Christopher Kimball: This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball, today we're taking a close look at bread with sourdough expert Richard Hart. But if you think he'd be impressed by your 20-year-old sourdough starter, you might well be wrong.

Richard Hart: Yeah, I mean, like, it is a pretty much it's a load of rubbish, like, it's just fermented flour and water and, like, you could start it in a week, and you have the same thing

CK: The hottest takes in bread baking with Richard Hart, that's coming up later in the show. But first, it's my conversation with Don Lindgren. Don's a rare cookbook collector. He once sold a mint condition of Joy of Cooking for over $30,000 but his favorite cookbooks are community cookbooks put together by church groups and town organizations across the country. He says community cookbooks are the core of American Culinary literature. Don, welcome to Milk Street.

Don Lingren: Oh, thank you, Christopher. It's great to be on Milk Street.

CK: So you're the emperor of community cookbooks. I think is fair. You have 1000s of them. I have maybe 20 or 30. I got interested years ago, and just love looking through them. But let's start by defining community cookbook, because you say I thought they were mostly like church cookbooks or societies, mostly of women in a town, but you have books from the caged bird fanciers or a Connecticut Rolls Royce owners Community, I love that. Connecticut Rolls Royce Owner Community Cookbook. So, when you say community cookbook, what does community mean?

DL: Well, you're right. There are lots of different words that are used to describe them. We hear church cookbooks, fundraising cookbooks. I look for three things if I'm trying to decide if a book is formally part of the category. And the first thing is that there is a recognizable community organization, and you're right most of them are church groups or like a hospital auxiliary, things like that. But over time, as American society changed, we started to see more and more organizations that were surprising. Caged bird fanciers, as you've noted, that's the first piece. The second piece is that the recipes are gathered from within that organization. And finally, the community cookbook has a fundraising or charitable purpose.

CK: Now, I just would love to see the Connecticut Rolls Royce community cookbook first page, please donate to the Connecticut rolls Owners Club

DL: And it is one of the books that is predominantly male, by the way, as opposed to the vast majority of them are produced by women's groups. And this one happens to be an almost all male group.

CK: So, the first thing I notice is there are lots of really interesting recipe names, right? You know, kelp mint marmalade, grape and cabbage salad served hot cherry bounce, pineapple omelet, pistachio mousse. So, what are some of the things that have struck you about these books that make them so unique and special?

DL: Well, I have to say that one of the things that surprises me about these books is that the recipes aren't the first place that I look to find things that are unique and special. What I like to see in these books is a glimpse into a piece of small-town America. It could be a big city too, but it's a small group of people within their community. So, you get these cross sections, these slices of American community life, where you see who are the advertisers, what kind of businesses existed in this small town, so that the advertisements are a really interesting piece of social history that you don't get from too many other sources. There's a second aspect that's one of the most exciting things for me about these books, which is the actual physical objects themselves. Some groups go full on DIY. They go to the church basement, and they find the mimeo machine. One of the businesses in the congregation is a flooring store, and they sell linoleum, and they have all these weird linoleum samples. So, they take the linoleum, and they drill holes in it, and they put ribbons through it, and you end up with a mimeographed book with a linoleum binding. I have examples in my collection of bindings that are asbestos, corrugated cardboard, steel and copper and wallpaper and oil cloth. So they were, they were using the things available at hand. There was a tremendous amount of handmade craft involved in this, and it had to be a community effort in order to make and assemble these books.

CK: Well, if you think about it, there are very few other things that humans do where there's pride of authorship. And you know what else, other than a recipe, can you really say is yours or expresses something about you? You know, very few people going to write a poem or a book about fiction or whatever, but it's, it was a way of expressing yourself to the public. And that's that's powerful stuff.

DL: It is, and, you know, I have lots of friends who are writers, and I have those books on my shelf, but there's a different thing on a different shelf, which is in my kitchen. There's a binder of recipes I've gathered from friends, and I know that I'm going to reach for Maya's gluten free almond and coconut flour cake on a regular basis. And I know that she got that recipe somewhere else, she's told me, but I'll never not think that it's Maya's cake.

CK: You talk about choice recipes, Denver, Colorado, 1897 on the front panel, it was printed in blue, green, the way to a man's heart. Did you see, did you see these books change in terms of social norms or attitude or presentation over 100 years?

DL: You definitely would see certain repetition of titles. So, the way to a man's heart is also a slogan that's on the cover of the Settlement Cookbook, 1901 and 1903 you see certain phrases like tried-and-true receipts. And there must be 100 books with that title in the end of the first decade and the second decade of the 20th century. You see the word pure often, and that's because of the pure food movement, which was this effort to, yeah, so 1906 the Food and Drug Act, the creation of the FDA, which had to do with, you know, good labeling and no ingredients that weren't actually food. You know, when you get to the end of the 1950s the cookbooks start to take on a different set of political values, and then they start to take on the 1960s esthetics. And the titles are, you know, cooking for the people, cooking with the people, cooking by the people. And there's a great anti-nuclear weapon cookbook. They did two different editions of it in southern California, and it's just great, you know, super bright, psychedelic looking. The internal pages are sort of almost look like they're brown craft paper with dark brown ink. You know, very much the kind of thing we might expect to see from Moosewood 15 - 20 years later.

