Welcome to our kitchen! We're veteran cookbook authors Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. Even after thirty-six cookbooks--including our latest, THE LOOK & COOK AIR FRYER BIBLE--we're excited to have Rose Wilde with us in this episode. She's the owner of the bakery Red Bread in Los Angeles and she's got a gorgeous new cookbook out: BREAD AND ROSES. You'll want it on your holiday list or on the new cookbooks you want for the new year. To find it, click this link.

If you'd like to find OUR OWN latest book on air-frying, please click this link.

We've also got a one-minute cooking tip about making gaucamole (which will surely shock you!) and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week: dan dan noodles and lebkuchen.

[00:49] Our one-minute cooking tip: how to make perfect guacamole.

[01:58] Bruce's interview with Rose Wilde, author of the new and sensational cookbook, BREAD AND ROSES.

[26:11] What’s making us happy in food this week: dan dan noodles and lebkuchen.

Hey, I'm Bruce podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough.

Together with Bruce, as you well know, we have written three dozen or more cookbooks, and the best that I can recommend is the Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible, perfect for all your holiday needs.

Don't you want to give an air fryer and a cookbook to go with it?

Well, here's one with over 700 photographs, 125 simple recipes.

It will show you step by step how to make Everything from your air fryer.

We are ready for the holidays, but we're not talking as always.

I say, this is not bad air frying in this episode of the podcast.

We've got our one minute cooking tip.

Bruce has an interview with Rose Wilde, the author of the new book, bread and roses, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Today's one minute cooking tip.

When you make guacamole, you need avocados at their perfect soft creaminess.

Yeah.

Okay.

Wait.

Um, come on, what, when is that?

It's that two second window in between hard, hard, hard, hard and dead.

Okay, so I get to make guacamole at 4.

17 on Tuesday afternoon.

Okay, so here's the thing,

it's always better to make the guacamole with them just slightly before they're perfect and then you can make it.

Rich and smooth by adding a tablespoon of mayo.

Oh my gosh, all of my Texas relatives are rising up to strike you.

We're in New England, it's okay.

Well, it does make sense.

I have to tell you that I eat a lot of avocado toast for lunch on whole grain bread.

It's one of my favorite things.

And I spread a layer of mayonnaise, and then I put the avocado on top of that, and then I put sriracha on top of that.

So it does go together.

You love avocado and mayonnaise.

I do.

Your relatives can go bite me.

Uh, well, um, okay.

Well, they probably don't want to, but, um, none of them are gay, but okay.

Uh, so, anyway.

That you know of.

Um, no, I pretty much know.

I lived with them.

Uh, so, anyway, up next on our podcast, Bruce has an interview with Rose Wilde.

She is the author of the new book, Bread and Roses.

Rose Wilde is with me today.

She's a pastry chef and owner of Red Bread, a farm to table bakery and cafe in Los Angeles.

She's also the author of a brand new book, Bread and Roses, 100 plus grain forward recipes featuring global ingredients and botanicals.

Hey, Rose, welcome.

Hi, Bruce.

Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

Hey, your new book, it's more than just a collection of recipes.

It's a guide that encourages home cooks and bakers, as you say, to embrace an eco friendly kitchen filled with a wide diversity of grains and botanicals.

Can you talk a little bit about that philosophy?

Yeah.

I really like to call it my eat more philosophy.

Which just makes me giggle because I, you know, I think that so much of the world is telling you to eat less and not eat that and don't eat to do that.

And I really want to break open those barriers and have you eat more than, uh, generally what's on our plate.

Plates these days, , especially here in the United States where we really embraced, , industry and monoculture.

There is so much that's celebrated around the world.

So many different kinds of grains, so many different kinds of botanicals.

And what I mean by that is not just flowers, but the whole plant, or as I like to call it in the book, eating root to blossom.

So the root, the stem, the leaves.

And the, , Blossom and the fruit.

So there's so many plants that you already are familiar with a part of it.

And I want you to eat the whole thing.

Eating root to blossom.

It sounds like, uh, eating nose to tail in the animal world.

