One of the dishes that definitely caught our eye was these jiggling pancakes that were a lot thicker than they normally were, but apparently, we're a lot fluffier and a lot lighter than your traditional American pancake and we sort of went to the source and went to this cafe that just served them and was known for them. There's a lot of transparency in the cooking process in Japan with a lot of glass windows. It was such a pleasure to be able to just see how things were done.
Rea and I sort of put our heads together to figure out how to recreate this. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. It maybe wasn't 100% as jiggly or as fluffy as the ones we ate in Japan, but I would say it's pretty close. It was just such an amazing experience to travel to a country and to explore food culture with someone that knows it so well such as Rea. Appreciate it, respect it, but also put our own spin on it. I think that's something that I really, really loved doing. When I was in college, I really didn't know how to bake at all and I really wanted to save money, so I would actually take ingredients from my dining hall from the ice cream bar where they had chocolate chips or Nutella or peanut butter and bring them back to my dorm and throw them together with a little flour and try and come up with a baked good that was edible that I could feed my floormates that could get friends finally and one thing that I really found was that people just absolutely love cookies whether it's eating them, whether it's making them.
Cookies became the thing that I just really wanted to nail and this is a recipe that I'm really, really proud of. Coming up with this recipe, I knew it had to be better than store-bought cookie dough or things that people are used to taking home and baking and getting at the store, and I really looked into using different kinds of chocolate. I used to work at a bakery in New York where I was just absolutely in love with their chocolate chip cookies and I knew it needed to be chewy on the inside. I knew it needed to be a little crispy on the outside and it had to be this thing that you crave over and over and over again.
One secret that I did learn was that the dough should be resting for at least 24 to 36 hours because what that does is that helps the flour absorb all the egg and the sugar and the butter and really allow certain processes to start developing flavors inside the fridge that you would lose if you baked the cookie dough right away because I think it gives it a more caramel, toffee-like flavor which I absolutely love. Mozzarella stick and onion ring were one of my more proud creations.
One thing that I really love to do when I'm coming up with ideas is just to think of two really, really delicious things that people love and somehow combine it into something that's even more delicious. I really wanted to combine mozzarella sticks with something else, kind of lay awake at two A.M. Thinking what can I make with mozzarella sticks? As I was about to fall asleep, I think my brain just drifted off and thinking about Shrek and I was like, oh, onions! Like onion rings, like oh my God, that's so cool. And I was like wait, is this even possible? To quote the famous green ogre, George's are like onions.
Onions have layers and I just started to picture cross-section of onion with all its co-centric ring. I mentally isolated two of them. Turns out if you use sliced cheese, it's almost a perfect width. It still looks like an onion ring after it's been fried and it did taste like a mozzarella stick and it did taste like an onion ring. It was a very fun day. Five-layer brownie cheesecake, that was probably one of my greatest architectural feats if I would say so myself. I was actually starting engineering in college. Not really a good student to be honest, but one thing that I definitely did pick up was the ability how to approach a problem and how to look at it from certain angles especially when things don't exist.
A lot of times we are asked to do hypothetical questions like if you wanted to accomplish this, how would you go about achieving it? And I learned that the easiest way is to break down the problem into its parts and kind of almost work backward. Cookie dough, Oreos, and brownies are a very common combination and I wanted to take that further. I really wanted to turn the flavor profile of a triple-stacked brownie into something else. I wanted to turn it into more of this spectacle dessert that you could really wow everybody at a party with and I just absolutely love layers and clean layers, so that was something that I set out to do was to turn a triple-decker brownie into a cheesecake.
The challenge with this recipe is that all of these elements all bake at different times, different temperatures, and have different thicknesses. I kind of wanted to go after the vibe of when you go to the Cheesecake Factory and they sit down this slice of this beautifully cut and assembled cheesecake. I really didn't know how this was gonna go until I made it, and I had to do a lot of pre-planning and thinking and being able to try to predict how the food would behave in a way that I had never done before. I was hoping that the brownie batter would not get dry. I guess that the cream cheese in the mixture would give the brownie moisture. It was really gratifying to pull something like this off especially when you have never really done this before. I guess I felt really happy and relieved that it actually worked.
After the brownie and cheesecake were set, that's when I put the Oreos and the cookie dough on top. I don't try to do recipes a lot of times because I think I really enjoy the challenge of getting it right on the first or the second try. Kind of nerve-wracking to cut it open because you really don't know how it's gonna turn out until you actually slice it open and see the layers and to my luck, it really worked out well. I was able to see all four elements in their entirety. I love to spend time just thinking about the food and really just trying to guess and predict how food is going to behave and sometimes I really just sit down and write things down and try to map out or draw out how certain foods before and after and so for this one I thought about it a lot and made some decisions and that's the sort of approach that I like to take because there's something really cool about trying something that's completely new and then somehow landing it on the first try.
