Nastasha: Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I'm your host, Nastasha Alli.
I've been excited for this episode because I think it's the perfect way to end this year, which has honestly been pretty special. Episodes came back and I had the amazing pleasure of speaking to so many interesting people. And if you've spent any part of your year listening to the show, I wanna just say thank you again, maraming salamat. It really means a lot that you're spending this time with us.
Now I'm a sucker for desserts and especially the ones that look almost too pretty to eat. And page after page of Mayumu Filipino American Desserts remixed by Abi Balingit delivers exactly that. Honestly, I'm not the world's greatest baker, but I do love the adobo chocolate chip cookies from this cookbook.
It's got bits of crushed pink peppercorns and bay leaves that are browned in butter. Chips of dark chocolate, a little soy sauce, a little vinegar. Honestly, ang sarap and Abi's debut cookbook has been featured on the New York Times Best Cookbooks of 2023 List. Amazing in itself. It's been featured in magazines like Vogue and Forbes and Saveur, and in tons of places online from Cherry Bombe to The Kitchen and the Food Network.
The book itself makes a great present. And with the holidays coming up, I say it's as good a time as any to gift this to someone. So let's get into it.
Intro
Abi: I'm Abi Balingit. I'm a cookbook author and a baker based in Brooklyn, New York. My cookbook, Mayumu Filipino American Desserts Remixed came out two years ago and I won the James Beard Award for Emerging Voice in books for it. And you know, right now I'm kind of, the blog has been on hiatus, but the Dusky Kitchen is what I am on Instagram and my website. And it's definitely one of those things where I'm like, oh, I feel bad that I haven't updated it since the book, but I will eventually.
Nastasha: Life has a way of just happening. So totally understandable. And I guess from my end too, like, I'm a project manager at a company called G Adventures that's based here in Toronto. So the podcast I really work on on weekends mostly. So sometimes there's also, you know, a delay for when stuff gets pushed out, but that's totally okay. We're, uh, doing our projects for the love of it.
Abi: Yeah. I was gonna say, it's so funny that you say you're a project manager. I'm also one, by day also, I guess baking by night, for a music company. And so, I feel you on having passion projects and also having kinda like Hannah Montana kind of a lifestyle for us.
Nastasha: It's true. But, you know, we don't take it for granted. And yeah, we do it because we love it among other reasons.
Abi: Mm-hmm.
Nastasha: Like during the pandemic, I was on hiatus for some time and so I started publishing regularly again January this year. So it's been really nice to get back into that groove. And for me it's really about wanting to connect with people who obviously are doing really cool stuff around food and exploring their heritage and culture through being a Filipino person in the diaspora.
And that's also part of why I really like doing the podcast is because when I do hear people saying oh, you know, I've got their book, or I've heard about them online. It's really kind of nice to see the background story on where people come from.
I saw some of your posts that you went to the Philippines recently.
Abi: I did. And that was like February, March. But yeah, it was the first time I had been back to the Philippines since 2019, 2020. So pre covid, I went to Pampanga for my cousin's wedding then, did not know what was gonna happen. 2020. I used all my PTO. I was like, all right, we're gonna go to the Philippines and enjoy time with family.
And before that, it was 20 years that I had not been back since then. So this was the first time that it was an independent trip that was like, I did get to see my family, but the itinerary was hanging out.
It was hanging out. But also making food, meeting great chefs like Chef Jack and Chef Lao, from Guevara's. We were able to do a really cool event where we basically did a live demo and then also had a lot of desserts from Mayumu on the menu at the restaurant in Manila, which was really special.
I think it's one of those things that I never thought could happen. Like, the book bringing you to places, even though I've been to the Philippines before, this is a very like, unique and special trip. And yeah, it was just so fun. Like it was too short. I was only there for like a week.
I wish I was there for longer and it's like a 17, 18 hour flight from here to Manila, so ideally would have had more time, but it was still really great.
Nastasha: It's the first step. Like hopefully there will be more opportunities and stuff to do it in the future.
Abi: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I feel like I just barely got to the surface of, like, you know, my friend Fed is like a designer and his brand is Atomic, and basically it's vintage clothes and stuff. And he has a shop there in Manila. And I was like, oh, well if I'm in Makati for like, two hours, we can make this work. And so it was just like, there was just so much more.
