Trading Architecture And Accounting For Cookbooks

Kristina Cho and Bryan Ford have a lot in common. They’re both children of immigrants, third-culture kids who got into food not through restaurants or culinary school, but by launching their own blogs. They dreamed of quitting their day jobs so they could write about food full-time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  Make holiday hosting effortless with Boars Head Sweet Slice Uncured Ham. It's the perfect centerpiece for gathering family and friends around the holiday table. Hand-packed into netting, Sweet Slice Uncured Ham has the look of a traditional holiday ham with rich flavor worth savoring. Slow roasted and delicately smoked, boneless Sweet Slice Uncured Ham delivers classic bone-in flavor made for the moments that bring everyone together. Find Sweet Slice Uncured Ham at your nearest Boars Head deli. And for holiday entertaining inspiration, recipes, and more, visit boarshead.com. My whole extended family and I went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this past spring. And I gotta say, I came away feeling like, number one, this is a great family destination. Number two, this is a great place to come all year round.

• 0:42Dan Pashman?

  The mini golf alone is probably worth, it's like the mini golf capital of the country. They have the most incredible elaborate mini golf courses. They also have more than 80 championship full-size golf courses, plus 60 miles of beautiful coastline, all-season sunshine. Of course, you can relax by the beach or the pool. There's also jet skiing, fishing charters, paddle boarding, and of course, food. Oh, man, did we eat well in Myrtle Beach. From fresh local seafood to craft burgers and craft beers to kebabs on the boardwalk. With more than 2,000 restaurants to choose from, from legendary no-frill seafood shacks to chef-driven dining, Myrtle Beach has it all. Plus, live entertainment at the beach, there's always something epic going on. So, summer may be winding down, but in Myrtle Beach, you're gonna find the coastal vacation of your dreams all year long.

• 1:27Dan Pashman?

  Start planning your ultimate beach vacation at visitmyrtlebeach.com.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  I went to the University of Cincinnati, and I was there from like 2009 to 2013.

• 1:40Dan Pashman?

  Did you hang out with the Kelsey brothers?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I, okay, so I will say, I will say, Jason Kelsey, I saw you in the dining hall many times.

• 1:50Dan Pashman?

  Okay, he doesn't listen to this podcast, just so you know, I don't think he's gonna hear this, but, but anyway, go on. Speak directly to Jason, Christina, please go on.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jason, we would see you, we would see you at Center Court.

• 2:00Dan Pashman?

  But you don't have any special insights?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I don't remember what Jason's cafeteria order was.

• 2:05Dan Pashman?

  You don't know what he was eating? Okay, all right, well, this has gotten us nowhere, Christina.

• 2:13Dan Pashman?

  This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. And before we get to today's show, I have two quick but very important notes for you. First off, if you need gifts for the eaters in your life, you still have time to order my cookbook, Anything's Pastable, which Wired just named one of the best cookbooks of 2024. Thank you, Wired. Get Anything's Pastable wherever books are sold. Or give someone the gift set of all three of my pastas and my cookbook. The pastas and that gift set come from Sfolini. You can order those at sfolini.com. That's S-F-O-G-L-I-N-I dot com. Second quick note, Memphis. I'm coming to Memphis. Our first ever live Sporkful taping in Tennessee. It's January 16th.

• 2:57Dan Pashman?

  I'll be chatting with the Memphis restaurateur and general food legend Karen Blockman Carrier at the Buckman Arts Center. I'll also be hanging out after to chat and sign copies of my book. For info and tickets, go to sporkful.com/events. Can't wait to see you there in Memphis. Okay, let's get to the show. Today, I'm talking with two cookbook authors who have a lot in common, Christina Cho and Brian Ford. Christina and Brian are both children of immigrants, third culture kids who got into food not through restaurants, but by launching their own blogs. They both wrote debut cookbooks that explored baking traditions that have long gotten short shrift in American food culture. And this fall, they both released their second cookbooks, where they're getting more personal and more in-depth about the subjects that matter most to them. We'll start with Christina.

• 3:42Dan Pashman?

  In 2021, Christina Cho published her first cookbook, Moon Cakes and Milk Bread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries. And before it came out, there weren't a lot of English-language books about Chinese baking. And Christina's book earned a lot of praise. Her new one, Chinese Enough, reflects not only what she ate at home, but what she ate with her grandparents, who ran Chinese-American takeout restaurants, while also cooking traditional Cantonese dishes in their home. Christina's maternal grandparents immigrated to Cleveland in the 1960s and owned a Chinese restaurant in the area. As a kid, she spent a lot of time there after school.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It was a Chinese-American restaurant. It was pretty big. Like, I remember there being a banquet room. In the back, there was a bar that I often did my homework at during off-hours.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  There weren't other people having like a cocktail there. I remember late at night, or if they were closing and my brother and I was still there, we would rollerblade in the dining room after they picked up all the chairs. It was epic. So amazing.

