Arlyn Osborne Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of three baking books, including my latest, “Snackable Bakes.” Each Saturday, I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Arlyn Osborne. Arlyn is a freelance food writer, recipe developer, and content creator. She's about to release her debut book, “Sugarcane: Sweet Recipes from my Half-Filipino Kitchen,” which is filled with gorgeous photography and delicious recipes featuring Filipino flavors with Western techniques. Arlyn joins me to talk about her culinary journey from working in places such as Food Network and Food & Wine to writing for publications, including The Washington Post and Bon Appétit. And then we dive into her recipe for ube cheese pandesal, her take on the traditional Filipino bakery staple, and all I can say is wow, peeps. You've got to make this bread at home. Stay tuned for our chat.
Thank you to Plugrà Premium European Style Butter for supporting today's show. As some of you know, I've been a big fan of Plugrà for some time now and was introduced to it at my very first bakery job when I was just a newbie baker. Fast-forward to today, I'm a professional baker, cookbook author, and recipe developer, and I continue to rely on Plugrà for all my baking needs. My fridge is always stocked with Plugrà sticks and solids. I especially love that Plugrà contains 82% butter fat. The higher butter fat content means less moisture and more fat, and as bakers know, fat equals flavor. Plugrà butter is also slow-churned, making it more pliable and easy to work with. I do a lot of baking this time of year for work and for myself and my family. Comfy bakes, like my pistachio chocolate anytime buns and cinnamon sugar buttermilk donut holes, and I always reach for Plugrà unsalted butter. I've also been making a lot of yeasted breads lately, and I love the buttery flavor Plugrà adds to my dough. Plugrà Premium European Style Butter is the perfect choice, from professional kitchens to your home kitchen. Ask for Plugrà at your favorite grocery store or visit plugra.com for a store locator and recipes.
Let's check in with today's guest. Arlyn, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk ube cheese pandesal with you and so much more.
Arlyn Osborne:
Thank you, Jessie. I'm so excited to be here.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yay. So you grew up with your mom and dad, your dad was British, your mom was Filipino, and you have described your childhood home as not only devoid of home cooking, not a lot of home cooking, but also not exactly a home that was overflowing with love. And I know you ended up finding a connection between both love and cooking, but how did that connection even happen for you in light of the environment you grew up in?
Arlyn Osborne:
So cooking, I don't come from a long line of cooks. I didn't spend loads of time in the kitchen with my mom or my grandma. Cooking was not a common thing in my household growing up. It was an activity really reserved mostly for special occasions, things like birthdays, holidays, that sort of thing. Most of our meals, they really came from fast food chains or freezer aisles, whatever was quick and cheap and didn't require a lot of dishes. And I'm a Millennial, I grew up in the '90s in the Y2K era, so that was when cable was the hot thing, and Food Network was in their heyday. So every time you turned on their channel, there was someone on the screen showing you how easy it was to make X, Y, Z. And I was like, "I can do that." It was so educational. I feel like everything in food entertainment these days is all game shows, but back then, if you wanted to learn how to cook, you were watching Food Network, and I really wanted to learn how to cook.
That said, cuts of steak and chicken and even fresh produce was just not part of the household budget, but things like flour, sugar, eggs were really inexpensive, and so that is how and why I went the baking route. Also, I already have a sweet tooth, so that was perfect anyways. And like you said, too, my childhood was, this is another piece of the whole picture, my childhood was there were some problems. It was dysfunctional, and I think that, like it is for a lot of kids who grow up in that sort of environment, there were a lot of things that were out of my control, and cooking was a way for me to channel some sense of control. It kind of just helped me block out whatever external distractions there were, whatever chaos was going on at the time, and really gave me that sort of mental space to process things. And I think everybody has their own unique way of doing that. Maybe it's running or gardening or painting or journaling, just to kind of get into that meditative state.
Jessie Sheehan:
It also sounds like, I wonder if it was, not only love for others, but a little self-love, too, to give you. Baking could make you feel good in that way.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, like self-care.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, totally, totally.
Arlyn Osborne:
When you cook for someone, you don't cook for someone you hate. You're cooking for someone because it says, "I'm taking care of you."
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Was the decision to go to culinary school, was that one that you worried over or thought over or was that just like you knew that you were going to go to culinary school?
