Food & Drink mini-series: Andy Baraghani on finding your home cooking style

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Food & Drink mini-series: Andy Baraghani on finding your home cooking style

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi FT Weekend listeners, this is Lilah. I’m here to welcome you to some summer-bonus content. For four weeks, we will be publishing special Food & Drinks-themed mini-episodes, mid-week every Wednesday. For each one, I’m approaching a different expert that I think is really good at something and asking them to teach us about that thing. We’ll talk wine trends with one of the world’s most influential wine critics, Jancis Robinson. We’ll talk taste and flavour with the chef of one of my favourite restaurants in New York, Ayesha Nurdjaja. And today, on this very first episode of the series, I’m joined by Andy Baraghani. Andy is a chef and food writer. He’s worked in kitchens from Chez Panisse to Estela, and he spent years developing recipes and making viral cooking videos for Bon Appetit. This year, Andy came out with a cookbook that I have been leaning on heavily. It’s called The Cook You Want To Be. And I’ve had him on to learn exactly how we can build all of our experiences into a personal home-cooking style. It’s a chance to think about what we’re choosing to cook and what makes those dishes or styles of cooking specifically feel like ours. Okay. This is FT Weekend, the podcast special edition. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Here’s Andy. Hi, Andy. Welcome to the show.

Andy Baraghani
Hi, Lilah. Thank you for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
One of the things that I really liked about your videos and that I love about your cookbook is that it’s very honest and it’s sweet and it sort of makes me feel like my kitchen can be a little chaotic and, like, I can trust myself to improvise on the spot and that I’ll be okay. And then I’m learning, like, not just like how to follow this list of ingredients and the order in which I use them, but how to just do it myself without worrying. (Andy laughs) So I’m curious, like, you know, what advice do you have for people who are trying to find their voice as a home cook?

Andy Baraghani
Cooking is a low-risk investment, you know, it’s . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true, yeah.

Andy Baraghani
It’s not something that . . . Typically it won’t cost a ton of money. It’s okay if it doesn’t go right. Because hopefully, and what I really like to promise people, is that even if something doesn’t go right, you will likely learn something. And it’s a lesson to have absorbed. And so that, you know, you won’t kind of do that ever again and you’ll try something and do it a different way. So that’s one thing. I also find that you have to be open and curious and challenge oneself. I really do mean that this applies both in and out of the kitchen. Whatever kind of craft it is, I think, when I think about my own life and about the kind of important moments and lessons that I’ve learned, it is when I’ve been the most kind of uncomfortable or vulnerable.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what’s an example of doing something uncomfortable in the food realm?

Andy Baraghani
I would say one of the easier things is if you’re at a market, whether it’s a piece, a produce item or a spice, I would, if it’s within your budget, I would buy it and I would try it, and I would try it on its own. Just if it’s a specific type of citrus, I would, you know, take a segment and try it and see what it tastes. Is it sweet? Is it tart? Where does it fall under that range? Is this zest a little bit bitter or is it more floral and sweet? Try using the zest in the salad, use the juice and reduce it down with a little bit of butter and see what that tastes like. But play with it. Experiment.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What would be like a simple way to experiment?

Andy Baraghani
You can teach a home cook about a new ingredient. It’s hard to tell a home cook to teach them about a new ingredient and then give them this really technical recipe. So the first part is like, challenge yourself to try a new ingredient. Play around with that. The second part is see if you would try a technique you’ve never done, if you’ve ever kind of made a aioli before. If you’ve done that, just emulsifying, you know, oil with egg yolk and making homemade aioli. And then you have this base and you can make it garlicky by adding a bit of garlic or herby by adding some chopped fresh herbs, a little bit of lemon juice. Those two things are very essential . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uh-huh.

Andy Baraghani
In order to . . . understanding what kind of cook you want to be, what your cooking style is, what flavours you’re drawn to. And the goal is not for it to always be right. You might not like every technique and want to apply it to your kitchen. You might not like every ingredient that you buy or all of the flavour combinations, but by kind of understanding what you’re drawn to and what you’re not drawn to, that’ll give you a better definition of what your cooking style is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Andy, I’d love to hear how you first got interested in food. Like, what are your earliest memories of food and of cooking?

Andy Baraghani
That’s a big question from the begin . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter)

Andy Baraghani
The foods that I was introduced to at an early age were the foods that my parents brought and traditions they brought from their native home country of Iran. They came to the US in the late 70s, just before the Iranian revolution. And so from my earliest memories really are having a lot of people over at my parents’ home. They were the kind of first ones to leave Iran and come to the US and so there was always an additional someone to feed, whether it was an uncle or aunt or cousins, grandparents. So a lot of those dishes are Iranian from my earliest memories.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious sort of . . . what your family was cooking growing up and what you took from that into your style?