When I try to come up with an idea for a recipe, what I really wanna do is be able to make people go like wow and really show them something that they are familiar with but maybe in a new way or maybe something that is new to them, but in a familiar way. It's always about taking the element of something that people know, twisting it and making it cooler, making it different, combining it with other things. The end result is to make people go wow.
That's sort of usually the approach I take when I want to really showcase food to people in a cool way. So for the eight desserts in one sheet pan, it kind of came from a time where it was the holidays, I had seen a lot of videos kind of pop up around desserts and baking and pie and Food Network actually released this one video that was pretty cool. It was like four pies baked in the same sheet pan and to myself, I was like wow, that's really smart, but can I take it even a little further? I know that pie is just one dessert.
There are a lot of desserts out there and a lot of baked goods that people like to eat. My hunch was that around Christmas time, around the holidays usually at these potlucks or parties, there would be a widespread of desserts and a range of cookies to brownies to cheesecakes to pies. I think this crazy idea came about because in my head I was like, man, what happens if you just put all of those desserts together? Is there a way to take every single dessert that everybody loves and turn it into just one thing? I think that's how the idea was born is I basically thought of what can I use to serve this giant dessert? And how do I make sure that everybody gets a piece they want? Because sometimes when you bring a dessert to a party, not everybody likes brownies, not everybody likes cheesecakes, but is there a way to make sure that no matter who you are at the party, you're gonna have one piece that's gonna speak to you? And that's how I sort of designed this eight desserts in one sheet pan.
I wanted to build it in a way where if you cut in a precise manner, you would end up with just a bunch of different flavors. You wouldn't really cut it just along where the flavors met, but you'd be able to get pieces or bars that would have two flavors, three flavors, and the golden crown is when you get that piece with all four flavors in them.
The challenge with designing this was that no matter what piece you'd get, the flavor should still go together. So you kind of have to play this weird math mix and match game of doing these two flavors go together? Okay, if this goes together with this, then this must be next to here.
There was a lot of me drawing things on a piece of paper and crumpling it up like you do in the movies and throwing it in the trashcan. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get a certain layout of which desserts should go in which area in the pan, so that no matter which piece you got, it would always taste great.
That I was going to attempt something as crazy as this a couple years ago, I would have never imagined that. I feel like once I started to do more and more videos for Buzzfeed did I realize that food is pretty much everything to me. Not only am I someone who loves to eat, but it does make me happy and it does make me proud when I'm able to pull of a certain dish or a certain thing that I see on the internet because I'm not classically trained.
Everything is really just approaching something and trying to apply certain rules and properties about food to see if I can actually make this crazy thing happen. This mirror cake, I literally just saw it when I was scrolling through Instagram and I was like man, this cake is so cool.
How do they do that? It's like some crazy, beautiful technique and I wanna figure it out and after doing hours and hours of research and a couple of tests, I was able to pull off something that looked very close to what these professional pastry chefs and these cake decorators would make on Instagram. No matter what I do, I know I will always love to showcase food in a beautiful way and in a way that people have been seeing it before. No matter whether it's recipe videos or whether it's a story, I just want to be able to make people feel a wide range of emotions, excitement, happiness, joy, craving, and I don't think that'll ever change. We're pretty fortunate that we've been able to make an audience of millions of people.
There's nothing like being able to feed someone. I think that's really what I believe, and that's why I love to cook. It's not only that I'm able to make fun of food videos that can touch a lot of people on the internet but also be able to actually create food with my hands, share them with people that I care about or people that I wanna hang out with. It really fosters a great sense of companionship, friendship, and just a stronger connection between people, and great that we have to eat every day because otherwise, I might get bored. It's funny because when I started out, I was really just borrowing a camera from my floormate that I had made friends with because I gave them a cookie one time and just recording whatever I was baking that day or whatever I took from the dining hall and posting them on who knows where.
One day I was connected with a frozen yogurt chain because they wanted a little amateur videographer to come in and do these short little froyo videos. One day a Buzzfeed manager saw these videos and reached out to me and was like hey, would you ever wanna come and make a couple of food videos for us? And at that time Tasty did not exist.
The food internet situation was really nothing. When Tasty was born, I was along to see it grow and to really see how much it touched people's lives and I was really proud of that. We all love food and we all support each other and we all love to showcase with video in a way that is very unique to our styles. It's really cool to see people tag each other and being like oh my God, this reminded me of you. Oh by the way, how's it going? I haven't talked to you in five years and it was like that's kind of crazy is that this random cake got someone to mention someone else because they knew that someone would love this piece of content.
I think that was really what resonated with me and why I strived to push to make even better food videos day after day. I never ever think to myself like oh man like I gotta go to work today. It's always been like, oh, I wanna make this cool thing. I wanna get there as soon as possible. Food just really brings people together no matter who you are.
I can honestly say that 99% of my friends are my friends because I have given them food. I love making these videos not for myself, but for other people because I really love how food is cool and I wanna show them that. Thank You.
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