Arlyn Osborne:
No way. No, I had no idea that I would go to culinary school. I didn't even know there was this whole food media industry out there. When I graduated college, I got a job immediately in corporate sales. I knew that I wasn't going to like it even before I started, but that really just felt normal to me. How many people really love what they do. It's work. It just feels like that's part of life. So a couple of years in, Buzzfeed was blowing up, Buzzfeed Tasty, that was the thing, and Snapchat was blowing up, and that was kind of the first time I'd really seen there was this world out there. And I applied for an internship at Buzzfeed Tasty. I didn't get it, but it put me on this quest to try to find what that was. So eventually, I started hosting videos and developing recipes for this food media startup company called Spoon University.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know Spoon University.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. I was just doing it from home. I still had my day job. Eventually, they had secured a partnership with Food Network through Snapchat. So my videos would start playing on the Snapchat page with the Food Network logo, and that is when that world, it was more visible, more tangible, I felt like it was a possibility.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is that when you decided to go to culinary school?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. So I was like, "I'm going to do it. It's out there." So I told my boyfriend at the time, I was like, "Hey, I'm going to move to New York, so if this relationship is real, maybe come with me."
Jessie Sheehan:
Where were you living?
Arlyn Osborne:
We were in Raleigh, and we dated in college, so I was like, "Maybe let's try to live a big life. Who knows? Let's move to New York." We moved, and he's my husband now, and as soon as I got to New York, I went to culinary school.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know that after culinary school, you worked for brands like Food Network and you hosted a lot of Food Network Kitchen videos, which I loved watching them, Arlyn. You're so, so, so good on camera. You worked for Delish and Serious Eats, Food52, Washington Post. This is all over the years. But did you know when you left culinary school that you were going to want a career in food media as opposed to a career in restaurants or bakeries?
Arlyn Osborne:
Definitely. That's what I grew up watching. I knew I just kind of wanted to work in production and that sort of part of the food industry, but at the same time, I really didn't know what was out there. When I moved here, I was really just naive. I am from a small town, so I didn't know what was possible, but I knew that I definitely wanted to be in food media.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, when you do work, if you're writing for a media site, et cetera, you develop recipes that are both sweet and savory. I've seen both online. But I think you consider yourself a baker. Can you describe your baking style or your dessert style?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. So I have a lot of experience. I went to culinary school for just the standards, so I was covering both your traditional, which is just savory cooking, and we had a baking section or a pastry section as well. But you kind of go into it, especially when you're starting out, I don't think you're making a lot of decisions for yourself. You're kind of like, "This is the editorial request." When I went freelance after a Food Network, that was also it, too. I just kind of wanted to get my name out there, start getting bylines, and yeah, I was willing to do whatever, and I feel comfortable doing both.
But I do consider myself a baker. I love that process of how it is so meticulous, and I know that that frustrates a lot of people. People are like, "Oh, baking is so complicated. You can't just turn on the tunes and pour yourself a glass of wine and be just throwing flour around." I like that it's a little more rigid that there are these parameters you have to follow, the way you have to cream butter and sugar together until you know that it's really pale and fluffy, and I've always been into that.
But my baking style, I think, is something that you sort of figure out along the way as you are in this industry over time. So I really like to just kind of have classics as my foundation, but then bringing my own self into it, making it fun. Of course, I love really tropical flavors. I just am obsessed with coconut, and you'll see a lot of that in my cookbooks. So sorry to anybody who does not coconuts in every recipe.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love coconut so much, so you're speaking my love language. That's a great segue into your new book, which you brought me a copy of. I'm so excited, and I was lucky enough to blurb.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes, thank you so much.
Jessie Sheehan:
You're so welcome. The book is called “Sugarcane: Sweet Recipes from my Half-Filipino Kitchen.” Can you tell us about how your book deal came to be? Was it the kind of thing where you were at home, working away on a proposal? Did someone approach you? How did it happen?
