572: The Choi of Cooking with Roy Choi

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0:31thinking about like if i was to put a korean recipe in uh let me put in the recipe that all the kids grew up with you know let me put in the recipe when you wake up in the morning and you you know you get that cartoon's uh whiff of smoke going through your nostrils and when the when it's the taktoritang day that's like that's celebration

0:55This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

1:22I love how Roy thinks about food, and we go over so many topics in this great conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

1:32Roy Choi, welcome to This Is Taste. It's so great to talk to you. How are you doing? I'm great, man. I'm on the media tour, man. Yeah, buddy. The war tour. I mean, Choi Cooking, what an incredible book. It's full of big ideas, a great title, like straight up great title. So tell me a little bit about when you came up with that title, what was ultimately going to be your big promise with this book? Well, it wasn't the first title. It came at the 11th hour after the team around me found the courage to tell me the first title was trash. And I'm glad I have a team that rallied to do that. The book started as a diet book.

2:15I had never dieted in my life, but it started, I pitched it as a keto book, believe it or not. And then because I had changed my eating habits and my lifestyle, everything was becoming extremely unsustainable. And I was gaining crazy weight and not just that feeling really lethargic and unhealthy. And I was going down the dark hole that had been going on for three decades. And so I finally made a change. And I thought that I could say something in this space because a lot of wellness and health doesn't speak to people like me, you know, and my friends and people from neighborhoods that the Kobi truck, you know, feeds and represents.

3:00And so it started that way. But then it grew as we were writing it. And thanks to our editor, Jen Sit, like she helped us shape it into this philosophy book. You know, I'd never really like had the courage or audacity to like feel I could write a book with a philosophy of life behind it. But I finally reached a place where I thought that maybe I could, you know, like I had lived long enough. I had enough experience. The recipes that I've developed over the last 20 years were really tried and true. The flavors had reached, you know, millions of people and there are results behind it. So I kind of use that ideology and thinking to give me confidence.

3:45And so the book has turned into and now has always been, I guess, my philosophy of life. And then so the title fits perfectly with that now. Yeah, it's really full of your voice and there's really nice, you know, breaks in the terrific recipes with some philosophy and just general thoughts about food and life. And I'm really curious, like take us back to that when you talked about the dark period when you were feeling lethargic and gaining the weight. I think honestly many of our listeners can relate to that. That's just part of life and it happens to many of us where we just aren't feeling great.

4:22I guess I know you can't summarize it in a soundbite, but what were you doing to your body and what were you consuming that maybe wasn't the best idea at that moment? Well, it's a little multifaceted in one aspect on the cook level. And many cooks out there will understand this. You know, we spend all of our working hours cooking the most nutritious food and delicious foods, you know, maybe 14, 15 different vegetables. um you know we're prepping all those things to make mise en place all the herbs that we're picking the flowers we're only using heritage breed meats and we're tasting the thing is we're tasting all that food along the way for 12 14 hours but as soon as we clock out like a cartoon you know where um you know we punch the clock and walk away from the the site like the old sheepdog we go right to fast food fast food candy chips chili burgers chili dogs milkshakes pints of ice cream ounces of weed edibles by the handful you know and and we just like almost like inundate our body at a at a at a turbo rate almost like a nitrous fuel can of of just horrible stuff just the worst stuff you could possibly think of and um that that's where i was man that's that's what and then that combined with the lifestyle that i lived as um outside of being a cook um the thing that kind of inspired this book if if you go all the way to the core of it is um my best friend died a few years ago and a few years before he passed away um he had been you You know, like us as guys, sometimes we have a hard time asking each other for help.

6:18Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, how you doing? Just how you doing? Exactly. Help or whatever. But we throw hints at each other. And he was throwing me hints of like, hey, just can you create a meal plan for me?

6:34And I wasn't ready. My head wasn't there. I don't know if my life was at that point yet. And I just, I feel like shit, man. You know, I feel horrible. I know it's not my fault, but there is something I could have done. And in a way, this book is a little bit of, if I could have done it, this is for him. Oh, man. Well, thanks for sharing, Roy. And I'm really, I'm sorry that you went through that. I'm sorry for your friend's loss. And I can relate in that, you know, when big moments happen in your life, It just is a wake-up call, and clearly with the joy of cooking and what you put into this book, you've written that meal plan, and you've condensed some of these thoughts.

