256: B. Dylan Hollis

24:05Yeah. No, you're right. I got a TikTok comment, I think three days ago that asked me, you know, would this recipe work if I switched a cup of milk chocolate chips to dark chocolate chips. And I mean, it's not their fault. I think you're right. It's just that's the layman's understanding of baking. And that's really what I, with however I could do it or have the opportunity to do it, that's what I would like to dispel. Like you said, it's experimentation. Right. And if you want to turn muffins into a loaf cake, just bake it for longer. Yeah, exactly. So I want to ask about dates because you have a whole section in the book that's dates not in the like era and time sense, but just that they include dates as an ingredient.

24:48What's the idea behind that? Well, that's because dates, dates must have been an object of unmatched affection. They were that girl. Yeah, they were. Everyone wanted them. Everyone had them. Like I say, it's not hyperbole. I think I mentioned this in the book to say that, say in the 1940s and 1950s, community cookbook, or even a professional cookbook, it would not be unusual for seven out of 10 recipes to contain dates in them. You'd have date macaroons, date bread, date nutloaves, everything. And, you know, I chose it not only because it's paying homage to the fact that dates were everywhere in the past, but that dates are one of those fruits that really built You know, not even just the state of California and the desert states, but a lot of the nation.

25:40Dates were brought to the United States and planted in California, you know, the Coachella Valley. And they exploded. We're talking about, you know, tens of millions of pounds every year. And the great thing about dates is that, you know, they're somewhat dried. They're high in sugar. And they basically never go off. You know, maybe they get a little hard, a little chewy. and they have a fantastic flavor. So all of these combinations mean that you could keep dates in your pantry for, you know, 20 years. Maybe 20 years is going a bit too far, but for a long time. And they were economical. They added sweetness.

26:19Maybe you didn't need so much sugar. So there's all of these factors that just – or maybe, yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe it was just a fever and people were just certainly obsessed with dates. And that's fine by me as well. I think it's all of the above. And I would imagine that you have a lot of dates in your fridge or pantry at home. Are there any other ingredients that you keep on hand that maybe you didn't in the past just because they play such a big role in baking yesteryear? Yeah. Molasses. I never used to do much with molasses. Like I don't cook much. I don't barbecue much. So I wouldn't use molasses in like a barbecue sauce.

26:50You know, I would not use molasses as much as I do now. So I keep molasses in my kitchen. I keep all sorts of strange things in my kitchen. ammonia ammonium carbonate for what well ammonium carbonate is uh they're smelling salts that's actually the compound but um they were a progenitor leavening agent you know between yeast and the invention of baking sodas and baking powders they would use ammonia so i i have baker's ammonia it smells terrible but once baked um it completely deactivates um dates is probably the biggest one I buy dates and, you know, buy 10 pounds each. Yeah. But, yeah, all sorts of grand things have found their way into my kitchen.

27:35But I don't keep that strange of ingredients because I don't go back too far. You know, I sort of had the cutoff at 1900. There's a few contemporaries of mine. I think of, like, Max Miller of Tasting History. I can only imagine what his pantry looks like because he goes back, you know, talking like before zero, sort of these, you know, triple digit years. He's got like woolly mammoth in the freezer or something. Yeah. That wasn't really happening in 1914. No, definitely not. So the date section stuck out to me. And then the worst of the worst section, of course, stuck out to me. Did you ever hesitate about including just really gnarly recipes or you kind of know that's what the people want?

28:17I struggled with it, Eliza. I struggled with it because on one hand, the terrible recipes play such a big part in my overall video production. You know, I truthfully try these recipes for the first time on camera and I taste them for the first time on camera with the exception of the jello poke cake when I announced my cookbook because, of course, I had tried that before. So, yeah, on one hand, you have all of these terrible recipes that people get shown a lot. And on the other hand, you have fingers. on the other on the on the other hand you have the fact that people are going to you know there's always that one person that is going to disregard the fact that this has the worst of the worst section and they're going to be upset that maybe they they tried this recipe and they're like it's terrible i said well i tell you it's terrible um but no i i i came to the conclusion that i wanted to prove to people that there are terrible recipes that exist in print in publication.