Arlyn Osborne:
So writing a cookbook has been one of my goals for a while now, and I think when you are on your own being a recipe developer, that's probably one of the goals that you have in mind. I really didn't have an idea. I was kind of playing around with some other thoughts. It had not occurred to me to do a Filipino-American cookbook. I just didn't think anyone would be interested in that. I don't know. I hadn't had a lot of experience just writing about that stuff at that point. Of course, things have changed so much since the pandemic, and it was actually during the pandemic that I thought of this idea. So I have a recipe in there for a ube banana bread, and this was during the time when everybody in the pandemic was making banana bread. Remember that?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Arlyn Osborne:
So I was at my mom's house, and this is in the southern outer banks of North Carolina. She still lives there. So I was there, and I was just making some banana bread and she had a little jar of ube halaya, which is the purple yam jam in the fridge, and I was like, "Oh, I'm just going to swirl some of that in there. I'll just put that in there and see how that turns out." And it was really good. I was like, "I really like this." And then that night when I was trying to go to sleep, I just kept thinking about that, and I was like, "Maybe there's something there." So I put together a little proposal. I already had a literary agent, Sharon Bowers, she's with Folio Lit, and sent her this idea, and she was like, "Okay, yeah. I think this is a good idea." So she shopped it around, and that's how I met Jenny Wapner at Hardie Grant, and we made a deal pretty soon afterwards. So yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
In the book are 80 recipes for sweets and desserts with these extraordinary flavor combos, drawing on your Filipino heritage coupled with years of professional recipe development, and it's kind of a combination of these classic Filipino flavors with these more Western techniques. Talk to us about that.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes. So it does have a lot of Filipino ingredients and actual dishes, but a lot of Western influences. That, for me, is very intentional. I am from a very small town, I'm from a very white town, and there a lot of ... There were a couple of other Asian students in my school, but it wasn't something that brought us together. I think that this was a pre-social media era, so there was not this big vast platform of connectivity and visibility like there is now. So I think at that time, we just really didn't want to draw attention to that side of ourselves, because nothing positive ever really came from being different.
That's a very limiting mindset, but I think that finding yourself, knowing yourself, that takes time, and that is just a benefit of age. The older you get, you've spent more years with yourself, you kind of see more of the world, you have a better idea of what your identity is. And I think that's the most important part of a person's life, is knowing your identity. And also you want your identity to be seen by others, because it doesn't feel good when nobody understands you and nobody gets you and you're misunderstood all the time. And for me, food was a really big avenue to kind of figure that out.
So I'm half-Filipino, and for me, one of the biggest challenges of being mixed race is kind of always living in that middle ground. You're in this place where you have to interpret and just know that you're always going to not be fully one thing and not the other. And knowing that you have two sides of yourself, you're just in the middle, perpetually. There's no fully diving into one or the other, and it's hard to feel like, "Am I choosing the right one? Am I representing that side in the best way? Am I insulting anybody in the culture?" Because you don't want to do that, but it is a challenge. And so “Sugarcane” is a really great way for me to bring some attention to that perspective. It's not traditional, but I'm not the person to write that book.
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll be right back. Today's episode is presented by California Prunes, the best kind of prunes out there. I'm a big fan of California Prunes for two reasons. They're a great addition to your pantry when it comes to smart snacking and baking. California Prunes are good for your gut, your heart, and even your bones. They contain dietary fiber and other nutrients to support good gut health and vitamin K, copper, and antioxidants to support healthy bones. I've started making myself a daily smoothie, which is a great vehicle for incorporating healthy foods into your diet. One of my favorite combinations right now is blueberries and kale with some prunes added for natural sweetness and depth of flavor. When it comes to baking, you can use California Prune puree to replace some of the sugar, eggs or fat in a recipe. It's super easy to whip up. Just blend prunes and water together, and voila. You can also add California Prunes to any treat that calls for dried fruit, like bread, scones, cakes, and cookies. Prunes pair well with ingredients like chocolate, caramel, honey, coffee, even chilies. They also add sweetness and depth to savory recipes like chicken marbella, sauces, or stews. For recipe ideas and more, be sure to check out the California Prunes website at californiaprunes.org. Happy baking and happy snacking.
I've got great news, listeners. Jubilee 2024 is taking place Saturday, April 20th at Center 415 in Manhattan, and tickets are on sale now. Jubilee is the largest gathering of women and culinary creatives in the food and drink space in the US. It's a beautiful day of conversation and connection, and I hope to see you there. You can learn more and snag tickets at cherrybombe.com. Now back to our guest.