CK: So, you have, what, 1200 of different community cookbooks. I guess

DL: That is a really old number, I’ve got to tell you.

CK: Oh, okay, so the obsession continues. (Yeah) So, so just to explain to me or us, the purpose of that collection, and what do you do with it? How do people get access to it, etc.

DL: So, the collection is all 50 states, and it can't be remotely complete, because, I mean, I think the University of Texas has a collection of just Texas cookbooks, and it's over 8000 books at this point, so there's no way I'm going to be reaching completeness. I now have in my main collection the state of Maine. It's approaching 2000 cookbooks

CK: That's pretty amazing.

DL: But it's a big state with a lot of little towns. And all those little towns produce them, which is fantastic, because these tiny rural places often the earliest printed book from that town was the community cookbook.

CK: Last thing is, have you incorporated in these recipes into your cooking repertoire?

DL: I have. There's a main cookbook from Bangor Maine in the 1930s that contains a recipe for something that I've tried making in the past. It's a shrub recipe. Most people, when they write a shrub recipe, it's about one sentence long, because it's very simple, but she this, this contributor, anonymous contributor, gave this really long explanation, detailing every bit of labor she put into it. So it's not just like, you know, you put the lemon juice into this or the raspberries into that you knew exactly how long it took her to squeeze the juice out of the raspberries and remove the seeds and carry it outdoors into the sun and put it back in at night so something doesn't eat it, and then back out again the next morning, so it continues to ferment. I mean, it was just like she wanted to say, this is a really easy recipe, but it's a lot of labor, nonetheless. And those are the kinds of things that really make me happy when I look at a recipe, like things where I like, I'm getting this little window into somebody's life, as opposed to just something, you know, delicious to eat or drink.

CK: Yeah, that's, you know, that's a really good point, because I I would really love it, you know. And I don't come across recipes like this too often, which is like a real conversation that's sometimes funny, sometimes cranky about making a recipe. And, yeah, that's an interesting point. It should be more personal, more point of view. And, you know, damn it, you’ve got to bring it in at night so the raccoon doesn't get it.

DL: Well, I think for people who love to cook, all of us have stories. And for the right recipes, we have stories that can go on and on. So, it's one of the pleasures of food, is it creates more and more fun stories to tell.

CK: Don it's been a real pleasure, and I need to go back to my own collection and start looking at them again. Thank you.

DL: Thank you, Christopher. It's been terrific.

CK: That was Don Lindgren, antique bookseller, also author of UnXld: American Cookbooks of Community & Place. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sara Moulton. Sara is, of course, the star of Sara's Weeknight Meals on public television. Her latest book is Home Cooking 101. So Sara, do you ever do takeout? I bet you do.

Sara Moulton: We do about once every two weeks. We have this thing in New York City called P O P O chicken. It's Peruvian chicken. You know, it's marinated and spit roasted, and it's served with the most extraordinary green sauce that's spicy and creamy. I've tried twice in two of my cookbooks to bust it. I cannot figure out what the heck is in it, but we put it on everything so good. (That sounds good). Next time you come to New York, I'll have you over for P O P O chicken.

CK: Great thanks. Okay, all right, let's take a call.

SM: Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: this is Catherine from DeLand, Florida.

SM: Hi, Catherine. How can we help you today?

Caller: I have a bit of a dilemma. I am on a church call committee, and we are responsible for interviewing and getting to know pastoral candidates. And as a result, I have taken up the daunting mantle of hosting a formal dinner party for the committee and the candidate’s family. (oh dear) yes, so what I would love some help with is some menu ideas that would work well with cooking for a group you don't know very well, and that won't tether me to the kitchen all night.

SM: Well, first of all, and this is something I do for regular dinner parties, pick something you can make ahead of time. (Okay) you know, like lasagna and then just a salad on the side with some crusty bread, or a stew, and then all you have to do is say, make the rice or the noodles to go with it, or a big pot of chili, because it's always fun to have people garnish it and have all different garnishes. There's also this recipe that I love that's good hot, cold or room temperature. Sounds counterintuitive, but it's fantastic. You take a cut up chicken, bone in, skin on and you dip it in melted garlic butter, and then you coat it with three parts fresh breadcrumbs to one part grated parmesan cheese, plus perhaps some dried oregano or thyme in there, and you completely coat it. And then you bake it off at like 350 until it's nice and brown and cooked through. And it sounds like it would be weird because the skin's still on, but it is so juicy and wonderful. I've never made it for somebody who didn't love it, and it's that simple. But let's see what Chris has to say.

CK: Hot dogs and burgers anybody? No, well actually, my go to would be posole, which is a stew. It's either a green one with tomatillos, or a tomato version with hominy. You know, the corn kernels that have been treated. You can make that way ahead of time, dump the chicken, or whatever you're going to have in it, and Hominy in the last 10 minutes, and just heat it up. But you can make the base ahead of time. It's a little different. Most people haven't had it.

