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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Jon Kung's new debut cookbook showcases recipes that push the boundaries of traditional flavors. His work falls into the world of what's called third-culture cuisine. It is titled Kung Food, Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen. Featuring a collection of about 100 recipes, the book reexamines Chinese American cuisine, and what it means to fully express himself through food.

A Financial Times review said that most intriguing recipes are those that draw from popular culture, whether inspired by Pokemon or that modern phenomenon, the online spat. The Kung Food cookbook includes gems such as sesame shrimp toast, Thanksgiving congee, a beef and broccoli pot pie, Hong Kong borscht, Dan Dan lasagna, Dan Dan lasagne, excuse me, and curry mac and cheese. You get the idea. You can also find videos of John making some of these recipes on TikTok and Instagram where he's a combined 2.3 million followers on all of social channels.

Kung Food, Chinese American Recipes From a Third-Culture Kitchen is officially out today. Jon Kung joins me in studio. Happy Pub Day.

Jon Kung: Thank you so much, and Happy Halloween, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Happy Halloween. Under a video you posted for a pasta dish seasoned with traditional Chinese condiment sticks, someone wrote in the comments, "This felt like watching my Italian mom and Chinese dad conceive me."

[laughter]

This gets this idea of being a third-culture kid, which is how you describe yourself. What does that mean to you? Third culture?

Jon Kung: Being a person of third culture just means that you grew up in a situation where you cross the cultural divide every day of your growing up or developing life. For example, if you were a Chinese American or Nigerian American, Mexican American, you're the culture that you were immersed in at home. The culture of your parents or grandparents or whoever raised you is very, very different from the culture that you experience when you step outside the home and go to school or go to work or whatnot. The people who grew up in this way just live life with a very specific kind of nuance in both cultures.

What we have found, it doesn't really matter what race or ethnicity or culture you came from in general. That nuance is very similar in the way we express ourselves creatively. You can look just in places like Japan towns or Korea town in LA or southwest in Detroit. I find that the food that we produce out of there, yes, it is a type of fusion, a lot of people would describe it as a fusion, but it is more nuanced than that. It is cooking with the intention of familiarity of both cultures that are represented in a dish.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about where you grew up. You grew up in Toronto, right?

Jon Kung: Yes. I grew up between Hong Kong and Toronto, and then later on in Michigan.

Alison Stewart: Where can we see the influence of Hong Kong and Toronto in this book? What's an example, a recipe?

Jon Kung: I have some pretty traditional and classic examples of third-culture food in, as you can see, with Hong Kong borscht as you mentioned earlier. That came from, as we know, borscht was invented in Ukraine, but that actually how it came into Hong Kong followed a lot of historic unrest as it traveled through Russia, and then made its way down to Shanghai and then finally landed in Hong Kong. It is something that I grew up with eating after school in the '80s and '90s, and you'd see those at cha chaan tengs, Chinese tea houses, and snack shops.

Then, of course, we have like the-

Alison Stewart: I want to go back to Hong Kong borscht. What's the flavor profile of Hong Kong borscht? [laughs]

Jon Kung: -okay. Instead of beets, obviously, one of the hallmarks of an immigrant cuisine is just to cook something that is familiar enough to you using the ingredients that you had available to you. We didn't really have beets or they didn't really have a lot of access to beets, but they needed something red so they used tomatoes and it's used with a base of either chicken stock or beef stock. I remember, I recall eating it with always oxtails and potatoes. It's not like a creamy borscht as you would normally be expected.

It's actually kind of a very watery, savory, but still a little bit tart because of the tomatoes, a very hearty soup and or stew.

Alison Stewart: You prefer one large oxtail per person in this recipe. Why is that important in your recipe?

Jon Kung: Because I feel like everybody deserves one large oxtail.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] How do you season the oxtail?

Jon Kung: I like to do a little pre-sear and then I'll do a parboil of oxtail to get rid of a little bit of the gaminess. We'll parboil it in with a lot of anise seed. It's interesting. Anise seed, when combined with the tastes of beef itself, makes things taste beefier, especially when paired with onions. That is in there. Yes, it's just a great dish.

Alison Stewart: I love the title of this chapter, Snacky Snacks, Bites, and Cravings, and you know exactly what that is.

Jon Kung: Yes. It just follows the mood. It's like, "What are you in the mood for?" I'm like, "I'm snacky today. I'm a little snacky snack."

Alison Stewart: A little snacky snack. You have a recipe for sesame shrimp toast, which is something that's been recently popular, but has a long tradition. what's the tradition?

Jon Kung: When the British brought bread to Hong Kong, it is just natural that you want to cook within the taste, like things get into fashion. Bread got into fashion in that way. I theorized that they made that shrimp toast simply by spreading a shrimp dumpling filling on top of the toast and then searing it in the way that we consumed tea toasts and whatnot. I don't have any confirmation of that. It's just based off of the ingredients themselves. It was like, "Oh, this seems like it makes sense." Actually, you could make that shrimp toast into dumplings if you had some leftover.

Alison Stewart: That makes sense. Toast is between avocado toast and shrimp toast, so every time I go to a restaurant, I keep seeing toasts. What do you think's up with toast right now?

Jon Kung: As an elder millennial, toast came out of the Great Recession. Well, our Great Recession. I feel like it was just an affordable way of us to exercise some culinary creativity with what little that we had and what we had access to. It's like we couldn't go out to fancy bistros or not during the 2007 through 2010s, but you know what, we can have half a sandwich.

Alison Stewart: I think you put something fancy on top.

Jon Kung: Exactly. Exactly.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jon Kung. The name of the book is Kung Food, Chinese American Recipes From a Third-Culture Kitchen. I love this idea of curry mac and cheese in the book. What was the inspiration for curry mac and cheese?

