263: Eric Adjepong

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. It's the ice cream maker, the risotto is like the recipe of death, using pineapples. There's all these little things that, again, through time and competing and losses and wins and stuff like that, you just realize and know what not to do for the next time.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59it's a special day in the studio eric adrapong is here to talk about top chef getting in competition mode and something new his children's book sankofa eric is one of our favorite people in food tv and it's so fun to talk with him about using food as a platform for education from our screens to our bookshelves especially since he has a debut cookbook on the way too we hope you enjoy

1:32Eric Ajepong, this is Taste. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Eliza, for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here in your, like, colorful outfit. You like it? It's not too bad, right? Yeah, I wish this was not a podcast so that people could see it, but they can trust me, maybe. I try to put a little personality in my wardrobe whenever I can, so yeah. And everything else that you do, I feel like. I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, why not? We I think when I talk about like food and fashion and anything that's just expressive, why not put like your personality into it? Why not put like all of all of me into it?

2:04And I think that shows as much as at least I try. OK, speaking of personality, we have to talk about Top Chef. I'm curious, do you consider yourself a competitive person? And did you before you went on the show? Competition has always been interesting to me. I've always been fascinated by like even just like a relay race or whatever. I'm fascinated by like everyone having the same abilities, the same capabilities, but there's a difference in skill or there's a difference in how well you do. And I think that shows how much time you put into it, how passionate you are. And really, it was just kind of like a test for me doing Top Chef.

2:40So I got to that point in my career and I'm like, OK, I want to put my skills to the test against other people who think they are, you know, Top Chef quality or Top Chef level and see where I fare out. And yeah, so I think I've always been competitive. I've played sports. I ran track. But being a culinary competitive, I guess, a culinary competitor is something I've never experienced, but I absolutely love. I think it gives me like a battery in my back that pushes like creativity and pushes my limits and pushes pretty much everything that makes me a chef. For sure. What was your track event? Oh, wow.

3:15I did – I was a short distance, so I did relays, four by one. I mean, I did mostly field events. So I did a long jump, triple jump. That was like my jam right there. That's cool. I did like 300 meter hurdles. See, I could never. No, never. But the relay, like four by one, that's like for the absolute fastest. I needed like 300 meters to get up to speed. See, after 100 meters, my battery's dead. So it's so interesting how it's almost like a left brain, right brain kind of like response, your body's response to running. So I know some writers who really get that euphoric running high after like a mile or so.

3:53Me, give me like a half a mile and I'm good. Well, I actually quit track because I had such bad race anxiety. Like the entire day, I just felt terrible. Did you feel that way when you were on Top Chef? Oh, my gosh. I feel like we just hit a new level of this podcast and we just haven't even really started. Yeah, it's a sports podcast. But no, in addition to that, it's the anxiety, that angst of like, oh my gosh, like that knot in your stomach kind of feeling. I know exactly what you mean. I felt that during track. I felt that right before every competition in Top Chef and every other competition I've done after that.

4:27I don't think any of that dies, but it does, if you try to channel it, it does kind of give you like a little bit of like oomph. You know what I mean? Yeah, I feel that. Is it weird to be like cooking food and feeling kind of like your stomach is in that anxiety place? It's not natural. No. It's not a natural feeling. Because normally you're cooking, you're in the comfort of your home. You know where your like utensils are. You can pull your drawer. You know where everything is. There's like a familiarity there with competing on Top Chef or on television. It's like a makeshift kitchen. Even the people that put the kitchen together don't know where everything necessarily is at the right moment, at the right time.

5:03And then your mind is racing, trying to like beat the clock, trying to beat your opponent. There's so many factors when it comes to just competing on television. The cameras are right there, right in your face as well, which is not normal. So you almost have to kind of like take yourself out of the TV world and try to put yourself into like my, at least for me, I'll speak for myself. I'll try to put myself into like the deepest chef zone that I can. Like nobody's around me. I'm in a silent kitchen. And not even the cameras are bothering me and just try to put the best food out. And I did that as best as I could.

5:38Yeah. I think that seems like the way to do it. Going out of Top Chef, I mean, you've just did Beachside Brawl. You're kind of like you're doing the competitive things still. Do you train? Like do you prepare differently now that you kind of know what it's like? I don't know if you can necessarily train. You can always keep practicing. I think like you don't want to get atrophy for your skills. You know what I mean? Like chopping and braising and all the things that pretty much got you here. But I think there's a level of you just know it. It's like trying to plan for an SAT or something like that.

6:09There's a four years worth of education that you should have had that you can't cram in four weeks. So I think for me, it's really just watching other chefs and how they prepare and how they think about ingredients in maybe a different way that I have. There's like a million ways to dice an onion. And I've seen so many chefs dice onions more efficiently, faster, less efficiently, you know, slower than me. So it was really just kind of like, for me at least, just gathering all the information from all the chefs and all the things that I see. And you kind of know what works in competition and what doesn't and kind of stay away from those things and just cook good food.