7:19And really, broadly speaking, the book is all over the place in the best possible way. It isn't a prescriptive diet. You're not saying eat this or don't eat that. It really just kind of seeps into the book's narrative. Tell us a little bit broadly about the recipes that are in this book. Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on all that. It's a wellness book. It's a health book, but it's the first step of that journey. Yeah. Right? And no one talks about that first step sometimes, you know? Like, because when you see wellness, when you see after leisure wear, you see Air One smoothies, you see beautiful skin and influencers, and you see the gym workouts and all these things, they already look beautiful.

8:05You know what I'm saying? But what about when you're ugly? You know? And what about like when you're ugly on the outside and on the inside and you want to change where you don't know where to start and you're still got you're still latched to the life that you're living, you know, and you don't hate the life that you're living. You love ice cream. You love chili burgers. You love hot dogs, you know. And then so this is about like, what's that first step like? Like, how do I not be shamed for still eating the way that I eat, but make slight little tweaks, slight little adjustments and remixes a little bit so that I can still feel good.

8:49But I can know that I'm heading in a different direction. And then I can start progressing and adding things to that. And I always equate it to like, if you want to start working out or getting some exercise, but you haven't exercised for a long time, you know, maybe you start with just walking down the street. Then that walking down the street becomes halfway around the block. Then halfway around the block becomes one block. And then before you know, one block becomes a half a mile. And it's the same thing with eating and cooking. And that's what this book is all about. it starts at the start line, not the finish line.

9:27Let me ask you broadly, you know, with this concept that you just laid out and you're in those first innings of your kind of diet journey and your kind of course correcting, is there something that you just are like, you should probably maybe eat less of this? I'm not gonna say cut because I don't think that's the vibe of this book is like restrict. But what are you thinking about like not leaning into food-wise? Well, I've been learning a lot too along the way. And in no way is this a nutritionist book. It's just a workshop book. It's a garage band of nutrition. But what I've learned along the way is that it's salt, sugar, carbohydrates, substituting certain fats, and looking at red meat.

10:20You know, and then so it's like taking those four or five pillars and finding ways to still create flavor bombs, but adjust the quantity of the salt, the sugar, the carbs, and the fat. Find different ways to fill your sensation with flavor. And that's where this book and the recipes, you have a whole section devoted to flavor bombs. It's like create these kind of – and you see it in a lot of cooking like Thai cooking, Korean cooking, on and on, right? Ethiopian cooking, like different dips and sauces, Laotian cooking. You have these like flavor bonds, especially Indian cooking. And so it's all about kind of that.

11:05And the other part is snacking. Snacking is the tip of the arrow to a poisonous death. How do you avoid it, Roy? I mean, so hard, man. We have to recognize it's not easy when we need like there's so many great snacks. So you have to train. You have to train yourself, Matt. I think, you know, it's all about training because we've been trained. You got to think about it this way. And these are all things I learned in my own head as I was going through writing this book. You know, we've all been trained by corporations and consumerism. our body wasn't we didn't come out of the womb craving red vines you know and doritos doritos you know and and and slowly slowly little by little our body and our psychology and our mind is being trained to develop these as natural instincts and habits um and so what we have to do is we have to untrain those.

12:05We have to endure the pain of untraining it. And what I mean by that, there is a transition period where your mouth and your sensation has to get used to nuts versus chips, has to get used to fruit versus candy, has to get used to vegetables versus bread, vinegars versus salts you know and you have to kind of like you have to that's the only that's the only difficult part i think you know that's the only kind of laborious part of this transition because i went through it so i'm speaking from a you know like an experienced first person like a journey of it is that i went through it too man i wanted i wanted to give up so many times and throwing the towel you know um those red vines and they're they're they're great like i love a good the red vines the the chips you know the uh the hot fudge sundaes you know with the with the sea salts you know like all that is sitting there for you and and you have and the mouth feel and you can just feel it you know and the porterhouse steak you know the the peter lugers with the grease and all of that's there, but you have to train yourself.

