There are still a few spots left at my Asian-ish pop-up this Wednesday! I just tested the dessert again and came up with a truly surprising and perfect garnish. It’s gonna be a fun night.
Also, I’m making a little gift of my Friday recipe for pistachio cookies. I’m eating one right now with tea and it’s soft and chewy and pistachio-y, and some of that taste and texture is thanks to brown sugar. (If you received the recipe on Friday, please note that I’ve updated some quantities, so use the linked version. Thank you Marina for spotting!) If you like this recipe, think about becoming a paid subscriber!
Okay, let me open Kayla’s interview with a story: We met on the line at Dirt Candy. She was pastry, I was savory. The work was killing us both a little every day, but she and a couple other people made it feel possible. We’d get coffee during our break and walk back slowly into the dimness of the restaurant. “Time to disassociate for six hours,” she’d say.
One day I caught Kayla at family meal and asked if we could walk alone. “I have something to tell you,” I said when we were outside. “I already know,” she said, looking straight at me with those warm, open, brown eyes. “You’re with child.” Chills ran down my spine in that moment, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised because Kayla is magic that way. Her wisdom seems to come from a highly developed intuition that she carries into working with people and with food. Combine that intuition with the technical knowledge she’s amassed over the years, and you get food that’s beautifully executed but still feels like it has heart.
Originally Kayla said her secret ingredient was heat, which fits her (soft warmth and fiery heat all at once) but then I made her choose an actual food ingredient, so she’s going to tell us about: brown sugar. Keep an eye out for her pop-up at Rhodora on June 10th+11th and read to the end to learn about her upcoming project, The People’s Table.
I add brown sugar to literally everything. I think it’s because my favorite flavor profile is, like, Burnt [laughs]. I just like smoky stuff. I love smoked meats. I love brown butter. I love molasses and brown sugar. A lot of that has to do with having a Southern upbringing. In the South, molasses is very much a staple.
I love sweets, but I love it with a kind of complexity to it. It’s almost like, if sweetness has a bunch of subcategories, savory is one of sweetness’s subcategories. Like toasted rice is sweet and nutty, but it's a savory sweetness. And brown sugar and molasses feel like savory sweetness. It's almost like you can taste the wood barrels that the molasses was produced in. It’s a little acidic, you feel it on the sides and the back of your tongue. It’s just the deepest flavor. It tastes so good because of time and the process and it’s so much more multi-dimensional than white sugar.
Usually when something calls for white sugar, I’ll use half-and-half white and brown sugar. In pastry, you use brown sugar when you want chew and you use white sugar when you want caramelization and crispy edges, which is why chocolate chip cookies call for both. And then you have to keep in mind that brown sugar has a higher moisture content, so I adjust for that in a recipe, maybe I’ll reduce liquid by a tablespoon or so.
I add brown sugar to a lot of meats. Like even store-bought bacon, I'll do fresh black pepper and brown sugar on it always. Pork belly. Every time I do a dry brine on my chicken I do salt and brown sugar. I use it in a lot of broths and stews and stuff.
For my girlfriend, I’m making her dinner on Friday, and I’m making her a piloncillo creme brûlée because when we went to Mexico she got obsessed with piloncillo. Piloncillo is a cone of unrefined sugar, it’s not like it has molasses added to it, but it’s a brown sugar in its own right. It’s this big block, and you have to grate it, so it’s a whole thing. I’m noticing lately that my cooking is leaning so much more Mexican than it ever has before. There's always going to be Southern influences, but this feels so familiar. I think it's because when I really got into food and was coming of age, I was eating Mexican food in Phoenix.
Kate: Can you tell me more about where you grew up and what you were eating?
I'm originally from the South. I lived in Louisiana and Georgia until I was about 10 and then I moved to Colorado and then I moved to Phoenix at maybe 13. So I grew up eating my Black Southern family's food in Louisiana. And then when we moved to Georgia, it was still Southern food but also not really. We were really broke when we moved, like we lived in motels and shit. So it was like fast food, and then when my mom got on her feet it was more like a family meal. But it wasn't the same as when I was in Louisiana. Like my grandma would make chitlins. There’d be fried chicken and a lot of smoking, my dad was always on the grill. So even though I was younger in Louisiana I remember that food way more than Atlanta.
