Hilariously enough, the three main ingredients in this entremet(French set mousse cake) form the acronym P.O.G., which is also used in Hawaiian cuisine to reference passionfruit-orange-guava juice. In this case, this P.O.G. refers to peach, osmanthus, and ginger, which happen to be three of my mom’s favorite ingredients. Growing up, we had a white peach…
Tag: Ginger
Nian Gao Basque Cheesecake
To celebrate Lunar New Year, I wanted to do a dessert that was inspired by nian gao, which are these brown sugar-infused glutinous rice cakes. I grew up eating nian gao, and admittedly as a child, I thought they contained fish. Mostly because the texture, being so dense and chewy, made it seem like these…
Acorn Sticky Toffee Puddings
This recipe came up because my friend and talented chef, Kesha Taro, and I were talking about acorn flour. Kesha worked for Gordon Ramsay doing culinary production for decades. She worked briefly on season 10, but I didn’t meet her until season 11 open casting calls, and she was super kind. Flash forward years later,…
Pear-Honey-Gingerbread Entremet
One of my favorite things my mom would make for me when I was sick is pears steamed with ginger and honey. The juicy steamed pears would be fork-tender, while being aromatic with both the fragrant honey and the warming slices of ginger. I still remember when I had COVID(not fun times at all), and…
Tea-smoked Miso Cod
This is a recipe that I have been wanting to do since before we filmed Masterchef season 12 in 2021. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to purchase a whole cod, filet it, and set up the tea smoker all in one go, mostly because of laziness, so that’s why it took forever to get…
Pink Peaches and Cream Cake
This cake was my original intended gift for my mom on Mother’s Day, before I found out that white peaches weren’t in season in May. For this recipe, I went with white peaches for a filling, as a reference to my childhood. Growing up, we had white peach trees in our backyard, and every summer,…
Mango Sticky Rice with coconut and pandan
Whenever I think of Southeast Asian desserts, mango sticky rice is probably at the top of my list for things that come to mind. Glutinous rice with ripe, fresh mango, and this salty coconut milk, the contrast and flavors are very different than what most people would associate with desserts. Some variations have toasted sesame…
Dratini Tteok
Tteok are Korean rice cakes that are eaten in both savory and sweet applications. They are quite similar to mochi, and have a delicious chewy texture to them. One of the more common savory applications of tteok is tteokbokki, which literally translates to stewed rice cakes. The cakes are usually stewed in a spicy, kimchi-gochujang…
Chrysanthemum Douhua
One of my earliest food memories was going to dim sum with my parents on Sundays. We would be served chrysanthemum tea with everything we ate and we would usually finish off a meal of spareribs, sticky rice, and dumplings and fried radish cakes with egg tarts and a sweet tofu called douhua. Douhua, which…
Red and gold(en syrup) tang yuan
If you are Chinese or Taiwanese and do not know what tang yuan are, then I truly have seen it all., Tang yuan(literally translates to soup balls or rounds) are a super popular Asian dessert, consisting of small poached mochi balls floating in usually a sweet syrup. They are often eaten during the holidays, and…
“Lazy mornings”: a plated dish
This dish was inspired by a Hong Kong breakfast classic, being macaroni soup. Macaroni soup consists of a creamy chicken stock, macaroni noodles, and ham. It is a Cantonese breakfast staple, and I found it to be the perfect inspiration for a fun dish! For my take on a macaroni soup, I went with a…
Mini milk bread toasts with homemade bread and jams
I just randomly had an epiphany the other day to make mini brick toasts with ricotta and jam. Mostly because I was missing the brick toasts from Sqirl(yes I know that’s controversial to be a fan of that restaurant with all of the moldy jam and recipe-stealing scandals, but you can’t deny that the food…
Scallion pancakes with braised oxtail and bone broth
So I was inspired by birria tacos, but knowing that I cannot make them authentically, I figured, why not take dishes and ingredients from my own culture, but just serve them in the same fashion? So I took the concept of a wrap with a dipping broth, and essentially made it Chinese/Taiwanese. I still remember…
Sweet tofu panna cotta with chrysanthemum poached pear
I was mostly inspired by douhua, or sweet tofu soup, when I was conceptualizing this dessert. The idea of this silky sweet tofu that is swimming in a ginger-palm sugar-type of syrup just takes me back to Sundays at my local dim sum restaurant in Lomita(which sadly has since closed and been replaced by a…
Rabbit rack with carrot puree and warm kale salad
For my second rabbit dish, I wanted to feature the loin and rack instead. I always loved the look of a chop of meat, be it a tomahawk steak or a lamb rack, because it appeals to that carnal instinct we all have from being descendants of cavemen. Despite that being an inspiration, I wanted…
Pear tarte tatin with milk tea crème anglaise
As somebody who has suffered prior trauma from tarte tatin, I can tell you now that I’ve made at least ten of them this year alone. To celebrate the fall, and to use the free bosc pears that were lying around at work, I wanted to make yet another tarte tatin. This time, I decided…
Passionfruit cheesecake shumai
These dumplings came about from my excess of passionfruit(what a problem to have, clearly) as well as me wanting to try making a steamed cheesecake dumpling. So I figured, why not mix the passionfruit into the cheesecake and make something truly original? To be a little more fun, I decided to dye the shumai shells…
Here comes a thought: a plated dessert
When I came up with the concept for this dessert, it really was to be something that would tackle the themes of anxiety and depression, two things I had to deal with a ton when I had come out. Having an entire student organization essentially outcast and passive aggressively bully you, as anyone can imagine,…
Beef and Broccoli Revised: a plated dish
On the back of that wedding challenge, the elimination that followed was a freaking outdoor grilling challenge, in the patio where we all stood during the helicopter intro! It was crazy! The contestants on the losing Red Team had to choose from a huge variety of steaks and grill a dish in an hour. Which…
Liz’s banana-chocolate tarte tatin
So this dessert goes out to a very special lady, Ms. Elizabeth Linn. She blew us all away during the tarte tatin challenge(the same one I’m probably never going to fully live down), when she made a banana tarte tatin with chocolate crème anglaise. I remember when we were planning our tarte tatins out, she…
Freddy's Harajuku 