• 4:42Dan Pashman?

  What are some of the things you remember eating in the restaurant growing up?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I have such vivid memories of specifically my favorite afternoon snack. After school, I'd go into the kitchen and like ask my grandpa or one of the uncles, like I call them uncles, like they're not actually my uncles, but one of the chefs back there. And I was like, can I have an egg roll? And they would drop like a fresh egg roll into the fryer for me. I was so specific as a child. I would cut it like lengthwise and then scoop out all the vegetables because I was like, I don't want that. I don't want the vegetables. I just want the, I just want the flavor of the vegetables that's like still in contact with the inside of the wrapper. And then I would dip it in like so much sweet and sour sauce. That was like one of my favorite afternoon snacks.

• 5:25Dan Pashman?

  So you would only eat like the fresh fried skin?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that has vegetable essence. That's what I would say.

• 5:33Dan Pashman?

  So even at this early age, Christina wasn't just eating her food. She was taking it apart and rebuilding it. Soon she was leveling up, seeing how else she could reconstitute her meals to create more excitement and deliciousness.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  My mom would prepare us like wonton soup with like a bowl of rice and vegetables on the side and then shrimp chips. I would put a little bit of rice in the shrimp chip, then dunk it in the soup so that the shrimp chip like softens for like one second. And then you take a whole bite and it's like crispy, soft and chewy and like you get the flavor of the soup. I was already like thinking of textures. I was a very strange kid. I really liked doing that.

• 6:10Dan Pashman?

  No, I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm looking in the mirror. This is the exact kind of stuff I would do when I was a kid. I always like dunking, dipping, combining, you know, like what is, does this go well together? How can you fuse this to that? What if I turn this upside down? Oh, wait, it fell off. That didn't work. Let me try it a different way. Always playing with your food. Yeah. Anyway, a lot of the food at her grandparents' restaurant was classic Chinese-American takeout, things like orange chicken and the egg rolls Christina had as a snack. But when she went to her grandparents' house for dinner, she saw a whole different side of Chinese cooking, one that would stick with her when she became a food writer years later.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  My family is Toisan, which is like a Cantonese sort of like area. Both my grandparents are Toisan. My grandma speaks mostly Toisan and her food is rooted more in that specific style of Chinese cooking. It's kind of hard to explain what it is, but like my grandma cooked with a lot of like dried shrimp and like a lot of preserved things. I remember like there's like dried bean curd, shiitake mushrooms, dried scallops. And so she would use that a lot of different like noodles and soups and like braises. Like I go to my grandparents' house, they make this like very specific style of food. You always start with soup and then there's like five to six like little dishes, some vegetables, some proteins, and you're just like mixing and matching and like assembling your bowl. Like that's where I could experience that type of traditional Chinese food.

• 7:30Dan Pashman?

  So in a way, though, your shrimp, chip, rice, wonton soup concoction, it was a very sort of Chinese way to approach eating.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Totally, yes. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not so much like a, I, I feel like I'm like learning to embrace like one pot cooking, you know, like, like one, one singular thing. Like, I've always loved like components to my meal.

• 7:51Dan Pashman?

  Christina wasn't the only one experimenting with her food. She may have gotten that trade from her mom, who was always doing her own experimenting in the kitchen, taking classic Midwestern dishes she picked up and adding her own twists.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  So my mom, when she makes her spaghetti and when she makes her meatloaf, it starts off with a base of ground beef, whatever the cheapest ground beef you can get. The flavor bases are, it's like salt, white pepper. It's like a little bit more pungent, I think, like funky than just like regular black pepper, you know, it has like an underlying heat that can kind of creep up on you. And then oyster sauce and ketchup. Oyster sauce is my mom's secret ingredient to everything. She, she puts it in her potato salad, her tuna salad. I agree with her, it adds this like really nice. Salty and like savory depth, like baseline of like seasoning.

• 8:43Dan Pashman?

  When she was 12, Christina started getting interested in not just constructing food, but cooking it. She started making things like mac and cheese and soon moved to more ambitious projects like cheesecake. Then, young Christina, who you'll recall was building edible structures of shrimp chips, found she had another passion, architecture. In high school, she took technical drawing classes, then studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati. That's where she saw Jason Kelsey roaming the dining hall. Both Kelsey brothers went there. Christina planned on a career as an architect, but she was still really into food. For her senior thesis, she drew up plans to redesign a grocery store, a Kroger of the future. In 2014, after graduating, she went out to San Francisco for an internship.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I lived in the inner Richmond district of San Francisco, and it has, I think, one of the best farmers markets in the city in the Bay Area. And I would go there every weekend and just like buy vegetables, you know, just like whatever was calling to me, take them back and like make a dumpling filling.