I think I grew up having a lot of resentment towards food because of how scarce it was or how complicated it was to get food, to plan the dinners, to budget, the food stamps. I wanted to love food, but I kind of hated food. Or maybe it was that I felt like food hated me. So the way I got into cooking was through resentment. I didn't want to eat fucking hotdog and white bread, I wanted to eat whatever Rachael Ray was making or whatever I was seeing on TV. And I was like, One day, I will. As much as I feel appreciation now for the ways that my mom cooked, as a kid I resented it and I was like, when I get older, I'm gonna make another kind of food.
How I started cooking as an adult was that I had dropped out of college. I was working at this little market called the Tempe Farmers Market. It was the first time I was around local, organic, all types of alternative food. And we had a few local bakers who dropped off their product. So I was like, I want to start making stuff for the bakery case. I made a little business called Soulfully Sweet Vegan Treats. I made my own little icon and it was so bad. But I started making cupcakes and vegan cheese cakes and just like interesting stuff. And eventually I quit [the job] and started baking full time. I lived in a studio apartment with my partner and I would bake for four or five cafes overnight. Like I'm talking all stuff I learned on YouTube — croissants, puff pastry, really hard shit that was probably not the best.
Then in May 2017, I broke up with my partner. I was dirt poor and losing money because I didn't know how to price anything. My brother had just passed away and my sister was at the height of her addiction, and my mom was like, You go do what you need to do. If you need to leave, just leave. So I came to New York. I worked for a coffee shop and I worked at Milk Bar. I had an artist’s residency at a gallery called Superchief and I would make food installations for whatever artist the show was about. And then I was posting stuff on social media, and a friend was like, your stuff looks really cool, I know a place that’s hiring, it’s called Dirt Candy.
K: What are some of the things you’ve been doing since Dirt Candy?
So the residency I did last year [at Cherry On Top] was called Dirty Southwest. We call the South the Dirty South, and I’m from the Southwest as well, so it was essentially combining both places that made me who I am. People got it, they were like, it tastes like Southern Black Mexican food. But I also don’t want it to be gimmicky. Like I'm not about to do a fried chicken taco, you know what I'm saying?
This year I’m kind of taking it on tour. The concept is staying the same, but the menu will change. It’s a lot more intentional with a lot more research going into it. Every single week, I'm recipe-testing at least two or three things, every week I’m reading a new book. And I want to make sure I'm always telling my authentic story as well. The food I grew up eating is northern Mexican food. So I want to distinguish that, like you're not about to see no moles on the menu, cause that’s Oaxaca. So it’s being very intentional and respectful as well.
The first place I’ll be at is Rhodora on June 10 and June 11th. I’m hoping this will bring a little bit of awareness to The People’s Table, to put myself back out there before launching that in the winter.
K: I’ve been really excited to follow your People’s Table project. Can you talk more about your vision for that?
My fantasy is anybody having access to creativity. I mean creativity in all fields, but as a chef I'm focused on the culinary field. So ultimately my dream is to have free dinners — interesting, quality, seasonal dinners. There are a lot of things that stand in the way between people who don't have much income and any experiences beyond getting their basic needs met. I know firsthand that food access is extremely necessary, and there are so many organizations doing a lot of good work, whether it's community fridges or serving hot meals or canned food drives. I know that. But the last thing I wanted when I was a kid was to have somebody see me and my mom picking up the food box from the church. I hated all the canned food that was dented, there was nothing about it that was liberating. It wasn't until I got to eat good quality vegetables and have a creative experience while eating that I felt liberated. But it’s not right that it was money that gave me those opportunities. And so, my dream is to just have people experience creativity for free.
I want people to be able to come and maybe it could inspire them to cook. Having an interesting meal could inspire them to cook better for their kids or to become a chef, or it could inspire somebody to go home and make a painting or whatever the case may be. Or maybe it's not even about the food, maybe just having access to a community table where people are talking and chatting can make somebody feel connected. All the things that are possible that are usually behind a paywall.