measure it either. So that was part of the problem. And then also the fact that you can, if you're making biscuits or something, you can overwork it. You can end up with Bisquick biscuits that are flat. So, hopefully, that didn't come into play with yours because you're not working them as much.
Kristina: I do have a feeling that something about the number of times that you stir makes a big difference; I could not tell people you need to mix exactly 50 times to get the right thing. It's going to be okay. Most likely, it's going to be fine.
Kristen: Is there anything from your book that you recommend for readers to check out for Lunar New Year?
Kristina: Two things that I think are popular for making during Lunar New Year would be the fried Sesame balls or the coconut peanut balls. I can't remember if it goes coconut peanut or peanut coconut, but you can figure it out. It's coconut peanut mochi balls. There are two different styles of ball recipes, but the dough on the outside is glutenous rice dough. So it's gluten-free, it's chewy, and there are other kinds of filling options inside. One is fried. And the other one is a no-bake style of recipe. And those are traditional to make during Lunar New Year because they symbolize the round moon in a sense. And there's also this very traditional Chinese style soup that you put the glutinous rice balls and boil them in a broth. They can be sweet or savory. So those are two fun ones.
Kristen: What are you looking forward to making this year for Lunar New Year?
Kristina: I am excited to make some hand-pulled noodles. I have not made that in a while, but it's always fun when I do. Noodles are another symbolic food to make because they represent long life. The longer noodles you have, the longer life you hope you will live. So I always cringe a little bit when people cut their noodles in half because you're not supposed to do that. So I'm excited about that, and I'm making some more dumplings. I've been living a very bun-centric life lately that I honestly haven't made dumplings in a while. So I'm excited to make some of those for dinner.
Kristen (voiceover): Thanks for listening. And my thanks to Kristina Cho, blogger at Eat Cho Food and author of Mooncakes and Milk Bread. Suppose you'd like to make Kristina's Pau Pau's Steamed Cupcakes (Fa Gao) for Lunar New Year, the recipe is up on Food52 today. And by the way, as far as mooncake molds go, Kristina's favorites are the plunger-style plastic molds because she finds them easier to use. And you can have a lot of fun, interchanging the patterns and using them for cookies and other baked goods too. She finds a lot of her favorites on Etsy.
This week's show is composed by Amy Shuster, Harry Sultan, and Emily Hanhan. What favorite recipe will you make for Lunar New Year? I would love to hear about it at genius@food52.com, or you can tag me at @miglorious on Instagram. And if you The Genius Recipe Tapes and the Food52 podcast network, the very best thing that you can do to support us and to help other people find the show is to take a moment to leave us a five-star rating or review. Or send this episode to someone you would love to share a mooncake with. Thanks so much. Talk to you next week.