A little earlier this year, I was tinkering around with a flourless chocolate cake recipe. Fast-forward a few months, and I was trying to think of a fun way to make a chocolate fondant-like situation. I envisioned this dainty but tall chocolate cake, similar to a molten lava cake, but firmer. I wanted this to…
Tag: gluten free
Kimchi Chicken Cacciatorre with Kale Polenta
This dish was really meant to be a homey meal, hence why it kind of looks like a giant pile of slop in a bowl. Those kinds of dishes are indicative of the fall/winter, being super cozy, comforting dishes that are ugly-delicious. In this case, I wanted to do chicken cacciatorre, an Italian dish consisting…
Gluten Free Pear-Almond-Kinako Cake
This cake came about from me having a bunch of pears from when I went apple/pear picking with friends, and trying to figure out how to use them up. My original plan was to do a pear-almond pancake, but I was really jet-lagged, having just gotten back from Asia, so breakfast foods weren’t really something…
Blueberry-Sweet Corn Basque Cheesecake
I wanted to make a corn dessert of some kind, just to embrace the seasonality of corn. Corn is just naturally so much sweeter and juicier during the summer, and it makes for some really great desserts because of that. I wanted to make a basque cheesecake, pureeing sweet corn into it, and just to…
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…
Gjetost-Azuki Basque Cheesecakes
Sometimes when you have accidents, you just have to pivot. That, or dump your mistakes into a parchment-lined springform pan, throw them into a burning hot oven, and throw a hail, Mary. This recipe was that. Originally, these were going to be cheese tarts, stuffed with a gjetost(caramelized cheese) and azuki filling, but I overfolded…
Persimmon Sticky Toffee Pudding
These sticky toffee puddings are the love child of two Chinese ingredients(Chinese almond powder and persimmons) and a classic British dessert. Whenever the fall/winter rolls around, persimmons are abundant. And trust me when I say this, but having Chinese/Taiwanese family friends, I find myself rolling in persimmons every fall because I always know someone that…
Quahog Clam Onigiri
A long, long time ago, I was watching a Japan travel video, where someone purchased these red clam onigiri(rice balls), stored in the clam shells, and enjoyed them on a coastal train ride. Now, I would have totally linked the video, but it was years ago and I honestly could not find it anywhere. But…
Chocolate Mont Blanc Chiffon Sandwiches
My favorite after school snack my mom would get for me was the mont blanc from JJ Bakery in Torrance. Their mont blanc consisted of a fluffy chocolate sponge cake with chestnuts and chantilly cream in the middle, and a generous piping of the creamy chestnut puree on top. It was soft, light, nutty, and…
Ajitama Onigiri
This recipe is inspired by an onigiri I saw when I was traveling in Japan earlier this February. We were staying in Shinjuku, and had about 4 days(including travel) to explore Tokyo. While we were at Tokyo Skytree, there was an onigiri store in the department store, and I saw this onigiri that was triangular…
Kakuni(Japanese braised pork)
Kakuni is a Japanese dish consisting of braised cubes of pork belly in this sweet soy-based broth, usually served with a braised egg and mustard. I came to really love this dish over the past year, when I first had it at a Japanese restaurant in Torrance, then again almost a week later when I…
Tofu-Miso Panna Cotta with Textures of Soy
I will not lie, this recipe is similar to an old dessert I did a while ago featuring a tahini panna cotta. but I wanted to feature Meiji tofu instead. Meiji tofu is a type of tofu made with double the amount of soy beans, resulting in a silkier texture and a more intense soy…
Date and Assam Milk Tea
I was randomly craving wintermelon tea late at night, but the nearest boba store was already closed, as were the Asian grocery stores, and as much as I would love to make wintermelon tea from scratch, I neither had a fresh wintermelon to do that nor the patience – for context, wintermelon tea is made…
Artichoke-Pecorino Risotto
Risotto is one of those dishes that takes me back to my sister and I learning how to cook when we were really young. We grew up eating a lot of Taiwanese and Chinese food, as well as overtly healthy dishes(boiled romaine lettuce seasoned with olive oil and nothing else, anyone?), but the one constant…
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…
Mango Pudding with Coconut Sago
Now I would be a flat-out liar if I said I grew up loving mango pudding. Truthfully, I couldn’t even eat a mango when I was a child, until the age of 15. It was a textural thing. The first time I ate a mango, that I can remember, I was 4 years old, and…
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,…
“Chicken and Dumplings”: a plated dish
This dish is a revisited version of a recipe I made a few years ago, but as a more composed plated dish. The dish itself was what I made for a collaboration dinner at Mader Lao in Oklahoma, with my friends Gabriel and Dara(from season 12 of Masterchef!). I offered to do the entree, which…
Gluten-Free Chocolate Milkbar Birthday Cake
So back when I worked at Milkbar, my least favorite cake to assemble was the chocolate birthday cake. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love eating chocolate cake. However, when it came to assembling this one, it was tricky. At Milkbar, at least for their actual bakery operation, each layer of buttercream needs to be…
Persimmon-Osmanthus-Sesame Gateau
This is definitely one of those recipes where if you do not have patience, it will not come together. Some of my recipes employ processes that may take hours, even days to do. That applies in this case too. For starters, let’s talk about persimmon. Persimmon is an autumnal to winter fruit that comes in…
Freddy's Harajuku 