SM: And you can do all those garnishes for that too

CK: And you can do a million garnishes for that. The second one I would think about is I did a Mexican beans. I was in Mexico City of years ago, and this is great recipe. We have at Milk Street for the beans, and then you can add shredded pork or chicken, whatever. You could add meat to it if you want it more hearty and then the sofrito, you know, the peppers and chilies and other things you sauté and add right at the end. And then you could also put a fresh salsa on top, so you can finish it off at the end. And it looks great and tastes great. And the last one I would like, if you want to spend a little more time, the biryani. We did one, a one pot biryani. It's a layered rice, essentially casserole, chicken, usually, or whatever it has the rice, it has a lot of spice in it, and that looks good and tastes great. So those are three slightly different things, but I totally agree do not do anything that requires last minute.

SM: No, ala minute stuff. Yeah, yeah.

CK: I've even given up on salads. I'll do something with a glass of wine. There are these little cheese puffs we got from Peru, which takes three minutes to throw together. You bake them up, and then I'll have a stew or a soup, and I'll do something simple for dessert. So, you've got three things to do. Yeah, I have to say you're quite courageous.

Caller: I love love to host, and I love to cook, and I've been following Milk Street for quite a while. I was up for the challenge, but then when I started to think about it, I wanted to do something a little bit different, a little more formal, elegant, but at the same time fun. So, these are all great ideas. I love the idea of either the chili or the posole.

CK: There's also a tip, most people buy hominy in a can, which doesn't have a lot of flavor actually, you can buy, you know, the dried corn, like you could buy dried beans, and you soak them overnight and cook them like it would beans, you know, if you do that, it's a little more work. It's not too much more,

SM: but it makes a bit of a difference

CK: but it'll, yeah, a lot of flavor. Anyway, Catherine, good luck with that.

SM: Yeah, good luck

CK: Take care.

Caller: I appreciate it. All right. Bye, bye.

CK: This is Milk Street Radio. Give us a call anytime. The number is 855-426-9843, that's 855-426-9843, or email us at questions at Milk Street Radio.com, welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: This is Laurie

CK: Hi Lori. How can we help you?

Caller: There are two chocolate cake milk street recipes I'd like to make sometime soon. One is chocolate Bundt cake with dark chocolate glaze, and that's adapted from Cheryl Day. And the other one is the chocolate blender cake with chocolate glaze (from Rose) yeah, yeah. So, my question is about chopped chocolate versus chocolate chips when making a chocolate glaze. So, the blender cake calls for chocolate chips, and I don't know chocolate chips as a substitute for baking chocolate, because they're usually made from lower quality chocolate, although there's some better ones on the marker

CK: and they have emulsifiers and some other things

Caller: Yeah, yeah but also chocolate chips, yeah, contain less cocoa butter in order to help retain their shape when baking. So wouldn't it be preferable to use a high fat chocolate, which I believe would enhance the glazes, smooth and creamy texture, or, who knows, maybe the recipe of Rose’s specifies for chocolate chips to carry the theme of easy blender preparation, and she concluded there wasn't much compromise on texture.

CK: Well, there's some very high quality they're not really chips, but they're kind of, you know, blobs. Those are good, so I think that's okay, but I wouldn't buy an inexpensive chocolate chip to use in a cake. So, I think it was just for ease. I'm with you. I would never use chocolate chips in a cake.

SM: What percentage cocoa would you add? You know how you can get 65 72 85

CK: I find anything over 70 to be bitter, inedible.

SM: Yeah. Me too.

CK: I like 60 65

SM: I do too. 65% cocoa sell.

CK: You know what I will ask Rose, but you're right. She could have done it because it was a blender cake, and it's just really easy, so maybe that's why, yeah, in general, I think you're absolutely right.

SM: Yeah, I agree too. We all agree that's miracle upon miracle yeah right

CK: Everybody's a winner. Call. Yeah,

Caller: Okay. All right. All right.

CK: Take care

Caller: Thanks a lot goodbye

CK: You’re listening to Milk Street Radio. Coming up a more intuitive way to bake bread. This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host Christopher Kimball. Richard Hart is internationally known for his breads at Hart bakery in Copenhagen, and before that with Tartine in San Francisco. Now he's sharing what he's learned from a life of bread with his first book, Richard Hart bread, Intuitive Sourdough Baking. Richard, welcome to Milk Street.

Richard Hart: Hi. It's really nice to meet you.

CK: This is the most timely interview, because about five days ago, my wife was given a sourdough starter, and I warned her of the potential consequences. And just yesterday, she said, I think I killed it. I so, so how do you know if you killed your starter? Let's start there.

RH: I mean, it's really hard to kill it. I mean, there's, I guess it comes down to knowing, I say in the book, it's a bit like learning to bake bread is like learning to play a guitar or something. I've never learned to play a guitar, but I would love to, but you just need to practice and practice and practice and really kind of understand what you're doing like a sourdough starter. It's a living pot of yeast and bacteria that are generally quite happy, and all they need is food and warmth like I guess the rest of us need.

