Podcasts about culinary heart

We all want to be the best at what we do. But how do we get there? We look at some of the best to learn their secrets.Chinese medicine and Chinese martial arts—like shaolin kung fu, ba gua zhang, xing yi chuan—are all known for their sages and their masters. Many of us dream of being able to study with someone who is truly a master. Unfortunately, traditional apprenticeship has been on the decline during the 20th and 21st centuries. What can we learn by looking at great masters in music, medicine, cuisine, and more? How can we understand more about ourselves, our trades, and our arts by looking at them?Like what you're hearing?

There's more to food than just calories and macros. Figure out how to pick the best diet for you, and how to get ahead of the next big thing.There are a lot of factors that go into understanding the perfect diet! From social to geographical, economic to cultural, join Dr. James Mohebali as he explores some of these considerations, and helps you understand how to sift through all the contradictory information that's out there about diet. On the way, we take a look at why Italians love tomatoes, how to deal with damp, muggy climates, and whether or not Mexicans are immune to hot chili peppers. Using Feng Shui, terroir, and cultural archeology, we look at some popular diets, like the ketogenic diet, and try to understand what role they can play in healing our chronic diseases and proactively maintaining our health.Like what you're hearing?

Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook, food-writer, broadcaster and author of some of our favourite books, specialising in Chinese cuisine. Fuchsia visited us at Honey and Spice where we talked about her latest book, Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China which is full of beautiful recipes from the Jiangnan province in eastern China, where she likes to eat in Chinatown and the best tools and ingredients for cooking authentic Chinese food in your own kitchen. 

What a story: A young, food-obsessed British student at Cambridge University named Fuchsia (God, I love that name) heads to China in the '90s to study, and manages to become the first Westerner to attend the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. After that, she zigzags between China and London and, in the process, becomes one of today's best English-language writers on Chinese cuisine. That's Fuchsia Dunlop's story, as you'll hear on this extraordinary episode of Special Sauce (part one of a riveting two-parter). Why has she devoted so much of her working life to writing about China and Chinese food, culminating in her latest cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China? Fuchsia explains: "I really do think that Chinese gastronomy and Chinese cuisine is both an amazing creation as culture and as expression of human creativity and inventiveness and so on. It also has many important lessons for everyone in terms of health. There's no other cuisine, perhaps, that combines pleasure and notions of health and balance like Chinese.... That's something that, in the West, in the whole world, we're struggling with. How do you eat well in a way that's both pleasurable and also good for health and environmentally sustainable? I think we can find many of the answers and solutions in traditional Chinese cuisine." When you listen, you'll learn, as I did, some Chinese cooking terms that defy easy English translation: zhi jia pian, ma er duo, gu pai pian, niu shi pian. What do they mean? I'm not going to tell you. You'll have to listen to find out.

In this episode of the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Fuchsia about her time at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, how she chooses recipes for her books and the gamut of flavors of Chinese cuisine. "You both want to challenge people and give people dishes that they don’t necessarily know, but also to offer them things that are doable and that are palatable," says Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer who has won a cult following with her recipe books of Chinese food. Fuchsia’s 2013 book, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, won the 2014 James Beard Award for an international cookbook. The renowned culinary organization also recognized much of her other work, which includes more books as well as articles featured in publications such as Lucky Peach, The New Yorker and the Financial Times. In addition, Fuchsia has appeared on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, CNN’s On China and NPR’s All Things Considered, consults on Chinese cooking for major companies and gives speeches around the world. For someone who described her relationship with Chinese cuisine as one that began fortuitously, it is an impressive list of accomplishments. As the first foreign student at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, Fuchsia studied the regional cooking style along with about 50 other students, only two of whom were women. She remembers the gender dynamics of that experience, as well as the slow transition of her classmates toward calling her by her name rather than laowai, the Chinese slang word for foreigner. Fuchsia’s latest book, Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China, delves into the cuisine of Jiangnan. It’s a region whose flavors she loves just as much as those of Sichuan, which she also has written about. Relevant links: Appetite for China: The website of Diana Kuan, writer, cooking teacher and author of The Chinese Takeout Cookbook. The Cleaver Quarterly: A publication that "covers Chinese cuisine as a global phenomenon and a lifelong mission." Travel China Guide: Eight Cuisines of China - Shandong & Guangdong. Recommendations: Jeremy: Ximalaya, an app for listening to audio content in Chinese. Kaiser: No-knead bread. Fuchsia: A Chinese cleaver.

In the first half of this week's Food Talk, Mike chats with Fuchsia Dunlop, an English writer and cook who specializes in Chinese cuisine. She was an East Asian analyst at the BBC World Service, and was the first westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Her latest book is Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China. After the break, Alice Feiring is back in the studio to talk about natural wines and the recent RAW Wine Fair in Brooklyn.