Transcript: Putting together a spring feast with chef Ayesha Nurdjaja

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Putting together a spring feast with chef Ayesha Nurdjaja’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Ayesha Nurdjaja is the executive chef and partner at two of my favourite restaurants in New York, Shuka and Shukette, and the best way I can characterise Ayesha’s food and her spirit is to quote a review that called Shukette a Middle Eastern party. It has an open kitchen that runs the length of the restaurant. The music is up. Every dish is a party. It’s bursting with flavour. It’s piled with herbs, it’s surrounded by dips. And Ayesha is the ultimate party host. I actually think of Ayesha as maybe Dionysus meets Demetra, like the god of pleasure and festivity, meets the goddess of the harvest. She knows how to use herbs and spices and fresh produce to create absolute joy. So as the weather warms up and we prepare for spring cooking, I have invited her on to inspire us. She’s with me in person in the New York studio. Ayesha, hi. Welcome back to the show.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Thank you so much. That is such an introduction. I feel like I have to change the horn on my car to have that, and I don’t need a copy of that. That was amazing. Thank you so much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I was going to ask if I got your Greek gods right?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
You nailed it. I might drop it. I don’t even know if they want to hear me anymore. Yes, that was powerful.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. We have listeners from all over the world. I’m wondering if you could tell them about your restaurants. Like, what kind of food are you cooking? Are you trying to emphasise something in particular?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Sure. I would call it Middle Eastern Mediterranean. I think I really take kind of the respect and the culture of like Middle Eastern cuisine and its simplicity, where it’s like olive oil, a few ingredients and nothing more. But really the seasonal approach that we have here in New York. So the green market is usually where the inspiration starts. And we try to source the best ingredients as possible so we don’t have to over manipulate it. And hopefully that’s what you’re getting when you come to the restaurant.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s all true. But it sort of makes the restaurant sound more conventional and orderly than it feels when you’re in there. Let’s place listeners at Shukette, if you don’t mind. How does it feel? Tell me about this concept of the rip and dip that you started.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
So I think when you come to the restaurant, you have to kind of submit. You have to look at the menu and say, how does this work? What am I doing? I think the whole idea of my philosophy of rip and dip is that everything complements each other, so there’s no rhyme or reason. You can order your kebab first, you can get dips later, you can get your dips and only finish them halfway. And then have a few vegetables and dip those vegetables in those dips. And ribbon dip is all about sharing. It doesn’t mean like you have to share with another person because you can kind of share within yourself. But then you’re building these dishes. I don’t know how to explain it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you can order like a few different types of breads, a few different dips, a few kebabs, a grilled fish, rice, everything is sort of covered in herbs and olive oil and deliciousness and butter. And so once you have everything on your table . . . 

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Then you’re creating this. You’re like building your own feast, right? If you will. Right. It’s the most committed vision with non-committal type of structure is getting. That’s how I can explain it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so I am excited to have you on to get people amped up about spring cooking. It’s almost 80 degrees here today.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Oh my God, I am amped about spring. I don’t know if you know this, but winter and fall are, like, pretty hard for me because, you know, the cuisine itself is vibrant, kind of like my personality. So I love to see, like, all the thing, the bounty of the summer. And the spring have to bring. So now that we’re turning, what I like to call like this is really the light at the end of the culinary tunnel. Where you’re kind of like saying thank you, but we’ll see you next to the root vegetables. And you get to begin with. Exactly. You get to embrace like all of the green stuff. It’s just this is where the inspiration starts going from, like the incubating of these small ideas. And then the dishes just start, like flowing out of you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So what are you starting to feel right now?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
I would say that the ramps are like the caviar of vegetable, like, wait all year round for. It’s such a short, short season. But the flavour in anything in the allium family, anything onion. I’m always going to be 100 per cent behind. So spring onions, baby leeks, spring garlic is one of my favourites coming out right now. Artichokes. But asparagus is also like near and dear to my heart. Asparagus to me is like tomatoes. You should really only eat them when they’re in season. That’s when you’re getting, you know, the true essence of what they are.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I know that you work so really seasonally. There are some vegetables that really only.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
But I think I like peak. Spring is kind of funny because just like today’s 70 degrees, it’ll probably be snowing and 50 degrees tomorrow. So the first cut of all these vegetables, you get an overexcited about it. And then it takes like four to six weeks for them to kind of get on a cycle that you’re getting them. So I kind of like try to pack in everything that I can, and it gives me a little time to make iterations of it. I always feel at the restaurant when asparagus come like for the some of the chefs that work with me, they’re always like, well, why do we have to change asparagus dishes throughout the season? And like, cause you get bored, right? There’s so many different things. The asparagus, when they’re young, you could blanch and shock them or shave them raw and eat them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
By blanching shock, you mean?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Boiling water that’s salted. Into an ice bath. Just to shock it. Which means that it stops the cooking completely and really retains its green colour.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, nice. OK.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
But as they get thicker or more grown, sometimes you want to grill them. We’ll put them in the plancha or express them in different ways. They can be sliced in salads. And I think that’s the beauty of kind of like always being able to create. You don’t have to have this one signature dish in the spring, but that as the vegetable evolves, so does the dish.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Do you have any spring rituals? Like the first time you get a ramp?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
What do I do? Yeah, I put it in scrambled eggs. That’s the first thing I do. I just chop up the bottoms and the tops and I have extra garnishes and I put. So I think the ramp-to-egg ratio is two to one ramps.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really?