29:17And these were literally the ideas of some sick or twisted individual. So I just wanted to prove that, yeah, this is a thing that someone made and printed this out. So I like to think of it almost as like a practical joke that's being played from the past that you are kind of helping continue into the future, even though you're saying that they're the worst of the worst. I bet there will be people that look at the title of something and say, oh, maybe that wouldn't be that bad. Or it's, you know, they don't like someone very much. They're coming over for dinner. They would want to make it in that context.

29:48But I think that's kind of fun, you know, even though I'm never going to make any of them or hopefully ever eat any of them. Yeah, exactly. And I realize that not everyone is insane as I. Not everyone has, you know, three bookshelves full of old community cookbooks. So if I could, like you say, continue this practical joke in a digestible manner for those who haven't come across all of these dusty tomes, so be it. So on the positive side of recipes we do like, what's like a recipe from the past that you think is overdue for a comeback in the same way that Baked Alaska is having a popular moment or something like that?

30:26I think macaroons, not in the singular sense of like a coconut macaroon or the French macaroon, the macaron, but I am obsessed with, as you might have been able to tell from like Food for the Gods of divinity. I'm obsessed with baked goods that primarily consist of egg whites that are meringue based. Like back in the day, you know, chocolate chip cookies or flour based cookies, they weren't really that popular. Even pre-1950s, the chocolate chip cookie, though being invented in the 30s, around that time at least, they didn't exist. There were hundreds of recipes of, well, even more than that for macaroons.

31:06They would be like, you know, it would be a cookie, but maybe just with some soda crackers, egg whites, sugar, and then you would have your add-ins, much like you would have a base cookie recipe, and then you would turn that into a chocolate chip cookie recipe. So, you know, I think of like Ricciarelli, which is like an almond flour macaroon. You've got egg whites, almond flour, and sort of citrus flavors, or, you know, just a plain chocolate chip cookie, but without flour. There's this great recipe called forgotten cookies. It's a meringue, like a kiss, a meringue kiss that you would make. But there's chocolate chips in there and some nuts in there.

31:41And they're called a forgotten cookie because you put them in an oven at 350 and you immediately turn off the oven and you leave them in there overnight with a door jar. Wow. And why? Just because you know how meringues need to cool down gently and not crack. And that's just one of those little things that, you know, someone from the past, the bygone years said, that's a good idea. That's the perfect time. Let them, you know, let them come to temperature, not crack. And you get this lovely, crispy chocolate chip cookie, but in a macaroon form. And yeah, so that's a long, long story short. I think macaroon cookies in general need to make a return.

32:17I like that idea. And I really like the name Forgotten Cookie because it's doubly true today because it's a cookie that has been largely forgotten in our own appetites and history. But, you know, maybe they're still in an oven somewhere and just pluck them out. It's a very romantic recipe name. Yes. Okay. So I want to ask you about a hot take, which is I've heard that you don't like baking with gram measurements and that you like to use cups and teaspoons, which is in opposition to the way that most bakers feel. So I just want to fact check that and find out why. I can see my reputation precedes me.

32:52Well, Shalia, our producer, tipped me off to this and I was pretty shocked. So I had to ask. Yes, I don't like using a scale. I don't like baking by weight. Even after the process of writing a cookbook, the process that I despised the most because I needed to make sure it was correct was the metrification of ingredients. You know, I just think that And truly, it's not that deep. I just think that using, you know, shoving a cup into a bowl or a container of flour, leveling it off, leveling it off and throwing it, you know, into your mixing bowl. I think that's easier. I think it's more accessible.