So now I want to talk about pandesals, and you've described them as Philippines' most beloved crumb-dusted bread roll, and you've said they're as ubiquitous, I love this, as bagels in New York, baguettes in France, it's iconic, a national treasure. Pandesal were usually bought in a bakery. People are not making their pandesal at home, generally, which is so interesting. And it's a bakery staple. It can be a standard breakfast item or a go-to choice for an afternoon snack. And I thought this was interesting, it actually translates to salt bread in Spanish, but they're not really salty, right?
Arlyn Osborne:
No. Yeah. I think that's interesting. It does translate to salt bread, but no, it's not salty at all. It's very much your standard bread roll, but it has that signature mark, that very fine breadcrumb dusting on top.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's an ideal canvas for spreading. So you have peanut butter, you have sweetened condensed milk.
Arlyn Osborne:
Nutella, you can dip it in hot chocolate or coffee. Yes, it's just a blank canvas for anything.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm like, "Should I picture almost like a Parker House roll or like a dinner roll you get at a ..."
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, like a dinner roll, it's like a dinner roll, a basic dinner roll.
Jessie Sheehan:
And this is also really interesting about pandesal. So you said in 2019 on the Interweb or on Instagram, pandesal got more flavorful and colorful. Can you unpack that?
Arlyn Osborne:
I also want to point out that I love that you chose the ube cheese pandesal, because this was actually the recipe I made the most out of the entire book. I just probably test, I couldn't get it right. I just was maybe made it like seven times just so she deserves the moment.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yay.
Arlyn Osborne:
But I love the ube cheese pandesal because it really shows what was happening during the world. So when I set out on this recipe, I was thinking of doing a pull-apart loaf, and I had tried out different things. And then I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to keep it the classic version." Classic is a loose term here because ube cheese pandesal was not a thing until around 2019. I am a bit of a food nerd, not in a gastronomical way, but more in a historical way. I just really think that food can uncover a lot about people and society and what was going on in the world at that time. And at the same time, what is going on in the world often impacts the food, what we eat and how we eat it. And ube cheese pandesal is a great example of that, because it was a pandemic food trend. Remember those? Like feta pasta? What was another one? There was pancake cereal?
Jessie Sheehan:
I made it for TikTok.
Arlyn Osborne:
Right? Yes. The TikTok thing. There was just so much, sushi-bake.
Jessie Sheehan:
That hot chocolate or that ... Yeah, sushi-bake. Remember it was like a coffee that you whipped, called like dalgo?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, dalgona. Yeah, the Korean coffee?
Jessie Sheehan:
Dalgona. I made that for TikTok, yeah.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. So there was all of those viral trends, and ube cheese pandesal was just something that happened during the pandemic.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is pandesal not usually made with ube, so it's not usually purple?
Arlyn Osborne:
No, it is just your basic standard bread. That way you can add your toppings that you want to it or dip it in whatever it is that you've got. Yeah, this kind of happened out of the pandemic, and it didn't wither away, though. It didn't just disappear. It's very much mainstream now, the concept of flavored pandesal. You can see it all over the place now if you go to a Filipino bakery.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also love that yours oozes with melty Velveeta cheese. I love you for picking Velveeta cheese.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, I love it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is that a cheese that's typical of a Filipino dessert? Is that just an Arlyn love of Velveeta? How did that happen?
Arlyn Osborne:
I do love Velveeta, but no, it's not just my choice. So cheese is a very common ingredient in Filipino desserts. They just love to put cheese in their sweets, which actually I think is so great. For example, there's an ice cream, it's called queso ice cream, and it's Filipino, and it's just so common. It's as common as chocolate and vanilla is in America, and it's just so sweet and creamy. But yeah, cheese is no stranger to desserts when it comes to Filipino cooking.
And the ube cheese is a very common flavor partnership in Filipino cooking as well. So when the purple pandesal came out in the pandemic, ube and cheese, that was from the get-go. You really want a cheese that's melty, that's really melty. You can't get all of the cheeses that are available in the Philippines, but Velveeta is one that is very melty and will give you that kind of ooey-gooey center, so that's why I went Velveeta.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. And then also yours also has the ube halaya, the purple ube jam, which I love. There's a saltiness, it balances the sweet, there's that vanilla flavor of the ube, which is the Philippines most beloved tuber. And then I love that rather than these bread crumbs, which are traditional, you have gram cracker crumbs over the top. I thought that was great. All right, so we're going to talk about ube cheese pandesal. So first things first, we're going to make the dough. So in a small sauce pan, and I wonder, do you have a favorite type, or are we just talking about a metal pot from restaurant supply?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, just like your typical something stainless steel. I have a copper little one that I like.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So in a small sauce pan, we're going to melt unsalted butter over low heat, and then we're going to whisk in some whole milk. Once the butter melts, we whisk in the whole milk?