Absolutely,

Bruce.

I'm really glad you picked up on that.

You know, I have a lot of background in really wonderful restaurants in Los Angeles.

, and so many of them embraced, I mean, probably over the last decade or more, this nose to tail idea.

I remember even one had a cute way of saying it, like nose to tail, even the squeal.

, And I just, I thought it was so strange that we didn't have a similar approach to plant matter.

So that was really kind of the inspiration for going root to blossom

for the most part.

Are all parts of plants from root to blossom edible for the

most part.

They are.

There's a couple where you have to be a little more wary.

For instance, you know, uh, rhubarb, the leaves are pretty toxic, but the stems are good.

. You know, another one that is often in people's mind is, uh, tomato plants.

You know, you don't want to eat a ton of the greens, but you can eat some of them.

Generally, what I do is juice them and then put them into a curd or something.

So toxicity levels are important to research for sure.

And I have a, uh, a section in the book about foraging.

It's all about like, you know, don't just go out into the wild.

mouth open, put everything in, you know, like we want to have some knowledge going into that.

But specifically, we want to have a global perspective of knowledge because food has always been political.

It's used as a soft power.

, and it is often , I'd let's say we hedge things a little more in this country when if you ask like a search engine Are tulips toxic?

They'll be like yes, but they're eaten all the time in france.

So really kind of broaden your mind to accept a world view of

that Speaking of world view your book is divided up into global chapters grains and bakes from asia from europe africa and even the americas but North Americans in general, as you said, aren't as familiar with the whole grains as the rest of the world, and why do you think that is?

Um, I

really think this is, you know, as, , an instance where, well, I think almost every instance is an instance where history can help us give context.

I'm a really big believer in, like, transparency and origin, not only helping us understand, but frankly, making things taste better.

Um, and you can really see the way our food system diverged from the rest of the world right around the end of World War two.

Most of the world, especially when we're talking about Europe, like the more developed areas that would have had economic access to a lot of industry.

In terms of the food system were flattened just because of the war, and we had a situation where we came into the war, but we didn't have a fighting on our land, with the exception of, of course, Hawaii.

So we still had all those industrial manufacturing plants intact, and we continued on that course when we built our food systems, and that naturally led to efficiency.

And.

Picking the thing that grew best and then multiplying that and then making sure it's that it could sit on the grocery shelves for a year on end.

So in some ways, , a lot of our food is still sort of in the rations world of food where it's not terribly alive.

, and in Europe, you had a situation where they had to go back to the fields because that's all they had.

And there became this really resurgence and deep love for.

The food that was local that you could celebrate because it was part of that cultural rebuilding.

And that's how we've kind of diverged.

And then if you look at Asia and Africa, um, other areas of the world, I highlight they have never quite had the, , intense manufacturing capabilities.

And so I often refer to some of these.

Absences of food in our country as sort of, , you know, downsides of affluence.

You know, we, we, we have so much white flour, but it's not nutritious, but we want white flour because it has long throughout history been associated with a status symbol.

It was originally for royal.

And if you think about it, it's because only really rich people could afford to throw away two parts of a food and, and still keep going.

, so a lot of these, , sort of drawbacks have come because we have so much economic, , accessibility and in other parts of the world, they have continued to rely.

on the same foods that have fed humans for thousands of years.

So, you know, I think it's always, always a fine time to make a different choice and look to other people and see what's, what's good and, and be in exchange.

So, yeah, I think that's sort of how our food system has diverged.

What advice do you have for people who are just Starting to expand their cooking and baking experience with grains beyond the usual suspects of wheat

notes.

Honestly, my best advice to anyone getting in the kitchen for anything is to, is to have an open mind and play.

We often forget like just how gung ho we are for those things as children.

And as adults, we have a lot of worries and concerns in our head that kind of talk us out of doing things and tell us we can't when we, when we really can anything.

Anything is within our grasp if we give it some time, which is our most precious resource.

It's the thing that makes food taste good.

It's the thing that builds our skills.

