Freddy's Harajuku

Milky Oolong-Strawberry Tarts

I have become fully obsessed with milky oolong, which is an alkalized oolong tea that tastes like those creamy milk nougats you might find in Asian grocery stores. I find that milky oolong is the perfect ingredient to pair with strawberries, as one is sweet and buttery, and the other is tangy and tart. I…

Pork and Collard Chou Farci

Chou farci is a French dish that translates to “stuffed cabbage”. I love doing renditions on stuffed cabbage or cabbage rolls because it is fun to bite into something that looks like a vegetable, only for there to be this unctuous, savory filling instead! In the case of my recipe, I wanted to pair the…

Bruleed Cheesecake with Sata Andagi

I came up with this by happy coincidence. I love when a lot of different factors or scenarios line up and I end up making a really cool dish. In this case, I was recipe testing a baked cheesecake filling, and happened to have more cheesecake filling compared to the crust I prepped. Rather than…

Constellation: A Petit Gateau

This recipe came about because my mother gifted me with a giant oro blanco citrus, and I had zero clue what to do with it at first. For those unfamiliar with it, oro blanco is a giant green, round citrus fruit that is a hybrid between a grapefruit and a pomelo. Meaning that it is…

Peanut Milk Panna Cotta and Madeleines

This plated dessert was actually inspired by sweet peanut milk soup(花生仁汤), a popular canned beverage from my native Taiwan. I still remember the first time I had it, it was in my grandma’s apartment in the Shida district on a hot summer night. It was a milky beverage with these tender, braised peanuts. I was…

Semolina-Tahini Cake with Biko and Coconut

While I was going through my sugar fast, I was craving basically everything with sugar. This dessert specifically was one of those sugar-deprived fantasies I conceptualized around two desserts that are notoriously sugar-laden. One of the inspirations was basbousa, an Egyptian semolina cake that is baked with tahini for a nutty texture, and is normally…

White Rabbit and Salted Egg Mimosa Cake

Easter is one of those holidays I literally never understood. I never grew up in a household that celebrated it beyond Easter Egg hunts and getting sick from eating chocolate rabbits and jellybeans, so whenever people talk about how it is this whole commitment that they had to spend with their families, I did not…

Haricot Vert and Feta Pita

I had purchased green beans(or haricot vert) on a whim and was trying to figure out a way to use the last few up in a fun and creative way. That was literally how this recipe came about. When I think about haricot vert, I distinctly enjoy their snappy texture, when blanched and shocked properly,…

Hamburg Steak Dinner

This recipe is my slightly bougie-r take on a a meatloaf and mashed potato dinner. I had some ground beef I needed to use up, and I figured why not make a hamburg steak? Hamburg steak is a Japanese yoshoku-style dish that is basically a beefed up(pun semi-intended here) hamburger patty that is seared and…

Baked Berry Ripple Cheesecake

Growing up, my mom only ever made two different kinds of Western desserts for us: white cake or baked cheesecake. I still remember as a really young kid, seeing her use our electric hand mixer to whip the cream cheese mixture(the literal only time she would ever use that thing), she would crush the graham…

Brown Butter Cereal Milk Egg Tarts

There are many interpretations on an egg tart. The most popular is probably the pasteis de nata, which are the Portuegese ones, featuring a thick, rich custard that is broiled on top for a creme brulee-like topping. I personally grew up on Hong Kong style egg tarts, which were a favorite of mine whenever we…

Red Miso-Black Garlic Pork Belly Baozi

Since I am about to travel in Taiwan/Japan in April, I was starting to think about what dishes from my youth that I missed the most. Baozi, or meat buns, were such a ubiquitous part of my childhood, being something I would eat at dim sum, for breakfast on occasion, and whenever I would visit…

Baked Chocolate Dulce de Leche Doughnuts

I wanted to make these doughnuts for a couple of different reasons. The first was that eggs are getting really expensive/hard to find about now, I wanted to do some R&D with egg-free desserts, this being one of them. The second was that I was fondly reminiscing about my time at Boston University, and recalling…

Olive Oil-Tangerine-Sesame Cake

It’s funny to see the rise in popularity with olive oil cakes, especially here in Los Angeles, over the past 4 years. It’s almost as if post-pandemic, that became the “it” cake in the city. You would be amazed to see how many bakeries and cafes sell a variation of it, and almost all are…

Pork and Shiitake Shumai

I still remember as a little kid watching Chuka Ichiban(a true old-school anime that heavily featured Chinese cooking, so think Shokugeki no Soma, but way less pervy) in Taiwan, and the main character Liao Xiao Ming made a dish called shumai. 5 year old Fred had zero clue what that was, but after asking his…

Chocolate-Milky Oolong Cake

Milk or milky oolong has been one of my obsessions ever since I got some from a cute tea shop in Munich. I’m partially ashamed to admit that I never heard of the tea prior to that trip, especially since it is a Taiwanese tea, and I am Taiwan-born after all, but better late than…

Peanut Butter Blossom Choux

I will be honest in that I never fully got why a peanut butter blossom cookie was referred to as a blossom. It’s a round cookie with a little Hershey’s Kiss sticking out of it – to me, that looks more like a weird hat or a part of human anatomy more than anything else….

Cheesy Broccolini Focaccia

This is one of those recipes that came about because I had a lot of leftover broccolini and was trying to figure out what to do with it. I still remember during the pandemic how people would make aesthetically pleasing focaccia landscapes, and figured, why not take a whack at it? Truthfully, I used to…

Lamb-Chickpea-Kataifi Fritters

These fritters were partially inspired by the mala cream shrimp dim sum from the Netflix show, Culinary Class Wars. The dish itself was a mixture of ground shrimp and pork, rolled in julienned spring roll wrappers and deep fried, so that there were these thin strands of crispy-fried dough for extra texture and crunchiness around…

Sweetbreads with Bacon-Caper Brown Butter

This recipe was heavily inspired by the sweetbreads with bacon, capers ,and brown butter from the now-closed Prune restaurant in New York City. Prune was a restaurant owned by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, and it featured food from her French-Italian upbringing. A lot of the dishes they served had this sense of resourcefulness, pulling techniques and…