Arlyn Osborne:
I really like a whisk that's small and one that's slim so it can get into those corners, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Corners. And we're going to heat the milk and the butter together until an instant-read thermometer registers about 110 to 115. So two questions. One, is there a certain style of thermometer you like, and second, are we looking for that temperature, because when we add the yeast, we don't want it to kill the yeast?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes, exactly. I like a digital instant-read. To me, I think that's one of the most important kitchen equipment tools you can have. So that's how I like to check everything, and it just reads it right away so you don't have to wait. If you wait, it can change.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to remove from the heat. Once it reaches temperature, we're going to add some granulated sugar, sprinkle in some active dry yeast, and we're going to whisk to combine. Can we use instant if we want?
Arlyn Osborne:
You can use instant. I've always used active dry yeast. So for me, that's just kind of my go-to.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Now, we're going to let that sit undisturbed until it gets foamy, which that'll be our sign that we know our yeast is working, for about five minutes. We're now going to add some melted butter, and I wondered about this. Could we use softened butter, or is a pandesal always made with melted butter, is that a choice you made?
Arlyn Osborne:
It's usually made with melted butter, and the butter's already in the pan with the milk and stuff.
Jessie Sheehan:
Of course, but I was wondering, I could imagine a recipe where you heat up the milk, you add your active dry yeast to kind of activate it, and then you're adding softened butter to the dough.
Arlyn Osborne:
Right. For me, I just wanted to make it easy, so I elected everything to just happen in one little pan if possible.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. So now, we're going to whisk in the ube halaya, which is a jam. Can you describe the jam and where do we get it if we want it to purchase it?
Arlyn Osborne:
You can find it in any Filipino grocery store, sometimes even just a standard Asian grocery store. I've even seen it in World Market, so that's an option. It's made of ube, which is kind of like the sweet potato version, but it's a yam. I know there's a very specific distinction between a yam and a sweet potato. So it does have that texture. It's kind of a little heavier, a little thicker, but it's sweetened, so it's kind of sticky, too.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is it purple?
Arlyn Osborne:
It's purple. Oh, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Love, love, love, love. So we're going to whisk in our jam, an egg, a little bit more granulated sugar, some ube paste. So the ube paste, I imagine, is different than the ube jam. It's not sweetened. Is the paste something you purchase, or is it something you can actually make from ube?
Arlyn Osborne:
The ube paste, it's an extract, but it's called an ube paste because it's kind of thicker than an extract, and it also already has the coloring added. And again, you can find that at a Filipino grocery store or an Asian supermarket. You can buy most of this stuff, too, online.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now in a stand mixer bowl, and are you using a KitchenAid?
Arlyn Osborne:
I have a KitchenAid.
Jessie Sheehan:
In your stand mixer bowl, we're going to whisk in some all-purpose flour and some kosher salt. Then we're going to add that yeast mixture that has the jam in it, that has the paste in it, and we are going to stir just with a fork first in our stand mixer bowl until a very sticky dough forms. Then we'll place the bowl on the mixer, fit it with our dough hook attachment, and we're going to knead on medium speed for about 7 to 10 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl halfway through, until the dough is smooth and stretchy and no longer sticky.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're picturing a, is it like a bright, beautiful purple dough like this?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, it is pretty.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, my gosh. Now, we're going to grease a large bowl. Are you like a restaurant supply kind of gal? Is it a metal bowl from restaurant supply? Is it a glass bowl?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. I was using a glass bowl for a long time. I like the metal bowls now. They're just so much lighter.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah. I'm a big glass bowl gal, I think, because I love my microwave so much.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, I love my microwave, true.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you can stick it in with your chocolate and your butter. So we're going to grease a large bowl with cooking spray. I had a question. Sometimes, if I'm making a dough, a yeasted dough in my stand mixer, I'll kind of scoop out the dough from the bowl, spray with the other hand, and then plop the dough back in so I just don't have to use an extra bowl.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, that's smart. I just kind of spray. You could put it in the stand mixer bowl, yes, that's true, but I just really like to move it over for some reason. I think it's just the way I've done it, and I can kind of judge ...