And I've really organized these chapters with my hope that you will kind of dive into the culture that most resonates with you, whether that means the Americas or maybe you're Asian American and you want to dive into Asia because you want to explore that.

And then within each chapter, it's really built to build your skills and your confidence.

Like it's.

All of them start with simple shortbreads or cookies and then build into tarts and pies, snacking cakes, and then breads.

And ultimately each chapter ends with a showstopper cake.

So if you were to just pick one chapter and work your way through it, you could then flip to another area of the world that you are completely unfamiliar with and still apply those same skills.

And You know, I wrote this book during the pandemic when I, we didn't know if we were going to travel.

So, so much of this book, um, for me was about allowing you the possibility to sort of see a culture and travel through food within the comfort of your own

home.

I want to talk about some of the recipes in your book.

The very first one combines two of my favorite things, shortbread and chamomile.

Tell me about these cookies and also what tricks or secrets are there to baking with flours as flavorings?

Um, I love that you love chamomile.

It's such a lovely flavor.

, I really, uh, loved using that in this recipe because I think, again, , none of the rest, none of the ingredients in this book are, are that esoteric or hard to find.

You just maybe haven't used them in this way before.

So, Chamomile we usually have as tea, but here we're grinding it up and we're putting it into the shortbread, , and we're pairing it with brown rice, you know, we're in the Asia chapter and what that brown rice does is it gives short bread, which is already deliciously buttery and crumbly, this lovely light texture that also has this like.

crumb that's just so beautiful and it gives it a depth of flavor and that's what we're really looking for when we're adding whole grains to things because generally doughs are 80 percent white flour.

They taste like nothing and so as a chef it's, it's my job to find places where I can put flavor in and as an eater it's just my joy.

So it just feels like this wild west where like you can do so much.

And that's my favorite thing about working with whole grains.

And what I really advise when people are trying to approach whole grains, whether they're the ones listed in this book, because I cover about 15.

So non exhaustive there's thousands, , is to refer to the flower flavor wheel, , which is at the beginning of the.

book.

It's an illustration by the very talented Stacy Michelson, and it really tries to put into a, you know, pun intended, digestible format, how to approach flavor.

And it walks you through some simple tests for tasting the grain through a porridge test.

Also making, again, shortbread because it's our, it's a really fast recipe.

You know, you, You don't even really need a mixer.

You can do it by hand.

And even if you don't flip to the recipes and you just stay on that page and you pick three grains that just spark your interest and run it through that simple shortbread recipe, you're going to get such astoundingly different results and you're going to be able to.

taste such incredible flavor and when you do, you're going to ask yourself, wait, did I put spices in this?

I don't remember putting spices in it, but that grain carries so much flavor on its own that it's going to become your secret ingredient that everyone's going to be like, how did you do this?

Your flavors are bold.

And I love that.

And for instance, you have a Toasted barley porridge with clotted cream and roasted kumquats.

Okay, so I need to know the origin of this dish.

And is this breakfast, dessert, a first course of

dinner?

It is all day, every day.

This dish actually comes to me from my time I spent in Tibet.

I lived there for almost a year, kind of backpacking through the country and staying at a couple monasteries.

And this toasted barley porridge is known as sampa there, and it is the main food source for almost everybody in the country.

And you either have it as a loose porridge in the morning, or if you're going to be walking around all day, if you're part of the nomadic tribes, you're going to make it into like thicker balls and have those in your pouch and chew on those.

So many different iterations with one ingredient, which was so inspiring to me, because I think that, you know, Even when we have less, we can have more if we're choosing our ingredients with intention.

The, uh, yogurt came into play because, uh, every afternoon when we finally, like, got back to the monastery we were staying with, that was like the treat.

And then occasionally when we were walking along, there would be kumquats and me and a friend of mine who were on this trip, , would roast them over the fire at night.

And I never got the opportunity while I was there to have all three things at once.

And so it was like locked in my brain that like, this should all be together on my plate.

And when I first opened my cafe many years ago, it was one of the recipes.

, we put on the menu and I was like, okay, I know this is going to be a stretch for a lot of people because it's new, but to my delight, people loved it.