13:26How do you think about this age of protein then? Because there's so much data out there that protein-rich diet is really helpful, nutrient-rich, protein-rich diet, but also thinking about lean proteins. Are you counting macros for protein every day? Is that part of your plan? No, I don't count anything. Again, I take a chef's point of view, again, a garage band. I'm not doing the Philharmonic, you know, and I'm not reading music or writing, you know, doing Richard Wagner, you know, I'm not doing that. I'm just, it's just garage pan, figuring it out, but using, you know, there are other forms of intellect that we have in this universe.

14:09And it's using the intellect of sense, instinct, experience, muscle memory, and, and like, kind of working through it. The one thing that helped me in this, in this transition was I was a chef already, right? Yeah. So I wasn't jumping into the pool completely cold. my body was already warmed up a little bit and so then i could i could approach things on not a novice level but um i i could bring my own experience into the decision decision making with proteins um proteins are very important you know so it's like the thing is though it's just about quantity and another thing i want to add to this this whole kind of matrix is it's not about just giving up things like just going directly from chips to snack or to chips to nuts or whatever that's a huge part of it but it's also quantities so when you are um in the previous stage where you're eating chips and red vines and uh whatchamacallits and you know things like that the thing is you're because you're kind of so conditioned and you're almost numb to all of this what it's doing to you the the amount of stuff you're eating is way outside of the boundaries of what you know naturally us as animals should be eating and um and so as you make the transition uh it's not that you can't eat meat but you don't have to eat a 24 ounce cut of meat but but before you make that transition it's very normal to eat a 24 ounce cut of meat you know It's very normal to eat a whole roast chicken or to eat a big 16-ounce bone-in pork chop, but still have that meat or that protein, but maybe have four ounces and mix it with all kinds of other things.

16:10The Chinese knew it way thousands a year. I mean, look at the food of like, look at stir fry, you know, three, four ounces of meat and you don't miss anything, you know? Well, it's the flavor bombs you're talking about. It's making sure that these, these little bits of protein, all these great vegetables, but you, it has to be interesting. It can't just be a monolithic flavor profile, like ganjan or soy sauce. You need to do more with that. Right. And that's what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes that's the, I mean, I'm American first, but I, you know, being American, I I feel like I have the right to criticize us too, is the biggest fault that we have in our food and our cuisine sometimes is that we're not as interesting in separating the vegetable and the protein.

16:53And so we have to eat larger amounts of protein to satisfy us because the thing that lies on the other side of the plate is steamed broccoli or a piece of cauliflower or whatever the case may be. Very, very unappetizing. Unappetizing and it's separated. It's separated and there's an element of you have to eat it versus you want to eat it versus going to Singapore or China or Thailand where it's all mixed together in the most interesting of ways. And you're not even thinking about the separation. You're thinking about the dish. And so, you know, that's what this book kind of touches on a little bit.

17:47And some of that maybe from an American standpoint is because it's so new and even our country is new compared to those examples we just said, is taking an approach of not complicating it but making it fun, mashing it up, doing remixes, making it so that it was fun. It's like a drunk hookup. You know what I mean? No, and the joy there is obvious. This philosophy. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. If you're one of those last minute shoppers, you might know the feeling. Ideas are running low and the clock is ticking. Here's a fun idea. Aura Frames. Aura Frames is the solution with a gift that feels personal, a little curated, and sent with love.

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20:53And I think it's a great entry point into cooking with eggs and being interesting with eggs. But you have a long career before Kogi cooking in hotels and you know the omelet bar. And I'd love to hear about this idea and the recipe. Thanks for bringing that recipe up. It's cool. You know, hotel chefs are some of the most disrespected chefs in our industry. You know, it's getting a little bit better now because hotels themselves, there weren't boutique hotels before. So hotels and chefs weren't really attaching themselves. But now prime real estate is attached to hotels. So the whole genre is changing.

