Mooncakes & Milk Bread | Kristina Cho
Mooncakes & Mlik Bread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries
By Kristina Cho
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Kristina Cho: Hi, I'm Kristina Cho, the author of Mooncakes & Milk Bread. It's filled with my favorite recipes inspired by Chinese bakeries of my childhood. And I can't wait for you to bake from it.
Suzy Chase: Before diving into this book, I'd like to thank my new sponsor Bloomist. Bloomist creates and curates simple, sustainable products that inspire you to design a calm, natural refuge at home. I'm excited to announce they've just introduced a new tabletop and kitchen collection that's truly stunning. Surround yourself with beautiful elements of nature when you're cooking, dining, and entertaining and make nature home. Visit bloomist.com and use the code Cookery20 to get 20% off your first purchase or click the link in the show notes. Now on with the show.
Suzy Chase: In Mooncakes & Milk Bread, you wrote "Chinese bakeries are not something to be discovered. They're not something new and trendy, but a beautiful facet of Chinese American life. Chinese bakeries have been around for a long time and deserve time in the spotlight." I think this is the first book of its kind dedicated to Chinese bakeries, if I'm not mistaken.
Kristina Cho: You are correct. Yes. There's nothing really out there that comprehensively covers a lot of the iconic baked goods from Chinese bakeries. So this is yeah, definitely the first one.
Suzy Chase: Did you know, that when you set out to write this cookbook?
Kristina Cho: I did a little bit of research and I had a feeling that it didn't really exist because I, myself, have been baking or teaching myself how to bake since I was in middle school. And over the years, I definitely didn't see myself or the type of food and recipes that my family love represented in any cookbook. And there weren't that many recipes online. Again, there's something different about holding something that's so comprehensive and has all the things that your family loves in one book. So as I started kind of researching for my book proposal and thinking about the book idea, I quickly realized that there wasn't anything comparable.
Suzy Chase: Let's go back to the late 1960s, when your grandparents moved from Hong Kong to Cleveland. Back in Hong Kong, your grandfather was a school teacher and calligrapher, but when he came to the US, he decided to learn how to cook and worked in kitchens. And his first job was to make endless trays of almond cookies. Can you talk a little bit about these almond cookies that are on page 192? And you didn't learn he wanted to be a baker until you started writing this cookbook.
Kristina Cho: It's a really interesting series of events. I never thought that I had much of a baking history within my family. I grew up in a Chinese restaurant family. So we had a lot of great savory cooks around and that's probably where I feel most comfortable, but baking was something that I took on for myself and learned how to do while I was in middle school and throughout the years. But yeah, my grandpa always has a tendency to want to teach things, I think because he was a school teacher. And when he first moved here, he worked in restaurants. It's a very kind of common career path for a lot of immigrants, because it's an accessible way for them to make a living. And I did not know that he, for a period, was thinking about becoming a baker. I knew that when he was thinking about starting his own restaurant, after just kind of working in back of house for a while, that he went back to Hong Kong and took a few classes in making dim sum.
Kristina Cho: But I didn't know he also tried to attempt to make breads and buns and things like that. And it was just something that my mom and my grandma told me as I was testing recipes for this book. Almond cookies are a very cherished recipe for me, because I think it's one of the few, again, baking memories that I have with my grandpa. He never really made them while I was growing up because he kind of retired his baking days once he started working more full-time running his own restaurants. And when I was, I guess 17, right before I went off to go to college, I asked my grandpa, if we could make these infamous cookies. Because I just have heard about them throughout the years and never really ate them. And so he came over to our house and he had this little kind of crumpled up piece of paper that had Chinese characters on it and it was a recipe, but it was scaled up to make, I don't know, a million cookies or something like that.
Kristina Cho: So we had to kind of figure out how to scale it down and make it feasible in our residential kitchen and make a dozen or two dozen cookies and we made them and they're so good. It's still kind of a fuzzy memory for me because it's been a while, but I just remember them being like so buttery and the most amazing kind of crisp exterior texture of nice chew in the middle. And I always fondly looked back on that memory because it was one of the last times I was in the kitchen with my grandpa. A few months after that his health deteriorated and he ended up passing away a few months after that. And so yeah, it's a very sentimental memory and also recipe for me. Do you
Suzy Chase: Do you feel connected to him in a way, because in college you studied to be an architect, but cooking kept pulling you back and then your grandfather was a school teacher and calligrapher and baking kept pulling him back.