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I wanted to, just to give listeners a sense of a dish, of yours, one of my, I would say my favourite salad in New York City is the fattoush salad at Shuka. Every time I go to Shuka, I know I should order other things, but I said I’m, like, drawn to the salad. It’s like perfect. It’s crunchy and fresh and a little sweet. It has, like, big pieces of fried halloumi in it. And one of the things that feels very unique to it is that it is covered in herbs. It just feels like bounty. Can you tell me a little bit about it and how you make it?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
The fattoush kind of was born from traditional fattoush salad. It’s always like lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, usually radishes and red onion, sometimes sumac and sometimes lemon juice. And what’s that famous line, “You can’t make friends with salad”? (laughter) I like to make friends with salad that I don’t have to make. So if somebody makes me a salad, I eat it. But for me to make a salad is like a pain in the neck. So when I thought about the fattoush, what I wanted to do is I wanted to feel like bounty, but I also wanted to have this mouthfeel that as you’re eating it, it doesn’t really feel like a salad. There are some lettuce, but the surprises of those herbs — cilantro, mint, dill, parsley — that are left whole in the leaves, with the pita that’s been toasted. It’s a textural delight, that salad.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, it is.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
So it’s lemon juice, olive oil with a little bit of honey, and then these big fried pieces of delicious halloumi, kind of like just sail it over the top.

Lilah Raptopoulos
They’re just bubbling like this.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
That’s exactly how they look. You’re right. They look like they got, like, too close to the sun’s surface and they’re, like, burnt, but delicious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I tried to make your fattoush salad last night, in preparation for this. Partially inspired by this conversation we were going to have. And the leaves, I just they were just too huge. I made them too big. It wasn’t really doing what yours did.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
But I think if you have that, like, if you buy a head of romaine and you cut it down into thirds or sixths. Yeah, I think you’re OK. The traditional fattoush salad is really like shredded sometimes. And that the thing about the one that we have is that it’s chunky. And I think that’s what you like about it too. So if you get a head of romaine, kind of pick out the small inner leaves. Those can remain whole and if you get the outer leaves, just cut them in half and kind of in thirds or fourths I think it could be OK.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s pretty nuts how like just the way that it that the vegetables are cut in a salad can make a salad good.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
It makes a tremendous difference. It also makes a tremendous difference in how it eats.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.