21:29But we used to be the butt of everyone's jokes. But if you look at an omelet station, it's probably, whether you're at a country club, a brunch place, or a hotel, it's probably the purest form of mise en place. You know, it's a station that's manned by one person that has to cook for maybe 700 people in a span of one hour. Incredible. Yeah. And you have to customize every single dish. and you not only do you have to customize every single dish you have to do it in a verbal way there are no tickets um you know everything is changed and and customized but it's also can be changed in the middle of the cooking process because someone's looking over and saying oh well you know add more mushrooms or uh that's too much cheese can you take half of that cheese out And this is happening while you have seven omelets going.

22:28And so it really takes, I think, the highest form of muscle memory, mise en place. But then also you have to have a smile on your face. A line cook getting a sub on a ticket in a kitchen that has no windows can mouth off. right oh but uh you can curse the diner all you want yeah you can curse the diner all you want so there's that part um i think there are related recipes in the list book the hotel omelet bar recipe and the big fucking salad recipe and those recipes are linked because they exist not only from a cooking a chef standpoint but uh but the other side of that where you're not before i was a chef or before you're a cook and it's the thing i love about those is that it's a little small window and pocket of freedom.

23:19You can do whatever you want in there. The salad bar salad, the big fucking salad, no one bothers you because the word salad makes it feel like it's healthy. But when you're a kid and you walk up to the salad bar, whether your mom is over your shoulder, whether your life sucks right now, whether you just can't take people in your ear and you just want to shut the world out, they're like headphones. You go to the salad bar, no one bothers you. And you could put as much bacon bits as you want, as much corn as you want. You know, you could put no lettuce if you don't want to, you know, you could fill it with croutons.

23:56It doesn't matter. It's kind of your own domain. And the omelet bar is that way too, because it's breakfast, because it's considered somewhat healthy. You know, it's the first meal of the day in many cases. If you're a kid, your parent wants you to eat hearty and healthy. If you're yourself an adult, you know, it's like, it gives you an excuse to figure things out, but it's like, you can make it your own. And sometimes when you're eating at an omelet bar in a hotel, you may be on a business trip, you may be at a convention or something, maybe at a job you hate. And maybe your whole life is a place where you don't have control over every single thing in your life, but the omelet bar, you got control.

24:38I love that. You know what I'm saying? The one moment in the day, you're adding a little bit of broccoli and ham if you want. You're doing a little broccoli. The one moment in the day, yeah, you could be like, this is yours. It's yours. It's your creation, you know, with this person, one-on-one, and it feels like jazz, you know? It's fun. And that's it. It's fun. I really like this recipe. You have an incredible recipe for a homemade sweet chili sauce, which I think, our shared friend Daniel Holtzman and I did a recipe for that one time and you got to make your own chili sauce and this is a great recipe you don't just make the chili sauce which you can use for many other types of cooking and cooking with vegetables and all that but you you add it to a peanut butter sandwich never thought about that Roy that's really I'm doing it I'm doing it thank you that's uh yeah that that sauce is called sweet child of mine after guns and roses yeah yeah um and uh there's a big philosophy in that in that recipe um and it's kind of hidden in in the context of the caption but it's because again if we want to get people to cook more sometimes everything can't be from scratch and we as chefs and as foodies and as connoisseurs and as food writers and as whatever right we're always like romanticizing and and putting a lot of weight on you know farm to table head to toe from scratch by hand artisan and those are wonderful things don't get me wrong you know they're important things that are the cornerstone of all of us in the industry but if someone's not cooking already that's a lot to take on you know and that might throw people off or push people away so sometimes we need recipes that start halfway in kind of like fast forwarding through like a movie or something to get to the good parts, you know?

26:32And, and so like this recipe starts with stuff that already exists, bottles of sauces, srirachas, this and that. And sometimes we shun that way of cooking, but a sauce doesn't have to all be from scratch. It can be 50 % already great sauces that are out there. And then you add a bunch of herbs and aromatics and gingers and galangal and all these things. And then you're just amping it. And, um, what I'm saying is it starts with a mayploid um and then it has sriracha and chili garlic sauce and i think uh oyster sauce or hoisin sauce fish sauce it has all these things that are already built on their own um and then you have to get past your ego and your your insecurity of like oh like i'm not creating a recipe ah fuck that and then you and then you just add a bunch of aromatics to it and you puree it together then you have something that is already great that has become greater i love Love that.