• 9:38Dan Pashman?

  In 2017, Christina started a food blog as a hobby called Eat Cho Food and began posting recipes and essays.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I really liked photography from architecture school. And I was like, I'm just gonna see what happens. I think that was more the mentality I was going into it. I probably never deep down thought that I was gonna be able to write a book or win awards or anything. Like, everything has been a complete surprise to me. But I really just thought that maybe it would be a fun hobby and help me channel my creative energy.

• 10:04Dan Pashman?

  As time went on, Christina found herself spending more and more of her week thinking about cooking and her blog, not about the job she was supposed to be doing at the architecture firm. That being said, her architecture training did come in handy when she had to come up with recipes for her site.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  It teaches you how to iterate. Yeah, in architecture, you just like have to do it. You have to get your hundred bad sketches out of the way in order to get your, your good one. When you want to be your recipe developer or you're trying to see if like making food is a potential maybe job or whatever, you like kind of have to like go through that.

• 10:37Dan Pashman?

  After a few years, Christina's blog had established an audience and she had a few thousand followers on Instagram. In 2019, a literary agent got in touch and suggested she write a cookbook. Christina said she'd think about it. A few weeks after that meeting, she was getting ready to host a Lunar New Year dinner party.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  We were gonna have like 30 people come over to our apartment. So there's a lot of people, need a lot of food. And I remember thinking like, this is so fun. Like, I love it. I was like, maybe I'll be a caterer. I don't know. I was just like, I just like, love just like spending all day in the kitchen, making lists. I love a list. Like, I was like, making plans of like, what time I want to cook the food and what should be served. I just like, loved all those details. And then the party rolls around on Saturday and I had some coworkers who were also friends come. And they're like, oh, Chris, are you like, missed promotion day? My office did like, surprise promotions. They're like, today's the day we're gonna announce like, senior designer or whatever. I realized, I was like, I don't care. I was like, I was like, I didn't get promoted. I didn't, wasn't expecting to. And I was just like, I just like, didn't care. And I just like, had this like, introspective

• 11:35Speaker 01

  moment in this party, surrounded by like, so many of my friends during a holiday that like, I, I've always felt that Lunar New Year was like, my true, like, start fresh New Year. Like, I love that holiday so much. And I'd had this moment to myself and I was like, I'm gonna quit my job. I'm just gonna like, figure out how to do this and like, trust my gut. Like, there was something telling me that I should just like, give it my all. And so that's how I decided.

• 12:03Dan Pashman?

  After that dinner party, Christina made a plan. She stayed in her job for a few months, using that time to save up money and develop her book concept. Then, she quit architecture. A few months after that, around Thanksgiving, she got her book deal. You chose to do your first book specifically about Chinese baking?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:21Dan Pashman?

  But your, your blog was not only Chinese baking?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 12:24Dan Pashman?

  So why did you make that choice?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Um, it was a lot of guidance from my agent. It seemed better to kind of start off with an idea that was really unique. There had been no other kind of like modern English written cookbook dedicated to Chinese baking, let alone like any sort of like Asian baking, you know? There had been plenty of like Chinese cookbooks, Asian cookbooks that maybe had like a steamed bun recipe in some chapter, or maybe like a, a egg tart recipe, you know? But there wasn't like a 300-page cookbook that had like 80-plus recipes dedicated to like all the different nuances and facets of a Chinese bakery. At that time, I was like really passionate about it. I was like, I really like that idea.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  That's something that I wish I had, maybe when I was 12 years old and like learning how to cook and bake, you know? Like, I didn't see anything like that reflected in media at the time.

• 13:20Dan Pashman?

  In 2021, Moon Cakes and Milk Bread was published. It won two James Beard Awards, and The New York Times and The New Yorker both listed it as one of the best cookbooks of the year. After that success, the most logical thing for Christina to do would be to follow it up with more baking content. But she didn't do that. She wanted to show off a different facet of her experience. So instead, she wrote her new cookbook, Chinese Enough: Home-Style Recipes for Noodles, Dumplings, Stir Fries, and More. For this one, she drew influences that spanned her whole life. When Christina was growing up, her family used to take trips back and forth to Hong Kong. In the book, she has a recipe for Spam and Mac soup, a Hong Kong diner classic. She also has a whole photo spread of step-by-step instructions on assembling an egg roll, like the ones she used to eat at her grandparents' restaurant. She's got a chapter called "I Love You, Here's Some Fruit",

