Episode 2 We speak with food content creator Saeng Douangdara about his new cookbook, The Lao Kitchen, and an upcoming event May 1 at MOFAD with drag performer Jujubee. We also continue exploring the street food in our Brooklyn neighborhood, DUMBO. Ivan and volunteers Aidan and Brittany visit and chat with Dustin at Cocoboys. NOTES: Muhammad Abdul-Hadi Down North Pizza https://www.downnorthpizza.com/ Out West Coffee https://www.outwestphilly.com/ We the Pizza: Slangin’ Pies and Savin’ Lives https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739586/we-the-pizza-by-muhammad-abdul-hadi-with-michael-carter-and-david-joachim/ Kalilah Moon Drive Change https://drivechangenyc.org/ Paul Van Ravenstein, Monique Mulder The Pickled City https://papress.com/products/the-pickled-city Ashley Rose Young Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans https://ashleyroseyoung.com/dissertation-research/ Saeng Douangdara The Lao Kitchen https://www.saengskitchen.com/cookbook James Syhabout, John Birdsall Hawker Fare https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hawker-fare-james-syhaboutjohn-birdsall?variant=32130063826978 Ponpailin 'Noi' Kaewduangdee A Child Of The Rice Fields: Recipes From Noi’s Lao Kitchen https://doikanoi.com/book/ Jujubee https://www.instagram.com/jujubeeonline/ Dustin MacKay Cocoboys 147 Front St (on nice days) https://www.instagram.com/cocoboysnyc/ MOFAD The Museum of Food and Drink 55 Water St 2nd Fl Brooklyn NY 11201 https://www.mofad.org/ TRANSCRIPT: 00:00 Ivan De Luce (ID): Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from The Museum of Food and Drink. Hey, Bernadette. Bernadette Cura (BC): Ivan! Long time no chat. ID: Yeah, how's it going? BC: Actually, I see you like four times a week. I'm sick to death of you. ID: It's only episode two. BC: I know. But it's good. I'm going great. We had a great couple of weeks here at MOFAD. So fun. ID: Yes, we had our event with Muhammad Abdul-Hadi, author of We the Pizza. BC: Yeah, we spoke with him during the last podcast. ID: And he was in conversation this past week talking about his cookbook. And there were some interesting 00:35 recipes in there that I had not noticed the first time around. It was a great way to kind of get more in depth there. One of the most interesting recipes in the book came from Chef Mike Carter. When he was incarcerated, he noticed that inmates would get resourceful with the types of um dishes they would make with their limited resources. So they would actually take Cheez-Its and ramen and make pizza dough out of it. BC: It is a striking recipe in it's really gravity 01:05 and humor at the same time somehow. The event was really wonderful. Yeah, we made strawberry lemonade from the cookbook as well. And we also served pickle lemonade because we had a pickle event the week before, so we were, the entire museum is obsessed with the pickle lemonade, including Nazli, our president. As a matter of fact, she made it, and so we ended up serving it alongside the strawberry lemonade at the event, and it was a hit. ID: It gave sort of a thirst-quenching 01:35 electrolyte kind of flavor. Imagine Gatorade but good. And I would imagine it would be good with a bit of tequila so I'm gonna give that a shot at some point. BC: Maybe vodka, tequila might be a little strong. ID: We're gonna have to do a comparison. BC: It's happening. Yeah. Okay so we have also some events coming up what do we have coming up on Thursday April 30th? ID: Yes we have our event From Pushcarts to Po’ Boys: How Street Food Becomes American. We're going to have food historian and author Ashley Rose Young over here at MOFAD. 02:05 BC: She was an advisor for our current exhibition Street Food City, right? ID: Yes. BC: So I'm so excited to have her in-house and what are they gonna be talking about, who’s she talking to? ID: She's going to be talking to NYU Food Studies Chair Jennifer Berg. Ashley Rose Young has a new book Nourishing Networks the Public Culture of Food in New Orleans. So she's going to talk about how everyday street foods in New York, New Orleans, and all around the country became American standards and influenced our diets today. BC: That's gonna be so 02:35 amazing. I cannot wait. And I heard tell of a New Orleans cocktail that's going to be on the roster for that event. ID: Wow, okay to embody New Orleans in a cocktail the possibilities really are limitless. BC: I'm excited. And then after that on May 1st, we have an amazing event coming up with Saeng Douangdara and he's gonna be in conversation with Jujubee who is a drag queen from Laos and they're fans of each other. 03:04 They support each other in promoting their culture. We talked about Thai food and how that's more comfortable for people. So a lot of people from Laos called their food Thai so it was approachable. Now it's going to have a spotlight shown on it with his cookbook. Excellent. Let's take a listen. BC: Yeah. ID: Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from The Museum of Food and Drink. 