27:26Yeah. And then that sauce reminded me of like, you know, we as like Asian kids didn't grow up with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So, but then when I made the sauce and I tasted it, it tasted like jelly. It tasted like maybe if I had grown up with jelly or jam, that this is what jelly or jam would be like. Because all my food was already spicy and filled with garlic and ginger anyways. so why wouldn't our jams be filled with garlic ginger you know and and herbs so then that became that then it was like okay if i i kind of created like an alternate version of myself right and then it was like so then if i did grow up with jam and jellies and i did grow up with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches what would that peanut butter and jelly sandwich look like so then it became a grilled cheese peanut butter banana sandwich with chili jam oh buddy on toasted sourdough On sourdough.

28:23That's the clincher is like a little bit of a sourdough. Roy, I want to ask you about Duck Dory Tong. There's obviously going to be some Korean recipes in this book, and I love that you picked this one. It's one of my all-time favorite stews, and your sauce mix has some unique elements, which I haven't quite seen myself. It's definitely a Roy recipe. You've got kiwi and Asian pear, garlic soy sauce, gojujang, oyster sauce, and this spicy chicken stew. Why did Dr. Itang, why did that make the cut for a Korean recipe in this book? You know, Korean food has become, I mean, you've written two books on it.

28:58Korean food has become so popular. We as Korean kids would have never imagined it. It's a food that is so bizarre to the Western palate and now that is so ubiquitous. It's so strange because our food is not linear. You know, it's not eaten in a progressive format. It all comes at once, you know, and it's all separated into these different things. And there are multiple things, you know, like if you think of a Western meal, there's one entree. But what if you had seven entrees? You know, that's how a Korean meal is served. And there are certain things that I never suspected to be the things that kind of stick their head out that have defined Korean food around the world, like sundubu and certain barbecues and things like that.

29:53But one of the best dishes we have is taktoritan. And I can't believe that it hasn't risen to the level of sundubu. For sure. Agree fully. Fully agree. Yeah, or the level of, you know, selam tang or the level of, you know, even now, you know, gopjang is like very popular. Yeah. You know, like. People are lining up in New York for gopjang. For gopjang. Yeah. How the fuck does gopjang beat taktoritang? You know what I'm saying? Yes. So it's like, so I was just like thinking about like, if I was to put a Korean recipe in, let me put in the recipe that all the kids grew up with. You know, let me put in the recipe that really when you wake up in the morning and you, you know, you get that cartoons whiff of smoke going through your nostrils, you know, like what is, you know, every kid wakes up in the morning, you know, coming out of their bed.

30:52Like, and when it's the Tak Turitang Day, that's like, that's celebration. That's Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Day, you know. And that happens like maybe five to seven times a year, you know, if you're lucky. And you can count those days and those days are imprinted and embossed and, you know, embalmed in you. And I just felt like I wanted to create that recipe to share so that maybe if people start making it, that they could have that imprinted in them as well. Does that make sense? Foley and listener, you know, pick up this book and there's so many recipes, but just for the DDT recipe, it's easy to put together, you know, using a blender to make the sauce.

31:42And to be clear, it's a spicy chicken stew. It's got incredible balance with a lot of vegetables in it. You can add some rice too if you like. I mean, it's really like we love chicken stews in America. Like there's a lot of them. And if we position it correctly, it's really like a crockpot dish. Absolutely. If we can get the right narrative behind it and the right storytelling behind it. And that was a part of it, too, because I want people to eat more taktoritang. I want kids 100 years from now that aren't Korean waking up in the morning and smelling taktoritang. Because I know that those memories for me are extremely influential and valuable, you know.

32:33And again, going back to philosophy, if I'm sharing my philosophy, you're also sharing your nuances and your touch points. So that others can take those touch points, apply them to their lives or their children or their next generations. and then start to develop their own philosophies of life. And this, from a food standpoint, is a big one for me. Well, I have to just have a follow-up about Korean cuisine in America. You know, when we wrote, when Dookie and I wrote our first book, Koreatown, we were working on it in like 2013. I mean, Roy, you were an impetus to start thinking about Korean-American cuisine with Kogi and all the work you'd done in LA.