• 14:05Dan Pashman?

  as an homage to a practice in her family and some other Asian families. Christina also wanted to show that her Cleveland roots were just as important as her Chinese ones.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I think the Midwesternness comes across in like, a lot of the recipes fit on one page. You know, they're very efficient. And I think of, of Midwestern cooking is like that kind of efficiency, using what you have. You know, like nothing like unnecessary ingredients just for the sake of it. There's a bunch of different recipes that I think kind of like encapsulate that. My mom's spaghetti, I feel like, is like one of those recipes that like really gave me the confidence to just like, do what I wanted to do and feel confident in it. Like, my mom's spaghetti is essentially what you would consider Chinese spaghetti, which is a concept I didn't even learn about until like the last couple of years. My mom made it up when she was 12 because she was tired of eating rice every day. She wanted to eat, she wanted to eat spaghetti. I think that recipe is a combination of like, definitely like-

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Cantonese flavor is using like cornstarch in the sauce to thicken it and make it glossy. But then it's like still ground beef and really like affordable spaghetti noodles. That makes a comforting and filling meal that I think a lot of people grew up with in the Midwest or any kind of American, American setting. I think I find a lot of confidence when I think back to recipes like that. I'm like, oh, my mom and my grandma were already adapting, so why can't I?

• 15:23Dan Pashman?

  As Christina dove into her past for Chinese enough, she ended up uncovering stories about her family she had never heard.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  My grandma's a very stoic person, like she kind of holds a lot in. And like, there's a recipe for hamchi, which are these like fried glutinous rice dumplings that are filled with pork and mustard greens. And they're really, really yummy. And I sat down with her a couple of years ago to learn how to make this. She gave me this like one piece of dough and she wouldn't allow me to make dumplings until I finished perfecting the shaping of the dough. You know, because that's like what, what she was taught to do. And so while I was just sitting there, just like manhandling this dough, trying to figure out like the right technique. She like starts to like open up about how like that's, that's how I learned how to make this.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And like my older sister and then like the village aunties actually taught me how to make this because my mom had like, essentially like a grudge against her, like her mom did not, did not like her because she had a lot of kids. And my grandma was the youngest, I believe, a girl. She just valued her brothers more, you know, like she found like the presence of another girl in their family, almost like a nuisance. And so she was kind of like describing her mom being this like really cruel person. I had never heard that before. I had let alone never heard of her talking about her childhood ever. And then she opened up about how her, her dad was the one that like actually showed love and like cared for her in that sense, you know?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And I was like, you've never like, you never talk about this, you know? And I think if I didn't, if I didn't, one, didn't make the effort of trying to learn this food and sit down and make this with her. I never would have learned this like very human aspect of her. And I think that the act of writing the book allowed me to kind of do all that stuff. But I think for people who are reading the book, I like to hope that like, oh, like maybe there's a recipe in here that reminds you of your mom or your grandparents or anybody in your family and you think that they want to make it with you.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  And there's something safe about this environment we were cooking together that allows for these different conversations to happen.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And I think that Chinese Enough is the cookbook that I've always like kind of had within me, you know, like I think if I could have started with a first cookbook, it would have been something like this that kind of talks about like who I am as a person, my style of cooking, who has influenced me throughout my life and talk about like the communities and the people and places that I have called home throughout my life and how they impact my food.

• 17:54Dan Pashman?

  That's Christina Cho. Her new cookbook is Chinese Enough: Home-Style Recipes for Noodles, Dumplings, Stir Fries, and More. It's available wherever books are sold. You can also follow her on Instagram at EatChoFood. Coming up, I talk with Brian Ford, whose new cookbook goes deep on Latin American baking. Then Brian bakes up a storm and lays out an incredible spread for me to try. I can't wait. Stick around.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  It's time to open up a can of advertisements.

• 18:33Dan Pashman?

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• 19:17Dan Pashman?

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• 20:03Dan Pashman?

  I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now, Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad Thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners. For a long time, I did not understand the point of vests. Like, why not just have a jacket? That covers your arms, too. But something clicked for me. I think I got gifted a vest, and now I am obsessed with vests. And it just adds that little bit of toastiness.

• 20:46Dan Pashman?

  And I got this new Quince Packable Puffer Vest. I love that you can just squish it up and shove it in the bottom of your bag. That way, you have it with you all day. If it gets a little chilly, break out the vest. I also got a Quince Down Quilted Vest. It is so soft and cozy. They make them for men and women, and as with everything you get at Quince, they focus on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. These are all timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too.

• 21:29Dan Pashman?

  And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was The Sporkful. It's the best way to support the show.