6:46It's tough, though. It's not easy. Yeah. I feel like when I watch food TV, every time someone goes for the ice cream maker in competition, I'm like, don't do it. There's so many like it's the ice cream maker. The risotto is like the recipe of death. Using pineapples gives you like you're not going to score necessarily a higher, you know, higher grade with the judges. So there's all these little things that, again, through time and competing and losses and wins and stuff like that, you just realize and know what not to do for the next time. Risotto, I understand because it's too much active stirring.

7:17But what's the problem with pineapple? You know, whatever reason, it's just a flavor profile that some people love and some people don't. And it's just kind of one of those things that you don't want to necessarily roll the dice on, especially for like a competition where you could get eliminated. So I just like you just completely just leave it out. Just omit it. Yeah. So there's a couple of things like recipes like risotto. Like you said, it's time consuming. It's a laborious task to do and just stand and stir while I can be doing 100 other things in the kitchen. So it's kind of like the recipe of death, so to speak.

7:47Yeah, the pineapple thing is blowing my mind because I love pineapple. I love pineapple too. I mean, clearly fantastic taste. So is there a dish that if you could go back again, you would skip the pineapple or do something differently? Yeah. No, I wouldn't change anything, honestly. I think everything that's gotten me to this point right now has happened for a reason. I don't want to sound cliche about it, but like all the losses came at the right time. All the wins came at the right time. And I've learned from each and every experience. And I think each experience has been valuable to me. So I don't necessarily think I would change anything.

8:22I like the position I'm in right now. Yeah, I think you have to think that way also, right? If you're always going back on what you could have done, then you can't get forward. You're not going to move forward. Not at all. And that's just kind of like, I don't know, not defeatist, but we're living life ahead, not necessarily back. So even for me, just not, even when I'm not competing, I'll watch a show that I've done maybe like once just to kind of get like some self, like just self-analyze and kind of self-police and self-correct. And then I won't watch it again. Yeah. Have you learned anything about how you are as a person by watching yourself on TV?

8:56Oh, yeah. That's a good question. I speak, I think it's just coming from New York. I speak fast. Um, so I just kind of tell myself even, um, it's wild cause I can watch, uh, like months later, uh, remembering as I recorded it to tell myself to slow down. Right. And I can see myself kind of like the wheels spinning even on TV. I'm like, oh, that was the moment I just kind of talked to myself to like, chill, relax, slow down. Um, and I think that's helpful. Um, enunciation, taking my time, um, like all the things that I guess people hear in in broadcasting and journalism school. I didn't go to any of that.

9:34I didn't do any of that. This is my first job that I essentially had no experience with. You know, I've never hosted a show before. So I'm learning on the fly about all these kind of like enunciations and I guess oratation skills. But at the end of the day, I'm trying to just like do my best. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, I thought maybe you would be like, oh, I didn't no, I used X ingredients so much or like I'm doing this, but it makes sense to me that the thing you would know the least about yourself is like being on TV because you've been cooking for a long time, but not necessarily doing that quite as much.

10:12For sure. I think for other people who may not have known me before Top Chef or what I've done before, they'll see me as like the host. And it's new. This is their introduction to who I am. But for me, with my mindset coming in from I'm a chef doing a hosting position or a chef doing a host job, I'm very much critical about like, you know, how I present myself and how well I'm doing. On the other side, though, as a chef, like I guess all my quirks and the things that I like the habits that I get into and fall into also make my food very unique as well. So it's the like you mentioned, maybe using garlic or ginger a lot or whatever the case is.

10:50I do use garlic and ginger often, but I think it also helps my food be what it is. Yeah, I mean, I would put that in basically any dish I'm making. Exactly. So, yeah, it's cool to kind of see. It's almost like listening to yourself, you know, a recording of yourself, you know what I mean, on the radio, whatever the case is. So it's awkward, but it's also helpful when you want to like – it's always self-improvement. So I see myself cooking, I hear myself or watch myself hosting, and I know what not to do or what to do for the next time. Definitely. So watching yourself and just being this person that straddles the hosting and the food side, I'm curious what you think about food TV these days.

11:31What are you into? Like, what do you think should be doing differently? I love food television right now. I fell in love with food. I've always been in love with food television. I tell this corny joke often, but for me when I was younger, it was like watching the cartoons, Power Rangers, and then like the cooking shows. Yeah. So watching cooking shows has always been kind of like in my wheelhouse, my lexicon, so to speak. And the evolution of the cooking shows has been so fascinating to me. It's not necessarily the stand and stir, which is fine. You know what I mean? Which is great. You get a lot of information from that.