03:31 Saeng Douangdara is a Los Angeles-based personal chef and content creator. His new cookbook, The Lao Kitchen, explores traditional and contemporary Lao flavors told through family recipes. After moving to the United States with his family at the age of two, Saeng grew up in Wisconsin, grappling between two cultures and learning recipes from his parents. After a month-long trip to Laos, Saeng discovered a deeper love of Lao cooking and founded Saeng's Kitchen. Saeng will appear at MOFAD on Friday, May 1st 04:00 in conversation with Jujubee, a drag queen and performer who has appeared on RuPaul's Drag Race. In The Lao Kitchen, she says, Saeng shares our Lao culture and food beautifully. 04:16 BC: Okay, just getting into the book a little bit. On the first page you described Lao Cuisine as funky. And I'm sure that has a lot to do with padaek 04:26 and the other fermented foods in the cuisine, is that mainly what you're talking about? Or is there like a metaphorical like other like funkiness? Saeng Douangdara (SD):I mean, I just admire the word funky now. I think about my childhood and even the community back then, like you would hear stories about like a lot of the refugees coming in and we'd be talking with each other and it was all about hiding your food. It was all about like, oh, this is too smelly. This is too, the padaek is too funky. 04:54 And so I also heard a lot of those stories from like neighbors, our peers and 04:59 other Southeast Asian folk talking about Lao cuisine. So there was a very much of a big shift that needed to happen. And so that's when I saw, think in the 2010s, when Lao folks slowly started positioning themselves and reclaiming that word of funky. And so that's why I use funky now in a way, an empowerment word, acknowledging, yeah, our food is different and it is pungent, but if you know how to use it, if you know how to use the funk, 05:26 your food is gonna be incredible. So I'm reclaiming that word of like, it's time to shine a light, big old bright light on Lao cuisine and the unfiltered fish sauce and all that good stuff. BC: I think it's so amazing that you have that recipe in there for the fish sauce. SD: It took so hard to figure out, cause when you know moms, they don't measure. So I had to go and just watch her several times. Was like, Mom, how do you do that? And it takes at least a year to ferment good padaek. it's a long process. 05:55 BC: You know, after it ferments for that first three months or whatever, you add the aromatics, you add like the garlic husks. And the peel of the pineapple. You were talking in one of your videos in your Instagram about how, you know, like the fish and banana leaves is sustainable. I mean, there's so many things about traditional cuisines and old ways. Where including like those waste products, the husks of the garlic and the pineapple. 06:21 I think that's really exciting. SD: I think that's a piece that I learned from my mom that, you know, she never wasted anything. And I think that's the generational knowledge that she carried on from Laos to America. And to be able to like... 06:34 first to see that I was like wow you really don't waste anything like everything was always used in the house every single grain of rice because you know Mom growing up was working in the rice fields to make every single grain so it's like that type of knowledge. BC: You know the work that goes into that rice. It's not just a bag that came from the store, like some abstract piece of food. There's also a flavor component to the husks, that idea that you could even get flavor out of some 07:04 like that. My dad, because there's, you know, when he makes his chicken adobo, which is like the national dish of the Philippines, sometimes people use peeled cloves, but my dad insisted on using the husk. 07:13 because it gave that special flavor and that like validated to me when I saw that recipe, I'm like, oh my God, my dad was totally right, you know, like there is flavor to be had in those things that are, that people consider garbage. So it's really interesting. And the fact that it's unfiltered, is that unique to Lao cuisine, the unfiltered fish sauce? SD: Yeah, so I would say within Southeast Asia, there's other types of unfiltered fish sauce, but I usually like to focus on how Lao 07:43 people create our own padaek or unfiltered fish sauce because it is very much with the ingredients that are in the staple Lao cuisine. So like in padaek, we use the sticky rice husk. So when like you're making your growing sticky rice and before it becomes that shiny white grain, you get the husk, the brown husk around it. And that's what they use actually to make padaek. But in the book, I say, if you can't have access to it, you can still use lightly toasted sticky rice powder to kind of get that similar taste. But essentially, 08:13 I focus on that bec