• 21:39Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Couple more quick holiday gift-related details that I didn't mention at the top of the show. If you want to give that special eater in your life my cookbook and pasta gift set from Sfolini, you gotta order by this Thursday, December 12th for guaranteed delivery by Christmas. Now, orders placed a couple of days later will probably still get there in time, but Sfolini can't guarantee it. Now, this gift set is one box each of all three of my pasta shapes, cascatelli, quattro tini, and vesuvio, plus a copy of my cookbook, Anything's Possible. Place your orders now at sfolini.com. That's S-F-O-G-L-I-N-I.com. Of course, the cookbook's also available separately wherever books are sold. Okay, back to the show. Ryan Ford grew up in New Orleans.

• 22:24Dan Pashman?

  His parents are from Honduras, and his cookbooks focus on Latin American baking. His first, New World Sour Dough, was a bestseller. Now, he's just released Pan Idulce, a much broader and more in-depth look at the huge variety of breads and baked confections from all over Latin America. I met up with Brian at his apartment in Queens. I wanted to chat in person, not just because I really enjoy in-person conversations, but also because Brian had promised to bake me some goodies from his book. First, though, I wanted to hear about the road that led him to this new book. He says it all started with his mother, who cooked for the family and preserved their Honduran culture through food. And one of Brian's favorites was always baleadas.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Baleadas, obviously. At a certain point, that was like every weekend when I was really young. Like, it was like, we having baleadas, you know?

• 23:08Dan Pashman?

  Talk to me about baleadas.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 23:10Dan Pashman?

  Because, so, I live out on Long Island, and there is a substantial Central American population right around where I live. In fact, in my town, there is a restaurant called La Seba King.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm bad, oh. No, I'm bad.

• 23:25Dan Pashman?

  Isn't that where your dad's from?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  That's where my dad's from.

• 23:27Dan Pashman?

  He's from La Seba.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  La Seba, man, yeah.

• 23:29Dan Pashman?

  And I had the baleadas. I had, there was one, baleada especial, baleada con todo.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I love that. You went down and got some baleadas. So, baleada is the national dish of Honduras, actually. It is my lifeblood.

• 23:41Dan Pashman?

  A baleada is made with a Honduran tortilla, which is a flour tortilla that's a little thicker and doughier than a Mexican-style one. It's folded over and filled with refried beans, cheese, and any other fillings you might want to put in there. Could have scrambled egg, avocado, or meat.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  But the key with the baleada, the tortilla, is the chew of the tortilla has to be very... It's gotta have the right... You know, when you talk about bagels and pizza crusts, people say, "Oh, it's gotta have the right chew." It needs to have this right snap when you bite it, soft yet a little bit firm. If you bite into a tortilla, a baleada, and you get a clean bite through the tortilla, like, immediately, that tortilla was probably a little bit dry, or a little bit too thick, or just not right.

• 24:20Dan Pashman?

  There should be a pull to it.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  A little pull. It's gotta be almost translucent-looking.

• 24:24Dan Pashman?

  I showed Brian a picture on my phone of the baleadas from La Seba King to get his take. He right away noticed the mix of dark brown toasty spots and translucent, slightly underdone spots.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  And I'm gonna tell you something right now, that's exactly how it's supposed to be. Exactly. Because those parts that seem a little gummy or pale and underdone, those are the parts that give that chew. That's the part that's gonna have that little bit of elasticity and that softness in the bite. So the tortilla looks really nice. 100% Seba King.

• 24:52Dan Pashman?

  The tortilla might be the key to a great baleada, but you also gotta make sure that your fillings are prepared right.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  So, the beans, the cream and cheese, all three of them have to meet certain criteria. The beans, for me, coconut milk. Coconut milk, that toquecito de coconut milk in the beans, that little touch of coconut milk in the beans is important. The aroma of coconut permeates Honduras. It's such an important ingredient. So you have the coconut milk in the tortilla, you got the coconut milk in the beans, not overpowering, and then cumin, comino. Comino, onions sauteed with butter. Beans prepared that way, just by someone who knows how to do it, it's their masterful. And then, you know, you refry them. The cheese, queso seco, queso duro, it's a Honduran cheese. It's very, very funky and salty. It's very, very overpowering.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Now, that, I will argue to the ends of the earth, there is no cheese that tastes like it, period.

• 25:47Dan Pashman?

  Food wasn't the only thing Brian took from his mother. When he went to college in New Orleans, he decided he'd follow her career path and become an accountant. But around the same time, he also got into baking as a hobby. Breads, croissants, and on Mardi Gras, he'd make king cake. Now, if you're not familiar with king cake.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Cinnamon sugar brioche, let's call it, baked and filled with cream cheese fillings, jam fillings, topped with a royal icing and three colored sugars, green, purple, and gold. And then they used to be stuffed with babies. When I grew up, you would go to school, you eat it and almost choke on the baby.