12:04But I love the fact that there's production companies and chefs and creatives who are essentially taking themselves out of the kitchen and going into the field, you know, and going to the mom and pops and going to the people who really are the fabric of small business. You know what I mean? Restauranteurs, chefs who don't have their name in the bright lights and things like that. I love those stories. I love, to me, that's like the backbone of what America is and the culture of America as well as definitely seen and heard and tasted through food. So I think watching that and seeing that progression in food culture has been really cool.

12:41So many different shows are exploring that. Taste of the Nation, my show that I'm doing right now, Cultural Eats. There's so many different places or people that are exploring. I think Anthony Bourdain helped tremendously with that as well, just kind of making the world a little bit more accessible and smaller when it comes to food. But then there's always competition. And I feel like people love to see competition and people want to see, like, who makes the best or, you know, you have the same ingredients. How do you decide to cook it versus how would someone else would? I think all of that has its own space and onus in the space of, like, culinary food and food TV.

13:18Definitely. I remember being a kid watching the Japanese Iron Chef with my dad. Exactly. When he takes the bite out of the bell pepper. Like that's not even anyone doing something with that ingredient. It's just eating an ingredient in a way that I'd never seen it before. Just raw, just straight up, unfiltered. Yeah, eating a bell pepper like an apple. That blew my mind. As a kid, I was like, oh, wow, you can really do anything you want with food. Not that I would want it. Actually, I would eat a bell pepper as an apple. You know what? Maybe as a dare. Actually, yeah, I would do. But you're absolutely right.

13:49Just to see how someone else approaches food that – everyday food that you saw. I mean, you've seen the bell pepper a million times until you saw someone actually take a bite into it. Chomp it. Chomp right into it. You're like, holy smokes. You can do that, right? Yeah. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, talking about food being shown in different ways, we're here to talk about your new book, Sankofa, which is a children's book, which I think is, like, so cool. And I'd love to know, like, why you decided to do a children's book. I decided to write a children's book because when I was younger, I never read anything remotely close to what I'm writing right now.

14:26I think about like how further the inspiration would have went if I saw someone kind of speaking about like growing up in an inner city, growing up with skin that looks like mine, growing up with like first generation American. and all those kind of like dealings, you know what I mean? The microaggressions, the things that you hear, the things that you see your parents go through, the food that you bring that's so much different. That to me was, it made me feel different when I was younger. And I think if I ever saw someone embrace that and highlight that and celebrate that, then my mindset around food and my culture would have been different.

15:09Not to say that it was a bad or a poor kind of outlook or whatever the case is, but I just think I would have had a lot more pride. It's always nice to see representation, someone that looks like you, sounds like you, whatever the case is, doing something that you admire. So I really, really did this book for my younger self in hopes to inspire someone else who may look like me in kind of like, you know, that generational turn, you know, someone who looks like me at the age that I was when I really wanted something or needed something like that to read. Hopefully this kind of comes right on time for them.

15:42Definitely. And you're also a dad, right? I am. Yeah. So I have a four-year-old. She's going on 25 pretty soon. Yeah. That's the vibe. Yeah. That's the vibe for sure. But this is cool for her to experience. And she has a little cameo, so to speak, in the book as well. And it's just nice. Again, I can, watching her watch me and cook and be a chef and be on TV is pretty cool. Like she, it's weird. I think being her father, she thinks that this might be like normal to have like your dad on television, you know, but it's not necessarily. And I think having this book here and all these kind of like relics of like episodes and things that I've done for her when she actually becomes older and kind of realizes what's going on, hopefully it's a pretty cool thing for her.

16:28Definitely. And I imagine that, you know, you're reading bedtime stories, you're immersing yourself in the world of children's books. Did you ever think about wanting it to rhyme? Like, how did you decide, like, what kind of children's book you were going to do? Oh, wow. The rhyming part. I never thought about that. We probably should have asked. No, they don't have to rhyme. No, but I wanted something that was easily digestible. I wanted, I think with children's book, especially the illustration is so important. I had Lala Watkins do all of the illustration. And I think she captured the story so brilliantly with the colors and just like the personality in the story as well.

17:11Like the curls on my head, you know what I mean? On Kofi's head and the food that we were eating and just like the sights and sounds of New York City. I think she did such a beautiful job capturing all of that, but in a way that's easy to digest for children or anyone who wants to kind of read the book. And I'm so thankful for it. So I think illustration was probably the second, if not maybe the first and most important medium for this book. The words are very important, but showing through the pictures and through the art I think was really important and we knocked that out. Yeah, I love that.