Kristina Cho: I think so. I think there's a lot of really interesting parallels between him and I, and there's something really wonderful about this recipe because every single time I bake it or literally if I just think about these cookies, I think about him, but yeah, I think you're right. While I was through college, there was always something kind of pulling me back to food. Obviously he instilled in me a really deep passion and appreciation for being in the kitchen and cooking. And I think I just kind of carry on his, I don't know, adventurous spirit in a way.
Kristina Cho: I think he always wanted me to kind of have a very linear career path just because that's just what grandparents want, they want you to have a secure career path and way to make a living. But he also kind of left a country, left his job to do something completely different, become a self-employed business owner. A few years ago when I quit my job to fully dive into food, and I think about how my grandpa did that. He did something that he really loved to support his family and involve food. And so yeah, I see a lot of parallels between him and I.
Suzy Chase: The beginning of Mooncakes & Milk Bread is a bit of a love letter to Cleveland's Chinatown. It was teeny tiny, but it felt like home. But what you lacked for years was a standalone bakery.
Kristina Cho: In Cleveland Chinatown for a long time it was fairly small when you compare it to the Chinatowns in say Chicago, New York city or San Francisco. And my grandparents literally lived one block away from it or just in the heart of Chinatown. And I remember when I was very young, all we really had was a dim sum hall, maybe two Chinese grocery stores and a few kind of standalone restaurants. And over the years it's slowly kind of developed more and more grocery stores, more restaurants and things like that and has become more of a destination. But we didn't have a bakery for a very long time. Now there is one there, but I remember in one of the Chinese grocery stores, they had a bakery case. It was the size of a closet. And I think they had a baker in the back that would supply it every day or so, but that was really the only option that we had if we ever had a craving for like our favorite bakery buns, like pineapple buns or cocktail buns.
Kristina Cho: I have a lot of memories going on road trips of my family. We went to Chicago a lot because it was only six hours from Cleveland, but we went on road trips to Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, whatever we could manage in a day. And a lot of times they had Chinatowns and our first stop would always be going directly to the bakery to stock up on buns so that we could have them for breakfast. It was the last place we would go to as we were heading home so that we could bring some back as well. So a lot of my family trips were kind of book ended by going to a Chinese bakery.
Suzy Chase: Okay. You just brought up the pineapple bun and I just learned that there's no pineapple in the pineapple bun. Well, it comes out looking sort of like a pineapple.
Kristina Cho: It's a very common assumption. You would assume that a pineapple bun has some pineapple in it, but there is not. I've been meaning to make an actual pineapple bun, maybe stuffing the bread with a pineapple jam or a curd or something like that in there. A pineapple bun is really just the milk bread based bun. And the top is a kind of cookie like dough that when it bakes it either naturally cracks or a lot of times you can score it into that crisscross pattern to resemble a pattern and texture of a pineapple.
Suzy Chase: I swear it tastes like pineapple.
Kristina Cho: Maybe just a mental thing. You take a bite and...
Suzy Chase: I know.
Kristina Cho: I can feel the tropical vibes.
Suzy Chase: So at the peak of your creative frustration, you started a food blog, eatchofood.com to document your ongoing kitchen adventures. And haven't we all done this, and to prove to your mom that you were able to properly cook for yourself.
Kristina Cho: Yes I did. That was one of the original intents and also maybe to prove to my grandma that I can cook for myself, although she doesn't know how to use a computer. But my mom will relay all of my adventures and updates to her. But I think up until a year ago, my grandma would keep asking me, "Oh, do you know how to cook? Can you feed yourself okay?" And that was while I was writing my cookbook, I'm like, "Yes, grandma, I can handle it. I can handle it. But yeah, Eat Cho Food started a few years ago when I was pretty unhappy at one of my architecture design jobs. And I remember I was just in the middle of a lot of more technical meetings. The building I was working on was under construction and I didn't feel creatively fulfilled.
Kristina Cho: I felt like I was just kind of coordinating and talking on the phone with people all the time, which I understand that's a very normal job for people, but I technically did start Eat Cho Food while I was in college, in the form of a Tumblr, which I don't know if people still use that anymore. But I used the Tumblr to kind of upload random meals I made during college. But few years ago is when I officially made eatchofood.com and made it more of a more robust website, I guess, more legitimate now it has become my full-time job, somehow. I look back on it and I, I can't really believe that it actually happened.
Suzy Chase: So I think your blog really took off when you posted the recipe for Chinese bakery style hotdog flower buns, and you were inundated with requests for more Chinese bakery bun recipes, and then you had an aha moment. I should write a cookbook.