• 26:19Dan Pashman?

  Plastic, right, a little toy, not actual human babies. For the record, no one's eating babies.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Let me give you, let me give you an alt for the edit, because that did, that baby's been stuffed with babies.

• 26:32Dan Pashman?

  We're gonna keep it this way. People's ears just pricked up, Brian, okay? Everyone just stopped what they were doing for a second. Now that I have your attention, this little plastic baby, first off, it's supposed to be a baby Jesus, not just any random baby. But it's placed inside the cake after the cake's been baked. Everyone gets a slice, and if you get the slice with the little plastic baby, then you have to bring the king cake next year. In college, Brian began trying to perfect his own king cake recipe and started selling them on the street. When he got his first accounting job, he continued the tradition on the side.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Went out there with a cutting board and I would just, you know, serve them up. Five bucks a slice, bing bang, you know? Cops pull up, they don't like it, you know what I'm saying? It was always a battle, but, you know, it's Mardi Gras, I, some cops would just take a slice as like a, as like a payoff or something like that, you know what I mean? These are the moments I was realizing that I should have a bakery. And then I would start going to work every day, talking about opening a bakery. And it's like, it was fun until I realized I was like talking to my bosses and I'd be, oh shit, I don't think they, because like they would like, they would like engage it a few times, but like when I'm, when I'm like always talking about baking, I was like, oh, like I'm probably gonna get fired.

• 27:38Dan Pashman?

  Brian, this is the fifth time this month you've started a conversation with, when I get the hell out of here.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's what it became, that's what it became.

• 27:47Dan Pashman?

  After a few years, Brian took the plunge. He quit his job as an accountant with big plans to open his own bakery. The decision was exhilarating. But after two months of recipe testing with no income, Brian realized he might have gotten in over his head. He went back to accounting. But a year later, he was still daydreaming about baking. So he quit his accounting job again. He decided he needed to change his scenery. So he figured he'd do some traveling. He'd never been to Europe before, and he was looking for inspiration to help him figure out his next steps.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I was like, hey, man, let me go out there to France and Italy. And I want to taste a croissant. I want to taste focaccia. And so I went and I was like, yeah, this is awesome. You know, I had my first month or so just going around Europe tasting bread. I've been spending all this time learning how to make croissants. I need to go taste them. You know what I mean? So.

• 28:34Dan Pashman?

  And what did you take from that trip?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  I took from that trip that I can't be in a box. I don't belong in a box or a cubicle or a job. Like, I can't, I cannot exist within the structure of not being able to move freely or decide what I do. That's what I really learned.

• 28:58Dan Pashman?

  Brian came back from Europe, and in 2016, he got an invitation that fit perfectly with his new outlook.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  A friend of mine was living in Miami, and he was like, yo, I just bought this house by the water. Like, why don't you come reinvent yourself here?

• 29:09Dan Pashman?

  So Brian moved to Miami and started baking nonstop.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  And I just dove headfirst into perfecting fermentation, perfecting mixing dough by hand, perfecting the sourdough pre-ferments, the timing of them, the humidity, how it affects them.

• 29:26Dan Pashman?

  He began selling his goods at a farmer's market.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Was actually selling king cake at my first farmer's market, selling king cake and baguettes and all this kind of thing. Besides the king cake, everything else I was trying to perfect was very European. Olive baguettes, pain au chocolat, brioche. I was very determined to make those perfect country style loaves, rustic loaves that looked like, had the perfect ear opening and all that kind of thing.

• 29:50Dan Pashman?

  Around this time, Brian's mom came to visit, and he wanted to show her how far he'd come with his baking.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  I was showing her my sourdough because I started to get really good at it. And she was like, you should make pain de coco. And then that was it. Instant, instant light bulb, instant, instant duh. Of course I should. I'm wondering, why wouldn't I?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  That was, that was the moment that took this pursuit for a bakery where I would sell croissants and focaccias like everyone else, no offense, to the pursuit of saying, well, why wouldn't I make pan de coco en semitas and pan dulces and mayorkas and medialunas and golfiados? Why can't I make a bakery with that? So I started writing about it, posting videos to social media. Those started to gain traction and that, and that was, yeah, that was the moment where I realized, oh, people are interested in a pan de coco made with sourdough. It provoked their mind a little bit. It caught them off guard and got them to say, whoa, what is this?

• 30:57Dan Pashman?

