768: Hands On Cooking and Hosting with Sohla & Ham El-Waylly and Restaurateur Will Guidara

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters - American Public Media

Sohla and Ham El-Waylly discuss cooking, collaboration, and their unique partnership, while Will Guidara shares insights on hospitality and intentional listening. The episode blends personal stories, cooking tips, and life lessons from the world of fine dining and food media.

Key takeaways

• Communication and planning are essential in relationships and cooking.
• Intentional listening creates meaningful connections.
• Creating systems turns thoughtfulness into a practice.

Transcript preview

Food has always been how we find each other across cultures and tables. Food tells our stories as powerfully as any oral history or written record, and the splendid table is committed to sharing these stories. Your support makes that possible. As we prepare to enter a second year without any federal funding for public media, what's kept this show going is the community of listeners who believe these stories are worth telling. Before our budget year comes to an end, make a gift to keep the stories cooking. Donate now at Splendid Table.org or click the link in the show notes. Thank you. Hey, it's Francis. This week we're bringing you back to an episode from a few years ago featuring the internet's culinary sweethearts, Sola and Ham Elwhaley. And the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Gadera. Have a listen. from a PM. So what's the secret to a good relationship? All right you didn't come here for romantic advice but I do think they're pretty universal answers. One is to really listen to each other and the other is to make each other laugh. Later in the show we'll be talking with Will Gadera who was a co-owner and led the service of 11 Madison Park which was once voted the best restaurant in the world. He has a new book called Unreasonable Hospitality and we'll talk about how you can be a better host and really a better person by taking some cues from great restaurant service. And first, we have the married duo of Chef Sola and Ham Elwayi. For years, Sola has been an internet cooking video star showing off her pastry, savory and nerdy, and nerdatry skills in video series about everything from killer pies and food science to recreating recipes on Earth from ancient history. And our husband, Ham, kept of his career, helping to run fine dining kitchens. But recently, they've teamed up to make videos together, including a series for the New York Times called Mystery Menu, and they just crack each other up all the time. We've got them answering your cooking questions and they're joining us now. Hey, Sola, hey, Ham, it's great to see you both. Hey, Francis, how's it going? I'm so great. I'm actually really walking on air because I got to have a conversation. And you know he always makes everyone feel so amazing and you know it was all about intentional listening and paying attention to your relationships and actually got me thinking because Ham you were on our sister podcast the one recipe shameless plug and on that podcast you were talking about how you know the two of you working together is just so much fun for you both but you know as someone who you know I love my wife very much I never had to work with her I kind of to imagine like you're living with the person, you're spending your life with the person, you're working with the person, it can't always be fun, right? So how do you manage like all the tough parts of working with each other? Ooh, communication I think is is key. Like we've always worked together even when we weren't married, so that kind of laid the foundation for our entire relationship. When we met in the CIA, we were in every class together and kind of just like, oh, oh look at these brown kids, together. And so we were initially lumped together often, and then that lumping turned into a very real love. That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard. I was mad about it in the beginning because it was like, oh, we're the only two brown people here, so you think we should be friends, and then they were right. From a lump to love. From a lump to love. But then so tell me, so like, as you worked, and you worked together in lots of different ways, right, you owned, right. You owned a restaurant together in a restaurant together in a restaurant together in a restaurant together, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you're up in culinary school together and you worked in restaurants and then you actually owned a restaurant together and then Sola you went into you know your fabulous food media career and Ham you continue working in restaurants and now you make videos together for us all to see so like well tell us what's fun about it but then also tell us like how you actually manage that. Well I guess we both work really differently. I do everything like in my head first and in notebooks first and ham is someone who does stuff like like he can't work on a dish until food is in front of him. So I guess in the beginning the first thing to overcome was understanding how each other's brains worked. And I also think the fact that we think differently is a is like a benefit. Like I'm the planner I love the spreadsheets. I love drawing pictures and making lists and then ham's like the execution. So like together we're like a really solid team. We have all of our bases covered. So you have this New York Times video series you do together that is kind of not really, I mean unless you can reveal the magic behind the curtain, but as far as I can tell, it's about you too being surprised, like oh, make a meal with this. So you really can't plan for it and now you're improving. So how do you like, how do you learn to dance together? If you have such different styles especially? Well, when we see the ingredient, it's a surprise and then we get one hour. But before we get into it, we get into it, we get into it, we make it, we make it, we make it, we make it, we make it, we make it, we make it's a very thorough detailed game plan and then we communicate the whole time while we're cooking to see where we are within our game plan. Yeah, constantly checking where each other's at