People were like, you should go here and you should go there. And I was like, I wish I could, like, the traffic is so bad I can't make it anywhere, I was just so, kind of overwhelmed, but also just so happy to do what I could do there. And I think it was a, a fruitful, wonderful trip.
Growing up in California
Abi: I was born in San Jose, California. I grew up predominantly actually in Stockton, California, which is not far at all. It's the Central Valley, that's an hour drive from San Jose. And both of those places are like huge Filipino populations and communities, which I was really lucky to have. And like a very big traditional Filipino family.
When I was growing up in San Jose, for the first six years of my life, I was living in the same room as my mom, as my dad, as my two sisters on one bed. And then the other rooms it'd be like my aunt, uncle, and then their two kids. And then another room would be like Lolo and my other two uncles.
Like it was not big house, but a big number of people and like loved ones in one household. And I think to me I felt like, oh, this is normal and this like full house, kind of like the show. Um, but you know, sometimes it's not always the case.
When you hear a lot of stories of Filipino families, especially like I'm first generation I guess growing up Filipino American, they immigrated here in the early nineties, and they were already in their thirties by the time they made it from the Philippines to California.
And so this was kind of the way they made it. My mom always would tell me the story of like, I came here with $200 in my bank account. And it is kind of the American dream in that sense of being able to then, once we moved out to Stockton, have a house with my own room and things like that, that I feel very grateful to have.
A core food memory in all of that I think was there was a time when I was like five years old and then the first trip I went to the Philippines, I got to go to my Lola and Lola's house on my dad's side. So we went over there and I remember just asking for mangoes immediately.
Like I was definitely like a fruit person. We had so many mangoes. I remember just like wearing a white tank top and it would always be stained orange and really sticky. 'cause I would just eat so many mangoes. And that's definitely one of those memories that like always comes back to me even when I have time to go back to California.
And the Philippine mangoes are very unique and special. Like the champagne mangoes are as close as possible to whatever you can get to the Philippine mango. But obviously not a hundred percent the same.
My parents will always, if they see it at Costco, they always get me mangoes 'cause they know how much I love them.
But yeah, that's a little bit of my origin story, I guess.
Nastasha: Mangoes are really special though because they're like, we're talking about earlier terroir and just like the food and the land and how that connects. And mangoes are also a great example of that because they do taste different based on where they're grown and how soon they're shipped and stuff like that.
But Philippine mangoes are just a whole other level. It's just a perfect level of sweet. And I'm sure you have extensive experience in incorporating it into desserts.
Abi: Oh my gosh. Any opportunity I have, I have like a mango dessert.
Nastasha: What's your favorite mango dessert?
Abi: I guess of the ones that I've made, I don't think I've even made it in a while, but it's in my book, it's basically mango cream puffs that are inspired more so by the layered icebox cake that we have. Like the royale style mango float. It used fresh mangoes and has whipped cream, but it just feels like a nice reinterpretation of that dessert, in a different form. I could make so many things.
I mean, I've definitely done another version of the mango float for Food and Wine. It was like mini trifles, but I dunno if you've ever had chamoy, when you have Mexican desserts and then they have the layers of the chamoy and the tajin, I incorporate that into the mango float as well. So just like a nod to growing up in the Central Valley, around great Mexican restaurants, bakeries and everything where you'd have this kind of dessert. So that was really special too.
Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed
Nastasha: One of the things that I really, really love about Mayumu is that reading the book as a casual reader, as someone who like picked it up, you get the sense that it's fun to read, it's fun to look at.
There's just so much joy in the photos and looking through the recipes and you're like, Ooh, I wanna make this and I wanna make that. And it feels like without trying to overstep things, like a reflection of you.
Abi: I love that. Thank you. I mean this is my first book ever, but like it's the goal, especially when no one really knew who I was before writing this book. And so it means a lot that like even talking for a few minutes, you feel that way and you could read that off the page without even knowing me for that long.
Because that's kind of like what I wanted to showcase about Filipino food is that it is fun and it's, there's inherently a lot of fusion in the food because of our history of colonization, history of the galleon trade for example, and the way that mangoes have gone through. Now we have the champagne mango available, so there's so many ways that I think I could connect that not just with the history of our food, but also my own personal history.
And so I feel like in retrospect, since the book has come out, very lucky that I had gotten it picked up in so many outlets and I remember when pitching the book , a lot of the pushback I got was that I didn't have at least a hundred thousand followers and I didn't have all these TikTok videos to support my food, you know?