17:47There's a moment that I really liked when the protagonist takes a bite of a ripe plantain and then the imagery around switches to this whole grove. And it's almost like, have you seen Ratatouille? I have, yeah. You know, and he starts eating the food and there's like the different motifs that come in. It's a really cool way to show about how food can be transportive, like not only in terms of connecting you to culture and heritage, but just the way that you can eat something that tastes sun ripened and kind of like feel connected to the earth in that way. Immediately. I'm so glad you mentioned that.

18:16That scene or that part of the book is so cool because of that. But like you read, it's really important to just to connect with what we're doing as far as the food is concerned. and really making sure that like how we talk about food and how we present the food is done with a lot of integrity. It's done with a lot of heart. I always say there's nothing new under the sun. So we're talking about, you know, eating plantains and kind of getting introduced to these ingredients that may be foreign. But there's to the other side of the world, these are everyday ingredients. These are things that people use all the time.

18:57And how do we straddle that like with sensitivity, but then also with the curiosity as well. You know what I mean? I want for the character to be open about, you know, their ignorance about the food and their kind of trepidation about the food, but, you know, also kind of be proud towards the end of the story. And I think we achieved that. Definitely, because it is a story about, you know, connecting or feeling disconnected from cultural food and heritage, but it's not the classic lunchbox story, right? Like, you don't have these scenes of the kid, the kid feeling authorized by their fellow kids.

19:31Like, you're not stressing that side of it. You're kind of just showing the way that you can connect with your family with the food, which I think is nice because there's already a lot of stories that are doing that other side. Like, you don't necessarily need to be teaching that a children's book. No, I don't think so. I think we we in the book, though, we kind of, I think, very sensitively and beautifully done, if I can say, talk a little bit about what that feels like to be somewhat outcasted in a group of your peers, your friends or whatever the case is. But I didn't want to harp on it so much.

20:02I think really the triumph of this story is leaving a place and kind of feeling down or insecure about yourself and then coming back to that place with a new kind of like vitality about who you are and where you come from. And I think we really achieved that. Yeah, I think it definitely comes across. And to me, it kind of connects to this larger practice that I've watched you do like online and on Top Chef and with dinners of using food as a vehicle for education. You did this dinner that was on Top Chef and then afterwards about telling the story of the Afghan slave trade through food. And this book, I think, is also an extension of using food to teach other things.

20:38And I mean, obviously you're a chef, so this is what you do. But I'm curious about why you think food is such a good vehicle or a platform for education. So for me, I think it's super important that when we have a topic of food, there's so many connections as well. Like it's not just the food that we're eating, but again, there's nothing new under the sun. There's been generations of people who've been cooking this meal. What's their story? How did this meal become so significant to our kind of like diets as well? And I think food is a perfect medium for that. So when we can capture all five of those senses and really have a unique way of telling a story, I think that's just – it's amazing.

21:19So I try to do that with the book. I try to do that with my dinners. I try to do that really in everything. There's almost like an education kind of – or a teacher hat that I kind of like put on and off when it comes to that. But it's also crazy because when I go to the other side of the world in Ghana, that education doesn't exist, so to speak. Everyone knows about this food. Everybody is familiar. So then I'm kind of talking about like why it's important to me or some of the influences like from America that you might be seeing in some of the dishes that I've been cooking over there. So there's always like a little bit of like an explanation and kind of talking about the food, but that's okay.

21:56I think as a chef, you should be equipped for that and talking about your food proudly, where it comes from, the ingredients, how it was cultivated, and really what you did to kind of make this cohesive meal delicious and good for the guest. Definitely. I totally agree with that. And I know that you're kind of working on a cookbook right now as well with Clarkson Potter. I don't know how much you can talk about that, but I'm curious if you're kind of thinking about that approach towards storytelling and food in the cookbook as well. Definitely. Absolutely. There's the two worlds that I kind of straddling between.

22:35It's the American or at least the Western kind of palette and idea of food and how we eat. And then there's very much like the African diaspora kind of way we eat and thoughts about food. And putting those two worlds together is important, but it is also very much me. Like being born here in the States, but then coming from a very like traditional, very close-knit West African family, this is what food looks like from my lens. So being able to talk about that in the book was very, very important to me. I think was like the really the through line between the entire or for the entire book is talking about my experiences, talking about my travel, but then exploring traditional dishes from West Africa, from Ghana.

23:24And then some of the things that have been inspiring to me here in America and what that looks like when I put both worlds together. That sounds great. Thank you. Is the cookbook also called Sankofa? Still working on the title. I think the spirit of Sankofa, which means it's not taboo to go back and fetch for something or make it right. The spirit of that is in both books for sure. I think fictionally it's told through a creative story, a creative lens, and one that could be easily digested by kids and people of all ages. And then the adult book, the adult cookbook I call it, does the same. But we're really trying to make sure that with the adult cookbook that we hit all of those notes of where I come from, what inspires me, my travels, and everything that's kind of brought me to this space right here today.