  Pan de coco is a whole wheat roll made with coconut milk. It used to be naturally leavened, like all breads used to be, but in modern times, it's generally made with commercial yeast. In Brian's recipe, he uses his sourdough starter as the pre-ferment. That leavens the bread naturally without commercial yeast, making his technique a throwback to traditional methods. It also gives his pan de coco a more earthy, hearty taste.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  So traditionally, it's a bread that's used for, like if you're eating soup or stews, it's a bread you would use to dip into that. So it's-

• 31:29Dan Pashman?

  But it's not crusty, though.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  No, it's not. It's a soft-

• 31:32Dan Pashman?

  It's soft and dense.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  It's a soft and dense bread. The coconut milk is a very enriching, fattening milk to use in your baking. So if you're using coconut milk, you're gonna get a fluffy inside, but it's gonna be a little bit denser if you're not using water. But again, the word, don't, don't fear the word dense if you're listening to this, by the way.

• 31:53Dan Pashman?

  I love a dense bread.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, dense is not a bad word when it comes to bread. Dense, density, challah's dense, right?

• 31:59Dan Pashman?

  A hundred percent.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  A bagel could be dense.

• 32:01Dan Pashman?

  Brian posting that pan de coco and getting a huge reaction was a major turning point.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  That was the ticket to saying, hey, I think I have a story to tell. I think I have something to offer. And it might not be a tangible location where you can come and, and, and see me baking and buy my breads, but it, it's a website, a blog, artisanbrian.com. I launched sometime in 2018 and it, and it had my first few recipes posted there. And let me tell you, man. To this day, I have still never seen people consume my recipes as as rampantly as that that pande coco recipe I posted for, I would say for a solid two years straight. I mean, every day, there were so many people posting it.

• 32:46Dan Pashman?

  Brian had found his audience online, but when he made this switch at the farmer's market, where he'd been selling European breads, some of his customers weren't sure what to make of it.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  People don't equate Latin American baking with the things that they want to consume for five bucks a pop. How about that? Does that make sense? Like, like, if you're, if you're spending five or six bucks for a pastry, most people are expecting it to be a certain way, you know, Danish or croissant. People are importing butter from France to make croissants, and then they charge six bucks for the croissant. No one bats an eye. No one cares. They're just like, of course, this is great. It's a croissant. It's amazing. But you try to use Mesoamerican chocolate and source your vanilla from Mexico and all this kind of thing. And, oh, well, no, this is ridiculous.

• 33:34Dan Pashman?

  This skepticism didn't hold Brian back. In 2020, he published his first book, New World Sour Dough. He brought together all the work he'd been doing on baking so far. There were recipes for ciabatta and focaccia, which he'd been developing early in his baking career, along with pande coco and other Latin American baked goods. Sour Dough plays a key role in all these recipes, and Brian was showing that baked goods from Latin America can easily be placed alongside more well-known European breads.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  With New World Sour Dough, I just wanted to let people know that you could actually bake from indigenous black and brown cultures in Latin America using your sourdough starter. Sour Dough was not invented in San Francisco, man.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  I want people to feel like Latin America is in their kitchen.

• 34:22Dan Pashman?

  Now, this approach was novel. There were not many Latin American baking books out there in the US, but this one was really good, and it hit at just the right time, when sourdough was already trendy and then COVID got so many people into baking bread. New World Sour Dough became a bestseller. There was a write-up in the New York Times, and Brian went on the Today Show. Now, at this point, like with Christina Cho, the obvious move for Brian would have been to lean into what got him a hit cookbook, right? Double down on the sourdough focus. But he too chose a different path. In his second cookbook, Pan y Dulce, which just came out, he leaves European breads completely behind and focuses exclusively on baking traditions from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. As I take a step back and look at the arc of his career, it feels like this second book is the one he's been building towards.

• 35:07Dan Pashman?

  Like with Christina, it's the one that was always within him. As I said to Brian, this feels like his magnum opus. New World Sour Dough is a great book. It did well, you know, but I just like taking a step back and thinking about the arc of your career that we've been discussing, like it feels like that was sort of the warm up and like

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:25Dan Pashman?

  Pan y Dulce is like, this is really like, what's the definitive book on Latin American baking? Like this is it. It's got, it's got so many recipes, so much technique, and then the storytelling and the photography. I just feel like it ties it all together.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  I appreciate that, man. It makes me, it's still like, I know, you know, like it's, it's just a lot of emotions because of, um, just like that, I just think about my parents and my dad's not here for this one. There's a lot, a lot of stuff that, it's more than just, um, making a book. It's, it's like connecting with, uh, my ancestors and trying to understand and unpack why I'm even here and how it came to be.

• 36:07Dan Pashman?