And so it is really nice that critically at least, the people that really care about food and are amazing writers have featured my book and like talked about it is huge. And I think the most surprising thing that I first noticed when I was promoting the book was that it would just get picked up even in places I would never have thought. Like somewhere in Greece. Somewhere in France.
In the Philippines, I feel like that was the most important thing for me. You know, I sent every single article to my parents and my family group chat of TFC and Vogue Philippines was huge.
And also when I was in the Philippines for this trip, I got a great Rolling Stones feature and I was like, whoa. Rolling Stones is really cool considering also my music background in quotation marks, but for food.
A lot of those opportunities, I've come to realize too is a mixture of luckily being in New York, a huge hub for food and media. At the same time, I've met people that I either talked to on Zoom or actually in person and talked to them again for the Philippines trip.
I spoke at Columbia University here in New York. They had this big Filipino student event and students from different Filipino orgs came. I had just talked about the book and talked about my experiences and just attended it as a speaker.
But one of those writers from there ended up being a writer based in the Philippines. Like moved from New York back to the Philippines and was writing for Rolling Stones and that is how I talked to them again and it was just kind of like that's so wild.
Especially considering this was this year and the book came out two years ago and I think that event that I did was also maybe two years ago. There's so much power in the passage of time, but also the connections you make in person and even the things you do on Zoom are so equally important, especially during COVID in quarantine and the pandemic.
That was kind of the building blocks of my career in food, but also of the book and it started all online and now it's manifested itself in so many physical ways and also the intangible ways of the internet of just like, oh, this is in an article and this is in like a podcast. And I think that's super cool, and super fun to kind of see after all this time.
Nastasha: Different mediums is a huge thing that I think is really cool to appreciate because there are all these different avenues and ways for people to reach other people.
And going back to the book, one of my favorite parts about it is really the stories. And I'd go so far as to say that that is my favorite part about cookbooks. And I definitely remember a lot of the stories from Mayumu and there's a couple of passages here. Actually, I just, I just realized this is a section about landing at the airport too. There's something here so I'm gonna read this part right.
It was hot and humid and the first thing I noticed was that every short man in the crowd could have been my father.
Abi: Yep.
Nastasha: And it was about three 30 by the time we made it to my Auntie Ida's house. But she still wanted to give us a warm welcome and feed everyone inside. I was greeted with hugs and kisses and a ripe mango to eat with my late night meal. Both cheeks were cut up for me to effortlessly scoop the fruit with my spoon and shovel it directly into my eager mouth.
By the morning, we'd see the rest of my dad's side of the family in droves, and my parents set up an assembly line of goodies from the balikbayan boxes they brought with them.
So it's just a short sample of one of the stories that you share in the book. But for anybody who is from the diaspora, it's a very relatable passage.
Abi: Yeah.
Nastasha: For a couple of things, the mangoes which we were also talking about earlier, the balikbayan boxes. And I wondered when you were writing the story parts at the beginning of the chapters, what was one of the either memorable or maybe slightly challenging parts to write about?
Writing a food memoir
Abi: I think for me, I had sought out to write the book, like memoir recipe, all sandwiched in different ways and I think the hardest part for me was talking to my parents. Like normally, day to day, we are just like, how are you? What'd you do? Or what'd you make for dinner?
Or how was work? And I don't think it comes naturally to be like, oh, so what was your favorite food growing up? What was Lola and Lola like when you were a kid? You know, and these kinds of questions that you get answers from in piecemeal, like randomly, maybe they'll talk about it in passing.
I actually sat down with my parents over Zoom, because it was still pandemic times, and I remember asking them questions. It was like a sheet of questions that I had that I needed to have the foundational parts of some of the stories in the book and especially of my parents like immigration to California.
And I think that was funny because it felt like one, at first really unnatural, but as we were talking just felt easier and easier to talk about. Sometimes with a lot of Filipino families, there's a lot of trauma, a lot of tough things. Um, my dad worked in Saudi Arabia for a very long time before coming over here to make money.
And a lot of my family is like split in all parts of the world because of martial law and things like that. And it is those kinds of connecting dots of the greater landscape of like, this was what was happening in the Philippines and this is why you had to leave.