Jessie Sheehan:
How much it rises.
Arlyn Osborne:
... how much it rises a little better.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to shape the dough into a ball, place that ball in our bowl, and flip the ball over so it's greased on all sides. We're going to cover tightly with plastic wrap. Recently, I did not cover tightly enough with plastic wrap when I was making a yeasted dough, and a dry surface was on the top of the dough, and then the dough never rose, because it ... Oh, it was so frustrating.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, I know.
Jessie Sheehan:
So cover tightly, peeps. A very important direction. And we're going to let this rise in a warm place until puffed, nearly doubled in volume, about two hours.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, a warm rise.
Jessie Sheehan:
And when you're looking for a warm ... Yes, a warm rise, probably because of the jam and the paste.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. When you're looking for a warm spot, I have a convection oven, and I'm often putting it on the back of the oven where it might even be a warm fan. Recently, I tried actually turning on my oven and then turning it off.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, I do that too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Do you? Is that sort of what you do when you're making this if you want to speed up that two hours a little bit?
Arlyn Osborne:
Right. So I love that you asked this question, because there's a section in the beginning of my cookbook, and it's just little notes and stuff. And I just put the important things, because I feel like that's a section no one ever really wants to look at, but one of them is a warm place. I'm like, "Here's what a warm place is." For me, I consider a warm place to be something that's around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. You can get to that a lot of different ways. If it's a summer day, I just put it outside in the shade, cover it with a little tea towel so it's not getting hit by the sun. If it's winter out in the world, I just will put a space heater on, put it in the bathroom or something or the closet and let it get really hot. And yeah, the oven trick is, like you said, I have a digital thermometer for my oven as well. I'm very particular. I like to keep an eye on what the numbers are, but I'll just make sure that I turn the oven off.
Jessie Sheehan:
And are all of those things, will all of those decrease the two hours, or actually that's what you need for the two hours?
Arlyn Osborne:
That's what you need for the two hours, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's good to know.
Arlyn Osborne:
It's the ube halaya. I think it really weighs down the dough, so it really takes two hours for you to see it kind of rise.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is it the kind of dough that you would be okay with either forming it into buns and then refrigerating it overnight, or even taking all of the dough at this point and refrigerating it? Do you consider this recipe one that you could make ahead?
Arlyn Osborne:
You can make ahead. Oh, yeah. A lot of those recipes in there, like the cinnamon rolls they have, which are actually mango rolls and the panda cocoa sticky buns, including the pandesal, I include directions for how to make it ahead of time, because I just don't think it's realistic if you want to make cinnamon rolls for you to do that all in the morning. "Oh, but it's so much work." So yes, you could let it rise the two hours, the first rise, you would form it into balls, and then put it in the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Nice.
Arlyn Osborne:
Finish the rise the next day.
Jessie Sheehan:
Once you've formed into balls, do you let it rise a little bit on the counter before it goes in the fridge, or do you just stick it right into the fridge after they're formed?
Arlyn Osborne:
I just stick it right into the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, great. So now we're going to assemble our buns. We're going to press the dough down with our fist to expel any air and transfer to an unfloured work surface. Now unfloured just because the dough, it's not terribly sticky.
Arlyn Osborne:
It's not sticky. It shouldn't be leaving any sticky residue on your hands or anything like that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great. And we're going to divide the dough into 20 portions. We're going to keep the portions loosely covered with plastic wrap while we work. We're going to line a sheet pan with parchment paper. I wondered if you had a favorite sheet pan?
Arlyn Osborne:
I love a Nordic Ware heavy sheet pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. With sides?
Arlyn Osborne:
With sides.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. We're going to line it with parchment paper, and we're working with one portion of dough at a time, we're going to cup our hand over the dough, roll it around in a circular motion against the work surface until it forms a smooth ball. I think it was Claire Saffitz, when she was on the podcast, talked about it kind of almost imagining ball bearings on the bottom of the-
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah. I listened to that one, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
I thought that was such a smart way to think about it.