33:39Of course, this is just opinion. And you're correct. I once did an experiment where I asked three people to, you know, measure a cup of flour and I would weigh it. and there were, you know, one was 120. There was another which was 162 grams. What is that person using? Yeah, and then mine was 114. Which is what you use in the book, right? Yeah, I made that executive decision. So I do concede if you're looking for accurate measurements, if you're looking for precision, you need to bake by weight. You know, if you're baking at any volume, if you're in a bakery, if you're baking by the, yeah, of course, weight's the way to go.

34:19But, you know, I like to bake by displacement, by cups and tablespoons and these things. I think because compared to a lot of my peers, I am an amateur. I like embracing the amateur nature of baking insofar as I like to keep it as accessible as possible. And I don't want to scare anyone. Weights, scales are invariably there's maybe for whatever reason. I don't know. I think they're scary. This is a personal phobia. Yeah. I'm now looking inward now. I'm not looking. I'm not liking what I'm seeing. I wish you had a scale behind the desk. This would be a great time to bring it out. But I get what you mean.

35:04And I think also if I can speculate a little bit about you as a person And from just what I've heard over this conversation, I feel like it's a nostalgic and like romantic and fanciful gesture to be scooping in and leveling out. And it's the way that home bakers were baking for a long time. And if you're trying to be channeling that spirit, it makes sense to me. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you said that better than I could. You know, I will ramble ad nauseum. But yeah. And it's like you said, it's just what people did. And I like to further that. And you don't mind doing the extra dishes. No, I don't.

35:36That helps, too. So to close out, you know, this is taste. We like to ask guests about their taste. I have some rapid fire questions for you. So just no thoughts, maybe a little thought, but just tell me what you think. Okay? Okay. Okay. Favorite cookbook? Favorite cookbook, Joy of Cooking. Favorite candy bar? Oh, I'm a weird one. 100 grand. Favorite decade for food? Ooh, 1925 to 1935. I know that's cheating, but. No, I love that it's not a proper decade. Favorite recipe that you've made a video for? Oh, the pinto bean cake. Okay, I have to ask why. I'm sorry. Just because it's absurd. Yeah. It was a cake made primarily of pinto beans.

36:21There was no sugar. There was honey. There were peanuts. You had to put it through something called a grinder mat, which I didn't know at the time, but it's basically just like a meat grinder, but I used a food processor. And yeah, it made a cake. It made a cake and it tasted good. And I was mad about it. I love that it tasted good. Okay, most underrated piece of kitchen equipment? I have to say the wooden spoon. Most overrated ingredient? It's not to do with baking. Can I say truffles? Yes. Absolutely. We do not like truffles here. Although I love truffle hunting. Okay, food for the gods or ambrosia?

36:56Just because of the time spent, I have to say food for the gods. And wacky cake or water pie? My goodness. This water pie I have a disdain for like nothing else. Wacky cake. Wacky cake it is. Dylan, thanks so much. This was so much fun. Eliza, thank you for having me.

37:20Hey, Eliza, what's up? Hey, Matt. Not much. Just, you know, adjusting back to life in New York. Oh, my gosh. Life in New York. So it's so tough and rough compared to where you just were. I just wanted to have this conversation about your recent trip to Paris and Lisbon, two places I've loved, but I haven't been in since before the pandemic. What is up? I mean, great things are up. It was really fun to get to go, to get to be one of the New Yorkers that goes to Europe in the summer instead of one of the New Yorkers that watches people on Instagram going to Europe in the summer. It's such a real thing.

37:53I've been biding my time. It was my turn. It was my first time in Europe in almost a decade, probably a long time. And I ate so well, not to brag, but had a lot of highlights that would be fun to share. So you were in Paris and you had a looked like a pretty cracking event for a cake zine in Paris. How did that go? Yeah, the event was so great. Taste. This is Taste producer Pat Stango came by the event. Yep. Shout out to Pat. A delight. Shout out to Pat. We did a pop-up at Combat, which is a really cool female-owned cocktail bar in the Belleville-Buchard-Malle neighborhood in Paris. They did a cocktail for us, and then we had a lot of magazines, and then we hired two bakers in Paris that I've admired from afar for a while to make dessert for it, which is always just a special thing to do to get to hire people to make pie-themed dessert, you know, a delight.