Jon Kung: I wish I can remember. I think it was like I was very intrigued with the Japanese use of cheese with a lot of their curry dishes. I had seen a lot of curry pans and curry breads, curry grilled cheese sandwiches. I'd seen airports in Narita. I wondered, as a person who lived in Detroit, I was also exposed to a lot of really good family recipes for baked mac and cheese. I was like, "Well, I wonder if this combination worked," and if you're going to try it, I would very much suggest that you use Japanese curry.

I think S&B is the brand that I prefer simply because of the combination of spices themselves lends itself to the cheesy flavors. Sometimes, if you use different brands, it can get a little accurate if there's too much ginger or cardamom at the top. It tends to clash with the cheese, but S&B is a very, very mild one and is a great to mix with any kind of cheese.

Alison Stewart: You note in the book, you have your recipe, and then there's a circle that says it was invented by James Hemming, the first French-trained chef, fresh-- Excuse me, French-trained chef in America, brother of Sally Hemmings, an enslaved woman who bore many of Thomas Jefferson's children. Why was that important to note?

Jon Kung: Because if you're going to cook in this way, if you're going to cook cross-culturally, I personally believe that it is very, very important to give credit where credit's due, whether it's to the chef that invented it or the culture that birthed it. There is an unfortunate habit that a lot of chefs have for just taking credit for these dishes when in reality, we are a society that appreciates the story behind everything. It's also just the easy way for me to just share that story.

Half the work is done for me. If I just give the entire story behind a dish and just citing my sources is just the easiest way that I can do that and most interesting way that I can express it.

Alison Stewart: Sounds like you have a real sensibility about the difference between appropriation and appreciation, which is an issue when you start talking about fusion of anything.

Jon Kung: Oh, for sure. Yes. At the same time, it's like, appreciating something is just so much easier, in my mind.

Alison Stewart: Just say [unintelligible 00:09:29]. Acknowledge it, right?

Jon Kung: Yes. Exactly.

Alison Stewart: As opposed to playing it off of your own.

Jon Kung: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Thanksgiving turkey congee.

Jon Kung: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right. What's congee for people who don't know?

Jon Kung: Congee is this savory rice porridge. It is very, very popular in Cantonese cuisine and you find it in Chinatowns. Also, Koreans have a very, very delicious form of it. They call it jook which is interesting because in Cantonese Chinese, we call it jook as well. It's pronounced the same way between the two languages. It is a very comforting. It's all you want in the wintertime. Once it's cold, it warms you up from the inside out, starting with your bones. It is very mild normally, but if you take a Thanksgiving turkey carcass and boil it down into a broth, pour on a bunch of rice and let that boil until it becomes this thick and soupy but comforting mass in a pot, it just tastes like the holidays in the most satisfying way.

Alison Stewart: All right, everybody, you know what to do with your turkey carcass now.

Jon Kung: Yes. We fight over those. That is the best part of any turkey.

Alison Stewart: You include a recipe in the book for pork and chive dumplings, which we have on our website. Thank you for letting us do that.

Jon Kung: Of course.

Alison Stewart: There's also a vegan dumpling option, which uses vegetables and tofu as filling. What do you need to know about tofu when you're putting it inside of a dumpling? What's important to remember?

Jon Kung: Well, to season your tofu is preferred, but it is one of the more difficult things to fold into a dumpling because of the crumbly nature. If you wanted to use some kind of binder, if you want to process the tofu in with some cooked rice or something to make it all stick together, that'll make your life easier, but I think we're at a point where in the culinary geist of America is where you can learn to appreciate tofu for what it is. What it is is just a lovely source of protein that takes on the flavors of whatever you add it to.

Alison Stewart: What about the handling and the manipulation of the dumpling wrapper? That can be tricky for people. What are some of your guidelines for so you have a success, set yourself up for success with your dumpling wrapper?

Jon Kung: Interestingly enough, I have a QR code in the book, in the dumpling wrapping section, that if you put your phone to it, it'll take you to a private YouTube video that I will show you and walk you through a whole bunch of dumpling folds in person. I've been reading books and just figuring out every way to, in words, in the written form, explain how to fold a dumpling, and I haven't read a book published recently or anything down into the 1970s where all they had is words. They didn't even have pictures how to explain it. I haven't done that.

I don't think it is something that you can do really successfully, something that is so tactile. I figured I'll do my best, but I will also show you.

Alison Stewart: You have to like, it's one of those things you have to see someone do it.

Jon Kung: Yes, you do.

Alison Stewart: What's a recipe you return to regularly?

Jon Kung: Probably, won't even mention it, the congee. I do that all the time, but the breakfast noodles are good too.

Alison Stewart: Oh, tell me about those.

Jon Kung: The breakfast noodles, I added in there because it was one of my first hugely, hugely viral posts on TikTok. It's probably like 14, 18 million views at this point. It was just me, just talking about the virtues of eating noodles, eating a quick bowl of noodles for breakfast. It's a great source of carbs. If you add an egg, it's super filling. It's got that broth element so you're satisfied for a good chunk of your day. I think it was such a novel idea to so many people that it just took right off. I had to put it in there.

I was like, okay, let's just fry an egg and some bacon and we'll put it on noodles on top of a really nice, savory broth that you either pre-make from the book itself or I also give you some options for instant broths that I do like as well because accessibility and ease is also a great, a big part of how I believe a cookbook should be accessed.

Alison Stewart: It sounds like it's perfect for the months ahead. The name of the book is Kung Food, Chinese American Recipes From a Third-Culture Kitchen. My guest has been Jon Kung. Jon, congratulations on your first book.

Jon Kung: Thank you so much.

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