Kristina Cho: Yeah. Yeah. I owe a lot to those hotdog flower buns. The hotdog flower bun was one of my favorite buns as a kid. I think, as a kid, you were like, "Yeah, I want a hot dog. That's all I want." And it was also a very cute shape and I liked how you could eat it pedal by pedal. But yeah, that was kind of the beginning of Moon Cakes and Milk Bread. I think when I posted it, I realized that it kind of struck a chord with a lot of people that they wanted more of that kind of style of baking. So yeah, that was my aha moment.
Suzy Chase: Can you describe the recipes for Moon Cakes and Milk Bread?
Kristina Cho: So Mooncakes & Milk Bread, I think that combination's really interesting just to explain, because it's a comparison of moon cakes, which was a very traditional Chinese pastry with milk bread, which is more of a contemporary or newer recipe in the context of Chinese food. So I wanted to kind of have those two as the star title baked goods to kind of show the variation in a lot of the recipes in the book. So moon cakes are a traditional pastry that's made typically during mid autumn festival slash harvest moon festival. There's a lot of different styles of moon cakes out there, depending on where you are in China or where a family is from. Every region has their own specific style of moon cakes. I grew up with the Cantonese style moon cakes, where you have a kind of soft and chewy exterior crust. The best thing I can compare it to is kind of like a fig Newton and the outside is that dough.
Kristina Cho: And the inside is typically filled with a sweet red bean paste, black sesame paste, white lotus paste, all super common. Sometimes it's filled with mixed nuts. And a lot of times the center has a salted egg yolk inside. A lot of people love it. I know some people don't like salted egg yolk but I love the salted egg yolk inside of noon cakes. The moon cake is put into a mold, either like a plastic mold or a more traditional wooden mold. And it's imprinted with a pattern on there. So they look really, really beautiful. Sometimes the imprints have well wishes carved in there or just literally tells you what flavor moon cake this is. And they are meant to be shared. They're pretty dense. It's kind of hard to eat a full moon cake. Well, I've done it before, but typically you're supposed to cut it into wedges and share it with your family because that's kind of the spirit of the mid autumn festival. It's about togetherness, your family sharing. So yeah. So moon cakes are small little pastry to be shared of your closest loved ones.
Kristina Cho: And then milk bread is, I mentioned before, a bit more of a modern bakery item, modern meaning in last... I feel like since the sixties are probably earlier than that, but milk bread is very similar to brioche or challah. It's an enriched bread dough. It has milk in it, obviously for the name milk bread and has eggs and butter. And it's a really soft squishy bread that's a little bit sweet, but it's on that kind of sweet line where it can work in a savory application, like being stuffed with barbecue pork or loaves of milk bread are great for making grilled cheese. I'm going to make one later this afternoon because I have some milk bread. But it's again, sweet enough that you can fill it with red bean paste or just a swirl of Nutella in there. And it's just really wonderful, versatile bread that stays really soft for a long time.
Suzy Chase: It's like a better brioche.
Kristina Cho: Yeah. I think so. I know there's a lot of brioche fans out there and I love brioche too, but there's something about milk bread that's so light and airy. You can kind of just keep eating it forever.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, I was just going to say, it's so easy to eat. You can just keep shoveling it in. It's so good.
Kristina Cho: Especially when it is fresh.
Suzy Chase: Yes. Oh my gosh. So my favorite local bakery here in Greenwich Village is Fay Da and I was excited to see you included it in the cookbook with a photo and everything. I love that place.
Kristina Cho: Yeah. Fay Da is wonderful. Before I go to the airport, I always try to a bakery, whether it's a Chinese bakery or not, but it's like, "I need a snack to take with me on the airplane." And a lot of times I would stop at Fay Da cause there's so many depending on where you're living or where you're going. I think they have 13 locations now.
Suzy Chase: So what do you get at Fay Da?
Kristina Cho: My favorite technically is a cocktail bun or gai mei bao and it is a milk bread bun that's filled with coconut, butter, sugar and a little bit of flour. It's like a cookie inside of a bun. So I always get that at pretty much every bakery that I go to. And then I also get a pineapple bun, my second favorite. It's really hard to say favorites here. Cause I love all of them. And then I like to see what kind of new seasonal thing that they have. When I was interviewing the owner's daughter for the book, they talk about how they do a lot of, kind of research and development and have different buns each week. And so maybe they'll have a jalapeno cheesy bun or something like that. And if it's something new that I haven't seen before, I'll grab it for the sake of research. I just have to know.
Suzy Chase: You have to do it for the people. Yeah,
Kristina Cho: Yeah, exactly. It's my service to everyone to try all these buns.
Suzy Chase: You just keep giving and giving.
Kristina Cho: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: So they have this, and I don't know if it's what you were talking about, I call it a coconut cream bun. It is amazing.
Kristina Cho: I think I know what you're talking about. Is it kind of split down the middle and filled with whipped cream?
Suzy Chase: Yes.
Kristina Cho: Yes. So I have a version of that in the book too. I think that's why the coconut bun that I really love, it's more commonly called cocktail bun, because they have this other coconut cream bun, but that one's really good too. That's one of my mom's favorite because she loves whipped cream.
Suzy Chase: Their pork buns are really good there too. And I always get a birthday cake.
Kristina Cho: Yes. Yeah. They're known for their birthday cakes too. I was always really resistant to the Chinese bakery style birthday cakes, because I wanted a grocery store birthday cake that was really chocolatey with a lot of buttercream and stuff and now I can't handle it and I'm just like, "I just want a Chinese bakery cake every year."
Suzy Chase: I think what I love about Chinese bakeries is the soft buns as opposed to a French or Italian bakery. And also I love the community aspect of it. At my Fay Da, there are always a few tables of what I assume to be old friends in their regular spot drinking coffee. And it's just a great place to catch up.
Kristina Cho: Yeah, it has kind of a diner feel to it. It's a community gathering for the grandparents to grab a tea and have buns and gossip with each other. Whenever I try to paint the picture of a bakery, I always talk about how you hear it before you actually get close enough to see it, because you can kind of hear the chatter of Cantonese through the doors, of people just kind of gossiping very loudly. That's a very important part of a bakery environment.
Suzy Chase: So you spoke with bakery professionals all over the country. Did you find they had things in common?
Kristina Cho: I have five bakery features in my book. I think what connected them all, it was part be the reason why I asked them if they wanted to be featured in my book was that they're all such long standing establishments. The Eastern bakery in San Francisco that I talked to was the oldest bakery in San Francisco Chinatown. Phoenix bakery in LA, they're also one of the oldest businesses in Chinatown. And so I think a lot of them had that kind of long standing history and also an incredibly loyal customer base. I did all the interviews, except for one, during the pandemic. And they spoke a lot about how their loyal customers are the sole reason of why they still have their doors open during a very, very hard time for restaurants and especially businesses in Chinatown. And so I think they all have resiliency and obviously incredible baked goods that people still keep coming back for.
Suzy Chase: You asked bakery owners what their top selling item was among non-Asian customers. And what did they say?
Kristina Cho: The most common answer was Chinese barbecue pork buns. And I don't blame them. Barbecue pork buns, whether they're steamed or baked are incredibly delicious. And I think people really love them because they kind of, I guess transcend a lot of cultural recipes. It reminds me of when you go to a barbecue place and you get that soft squishy bread or toast on the side. But instead this is all encapsulated into one bun.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party where I ask you, who would you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why? And for this segment it can only be one person.
Kristina Cho: Right now in this moment, I would love to have a dinner party with Ali Wong, the comedian.
Suzy Chase: I love her.
Kristina Cho: I love her. I always see her going to my favorite dim sum spot. It's like a hole in the wall called Good Luck Dim Sum. I remember I went there on a Saturday, I saw a picture of her that she went there on Sunday and I was like, "Dang it, I just missed her." So I've always wanted to see her or meet her at Good Luck Dim Sum. So I would love to have her over for dinner and talk about why we love the same dumplings.
Suzy Chase: I signed up for your Shiny Fruit Cream Cake Zoom Class, hard to say, on November 6th. And I can't wait. Tell us a little bit about your workshops.
Kristina Cho: Yes. I love teaching my workshops and my Zoom classes. I like them to be very interactive. I always encourage people to turn their cameras on. You don't need to be on mute the whole time unless you have like a really loud house, but ask questions. We can chat with each other. I like to create an environment where people feel like we're all in one big kitchen together. Because that's ideally what I would want them to be like, where we're just baking and chatting and having a great time. I'm really excited for the Shiny Fruit Cream Cake Zoom class. It's hard to say. I'm really excited for that class. I'm hoping that within two hours we can bake some sponge cakes, cool them down and then cover them in whipped cream and fruit. So far, all my classes keep within about the two hour mark. But that's always my fear is that it runs a little late, but it's always because of a good reason. We're just having too much fun talking to each other.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Kristina Cho: My website is EatChoFood.com. My Instagram is also @EatChoFood. Let's see, I also begrudgingly have a TikTok that is on EatChoFood.com. So you can find me there as well.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Mooncakes & Milk Bread and support the podcast, head over to CookerybytheBook.com and thanks Kristina, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Kristina Cho: Oh, you're so welcome. It was so fun to be here.
Outro: Follow @CookerybytheBook on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book.