38:45It's such a delight. Can we first get like a fit check? Like what are people looking like when they're rolling into the cake zine pop up in Belleville? Well, what's the scene? It's funny because I was just talking to someone about how I feel very heartened that like any event we've done, which we've done one in L.A., we've done a bunch in New York and then this one in Paris. We somehow find the cake people, which I mean, someone that has a neck tattoo of a slice of cake, real person at the party. Someone with a really cool purse that has like fake frosting on it. Like there's a little bit of like a cake fashion culture, but then just like cool people that want to have a magazine, have some pie.

39:20And we did these two really, well, more than two. We had two bakers do pie. We had Alina Pronopanko, who is Ukrainian, who did a Ukrainian like lemon poppy seed cottage cheese pie. Very traditional. And she does a very like black aesthetic with her pastries. So that was fun. And then Andrea Sham did three pies that were Neapolitan ice cream flavored. And they had frosting on the top that looked like a lattice. So I saw that. I saw the photo you shared with me. So a black aesthetic for pie and cake and dessert in general. So curious. How do you make pastry black? Well, I think it depends. I went to a pop-up she did at Marty that weekend also, which is a cute coffee shop in that same neighborhood.

40:00And she does these oysters. they look like an actual oyster but with this giant kind of craggy black shell and it's actually like a salty chocolate cookie shell and then she does panna cotta inside of it that looks like the kind of meat of the oyster and it comes with a lemon that you squeeze over the whole thing so it's very much like an actual dessert oyster experience it's served with with a lemon juice that's with the whole lemon wet and then you squeeze it over just like you would do with Oh, wow. So fun. I feel like that's not something I've seen other people doing. I love that. And then, so, of course, you visited the restaurants of Paris.

40:38Did you have Dizzy Day? Did you have the croissant? I didn't, but I had a really amazing—I went to Tapisserie, which is a patisserie that the people that do Septime, which is a very famous tasting menu spot, do. And they have two things that are kind of the standouts that I really liked. They do a flan slice, but it's on really, really flaky puff pastry. It's this like huge, thick slice of flan, vanilla bean all over it. That was really great. And then they do choux buns that are called choux à la fleuve, and it's flavored with like a kind of hay-scented cream. So they infuse the hay into the cream, which I was looking up this place on David Liebowitz's blog, and he was saying that like fleuve is one of like the trendy patisserie flavors of the moment in Paris right now.

41:21Oh, fleuve is the hay flavor. Hay flavor, which I'd never had before. And it's kind of grassy and honey-like. And I really like a vegetal dessert moment. So I liked that a lot. Yeah. Hay is the new P. Hay is the new P. And also a trend that I noticed that was really interesting is that two of my favorite meals, kind of the nicer meals that I did, are both French-Asian chefs that are doing kind of interesting food in that kind of intermingling stratosphere. So I went to Moco Loco. They have a Korean chef there right now. His name is Esuli and he's doing like hamachi with lardo and like a Granny Smith granita.

41:55Unbelievably composed and beautiful food. I was on your Instagram checking it out. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's like cooling, the flavor contrast, the texture contrast. That was really great. They do like beef tataki with house made chili oil. And then also I went to Le Cervant, which is the sisters that are French Filipino. You know, probably the best thing I had there was this brioche toast with really beautiful sardines just kind of laid out on top. It was 90 degrees. There's obviously no air conditioning. So I couldn't really eat in the way that I wanted to. But I did have pho, even though it was so hot out.