And I've done it with many different toppings before, like roasted stone fruit and time.

So I think this is a really great alternative if you have, , Oatmeal in the mornings like this is even faster than oatmeal, super delicious and the roasted kumquats especially like I just like to make a huge tub of them and have them in my fridge to snack on.

Rose, you offer up a slew of recipes with emmer.

So can you talk about what that is and how do you cook with it?

Emmer is actually one of our oldest grains.

, emmer and einkorn are usually referred to as the mother wheats.

So many of our modern wheats and even our heritage wheats and heirloom wheats can trace their lineage back to these two.

, so they are very revered in many parts of the world.

And emmer is this fairly short grain that is generally really dark brown, and it's a really strong grain.

So if you're following the tests in the beginning of the book with the tongue test where you hold a grain under your tongue and like for 10 minutes, don't move it, just let it sit there and hydrate.

And then you try and chew it.

Emer is going to be one of those ones that gets gummy.

And it gets really chewy and that tells you that it's really strong.

And so it's a great bread flour.

So emmer was one of the first grains that we used for flatbreads.

And eventually when we invented a closed oven, , became our, , like lofted breads and It is just, it's really special.

I think it's, it's got this wonderful tannic, deep nutty flavor.

I'm always hesitant to tell you exactly what nut or what exact flavor it calls to mind for me because flavor is so memory specific and cultural specific.

So I really hope you use that flavor wheel to define it for yourself.

But emmer is super special.

And one of my favorite recipes in the book that uses emmer is the emmer maritoso.

Uh, which is a bun from Italy that is um, like a sweet bun and you cut out like a little almost Pac Man smile from it and fill it with cream and in the book I have it paired with um, lavender roasted blackberries and it just gives this beautiful base note to an otherwise sweet preparation that also has the sour blackberries.

And the lovely story about maritoso is that they're traditionally made by new husbands to give to their wives as gifts.

So every food has such a really beautiful story.

I want to talk about the story behind a fried hand pie in your book.

The picture's gorgeous.

The pie is being split open, but instead of, you know, your typical raspberry or strawberry coming out, you have a runny egg, sweet potatoes.

and feta.

So I love that balance of flavors in there.

But what I really love is the memories you talk about of fried pies at your local Wawa gas station.

Tell me how this recipe came about.

, Rose: yeah, I know.

I think that this memory really settles me squarely as having spent some time in the South with Wawa.

I love Wawa.

Shout out to Wawa endlessly.

There was a wall across the street from, , my college, the college of William and Mary when I was attending it.

And, , my dorm, especially it was literally right across from it.

So I, I mean, I wish they'd had like a customer rewards program because I spent so much money there.

And I was a huge fan of the fried hand pies that they called home run pies.

And as you said, they're traditionally filled with sweet jam.

My favorite was like a cherry one that was glazed.

, but I'm honestly, I've always been a more savory person than a sweet person.

So you will find in this book that there's tons of savory bakes and there's also a lot of cooking.

Um, so it's for everyone.

And I had always dreamed of having like, A runny egg inside a fried pie and I was just like, there's got to be a way to do this to like figure out the other elements in there so that they don't get overcooked.

And the pie dough is still super stable.

So this one took quite a few test runs to figure out and get exactly right.

And we probably got it right.

Literally like a couple days before we shot it where I was like, okay, Okay.

And as a perfectionist, I tend to do things over and over and over again.

But this is, to me, like, you know, my favorite breakfast wrapped up in a pie that you could eat on the go.

It's so delicious.

Uh, it's got sweet potatoes in there.

Sometimes I fold sweet potato greens in there.

There's the feta.

If you've never eaten sweet potato greens, they are so good.

So delicious potato greens, toxic sweet potato greens, delicious.

, and it's topped with a couple, , corn flour, uh, that has just a little bite, but also some beauty.

So yeah, that's one of my favorite.

You pulled out all my favorite recipes, Bruce.

Well, that's another recipe that calls for corn flour that I want to talk about and it's your corn crust blueberry pie So it's a two part question because it's a two part recipe What does the corn flour add to the crust and you serve this pie with lilac ice cream?