CK: So, this is a really dumb question, but why is it called sourdough? Is it inherently sour? Is it? Well because it got started…

RH: You know what, like the bread big got the name sourdough. I don't know where the name actually come from, but I guess the the term of a sourdough is also like a bread that's made with, uh, wild yeasts, (right) You know, not like commercial yeast is a tool that the baker's got, I guess, in the early 1900s and sourdough is the original way of making bread, and it's basically a fermented flour and water that turns into a sourdough starter. And that's like the how people have been making bread forever, and it's more beneficial in the way that it's better for your body, it's better for your gut, it's better you can digest it easier because that the sour dough, kind of predigests the wheat for you. So, like, there's a lot of problems with wheat intolerance and gluten intolerance, and a lot of us bakers believe that it came from people eating really quickly made breads. You know, as a kid, I grew up in the I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s, and we were eating that, really __ supermarket bread, and that was what we always thought of as bread. But I believe that those quick made breads are not so good for you. So, sourdough, I mean, it's much better for your health. And, yeah, and I guess the name comes from there is sour notes. But I believe if you're eating a loaf of bread that's just sour, the baker's kind of made a mistake, and they don't 100% know what they're doing, it should be a very complex mixture of tastes, not just sour.

CK: So, you've had an interesting career. How did you decide to end up in Copenhagen and have a bunch of bakeries there? You met Rene Redzepi, but that's a big move, right?

RH: Yeah, so I was working, I'd been at Tartine for seven years, and was very happy. I always knew that I wanted to open my own thing, so I decided to reach out to Rene because we'd met a few times, and the last time we'd met was in Australia, when they did their pop up in Sydney. And after the Rene sat us down and said, hey, do you guys know anyone who would want to come and bake with us? And at the time, I was happy, and I was like, no, there's no way I would want to go. There I was, you know, I was happy in California. But as the time went on, I just felt ready, like I had a small family, and I felt ready to introduce them to something different, like we moved to Europe and see I wanted to be closer to my home. I'm from London, so I reached out to Rene, and he asked what I was looking for. And I said, well, I'm on a bakery in London, and I'm on a bakery in Paris. And he replied and said, Look, I'm so happy with your email. Look, come and open a bakery in Copenhagen, then you can go wherever you want. So, like in 2016 we moved to Denmark.

CK: So, you talk about rye bread, which is totally different, as you mentioned, than what Americans think of as rye bread. So, to a Dane, what is rye bread?

RH: It's a really dense, heavy loaf. It's baked in a tin, and it's made with just rye flour. In America, rye bread is generally made with wheat flour, with a scant, small amount of rye flour in it to call it rye bread, it's still pretty much a wheat bread, but in Denmark, it's a really dense, little heavy cake of a loaf and has lots of seeds, and generally, like some dark malt powder. And generally, they slice it really thin and they make open face sandwiches on it. It's called rugbrød but I'm sure I bastardized that, because although I feel like I can say a word should be Danish. I can't say it at all. So also, like the lucky thing of being connected to Noma, like we set up a test bakery in in Noma went of the new space they built, they had four greenhouses, and they set me up a test bakery, and then they gave me a taste of all these potions they make, you know, every kind of powder, miso, sauce, all these kind of things and like, I left that day, and it blew my mind away, thinking, wow. Like, everything they created for flavor was genius and like, so one of these things was a miso that they made from rye bread. So with that in mind, it made a lot of sense that I would use the rye miso in my rye bread. You know, it's, in a way, it's a full circle, because now we give them the rye bread, they turn it into miso, and then we put it back in our rye bread. It's kind of an umami hit.

CK: I'm quoting you now. I've got a 10-year starter, 100-year starter thing. I think that's rubbish. I love that, good for you. I'm so tired of people talking about their starters, like their children or something.

RH: Yeah. I mean, right, it is a pretty much it's a load of rubbish. Like, it's just fermented flour and water and, like, you could start it in a week, and you have the same thing. It's nothing more than that. It really isn't. And, like, maybe it takes on different bacteria’s because of where you are in the world or your climate. But like, the truth is, it's just fermented flour and water. And, like, I remember, like, people freaking out and saving up backup starters here and there in case someone throws it out, and having a panic, like, oh, my God. The truth is, if you threw away your sourdough starter and you're working in a bakery or a kitchen or something, if you've got bread in the proofer that's also your part of your sourdough, it might have salt in it, but you could take that bread, feed it, flour and water, and you've got a sourdough again, like, this mystical idea of this sourdough, yeah, like you say you're a little tired of it.

CK: Another one of my favorite things in your book, good, deep bread. Yeah. What does that mean?

RH: Okay, so, like, so basically, like, I grew up eating supermarket bread and stuff, but like, we would go to the supermarket and there would be a bakery in the supermarket, and they would pull out these, like white bread in England they're called bloomers. I know you have them in America too, but it's just like this white bread, and it would come out and it would still be warm. And like that feeling of warm bread, even if it's not very good bread, is still a wonderful feeling. You know? It makes you very excited, something about warm bread. Anyway, so I set about a task to make good bread out of you know, like, make that bread, but make it good for you. Because, like, generally, those breads that come from the supermarket, again, they're packed full of yeast. They're very quick fermentation. They're not good on your body. So, the idea was to make three different fermentations, mix that together and then turn that into your dough. So, like the yeast would come from a poolish, which is fermented flour and water with commercial yeast, and then I would also make a biga which is a similar thing, but it's a less hydration, but it's flour water and commercial yeast and then a sourdough starter. So, the idea was to mix those three fermented products together and then turn that into your bread. So, in doing so, everything is fermented, so it's better on your body.