  Pan y Dulce has savory recipes and all kinds of sweet cakes, breads, and pastries, recipes with indigenous grains, and regular all-purpose flour. And there's a bunch of recipes in the sourdough chapter where Brian gets to show in a range that goes far beyond his first cookbook, that sourdough has long been part of baking cultures throughout the world.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  I see Latin American baking as the premier form of baking. Like I like the ingredients and, and, you know, the chocolate and, and the vanilla and, um, the panela. So that's why I'm so passionate about doing more and finding more stories until, you know, when you see the World Cup of baking or any form of high-level baking, there is the respect on, on the pan dulce and it's there as a, as a colleague to that croissant. That's what, that's the goal.

• 36:59Dan Pashman?

  With his new book, Brian's well on his way. But as much as I was enjoying our conversation, I have to admit, I was focused on more immediate goals relating to the glorious array of baked goods from his new cookbook that Brian had laid out for me. When's it time to eat?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  All right, so we have a pizza napoletana, which is a version of Argentinian style pizza. We've got some, this is a pan de plátano a la parrilla, which is a sourdough bread with roasted plantains, honey and sea salt baked on a banana leaf.

• 37:27Dan Pashman?

  All right, should we eat first? The pizza, because it's hot?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:30Dan Pashman?

  All right, let's do it. This is an Argentinian style pizza with thick cut tomatoes on top and whole olives stuck right in the dough. Listen to that crackle.

• 37:41Dan Pashman?

  Like you have great contrast here. We're eating char and crunchiness and then doughiness and the garlic and whole olives also. Whole olives on pizza should happen more often.

• 37:54Dan Pashman?

  Let's keep eating. What should we have next? Why don't we get into the plantains? All right. So, so I should describe these for our audio listeners. These are long, narrow, they're like a foot long, but only a couple of inches wide. A very, a real char on the crust. They feel hard and they feel heavy. And they have slight, long, sort of plantain quarters laying down the center of them. And then they're drizzled with honey and sea salt, you said?

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yep, I'm gonna go ahead and get right into it.

• 38:27Dan Pashman?

  This is a meal. I love how hearty it is.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Now, we have the alfajores.

• 38:35Dan Pashman?

  Alfajores are small, almost bite sized sandwich cookies with a cookie that's sturdy and yet still tender and a rich dulce de leche filling. One of my all time favorites. This is a good day at the office.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of the, one of the takeaways I got from wholesaling, my wholesale bakery exploits last year was perfecting these because I sold them to a coffee shop here. And the thing is that they're, they're maicena, so like they're cornstarch and wheat based. So it's almost that marriage between corn and wheat that you see in Latin America. You need to have the right, they're crumbly, but they're not dry. You understand, you understand what I'm saying? They're crumbly, but they ain't dry. They're crumbly, but they're moist in the middle and then they blend in with the dulce de leche and you don't have filling exploding, you don't have. It's not cracking off and falling. So it, I'm not gonna lie, I'm actually kind of impressed with myself because, because this, when I bit into it, I was like, oh shit, that hit.

• 39:29Dan Pashman?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  That, like, when I bit into it, I was like, that hit.

• 39:31Dan Pashman?

  Ooh, it's so good.

• 39:36Dan Pashman?

  That's Brian Ford. His new book is Pan Y Dulesay. It's available now wherever books are sold. You can also follow him on Instagram at Artisan Brian. And get this, we are giving away copies of Pan Y Dulesay and Christina Cho's new book, Chinese Enough. To enter, all you get to do is sign up for our newsletter by January 6th. You can sign up right now at sporkful.com/newsletter. If you're already on the mailing list, then you're already entered into this and all of our future contests. So get on the list. Plus, we'll drop you a line once in a while with recipes and links and other fun stuff. Open to US and Canada residents only. Again, sign up now at sporkful.com/newsletter. Next week's show is our annual salad spinner, Year in Food. This is our rapid fire roundtable show where we look at the strangest and most surprising food stories of the year. I'll

• 40:20Dan Pashman?

  be joined by Nikita Richardson, food editor at The New York Times, and Joe Yonin, cookbook author and food and dining editor at The Washington Post. In the meantime, if you're looking for more Sporkful episodes, check out last week's show about the mixologist who went sober. LPO Brian tells me about what changed with her work as a bartender when she went sober, and she shares some great recipes for non-alcoholic holiday drinks. That episode's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to the Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners

• 41:02Dan Pashman?

  can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer. Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Andres O'Hara.

• 41:14Dan Pashman?

  It was edited by. Nora Ritchie. Our engineer is. Jared O'Connell. And our intern is. Julia Liu. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producers are Colin Anderson and Nora Ritchie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  And I'm Miriam in South Orange, New Jersey, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better. Happy birthday, Jeff.

• 41:44Speaker 02

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• 42:13Speaker 06

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