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OK, so we’ll put all of your tips and recommendations in the show notes for listeners. But can I ask you to walk us through another spring feeling recipe that someone can cook if they’re just getting their hands on some exciting vegetables?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
I think spring to me and simplicity kind of go hand in hand. So when I think about spring, I’m hanging up my apron of the long cooking. Right? Because we just come out of winter with braises and big meats or even, like, cooking vegetables like heads of cauliflower for a long time. And now I think about things that are quick. So to me, spring is like a good bounty of like, seafood. Shrimp cook really quickly. Scallops cook quickly. Swordfish, depending how you cut it, can cut really quickly. Kebab season is in full effect. You know you get you preparing for the summer. If I had to walk you through one dish, I would think, you know, I didn’t eat shrimp for a long time, and it wasn’t on purpose. There’s just something that didn’t excite me. I felt like it didn’t really have flavour, but maybe I didn’t give it the right chance. And you have to get the right shrimp. If you’re getting the farm-raised shrimp, then it’s like, you know, everybody says it tastes like chicken. It really has no characteristics. But the beauty about shrimp is: A, it takes on marinades really well. It has great mouthfeel. There’s a snappiness to them when you’re cooking them properly. And 3 is that they’re quick to make. You can sauté shrimp in six minutes. So if you have fresh clean shrimp in the refrigerator and you come home from work like you don’t just have to have a salad, you can actually make something. I think everybody knows what salsa verde is or like a chimichurri, right? Like kind of this herbed chopped up, condiment that has like some kind of garlic and, and hopefully there’s onion in it because I can’t live without onions and the herbs and lemon juice and you kind of use that as one of the layers of your dish. Like I think it would be great. So one of the things I love to do is when I get shrimp at home, I just put a little bit of white wine, parsley, grated garlic on a microplane and lemon juice. And I kind of let it sit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You let it sit with the shrimp and like as a marinade.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
And I put it while I’m preparing everything else I kind of have them at room temperature. And then usually I’ll do something like sometimes I’ll have like fresh peas on hands or right now fava beans are really good. And I’ll blanch and chuck them really quickly and maybe some asparagus and cut that up. And then literally, I’m trying to think of where I would go with it, but I would take the sauté, as I’m sautéing the shrimp on one side, I’m kind of throwing the blanching, shocked fava beans and asparagus cut up, maybe some spring onions or some red onion if you have it, and all in the same . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Into the same pan.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
In the same pan. Well, you want to make sure that it has the surface like a 12-inch pan. So you have a lot of room. So the shrimp go down on one side. And then as this sizzling, I would just layer in the fava beans and some of the asparagus, and then maybe make a purée out of that chimichurri that we were making, and then maybe fold that into a little yoghurt.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, nice.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
And put a little dollops of yoghurt on the plate. And then we’re ready to three minutes on one side the shrimp, you flip them on the other. Kind of like a big flip like that. And then finish it maybe with torn dill and some torn mint leaves. Oh even basil will work well. And then you just, you kind of arrange it on the plate, like, as if you would do a stir fry. Maybe finish it with a little bit of a fresh lemon juice and lemon zest and a little drizzle of good olive oil.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s amazing.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Are there any, like, creative ways that you can inspire us to use herbs like, dill and cilantro? I mean, you can get them all the time, but they feel particularly fresh.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
I’m kind of like, really excited because I love herbs. And I think, like, if a dish doesn’t have an herb it, then it’s not my dish. I think like one of the things that it kind of points out in this time of year, I think like mint, basil, dill. I think herbs also have seasons. Sometimes they’re woodier, sometimes the stems are really soft and then you’re getting flavour from both ends. The way that I like to use herbs is sometimes like just as garnish as the finish, but like to chop them up. A lot of people finely chop their herbs. I like them a little rough cut because I feel like you want to taste them. I feel like basil is one thing I don’t really like to touch with a knife. Kind of like a torn situation. And I think, like, iterations of the herbs, like, if you purée them, they’ll last really long. So if you do use that blanching shock that we were talking about, and then you purée them and you get like a base, then you can fold into a lot of different things. You could make herb yoghurt. Goat cheese with herbs. So if you had like asparagus and you grilled them and then you had this herbed goat cheese on the bottom, then you put the asparagus on top. I mean, how delicious would that be?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Exactly. Amazing.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
You go a little further and add cheese and nuts and make a pesto. I feel like herbs are just like a building block of flavour. And if you chop them, if you purée them, if you use them whole like you’re never going to lose. It’s always going to be that freshness and brightness to the dish.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to back up a little bit. Your parents are Italian and Indonesian.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What did you grow up eating and making in the spring and summer?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
I always like to say I grew up on the original set of chopped because my parents. My mother is the most amazing cook in the whole world. Half the office we could bring into the house, and she could whip up like a 10-course meal. (Laughter) And my dad came here from Indonesia and he got a job at a restaurant. And then he worked on a ship that transported liquid natural gas from America to Asian countries. So he was kind of away for four months and home for four months, but he had to go through like a culinary school training. So he really knew how to cook global cuisine. But of course, because he was so far from home living in Brooklyn, he would cook a lot of Indonesian food. So I remember like, kind of like waking up and getting ready for school and coming downstairs and seeing fish head bob, like, in and out of a big pot. My dad loved soup, any kind of soup and, like, fish soup was, like, one of his things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Do you have any sort of memories of spring food in your childhood that you kind of bring to now?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
It’s so funny that you mention that because as we were talking, I was thinking, you know, my mother always had a garden, and one thing that she had was lemon thyme. And I remember she used to make chicken salad with lemon thyme. And I didn’t realise I like chicken salad. I think it was a dish that she made all the time. And it reminds me of spring, because I remember it being like the first herb bush that would come out. And recently I just put, like, an egg salad on the menu at Shukette, which was so controversial because people were like, this is not a dip. And like anything is a dip that you can dip your bread in. So, relax. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
And so that flavour, the lemon thymem you ended up putting that in your . . .