So, how do you do that?

You use fresh lilac flowers?

I

do use fresh lilac flowers because, , when they're in season, it's just, I mean, for me, it's the most romantic week of the year.

, we have a farmer at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, Weiser Family Farms.

They bring just literally carloads of lilacs to the farmers market and it's just.

The intense aroma is gorgeous.

So, , I started making this ice cream as a way to make that last a little longer.

, you can absolutely use dried lilacs, although I would double the amount of flowers because it will, , it won't be as strong.

Uh, the big thing is you want to make sure that you're only using the petals and you're removing the inner pistula.

kind of sex organs of the blossom because they can be very bitter and you don't want to impart that into your cream base.

But my hope is that people use this ice cream base for any flour because fat is what carries flavor.

And so infusing florals and herbs into cream is a really wonderful way to get super fun, um, ice cream flavors, uh, that are a little outside the box.

One of my favorite ways I've reused this ice cream base.

Without the lilac blossoms is with a really cool plant called walk a tie, which is in the mint family.

It's from the Americas.

It's a Peruvian Bolivian mint, and it's so so super strong.

So if you love mint chocolate chip ice cream, walk a tie is going to kick it up a whole nother level.

, So that's the ice cream, , and it's really simple to make, so I hope everyone makes it every time they see a blossom that just, like, makes them swoon and they want it, uh, they want to eat it.

And then in terms of the pie, this is probably one of my favorite, , pie doughs in the whole book, and there's quite a few.

, this one uses a technique of adding, uh, milk and an egg to add more protein.

to help bind because you are using a grain like corn that is naturally gluten free, which is something I love to call out because I think oftentimes when we say whole grains, a lot of people who are gluten free are like, Oh, not for me.

But actually so many grains are naturally gluten free.

Um, and one of the things that you need in a pie dough to help pull it together is the protein gluten.

And so if you don't have it in the grain, you can borrow it from the milk and the egg as a binder.

So just a little baking science there, but I love it in this pie dough because that corn flour gives your pie dough this super golden color, which is going to make it look like you really used the best butter ever, which you should, but it's just going to really amp it up.

And on top of giving you a really flaky shattery pie, it's going to give you this.

Wonderful, like texture where there's like a little bite and a little grain to it.

So it just adds another dimension of shatter.

And I think it's like a pie dough that you should be filling everything with.

It's really super easy because of that milk and egg.

So this should be your go to pie dough.

Okay, Rose.

Now you've got.

Me wanting to experiment with, uh, with botanicals, with flowers, but when cooking with them, is it okay to use blossoms for our own gardens?

And if not, where can home cooks find culinary botanicals?

I think that's a great question.

I think your garden is actually the best place, assuming that you're not using Miracle Gro in your garden.

, our biggest concern with flowers, especially when we're buying them commercially, is that even more so than our food, they are very heavily sprayed to deter bugs because we want beautiful blossoms, right?

So I source all my florals and, and my herbs and things like that.

The same way I source all my food, like from trusted farmers who are doing organic practices, who I can ask questions and they have answers.

So I'm always looking for transparency.

, and then I'm growing them myself.

, so there's so many things that even if all you have is a window sill, like so many florals will grow there.

So many herbs will grow there.

So you have actually access to so many botanicals that you can use in a small space.

Another option is to forage for them.

And that again requires a little more knowledge.

But you can start that by just like walking into some natural lands in your area that, you know, are protected.

Many of them are public lands.

If they're not get permission first, but very often you have neighbors who are growing things because they love them and they have too much.

So it's a really wonderful way to build community by just knocking on someone's door.

I'm being like, Hey, I noticed you're growing tons of chamomile.

Could I have some and bring you back cookies?

10 out of 10, people say yes.

Rose Wild, pastry chef and owner of Red Bread Cafe and Bakery in Los Angeles.

Your new book, Bread and Roses, 100 plus grain forward recipes featuring global ingredients and botanicals.

Great, good luck with the book, and thank you so much for sharing your insight on baking with botanicals with me today.