Arlyn Osborne:
It is. That's a great way to explain that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, because it's a trick that once you're doing it sort of makes sense, but it's not easy to describe.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, it's not like a picture, too. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now using your hand, you're going to flatten the ball, this is an interesting stage, but we're going to flatten the ball into a two-and-a-half-inch round. And then we're going to add two teaspoons of the cold ube halaya. Why cold?
Arlyn Osborne:
Cold because you can maneuver it a little bit easier. If it's so warm, it just slides around. It's a mess.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is it the kind of product you keep in the refrigerator anyway?
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, yeah. You keep it in the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
And now we've used it twice in the recipe, right? Once in the dough, and now once in the filling.
Arlyn Osborne:
And now in the filling.
Jessie Sheehan:
And one more question. This is interesting. The halaya is something that when you're at your grandmother's house, it might be on the table as one of the dips.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. So I love that you're now incorporating it into the bun itself through the baking process. So we add the cold ube halaya to the center of the dough. We press one inch piece of the Velveeta cheese. Are we kind of pressing it on top of the halaya?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yeah, we're pressing it onto the halaya, and also the cheese should be in a little coin.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Literally a round coin.
Arlyn Osborne:
Literally a round coin, and that just was something I figured out during the testing process. I started with just a cube, but it was not spreading out enough to where you could get a bite. Every bite had a little piece of cheese. So if you flatten it out, you just cover more surface area.
Jessie Sheehan:
So just out of curiosity, so we take our Velveeta block, we cut it into small cubes, and then we kind of manipulate the cube into a coin shape.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's why Velveeta's brilliant, right?
Arlyn Osborne:
It's so great, it's so easy.
Jessie Sheehan:
You can manipulate it. Love it, love, love, love. Now we're going to bring up the edges of the dough and sort of seal in the halaya and the Velveeta and pinch it to seal. Then we're going to flip it over and dip the smooth side of the bun where there's no seal into the graham cracker crumbs, and they just stick?
Arlyn Osborne:
And they just stick on pretty well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, great.
Arlyn Osborne:
If they don't stick on, you can brush it with a little bit of water if you need to just kind of make it-
Jessie Sheehan:
And was that just like a brilliant Arlyn moment where you're like, "Oh, I'm not going to do breadcrumbs, I'm going to do graham cracker crumbs," or was there a process of trying out different things?
Arlyn Osborne:
I knew that I wanted to do something sweet since this was going to be more of a dessert bread. And you could do the regular breadcrumbs. That's fine if that's what you had. But I just had graham crackers for all the other pie recipes I had done, so I was like, "Let me try that." I love it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, we're going to place the bun seam side down, so the graham cracker crumb up on the lined parchment pan. We're going to arrange the buns in five rows of four, spacing them about one inch apart. We're going to cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until puffed and expanded in size about 50% for about an hour. The buns will be touching, but the gaps between them should be almost closed when they're ready to go.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes, when they're ready to go. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, we're going to preheat the oven to 350, and we're going to bake until the puffed buns are touching, and an instant thermometer inserted into the side of one that's in the center of the pan. Explain that to us.
Arlyn Osborne:
So you always want to test a bun in the center, because the edges are going to cook first, so the buns around the edges. And same with a cake, the edges are going to cook first, they're going to get brown, that's why they brown. You want to test one of the buns in the center. Now, you don't really want to just stick this one in the middle like you normally would. If it didn't have a filling, you could just stick that right into the center. But you stick it into the center, there's going to be cheese that's going to be hot. So you want to stick it into the side to test the bread part.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Makes sense. And you want your thermometer to register about 190 degrees, and that'll be about 20 minutes. If you don't have a thermometer. Are there visual signs that we're looking for that tell us that they're ready?
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, yeah, yeah. You can kind of see that it's browned around the perimeter, those buns around the outside. Just kind of press the center on the side just to see that it's not really soft. You'll be able to tell.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now as soon as the buns are out of the oven, we're going to transfer them to a wire rack still on the pan.
Arlyn Osborne:
Still on the pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to cover loosely with a tea towel for 10 minutes, because this helps them soften a bit. Tell me about the softening. Is that a trick for any yeasted dough, or is this a-
Arlyn Osborne:
No, no, no.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, tell me, tell me.
Arlyn Osborne:
This is something that I just do whenever I'm making any type of bread product that I kind of want to be soft. Scones, too, I do this with scones. As soon as they come out of the oven, I put them on a rack, and then I just drape a little tea towel over because that heat gets trapped underneath the towel, and it just sort of creates this little steamy bath, I guess, for the buns. And if you just do that for 10 minutes or even 5 minutes, it just kind of softens things up.