CK: You went to Paris and said, their baguette’s suck or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth,

RH: Oh my god, you're about to get all the Parisian bakers kill me.

CK: Well, I agree. I think their croissant are not good

RH: Yeah, and when was the last time you were there?

CK: Last fall

RH: I was there in January

CK: I just find that, you know, you don't get a super crisp outer crust. The inside is not pillowy and light. No, it's just heavier

RH: My baguette, my my French style baguette, is in my head. It doesn't exist in France. I can't find it. Like, I imagine it to be this thin, shattering crust and this open, translucent crumb. And like, I produce that, but like, I've never found it in France. And you're it's true, like, there's a ton of boulangeries, and the majority of them are, like, they're not made with love. I mean, there's a few modern bakeries that have come up over the last five years that are doing a much better job than before, but, yeah, there was a lot of love lost. There's like, literally, there's like, five boulangeries on each street, and the majority of them come from a frozen, prebaked product.

CK: So fresh bread in a skillet. (Yeah) what's that?

RH: I put that in there because that's my favorite way to eat bread. Like I like fresh out of the oven, bread I would like to slice it and then treat it like a like a steak, slice it, put some sort of fat on it, and fry it super hard in a skillet. The texture becomes super like crisp, but the inside is so custardy and light, it takes you into a whole new realm of pleasure.

CK: So, a lot of people say one of my kids was a baker for a while. You know, you get up at three in the morning. It's just brutal. It's hard to have a life, and there's a lot of repetition. So, you've been doing this long time. You're still at it. You're starting a new bakery in Mexico City. Does the the actual work of making bread. You still love it.

RH: I'm in love with it completely, like I'm so addicted, like I'm making bread in my house right now, you know? Like I completely love making bread, like the meditative effect of it, the excitement of baking this loaf of bread. Will it be better than yesterday when I when I gave up being a cook and and moved to being a baker, my mom was like, you're going to be so bored, like, you only have a few ingredients. And, you know, man, I've never been so challenged, like, I'm so excited to wake up every day. And you know what, no one likes waking up at three o'clock in the morning. That is rubbish. It sucks. It's so horrible. But you know, like, I'm I'm hoping in Mexico, people start later, actually, like in Denmark, we opened our doors at 7:30am which meant we baked in the middle of the night so we could supply the shops. But like here in Mexico, I feel like everyone starts a little later and carries on a little later. So, yeah, and also, like, if, if you love your job, you're not actually going to work. This is just what you do, you know. Like, it doesn't feel like a day at work. It feels like your life, like, you know, it's, it's a wonderful thing. I never complain that I'm, oh my god, I'm going to work, like, I love it.

CK: Yeah, I feel the same way. (Yeah) Now, okay, let's talk about what you like in music, Nick Cave and the bad seeds.

RH: Oh my god.

CK: So, I pulled him up on YouTube yesterday, and I got so incredibly depressed, and then realized he's been referred to as the master of melancholy. I really like the music, but this is not, yeah, get up and dance music.

RH: I mean, my bakers, like, if I'm playing Nick Cave, my bakers are like, turn that off. Turn it off. It's too depressing. And you know what, I don't consider it depressing at all. Like, I consider it so beautiful. And like, if you listen to the lyrics, the lyrics are so lovely. Like, he's singing about love and connection and human and I don't know, like I'm so into him, I guess that style of music just really affects me. I really love it. Well,

CK: Well, it's nice to realize you don't like making bread or cooking or music or not. Yeah, Richard, it's been Yeah, just thanks a lot. It's been a real pleasure.

RH: Yeah, it's been a lovely conversation. Yeah,

CK: Thank you so much.

RH: Oh, yeah, great. It's been lovely talking to you.

CK: That was Richard Hart, owner of Hart Bakery in Copenhagen. His book is Richard Hart bread, intuitive Sourdough Baking. You can get his recipe for English [email protected]. Celtic mythology claims that fairies hate bread. In Ireland, people used to place bread in their pockets when visiting fairy locations, or even hid it in their children's clothes after dark to protect them from fairy mischief. And bread, of course, turns up in all sorts of stories, from Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs to Red Riding Hood, who was bringing a loaf to her grandmother. Yet in the kitchen, even stale bread was considered a prize ingredient, bread for stuffing, croutons, summer puddings, Panzanella, tiramisu, Spanish garlic bread soup, and in 1000 other recipes. So, fairies may hate bread, but for humans, it's still the staff of life. You're listening to Milk Street Radio coming up the way you've been dicing your onions is all wrong.

Hi, I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is Milk Street Radio. I'm joined now by Rose Hattabaugh

to talk about this week's recipe, Turkish Crescent cookies with spiced walnut filling. Rose, how are you?