Ayesha Nurdjaja
And my egg salad, yeah. And then I was, as I was eating it and I was like, wow, this tastes familiar. I couldn’t until we started talking about spring, that I remember the memory of that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, that’s so cool. I also love that it’s a dip. Anything’s a dip.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Anything’s a dip. Anything that you could rock your bread in. That’s what I’m, that’s my thing. My next restaurant’s not going to have any forks and knives. I’m giving it up. It’s going to have extra napkins.

Lilah Raptopoulos
How did they . . . I mean, it sounds like it was really like a global cuisine kind of kitchen that you came from. And then you’ve created two Mediterranean, Middle Eastern kitchens. How did it influence . . . 

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Yeah. How did it happen?

Lilah Raptopoulos
How did it happen, but also how do, how does that sort of kitchen that you grew up in influence your kitchen now?

Ayesha Nurdjaja
It’s kind of like a lineage. And I think the way that I used to, like my dad was very big on, like, flavour profiles and building flavour. And I think that kind of resonated with me. Like I’m always thinking about now more than ever, like, how do I maximise flavour in minimum time? But so I think I had like really good building blocks. You know, being, like I said, exposed to the spices, different types of cuisines kind of opens your palate at a young age. Like it wasn’t . . . the conversation wasn’t about what we would eat. It was what we had. And we did eat it. That’s really kind of how I cook too. A lot of people say, oh, it’s very easy to eat at Shuka or Shukette if you’re a vegan or vegetarian. I don’t really think about that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s interesting.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
I definitely think about like I love dairy, so it’s kind of easy, like anything with yoghurt or halloumi or feta like to me makes things better. So I’m kind of conscious of like where it is on the menu. But when we’re creating, I just like always looking at it and just thinking, like making sure that we have an array of things that people can have. And I’m happy that the approach to my cooking really reaches a lot of different audiences.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. For sure.

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Ayesha, thank you so much. My very last question, which I ask a lot of creative people, is just when you feel most creatively fulfilled in the process of.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
That’s like a . . . that’s a great question because I think I feel the most fulfilled when I feel like I’m around people that like or feeling what I’m putting out there. So if I’m at the counter at Shukette and you see people like kind of eating it and put their head back, or I’m able to create with my team and have them taste it or have their input and maybe being able to integrate that. I think that’s those are the things these days are making me feel so most fulfilled.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. Ayesha, this is such a delight. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Ayesha Nurdjaja
Thank you. My pleasure.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. We have put links to everything mentioned today in the show notes, including where to find Ayesha on social media. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me on email and on Instagram. And finally, a link and a discount code for the US FT Weekend Festival, which is happening in Washington, DC on Saturday, May 4th at the Reach at the Kennedy Center. Nancy Pelosi will be there with lots of other guests, and I’ll be there and we’d love to meet you.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer, Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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