Those are really hard conversations to have and I don't, I never think it's easy to. At least for my family, talking to them after this book experience, it was a sense of survival too, to not have to rehash the past. But it is really important to remember and to like have that. When I was in California, even last week and I hadn't seen my family for maybe six months or so, I saw on the garage, my dad had tapes of recorded messages.
He would send to my mom by mail, so it'd be like from Saudi to my mom's address of our old house in San Jose. And I was like, what? What is this? Like? He was like, oh, you can't listen to these. I was like, I can't listen to these. Like, what do you mean? And he was like, no, no, no. Like I don't even have a cassette player for you to listen to.
Like this is private, I was like, and so I think it's really those kinds of things that you only like sometimes see by secret or by accident. Like that was very intentional when I had first started writing those stories in the book. And so I feel like it was a really long-winded way of saying that.
But talking to your parents sometimes is hard because you just wanna have pleasant conversation and some things aren't pleasant to talk about, especially in our family and history and stuff, so, yeah.
Nastasha: I really appreciate you sharing that because that's really key and I think it is important to talk about, and from my perspective, like seeing the complexity of our experiences. Right? The more you see it, the more it also encourages me as an everyday person, as a Filipino person in the diaspora to again, find a common thread in it and find it relatable in such a way where it also prompts me to maybe ask my parents about something that I'm curious about.
And everything you said rings true, right? Like by virtue of being someone from the diaspora, there is that ingrained experience that it probably is more negative or is related to some form of trauma that your parents don't even wanna talk about. And having spent my fair share of time in the Philippines too, like I get that.
But in the course of food, I think it's really important from the diaspora side to recognize and accept that, because it's part of the conversation of oh, your parents didn't wanna speak Tagalog to you growing up. And so a lot of Filipino Americans or Filipino Canadians, just don't grow up speaking the language. But understanding that the underlying reasons behind that are their own.
Maybe they had their own experiences when they first moved here that made them believe that and wanting to pass that on to the next generation kind of thing. Anyway, I think it is totally valuable to be open about that because it shapes our experiences and kind of reclaiming those, it sounds like a buzzword, but reclaiming that narrative is really powerful for people who are listening to the show, for example, because you're already at that stage where you understand that the food is just one part. Like the food is really important to Filipino culture, but it's just one part of it.
And
Abi: Absolutely.
Nastasha: It touches every other part of your life, whether that's, you know, your migration story or your current story, what you wanna do for the future, if you've got kids and how you're teaching them Filipino food culture and stuff. So, it's all related.
Abi: Mm-hmm. For sure.
Red velvet silvanas
Nastasha: From a recipe development perspective, I was wondering if you could talk about a couple of recipes, one or two you've developed that you consider a really good example of being that connection to your Filipino, Filipinx identity?
Abi: Ooh. I mean, there's so many
Nastasha: It's pretty much the entire book.
Abi: I know I could choose them all. But I think breaking down what Filipino American kind of means was part of the book as well. I think being in the diaspora, you too sense that like the globalization of food is very interesting.
When I think of American food, I don't just think of apple pie or like fried chicken. I think of, you know, Thai food, I think of Mexican food. I think of even Peruvian food. I think it's just because of the diversity that there is in America.
I had a
Nastasha: And your lived experience too
Abi: yeah, yeah, definitely. It's, we don't live in our own bubbles, you know, everything kind of comes together and flows in and out of like osmosis of flavors and techniques. I think one example at least of regional , oh, American food and combining that with like, Filipino traditional kind of a recipe.
I did a red velvet silvanas. And I love silvanas. It's like They're just mini kind of versions of the sans rival cake. For me, like translating, okay, this is a very traditional, southern, American flavor profile that has now like broken into the mainstream for sure, the past couple decades and stuff.
But it was fun, you know, you're adding the cocoa powder, you're adding some red food coloring to make it super, super red. I use cream cheese frosting instead of traditional buttercream that we would normally use. Usually it's French or even meringue, buttercream.
I froze them. I made them into little portions. And it is like silvanas, it's basically using cashews and cashew meringue. But it definitely had this American flavor profile. And I think it was just like, oh, this is both Filipino and American in its own way.
In another form, I did a strawberry shortcake sapin sapin, and sapin sapin being traditionally a Filipino merienda, like a kakanin where it's normally ube, normally jackfruit, normally coconut.
I made that into a strawberry layer with strawberry jam and then another vanilla layer, and then a molasses cinnamon layer to represent a strawberry shortcake bar you would get from the ice cream aisle of the grocery store. And I would use latik. And freeze dried strawberry powder to replicate the cake crumbles that you would get on that iconic bar.