Bruce, thank you for having me.

You asked wonderful questions and got me excited about my own book again.

So thank you.

I can't wait to see what you make.

Okay.

Eating with botanicals.

It's just something that actually I have said we can't do at our house because I spray our various roses for, uh, you know, all kinds of bad pests.

But I have to say that I do use, uh, what do I want to say?

Natural, what's the right word?

Organic sprays.

I'm still not baking with them.

Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, I use neem oil and stuff like.

that.

But it's neem oil shortbread.

There you go.

Yeah, no rose about

that.

So make sure you do get culinary floral items, right?

Culinary grade floral items.

But it is an interesting idea to bake whole grain with botanicals.

I think that the cross between whole grain and botanicals would work out really

well.

Think about the flavors.

We're usually used to baking with cinnamon and vanilla, and that's basically maybe some orange zest.

But you open up the whole world to lavender and Tulips and roses and camomile.

And I

think that this would work best with whole grains, right?

I mean, I think she's right.

I think it's a great idea.

That's the reason her cafe is so successful.

Yeah,

undoubtedly so.

Okay, so, before we get to the last segment of this podcast, let me say it would be great if you could subscribe to this podcast, if you could rate it.

Any rating in any platform will do.

I know the platforms are disappearing like Stitcher and Google, but there are still lots of platforms out there where you can hear us and any language that you want to give us a review, just even nice podcast would be fantastic in any language across the globe because we know we're heard across the globe.

So I'm out.

Bye.

Thanks for that.

And on to our final last segment of the podcast.

What's making us happy in food this week.

This is making me happy, but I don't think it's making Mark happy.

That's my Dan Dan noodles.

I made them for dinner this week.

Well, that's a story.

So here's the thing about Dan Dan noodles.

You know, they're just quintessential in every New York Chinese restaurant and probably many Chinese restaurants around the world.

And in China, they're served.

It's a snack, a little tiny bowl.

But I made a giant, huge serving bowl of them.

That's the story.

And I was out of tahini.

So I made my own tahini by putting sesame seeds in the turbo blender.

And I didn't make my own noodles for this one, but I made my own chili oil.

And it was so delicious.

I used those fermented sumac high in it.

And the thing is In the dish that should have fed five people or six people that fed two people, there was a cup of chili oil.

Yeah, and, uh, anyway, the story is I ate two big bowls of it because it was so delicious and the next day was not pleasant.

He didn't get to leave the house, but I did and I had a good time.

Well, I left the house, but it was a little bit unpleasant, uh, during the night and then all the next day.

I just ate too much because it was too delicious.

Okay, so that's gross, so let me say what's making me happy for this week.

And that's a recipe that we make every year, and that is Nancy Baggett's, the storied, legendary food and cookbook writer, Nancy Baggett's Leibkuchen.

I think these are from her mother in law's recipe, I think, but I don't remember the whole story.

But if you want to see the recipe for these Labe Kuchen.

They exist on our YouTube channel, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

You can see their recipe there.

They are really delicious.

Or you can go out to Nancy Baggett's website and you can find the recipe there.

They're, what are they?

They're like dried fruit, spice.

Yeah.

They're basically like fruit cake, mushed up into cookies, but baked and lumps.

They are lumps.

They're not.

Crispy, they're soft.

They're soft and you make a royal icing glaze on them.

Yeah.

And they're full of, you know, candied dried fruit and spices.

Oh, they're delicious.

They

are absolutely delicious.

And very much in the holiday spirit.

And they make me happy every year.

When we make them at this time of year for the holidays.

I don't know why we don't make them other times of the year.

Because it's not the holidays.

I guess not.

I guess it's one of those things.

That's our show.

For this week, a show complete with, I don't know what, bathroom stories and mayonnaise and guacamole.

And delicious dan dan noodles.

Wow, it's no wonder we have a cooking show with such great content.

All right, so that's the show.

Anyway, we hope you will come back next week for another episode of Cooking with

Bruce and Mark.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food, so go to our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell us what's making you happy in food this week, and maybe we'll even share some good ones here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.