42:28And it was amazing, amazing pho at Song Heng, which is like a longtime Vietnamese spot in Paris. So moving on to Portugal, you spent some time there as well. And any listener of this show knows, and Anna and I talked about it a lot. But there's one moment when Tatiana and I all went to Portugal in the same summer. It's been an absolute destination for many Americans in the past pre-pandemic. But you got to go there for the first time. Tell me about your experience in Portugal. Well, I went to eat shellfish and sit on the beach. And I did both of those things. So I was very happy. I think probably the craziest meal I did is I went to this place that's called Cerveria Ramiro.

43:05Did you go there? I didn't get to go there. It was on a list originally, but I never made it there. Yeah, you know, it's been open since the 50s. It's a Bourdain spot. It's giant, like three levels. You have to get a ticket if you come there when it's busy and then they call your ticket. It almost reminds me of Contramar and that it's an old school seafood focused spot that's very beloved. And we just, they kind of balled out, feasted. We got the largest shrimp I've ever had in my entire life. And reddest too. Reddest, largest, the only kind of shrimp that carries the roe in the head. and they kind of slice it for you table side and then mix up the row and then spoon it over the shrimp, which is just like dinner theater.

43:42So fun. I had gooseneck barnacles, which are like a big delicacy in Portugal and Spain. I love those. And you can get those on the beach and you can get those, you know, at the bar. You can get them like anywhere. It's crazy. Yeah, they're called percebes. And you have to like slice them and then pull them apart. It's kind of like a eating experience. And that was probably the thing that like other people in the restaurant, we had three different people come up to us, say, oh, someone at my table wanted to try them. They were too nervous. Can I have one? So we were just giving away barnacles to all these people.

44:11Why would you be nervous? Is it just because the shape is a little off-putting? The texture might be a little bit strange. I think, you know, I think there's only two kinds of barnacles that you can eat. So they're not something that's commonly eaten. And they weren't expensive. But I could see that if you were the only person at a table that wanted to try them, they come in a whole batch. Like you don't necessarily want to be stuck with that many barnacles. But I really liked them. I found it was kind of like eating a clam, like a little chewy, very oceany. Very lots of umami, great bar snack, great with alcohol, great to snack on.

44:41Yeah, that was really great. And also something that I was not expecting is that all of the parks in Lisbon have little kiosks that sell like coffee and alcohol. And so you can just get like a Porto Tonico and sit in the park like anywhere. And that's what everyone is doing in the neighborhood. So that was like the other big highlight for me. What a great trip. Now, let me ask you lastly about Portugal. Was there something about the food that surprised you? you know we again have written about Portugal a lot but what surprised you? I thought there would maybe be more vegetables than I ended up eating which I'm a Californian so I feel like in general in Europe also I like I'm nervous to say this but the fruit that I had in Paris was not good and I thought it would be good I like went to the farmer's market it's hotter there it's like staying lighter later I was like maybe we'll have better stone fruit and it just was not what I wanted it to be, which is kind of a bummer.

45:30But on the flip side, everything else was super great. Yeah, sure. I mean, okay, like, you know, it's like a farmer's market in New York. Like you're going and you're kind of having a mixed bag. And if it's local, you know, the climate change. Yeah, I've been in the news. Yeah, I've heard about it. It might be because it's affecting some of the way that some of the produce is coming to market. And, yeah. Look, maybe I didn't go to the right stand at the farmer's market. I will give myself some grace room on that. Respect. But everything else I loved. I had a lot of good bubble tea. I had really good Iranian food when I was in Portugal.

46:08I think that, like, it's just fun to be eating in a different city and notice, like, where the locals are going. And, you know, of course, I went to, like, a third-way coffee shop that everyone was speaking English inside. Like, there is definitely the vacationer influence to be found, I think, especially in Lisbon. I noticed that. Yeah, it was a great trip. I also flew back with what I thought was a lot of tinfish, but in hindsight was not enough. So I think that's my top line note is that if you're going to Portugal and you're going to buy tinfish to give to people, remember that you also want some for yourself and get like twice as much.

46:39I love that. Well, thanks for sharing, Eliza. I appreciate it. Oh, yeah. Anytime.

46:47This is Taste is hosted by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things happening.