Rose Hattabaugh: Good Chris, how are you?

CK: Good. I was in Istanbul about a year ago. Before that, it was 50 years before that, I was there as a college student and boy that place has changed. I mean, it felt kind of small and was playing soccer in the streets with some kids and some back game. And it's really become a large city with really big suburbs, but there are wonderful places still there. Hajir Bakir bakery, for example, is like the oldest bakery in town, and they're famous for Turkish delight, which is amazing. They have like 30 different flavors. But I had a cup of coffee one morning, and they served this crescent cookie, very thin dough, and inside it was walnuts and sugar, dried fruits, etc. absolutely delicious, and it wasn't super sweet. I just love this cookie. So, I ate a few of them just to make sure I'd remember how good they were, and you started working on them.

RH: Yeah. What was really unusual about these cookies is the dough. It had a little bit of yeast in it, but it was not for airiness. It was more to make the dough tender and light. So, it's something that you knead by hand, but the yeast was a really nice component of this.

CK: What's interesting too is they used a little bit of cocoa in the filling, although I don't think we did, but it was the texture. It's almost a rustic cookie, right, in some ways.

RH: Well, what I love about this cookie is the bakeries actually use their cake scraps to make this filling, so it's a great way to use up extra nuts and cake scraps. We ended up using a fluffy kind of panko crumb to replicate that. And then we have some walnuts in there. We have spices, all spiced, cinnamon, lemon, they, as you said, can use cocoa in that, but it's a delicious filling, and it's not too sweet, and it is a really substantial cookie. It's very grown up.

CK: Yeah, the Turks have a real expertise with cookies like the sort of maamoul cookies that have a date filling, and these are just lovely. They're not just sweet on sweet, right? They have interesting texture and flavor, and it's much more sophisticated, I think, than many other cookies in the world. So, one last question, though, is the shaping? Because you look at a crescent cooking with a filly, you go like, I can't do that. So, is this doable?

RH: Oh, it's really easy. All you have to do is roll the dough into a three by five-inch oval, and then you put some of the filling in just close the ends. And what I like to do is roll it on the counter, so you get kind of a cigar shape. And what that does is it will close up the cookie, but also help the filling go all the way to the ends. I don't know if you've ever had a cookie like this, where you bite into it, it's only dough, and then you just take the ends and twist them around into a little crescent, you brush the top with a little bit of egg and sugar and sprinkle it with sliced almonds.

CK: So, I know my kids like the standard, you know, colored icing cookies, because they don't like the cookies. They like the icing. But next time we make cookies with the kids, I'm going to make these because they're kind of grown-up cookies, and they really go great with a cup of coffee, Turkish Crescent cookies with spiced walnut and chocolate filling, direct from Istanbul. Thank you, Rose.

RH: You're welcome, Chris. You can get the recipe for Turkish Crescent [email protected]

CK: I’m Christopher Kimball. You're listening to Milk Street Radio right now my co-host, Sara Moulton, I will be answering a few more of your cooking questions.

SM: Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: Hi, this is Josh ___,

SM: Hi, Josh, where are you calling from?

Caller: I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts.

SM: How can we help you?

Caller: I've been making limoncello for a few years now, and I've seen a lot of things on the internet about how long you're supposed to let it sit both before you put in the simple syrup and afterwards. And the part that's always confused me is when you're letting it sit with the simple syrup. I don't understand why it has to be for so long. People say that it mellows over that time. I'm just not really sure what that mellowing process is. So, I was wondering, you know, what is happening chemically there, and how long you should actually let it mellow with the simple syrup

SM: Let's just go through the process. So why don't you tell us what you do?

Caller: So, I start with, you know, zesting 15 lemons or so. I mix that with a liter and a half of a combination of vodka and Everclear. Let that sit for 30 days to 60 days, sometimes just the two of those combined. And then after that period of time, I'll mix in simple syrup of like four cups of water, five cups of sugar, and then let that sit again. Finally strained it all out at the end of that process.

SM: And how do you like your Limoncello? Do you like the one that you make?

Caller: Yeah, I've been experimenting with, you know, different ratios of the alcohol the original recipe I got used all Everclear, and that was a little too powerful for me Yeah. Ever

SM: Yeah. Everclear is pure grain alcohol, so it's pretty, pretty darn potent. Yeah, a couple years ago, this woman I was working with for my cooking show made limoncello, 10-day limoncello, which seems pretty darn speedy. We should point out that when you do the lemon zest, you peel the lemons and make sure you get none of the white or as best you can keep the white out, because the white is bitter, but she would soak that in the vodka first, and then take it out and soak the skins in the simple syrup, and then she would combine the two. But my thought is, if you do it a shorter period of time, you're going to have a brighter, fresher sort of flavor. You know, the peels have not been sitting in there all that long. And if you do it longer, and I believe in Italy, they generally do much longer than that, at least three months, you get more depth of flavor because it's just had more time to hang out. Let's see what Chris has to say.