So there's so much play with both form and flavors of Filipino food, that I guess I only highlighted mostly the infusion of American flavors. But at the same time, like the base of that being coconut milk and rice flour, those are foundational ingredients in Filipino cuisine.
And so a lot of times it's like the discourse of, is this Filipino enough? Is this American enough? It's always parts of a whole, you know, and so it was nice. I feel like you think of it holistically really too, like what is approachable to make for someone where you can see these flavors and see where they would go even without making them yourself. And also color driven kind of stories of like, the layered look of a sapin sapin and use that in a different gradient, in a different way.
One of my friends from college, Charisse Celestial, is the illustrator for the book. She's based in San Diego now, but she basically did illustrations for me for certain recipes for the page of the Filipino pantry essentials.
And I think the color in the book is very important, and the photography too, but having those illustrations , saying in that sense, these are the connections. Just like literally drawing them out sometimes. It almost looked like a Venn diagram of like, these are the connections that you're supposed to see in the dish and stuff.
And so it was really helpful, everything was super intentional in the book, and I'm really proud of that, for sure.
Nastasha: And it comes through, the intentionality of it. And that plays into the whole initial feeling that you get when you're browsing through the book, is that it's fun. It's like joyful to flip through because of those things that you were just talking about that were intentionally a part of the development of it. The color scheme, the fonts, the illustrations, the photos for sure. Every page you make me wanna go, like put it in my mouth right now.
Abi: Oh my
Nastasha: In general. But as you were talking one thing I realized that I would love for listeners to hear who haven't bought the book yet. So obviously this whole episode is an invitation to buy Mayumu Filipino American Desserts Remixed.
But for those who haven't read it yet, it would help to learn a little bit about your entry into baking, because I feel that describes the direction that you take in terms of maybe also just how you come up with all of these amazing ideas.
Abi: I do feel for me, I have like a perfectionist mindset, which is so bad. I try to break from a lot of times, but it's really hard not to. I think a lot of baking that people have hesitation with sometimes is like we have to be really precise with the measurements.
We also have to have so many pans and so many things. But honestly even if you have a whisk and a bowl and a spatula, like you can make a lot of things happen with those.
But it was really like a breakthrough for me when I was in high school and was getting even more into baking.
I was 13 when I started, and I remember for Christmas or my birthday, there were so many things I would ask for from my parents. Eventually I asked for like a KitchenAid mixer. And they got one from Costco for me when I was 17, and it's the one that I still have in my kitchen right now, so I've had it for 13 years. And I love it so much. I think it changed my relationship with baking completely because I felt like, this is the status symbol, but also functionally my arm wasn't gonna fall off anymore. It felt so good to make cookies rather than suffer while making cookies.
And it was
Nastasha: the breads.
Abi: the breads. Yeah, I
Nastasha: make breads manually. I have to use a mixer.
Abi: I know and kneading is a lot. Like I will sometimes knead by hand and I think in the book I like put all by hand kneading just for people who didn't have a KitchenAid mixer to also partake. But I was like, it definitely changed my life for the better.
And I think that a lot of the media I would consume also growing up was Food Network, I'd watch YouTube, like I just would go on people's blogs all the time. Sally's Baking Addiction is still one of my favorite bloggers to date.
I think that's the first step for some people too like, being comfortable in your kitchen is knowing the tools that you have and what to work with. Everything is not perfect, if your oven's kind of wonky, the temperatures are off, like it's too small, mine always is for some reason. You know, you make it work.
I moved in with my partner a year and a half ago. I felt like I couldn't bake at all, like when I initially moved here. 'cause I was like, I don't know where anything is. Everything's in boxes. Also nothing is organized properly. And over time I've been able to like get it to a standard where I'm like, okay, I know where everything is and I know how this works and I know I have to adjust for that. It's just nice to feel that in your space and to also use that to your advantage when you're in the kitchen because there's just so many things that are keeping people from baking and cooking.
And I think primarily it's being tired and you'd rather just have food immediately or sometimes, it's gonna just get takeout. But I do feel like the kitchen is way more inviting when you know what your tools are and what you have and what you don't have.
Starting a baking blog
Nastasha: I totally agree. The being comfortable in your kitchen part is super huge because, can you tell us again why the name Dusky Kitchen came about or how it came about initially?