and the in the kitchen like whether you're doing an hour competition show or setting up a restaurant or cooking Thanksgiving dinner that plan portion is the most important part that game plan so you know so you know exactly where you want to end up and how you're gonna get there. So that's with that show specifically the game plan is the game plan is the game plan is the most important the whole process and it's why it seems like we can get so much done in a short amount of time is because we know that this is going to take five minutes and while that's going we can do this and then we can do that the game plan is paramount to any kind of cooking project endeavor. The one time we didn't have a game plan was when we were making our wedding cake and that was a struggle. No we had a game plan. We did later. We didn't initially start. with a game plan. We were just kind of we made a bunch of different cakes and tasted them and and put them with different fillings and then we came up with a game plan and then the rest of the process was pretty smooth. Well that was the first time we did something like really big together. It was a six-tier wedding cake for like 300 people. It was our first wedding cake ever and we just got out of culinary school. Well yeah but also we like did not know how to do that much cake. So we started early and we just made like cake after cake after cake after cake to like figure out the recipe and then we did our own like tasting where we made like multiple cakes and stacked them in different ways and like tasted them. So it was like a lot of chaos in the beginning but then once we like nailed down our recipe it was pretty smooth until the decoration part which we were like oh this is easy right and it's not. Then we went it kind of slid back into chaos but it was very fun it was a great experience it was a good it was a good like relationship test right before you get married because we also like stayed awake three nights before the wedding because we were just baking cakes building cakes so we had we're on no sleep and and things turned out okay so the fact that you made it through and actually got to the wedding and then decided to both say yeah I do really I think really good test right before the weddings like can you make it through this well I feel like it was a really good metaphor for marriage because like we had so many ups and downs like when we did finally eventually get the six layers of cake and each layer was like eight inches tall we wanted to put like a shiny chocolate glaze over it which is traditionally made with gelatin but our family is Muslim so we thought we could just you know eyeball it with agar and we invited everyone like the whole family was there so we're like everyone come into the kitchen we're gonna pour on the chocolate glaze and then we poured it on and then like everything just melted and slid right off and then there was just like a waterfall of chocolate on the kitchen floor beautiful stunning moment no one had ever seen anything like that before yeah yeah everyone was very concerned yeah we got really sad and then but like just like in life we talked about it we regrouped we came up with a better plan we and then ham transported it and then there was a surprise tropical storm. Yeah, so our wedding was at like the peak of this cliff. So there's a winding road that you had to take to get to the top. So there was torrential downpour. I was in the back of a van literally cradling the cake and trying to protect it from every bump in the road. I ended up taking my suit jacket off to cover the cake. carried it into the place we had to touch it back up when we got it was it was very stressful but it was so stressful that the actual wedding was so easy and so stress free that it was like oh this is nothing because we made this giant cake and then transported it in this tropical storm up a hill because we already got past the moment where I wrapped the wedding cake in my wedding suit in my wedding suit this far. That was fun. Cake got eaten. It was a good cake. People liked it. Well okay that is fantastic and here you are I load this many years later. So we do have lots of folks who called in with questions for you. So let's get to them. Hi Solon, my mom, my sister and I are big fans of yours from the Philippines. Our question is how long does your dry brining chicken last in the fridge? My We watched your fridge tour video and saw that ham left something brining and my mom left a spatchcock chicken to dry brine for around four or five days and it ended up being tasty but a little bit weird. Please give us some suggestions. Thanks. Oh my God I love this. They're so cute. I love this person. I understand what she means by tasty but weird. Yeah. Yes, I feel like there's a window when the dry brine morphs from dry brining and into more of a cure. So I know exactly what you mean by tasty but weird. It tastes almost like a processed ham because it draws out too much moisture and then the meat starts curing. So depending on the size of what you're looking to brine. So if you're doing a whole chicken, I would not dry brine it for longer than 48 hours, because then you're just going to start going to start going to cured meat territory. If you're doing parts, I would keep it from 12 to 24. Like essentially the larger, the piece of protein that you're brining, the longer it takes, but I would rarely go past 48 hours just because you're just going into a different territory at that point. If you're looking to cure something, go for it. But if you're looking for dry brine where you're looking for a nice dry, moist interior. You want to keep that on the 48 hour if it's a large piece of protein and 12 to 24 if it's a smaller piece of chicken, pork, or beef. If you're doing fish, that's even less time. I would do three hours up to 12 and really nothing nothing past that. Shrimp and scallop that's really small also benefit from a dry brine, but I wouldn't go longer than an hour on those things because then they're going to start to get tasty but maybe a little tough. It's just to be weird. Yeah. And for anyone who's not familiar with dry brine, it's just like all you do is pat down your protein, evenly sprinkle it with salt and then you could