CK: I don't like limoncello, and I've been very clear about that. I do think if you can make one that's not as sweet,

SM: You just add less simple syrup,

CK: Any kind of alcohol that's got a fair amount of sugar in it is going to be tough on the morning after. But let me ask you, do you like limoncello because you, she asked you that question a few minutes ago when you did pause a little bit,

Caller: it definitely can come out syrupy. You know, one thing we've been thinking about for our next batch is adding some ginger.

SM: Oh, I love that idea.

CK: That's a good idea. Yeah, I like that idea a lot.

Caller: I will admit, I haven't found too many cocktails that it goes well in

CK: There is a cocktail the French do, and you use sparkling water and a little bit of vodka, just a tiny bit, like half an ounce, but it's mostly sparkling water, a little sous and a little gin or vodka. That's delicious. I think you're right. I think if you used it with sparkly water of some kind in a cooler, that I think makes a lot of sense. And the ginger idea sounds great,

SM: I think it's brilliant. Yeah

Caller: I mean, I have used it successfully with some sparkling water and, you know, muddle some kind of fruits into the bottom, and so tartness of the fruit sort of takes a little bit away from that syrupiness.

CK: Yeah, I think those

SM: You can add less simple syrup, but I love the ginger idea. I might even try that, Josh, thank you.

CK: Josh, thank you so much.

Caller: I'll email back to let you know how it goes. Thank you.

SM: Please do, thank you. Okay bye bye

CK: This is Milk Street Radio, if your cooking needs a correction or some help, give us a ring. 855-426-9843, that's 855-426-9843, or email us at questions at Milk Street Radio.com,

SM: Welcome to Milk Street who's calling?

Caller: my name is Diane.

SM: Hi, Diane, where are you calling from?

Caller: I am calling from Louisville, Kentucky.

SM: And how can we help you today?

Caller: When a recipe calls for oil, or I hear like you or Christopher, refer to, would just add oil. I don't know which oil to use. Is there a standard for a stir fry, like a vegetable stir fry, or I like to fry tofu. I am a vegetarian, but I haven't found the right oil to use for that. (Wow). So, I'm wondering if you have any suggestions, or what do you keep in your pantry?

SM: Let's just start by saying it has to do with flavor, and it has to do with smoke point. So, you should consider what kind of flavor profile it like if you're cooking Italian food, you might want to go with extra virgin olive oil. I mean, not to fry in or cook at a high heat, but you know, that's the flavor profile you're looking for. In Asian cooking. A lot of times it's peanut oil, which has a faint peanuty taste but a high smoke point. So, it's good for a stir fry. If you're looking for an oil that has no flavor, but you need oil in the recipe. You're looking for something like grape seed or safflower or sunflower oil, and all three of those have high smoke points also, which means that you could cook with them. The more refined the oil, the higher the smoke point, the less the flavor. A refined coconut oil is not going to be very coconutty. An unrefined coconut oil is going to be quite coconutty. And if you have an oil that has been toasted, it's not good for sauteing, and it's very strong in flavor. So, like a toasted sesame oil is something you use more, like vanilla extract as a flavoring, not as big amount of oil in a recipe. Chris?

CK: The answer, I think, is grapeseed oil. I buy gallon jugs of this for very little money. It's very neutral tasting. Canola oil is horrible. It's got a fishy taste.

SM: I hate it too, I hate it

CK: I wouldn't do coconut oil. Anything that's got a strong flavor. You want no flavor, really. The peanut oil's got too much flavor. Grapeseed oil does have a high smoke point, but there is something interesting most people don't know if you get a supermarket olive oil. That's not a super-premium, unfiltered oil. You can fry in it. The smoke points around 420 or 430 but I'd say grape seed oil. I just fried some chicken cutlets a couple nights ago. That's my go to it's really inexpensive, and the flavor is neutral, and it's got a high smoke point. And you can buy big chugs of it cheap.

SM: Does that answer your question, Diane?

Caller: Well, yes, I have never used grape seed oil, so I'm looking forward to that.

SM: I'll tell you something I've been increasingly seeing is on the label, it will say good for frying, which means it has a high smoke point. Oh, which means it's a good oil to use.

CK: Diane, thank you so much. Been a pleasure.

Caller: Yeah, thank you.

CK: Take care. This is Milk Street radio. Now let's check in with our friend Kenji Lopez Alt. Kenji, welcome back. What's going on?

J Kenji-Alt: Oh today, I thought we'd talk about something very nerdy and mostly useless,

CK: Oh, that's going to appeal to me greatly.

J Kenji-Alt: Well, it's about onions, and specifically about how to dice them in the most efficient way to do it. There's a couple of methods. There's the classic Jacques Pepin la technique, method that they teach you at culinary school, where you do a series of vertical cuts and then you do a series of horizontal cuts, as if you're kind of pushing the onion through a grid and it falls apart into little dice. But there's people who tell you, well, that method doesn't make that much sense, because an onion is not square, it's round, and so you should be cutting your onion radially. You know, people like Alton Brown, they recommend that you point your knife in towards the center of the onion, so you end up sort of with a starburst pattern, you know, starting at the center point of the onion and coming out. So, you know, I always wondered which of those methods actually is better, which one is going to give you that even dice with the fewest number of strokes? And so, in order to do this, I called up an old friend of mine from MIT, and he helped me build a computer model of an onion that we can then sort of overlay various knife strokes onto and calculate some of the basic geometries

CK: Kenji, we've known each other 15 years anyway, probably, (yeah) I always worried someday you would just go beyond the fringe, like your show of genius and brilliance, would just go into some strange scientific ether.