Andy Baraghani
Well, I think the food is . . . (exhales) acidic and heavy on herbs and a deep love for dairy in the form of yoghurts. And it’s actually a quite delicate cuisine. It’s not heavily spiced. There’s no really fiery heat to the flavours. You’ll see a little bit of heat in the southern area of Iran. They love rice and it’s never a side dish. It’s always the main event. Many different types of beautiful flatbreads as the highly-seasonal stews made up of fruits and meats and herbs and a lot of yoghurt sauces that don’t just have yoghurt and cucumber but sometimes we’ll have walnuts and pistachios, raisins, sizzled mint, green garlic. It’s a really, really beautiful cuisine that . . . part of my job as as a writer and recipe developer is really kind of bring that food to people’s home.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I discovered your work — deep in the pandemic actually — I had all of these herbs going bad and I knew about kuku sabzi, a Persian dish, Iranian dish from growing up. And I found your Bon Appetit video on YouTube. It’s like my favourite thing I made in the pandemic and I still make it all the time. I’m curious about your experience putting that video out. You wrote a piece a few years ago about how cooking helped you be open about your ethnicity and that growing up you wanted to hide your Iranian identity. Can you tell me about that and how that changed?

Andy Baraghani
So kuku is a kind of a genre of egg-based dishes in Iranian cuisine, and sabzi means greens. I mean, that was definitely one of the harder pieces of writing. When I did that video, it was one of, actually, the first videos I ever did for Bon App. And I remember pitching the video and it was kind of had a lukewarm response of even being embraced. I think we have to remember, like, it was a different time and . . . but I just had this feeling that something that I grew up was so easy to make and people were going to be able to learn about this dish, make it, learn about this dish from a very special cuisine that, from a culture that hasn’t always been highlighted in the most positive light in this country. I eventually shot that video and it took off. And so that dish just followed me very much throughout my life. And the essay that you mentioned about talking about my ethnicity, I should say that I’ve loved Iranian food throughout my life, but I never had a desire to learn that food and to cook that food. That was the food that I grew up with. That was my family’s food. But that wasn’t my cooking style. But it kind of did change when I had to do some research and work with my mother on a story. And we ended up kind of featuring, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine of my mother’s dishes. And I really fell in love with that food again. And so I started incorporating those techniques and flavours of Iranian food into my own cooking style.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Okay. Andy, I would love to do a quick speed round with you with the time we have left. Are you ready?

Andy Baraghani
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Okay. What is the most underappreciated herb?

Andy Baraghani
Fresh bay leaves.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Bay leaves?

Andy Baraghani
Yeah. Fresh bay leaves are kind of amazing. I think fresh mint is underused. I think it’s looked at it as like a garnish or a little goes a long way, but I think it’s so delicious in pastas or torn in salads or pounded to make like a little bit of a minty basil pesto. I think it’s so delicious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Use more than you think?

Andy Baraghani
Use more than you think, always.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, always. Okay, good. Favourite summer salad?

Andy Baraghani
It’s a dish that I keep making from my book, actually. And it’s called . . . the recipe name is juicy tomatoes with Italian chilli crisp, and you just take good tomatoes, season with salt, splash them with vinegar — I like sherry vinegar — and then you make this spicy oil made with extra-virgin olive oil, sliced garlic, anchovies, and you cook until the garlic is crispy, and then you add chilli flakes and fennel seeds, and then you pour this hot, garlicky, spicy, fatty oil on the vinegar tomatoes and sprinkle it with basil or parsley. And it’s quite delicious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What’s a spice that you would recommend people experiment with? It doesn’t have to be the most useful spice, but just like an interesting one to play with.

Andy Baraghani
I use a lot of turmeric, so that’s something that I think people should be using. Cooking in oil or butter or in and over yoghurt as a turmeric dip. Butter and tossing that with rice, sprinkling over proteins, fish, meat, and put it on the grill or searing it — I love it so much. I also think, and this is a really simple one that a lot of us have: whole black peppercorns. I mean, it adds texture if it’s coarse. I think cooking it in butter and oil and adding pasta, rice, it adds like a nice lingering heat, mild heat that I really, really love. Black peppercorns are something that I use a lot of.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Andy, this is a pleasure. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Andy Baraghani
Thank you for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That is our first of four mini-episodes on Food & Drink. You can check back next Wednesday for the second. I am speaking with Ayesha Nurdjaja, chef of Shuka and Shukette, about how to flavour and how to taste. I have put links to everything that Andy and I mentioned in this episode in the show notes. This show was produced by Molly Nugent, executive produced by Topher Forhecz and Cheryl Brumley, and engineered by Breen Turner with original music by Metaphor Music. Special thanks to Alastair Mackie.

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