Abi: Oh my gosh, at this point, it's so funny. When I started my baking blog, I was in my apartment with three other roommates. So there's four of us, and it was like a four bedroom apartment, and in the very middle was our kitchen, and there was only one window. And I'd also be commuting back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn from work.
And by the time I got home, it'd be like 6:30, 7 sometimes, and it'd always be dusk. And having only one window for natural light also felt like dusk. So I called it the dusky kitchen. Now I have an apartment where there's zero windows of natural light, so I could be night kitchen at this point.
But it is kind of the sentiment of, we were talking about earlier of just like making it work and being okay with it. And I think I have to keep reminding myself too, I don't think I'll ever change my handles for anything because I will always be in the Dusky Kitchen, even if I have a gorgeous new apartment with beautiful windows.
Nastasha: Stick with it. Yeah.
Abi: It will always be the dusky kitchen.
Um, but yeah. I think for the longest time too, I was holding off on starting my baking blog because I was like, oh, I don't have the right lighting. And it was in the very old school way of thinking of like, I need to learn how to do real photography and I need backdrops, I need blah, blah, blah.
And I just made it work without it. And it was like the best thing that ever happened to me. But it's also one of those reminders, I'm like, I still put myself up in those pigeonhole ways of I can't do this until I have this X, Y, Z, all my like ducks in a row. But it's not how life always works.
And I think I have to keep reminding myself that.
Nastasha: So reset the expectations. I like, relate to so much of what you're talking about.
Abi: Real, I know.
Nastasha: We, just that whole perfectionism thing is , even just thinking about the podcast, right? Like having the right microphone set up or having the right software to edit the show and put all these bells and whistles and stuff and like part of why I love doing this podcast is because even though we're talking about food, it's always connected to other things.
Like the whole idea of just going after something, even though you don't maybe feel like you're fully there yet. I mean, if you didn't do that with the Dusky Kitchen blog, would you be where you are at now I guess is one way to look at it.
Abi: Absolutely not. I feel like imposter syndrome gets the best of us, all of us. Writing a cookbook, I didn't think I could do it initially. And just doing it, sometimes it's like building the ship as you're sailing it as people say. That's how it feels like a lot of the time.
It gave me a lot of comfort knowing and talking to more people in food that sometimes they feel the same way, no matter what you're doing, you think the most successful person in the room has it all together and they don't most of the time. Sometimes they do. And it's a very envious kind of feeling, but it's okay not to have everything.
Nastasha: Most people are pretty regular and we're not that perfect.
Abi: Me included. Me included.
Nastasha: All included.
Collaborating on recipes
Nastasha: I wanted to ask about collaborations that you've done with other people. And you mentioned that when you went to the Philippines, you got the chance to meet the chefs from Guevara's, was it?
Abi: That one particularly, it was interesting because my recipes, normally I think of them as oh, you're making them at home. But adapting them to scale up in a commercial kitchen and their style of restaurant is a buffet. I was like, how are you gonna do all of these Baked Alaskas in Manila for a group of people.
And they had ice baths, like tubs, the container was full of ice and then they piped a meringue portion on top of each individual cup of ice cream. And the halo-halo Baked Alaska, to make them individual portions, they torch them basically all at once and then they just keep going. Like, you have to adapt even your existing recipes to make it work for, you know, everyone's needs. And so I thought it was really interesting seeing their kitchens and their staff were so great to making that happen.
Stateside for me, there was one that I did at this restaurant called Little Egg and the pastry chef there, Tanya Bush, she's incredible. And she is the co-founder of Cake Zine, which is a great independent publication that has different issues and different desserts.
And when she asked me to do a dessert collaboration at her place where she's a pastry chef, I was like, oh, it's so cool 'cause her dough was so good. It was just such a good base to have. She uses fresh yeast and we were able to do basically a chicken inasal inspired sticky bun. And so it's baked in the banana leaf, but also there's a lemongrass component to it.
The bread is flavored with annato, so it's bright orange, it almost looks like a pumpkin bread. But that lemongrass caramel, brown sugar mixture that it's coated in is so good. I only made it for the collaboration and just like by myself another time 'cause I loved it so much, using my own brioche recipe. It was so unique because we talked out the details, going into the kitchen it was kind of like your mind meeting my mind where it's at. That was for one day only kind of a thing, and that was really great.