J Kenji-Alt: Yeah. Well, we might have got there at this point. Well, you know, the thing is that when you when you do cut vertically, right? So, what happens is, when your knife is sort of towards the center of the onion, you get some really nice even dice. But as you get further and further to the edge, your pieces kind of end up weird and elongated. However, when you do radially, all the pieces that are at the very center, you end up with these tiny sort of pie shapes. And towards the edge you get bigger pie shapes. And so, neither one of those is particularly even. And as it turns out, neither one of those is actually the most efficient method. So, what we tested was, rather than pointing straight vertically or pointing straight at the center of the onion, what if you did somewhere in between that? And so, we set up a model where you could kind of move the point where you were aiming the knife and calculate the standard deviation of the piece size according to that movement.

CK: So, hold on, hold on a second. So, you have an onion, you're cutting off the ends (correct) Then are you cutting a pole to pole?

J Kenji-Alt: Yeah. So, you trim off the root end, then you cut it in half, you know, and lay that onion half flat. So that when you're when you're looking at the onion, you see, you know, a series of concentric circles that are the layers of the onion. So, the beginning is the same way you would cut an onion anytime you know the standard method of dicing an onion. And then the question is, when you're making that initial set of cuts, where do you aim your knife? And what we discovered was that if you consider the radius of the onion, you know, that is the height of that half onion, okay, you think of that as one. If you aim your knife at a point that's point 577, below the surface of the cutting board. That is actually the mathematically ideal place to be aiming your knife. Now, of course, nobody's going to actually take a ruler and measure down point 577, from the knife, but the basic rule of thumb is that instead of going perfectly vertical and instead of going perfectly towards the center of the onion. Aim about halfway between those things somewhere in the middle, and you'll end up with an onion that is much more evenly diced than either of the other two methods.

CK: Well, let's just talk about one other thing, the food processor. I found that a food processor will massacre and it just destroys it. You want to talk about that?

J Kenji-Alt: Yeah. Well, for sure, yeah. I mean, as you know, like the things that make an onion smell like an onion, an onion are these precursor chemicals that are inside the cells that, until the cells are busted open, those precursor chemicals can’t combine. And so, the more cells you break open, the stronger that sort of really pungent, tear inducing onion aroma is going to be in a food processor really just kind of massacres an onion. So, you release all these juices, you know, you put an onion and food processor then comes out wet. And then on top of that, once it's wet like that, it becomes very difficult to sweat an onion or sauté it, because rather than softening, you end up just with this pool of liquid that you then have to reduce. And so, you sort of end up losing all the juices, creating these aromas that you don't really want. And then the little bits of onion that are left over are not going to be even anyway. Yeah, I would definitely avoid any kind of spinning blade when it comes to onions,

CK: I have one last question. Now. I've been told a yellow onion, even though it's more sulfurous, however you want to describe it raw, ends up being sweeter when it's cooked, even sweeter than a white onion or red onion, or maybe even a Vidalia. Is that true, that the stronger the onion before cooking, the sweeter after.

J Kenji-Alt: Well, I mean, as far as I know, and I probably learned this from you, but as far as I know, yellow onions and Vidalia, so called sweet onions, are pretty similar as far as sugar content goes, it's just Vidalia onions have fewer of those sulfurous compounds, and so when they're raw, they don't smell as pungent. However, once you cook them, none of that really matters too much. They end up sort of pretty similar. So, it's, yeah, it's really only in their raw state that you know, those vedalia’s, those Walla Walla onions, are going to taste sweeter, but if you're going to be cooking them, then there's no reason to pay any extra for those

CK: Kenji it may have been useless, but it was fascinating. Thank you very much.

J Kenji-Alt: Those are my favorite kinds of tips. I think

CK: That was Kenji Lopez Alt. He's a food columnist for the New York Times, also author of The Wok: Recipes and Techniques. He also co-hosts the podcast The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. You can find more information on Kenji's research at Milk Street Radio.com That's it for today. To hear all of our episodes, head to Milk Street Radio.com or wherever you get your podcasts, to explore Milk Street and everything we have to offer go to 177 Milkstreet.com you can become a member, get full access to every recipe, free, standard shipping for the Milk Street store and lots more. You can also learn about our latest book, which is Milk Street Bakes. Plus, we have a complete collection of all of our favorite recipes at Milk Street Radio.com/best recipes. Can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. On Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions and thanks, as always, for listening.

Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH co-founder Melissa Baldino, executive producer Annie Sensabaugh, senior editor Melissa Allison, senior producer Sarah Clapp, Associate producer Caroline Davis with production help from Debby Paddock. Additional editing by Sidney Lewis, audio mixing by Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole Massachusetts. Theme music by Toubab Krewe, additional music by George Brandl Egloff, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRX