Food at restaurants just tastes better, it isn’t just that someone else cooked the food either. Chefs know lots of little tricks for prepping, cooking, and serving food. It takes a special kind of magic and skill to turn chef’s dishes into recipes that home cooks can master, and this week’s guest Christine Gallary has all that and more. Christine is one of Meghan’s colleagues at Kitchn.com, but she spent the last 3 years working on an epic Chinese food cookbook. She distills everything she learned to help us cook better too.
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About Our Guest: Christine Gallary
Christine Gallary lives in San Francisco and grew up eating Chinese food at her grandmother’s table before she got her culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Besides being the Food Editor-at-Large at Kitchn, she dabbles in all things food-related, including recipe testing, food styling, and her latest project, the Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown cookbook. All her culinary adventures can be found on her Instagram @cgallary.
A Restaurant Cookbook 3 Years (!!) in The Making
Even though Chinese food, stir fries, and rice are some of our most requested episode subjects, Chinese food is such a monolith (and incredibly regional) that we couldn’t tackle it in a single episode. Instead, we got to chatting with Christine about her Cantonese grandmother, her experiences a recipe developer and a mom as well as her latest project.
Christine’s most recipe development project is Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food that just came out in March; Both of us we’re SHOCKED to learn it took nearly 3 years to create this beautiful book. While Christine documented the recipes in the restaurant, she also had to go home and turn those restaurant dishes into recipes for all of us.
- Mister Jui’s – where we’re all meeting for a DIJFY conference in 2022
- Mister Jiu’s Red XO Sauce
- Mister Jiu’s Oxtail Soup
- Grace Young is The Queen of Woks
- Kitchn’s Skills Showdown for Popcorn
- Wok Wednesdays
- The Problem with SEO and White Supremacy
- Salt, Acid, Fat, Heat because we haven’t stopped using it
- Preserved lemons with honey
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