The last one I'll mention is my friend Rainey, she's Bangladeshi and we did a South Asian inspired style of desserts for her multi-course menu at a restaurant here in Brooklyn called Winona's. That was like a couple years ago now. But I remember making again, mango dessert and it was basically a rose water meringue. And it was filled with the mango kind of pulp that you would use for a mango lassi, and then having like yogurt at the base. It was just a really good, great dessert. That was like a meeting of the minds once again. Like she came to my apartment and we did a tasting like, is this in line with your menu? Is this in line with the other things that you're gonna serve? And so I think there's always those kinds of questions that you ask when you do a collaboration of how much do you have to play with what else is being served?
Or is it just like an independent thing? Is it just gonna be, you know, this is the only focus is this. It doesn't have to clash with anything. It's a really fun process and I think I take a lot of pride in successfully doing something where you see both of us in it. And that's the fun of collabs.
It's just like, great. It feels in practice, really special. You feel like the energy in the air and stuff.
Nastasha: The meeting of the minds part is really cool. And I mean, that's just reflective too, of cooking. It's not really a solo thing. Especially in this kind of realm of exploring different cuisines and experimenting with different flavor profiles.
And what's really cool about Mayumu is that it does open that avenue for diaspora cooks of other cultures who also have a very strong dessert tradition, like South Asia for one, has an incredible variety of sweets that I've only tasted a very small portion of. But there is those commonalities, whether it's in ingredients, so like Indian mangoes are different from Philippine mangoes
Abi: For sure. Yes, yes, yes.
Nastasha: But for example, the lassi, that's a very iconic drink.
All that is to say, desserts are such a great platform almost to experiment with different flavors and when you were talking earlier about the chicken inasal.
Abi: Sticky buns.
Nastasha: in the sticky buns situation, I'm like, savory breads, savory desserts. That's a whole other world. Like I know you've got bagoong caramels in the book. So just 'cause it's desserts doesn't necessarily mean everything is 100% sweet all the time.
Culturally layered like sapin-sapin
Abi: Yeah a hundred percent. And I do think a lot of Filipino desserts aren't always super sweet, especially the traditional ones, or like a sticky rice suman where you also have like a plate of sugar and sesame seed sometimes with your palitaw.
Like, it's nice that there's that amenability of yes, change is good. And every person has their preferences and it's very subjective of what they like. And I do realize the more that you bake and make things of different cultures and different cuisines, the commonalities come through a hundred percent, and in ways that you might not even expect.
And I was thinking about it recently too, even for yema and stuff, it's like basically just cooking down condensed milk and it turns into this chewy, tasty thing.
But if you've ever had the Brazilian brigadero, cooking down condensed milk until you're able to kind of eat that and roll it in cocoa powder and stuff.
And there's definitely other Indian sweets that also have that same tradition of milk powder, condensed milk, cooking that down and turning into another sweet, so it's fascinating to see all these common threads, like as you make things, you're like, oh, this is the same thing, kind of, but then you add your own twist to it.
Culturally or yourself personally. It's just so much fun. I love food.
Nastasha: And yeah, desserts are pretty special because for me, growing up in the Philippines, I think when you think of it from like a western canon, right? Desserts are the end of the meal.
You've got starters, your mains, and desserts after. But if you're now looking at the traditional Filipino dessert canon, which is also something that I hope people are interested in after reading something like this is that you see, in Mayumu, like your interpretation of these desserts, but then hopefully that also strikes curiosity in people who have never tried, for example, tibok-tibok or an original something, to kind of seek out and also understand how those things were made, is also really important because the Filipino desserts cannon is, it's not strictly the western desserts that most people will automatically think of when you say desserts.
So that's just my rant into desserts is not a closed box in the Filipino food canon. It's open to interpretation to different ways and kinds.
Abi: Absolutely. And sometimes people think of French pastry and European pastry as like the pinnacle of desserts and stuff. And I think that definitely closes a lot of people off to the idea of steaming and other techniques are just as important as knowing how to make a meringue or do all these other things that are like the tent poles of that kind of cuisine, which have, you know, been parts of our desserts too.
Obviously the Spanish influence of having more of the breads and traditional pastries that you would think of in European kind of context in the Philippines. Mm-hmm.
Nastasha: The sapin-sapin is a good example of that, and came to mind because you were talking about steaming, but that is a very specific technique that, I mean, if you get really, really good at it, you're gonna make a really, really good sapin-sapin because the layers are gonna be like clean cut, you know, and like you'll see.
Abi: If you it too soon, it'll, like, I've had it happen where I was like, oh, it should be fine. And then it starts sinking and becomes like a marble sapin-sapin and the layer effect is gone. Like steaming is such a mystery. And I even to this day when I think about writing the book, it was the traditional desserts and even just making biko and things like that just over the stove top, there are a lot of visual cues that you have to look for and sometimes because it's enclosed and it's steamed, you're just like, I don't know what it's supposed to be looking like.
And it's just all texture and feel. It's very intuitive. That is one of the challenges I think of writing those recipes for sure is just, I understand why my mom was like, it's just till it, you know, it tastes good or right. It's very hard to explain.
And so demystifying that is important and trying your best to, is the goal of a cookbook author, but it's like I even was bamboozled by some of my earlier attempts at some of these desserts 'cause they weren't panning out, right?
Nastasha: I like that approach, demystifying it, because I think that's kind of how I wanna end our chat today, is thinking about what people take away from reading the book, and trying the recipes and just finding something that, for lack of a better word, like speaks to them that they wanna try from it.
Because cooking, like you were saying earlier, even in your kitchen, becoming comfortable with whatever tools you have and learning how to make the most of the ingredients that you have. And that's really aligned with a lot of Filipino values, I guess, the making the most of what you have and just going at it and seeing where it goes.
Takeaways from the book
Abi: Yeah, I mean, I hope the biggest takeaway is that there's so much beauty in like the regionality of our cuisine and even American cuisine, that you can go anywhere with it. I think it's like limitless in ways that you want to see the food that's on your dinner table. Like you can make it happen, it's just a little bit of the effort that goes into it.
Like we said, having some core tools. You don't have to have every single fancy piping tip or anything to be the best baker in the world. But having that intentionality is really important. Like, you know, you can get stuck in a routine a lot of the time, and I hope Mayumu serves as a reminder to try something new and something different and try something that can be a little bit familiar, but also exciting in a new way. And I think if we approach life that way of just making small changes to make, you know, it becomes like a wider butterfly effect of that.
And so that was my one parting thing. I hope Mayumu gives a lot of inspiration and it just keeps going to other people and however they use it in their day-to-day life.
Nastasha: I think that's really good advice. Like take something from it and get inspired and hopefully that will lead to experimenting in the kitchen and finding a new dessert that
Abi: Being in the kitchen for sure. Just like having inspiration be like, oh, I wanna make this. And I've had that feeling before where you see a recipe and you're like, I'm gonna buy all the ingredients for this. I don't care. I'm gonna make this tomorrow. And I think that that feeling is like a lightning in a bottle kind of a feeling.
Sometimes I really don't feel like cooking for weeks on end 'cause I'm like just tired and exhausted. But I really hope for that feeling that someone at least feels that from one recipe or at least one, hopefully from Mayumu.
Nastasha: Yeah, I think that's pretty safe assumption. There's a wide variety of stuff to choose from and different ingredients and if you're a crazy chocolate lover, if you're a crazy big ube lover, obviously also that's a big draw for people.
And one thing I kind of wanted to tie back to is we're talking about these recipes and how that is a connection to our culture and identity and our sense of self, for lack of a better word.
Like, having recipes and books be kind of like, that guide is really cool, but really at the end of the day, it's also about like us, like, this is getting kind of dramatic, but like finding the recipe that will work for us, you know, even if it's like one little tweak that you make, or like you double the amount of, I don't know, like cocoa because you really like chocolate in a certain thing.
If you experiment and make it fit to what you like, then no one's gonna tell you that's wrong.
Abi: Exactly.
Nastasha: You could just do it.
Find Mayumu
Nastasha: My warmest thanks to Abi Balingit for making the time to chat with us for this episode. Head to the links in the show notes for more information on where to buy Mayumu Filipino American Desserts Remixed. And if you live somewhere with a library system that doesn't have it, you know you can always request it. And I encourage everybody to do that where they can.
Our theme music is by Crowander with Segment Music by Eric and McGill, Blue Dot Sessions and Podington Bear. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and tell a friend, and I would really appreciate it if you wrote a review on whatever platform you're listening to, or you could even send me a message or an email.
Until next time, maraming salamat. Thank you for listening.