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, love that, but I have some questions, because definitely I could see doing that with cinnamon rolls, particularly if you've maybe over baked them a little bit, and I think that's brilliant. But with a scone, I kind of like ... I guess everybody's scone recipes are different, but I kind of love the crispy. If you cover the scone, do you lose the crispy top?
Arlyn Osborne:
Not really. It kind of just makes that center a little bit softer. I don't know.
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey. I am going to be on a draping parade.
Arlyn Osborne:
I guess it depends. A draping parade. Let's go there.
Jessie Sheehan:
A draping journey. We're going to cover our buns for about 10 minutes with our tea towel, and then we're going to enjoy. We're going to store in a resealable plastic bag in the refrigerator or the freezer and reheat in the microwave. Now, do you store in the refrigerator because of the cheese?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes. So that's the tricky part. I don't ever recommend storing any bread or any cake in the fridge, because of course, that just really destroys the texture you've worked so hard to create. Of course, people will come after you if you don't say to put it in the fridge. I personally am okay to have them out for a day.
Jessie Sheehan:
I've been wondering about that a lot, because my next book that's coming out in September, it has a lot of cheese in it because it's like a savory baking book, and I am having people put everything in the refrigerator.
Arlyn Osborne:
It's so frustrating.
Jessie Sheehan:
Even though it goes against everything I believe in.
Arlyn Osborne:
I know. Even if it's like cream cheese, I'm like, "Well, that can sit out for a day. It's fine."
Jessie Sheehan:
But I even put everything with cream cheese in the refrigerator.
Arlyn Osborne:
I know. It's tough. It's a tough call.
Jessie Sheehan:
You can't win.
Arlyn Osborne:
You can't win.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, you can't win. And then reheating in the microwave I love. So there are a couple of other “Sugarcane” recipes that I wanted to talk about with you, just you can tell us a little bit about them. One is the cake you eat for your birthday every year, which is your ube coconut cake. Can you tell us about that? It sounds so delicious.
Arlyn Osborne:
Oh, it is so good.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I want you to make it for my birthday.
Arlyn Osborne:
It's so good. I'll make it for your birthday, Jessie. I promise.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Okay, good.
Arlyn Osborne:
So the ube coconut cake, that one is such a great recipe. It's a hefty cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Hefty in it's dense, or hefty ...
Arlyn Osborne:
It's heavy. It's a big cake. I think it's the only tiered cake in the book, so it is kind of made for your celebration, birthday events, things like that. So of all the cakes in the Philippines, the ube cake, that's the one, that's THE cake. It's got the crown. And interestingly enough, I'm from the American south, that's where I grew up, coconut cake is a really big thing. So, so good. So I immediately knew that I wanted to kind of merge these together. I didn't want to do a traditional ube cake, which is actually made with a chiffon or a sponge cake, so it's really light, it's really squishy, and that's very delicious. But I was like, "This is a great opportunity for me to combine ube with the coconut, Southern coconut cake," which ube and coconut, they go together so perfectly anyways.
So the coconut cake that I wanted to recreate here is a Southern coconut cake that's known as the three-day cake, I think that's kind of the name. The frosting is just sour cream, shredded coconut, and sugar. That's like it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow.
Arlyn Osborne:
And you add so much shredded coconut to the sour cream-sugar mixture, of it, enough to create something, the texture that holds. Now, this is the interesting part, too, because this is just something a lot of people probably don't want to do, and I just said I don't put a cake in the fridge, but this is one of those cakes that you put in the fridge. So you cover your layers of the cake. And my ube cake is just kind of like your traditional cake texture. It's not the chiffon. It has buttermilk in it, so it's really tender and soft and flavorful. Use-
Jessie Sheehan:
Purple?
Arlyn Osborne:
Purple, of course. So you slather it with this sour cream frosting, the coconut frosting, and you cover the whole thing in the frosting. Then you cover the whole thing in plastic wrap, so you're really kind of just keeping everything nice and tight. You let that marinate in the fridge for three days. I only do one day, because I don't really think you need the full three days, and it just does something to the cake. Like all that extra sour cream juice just kind of gets into the cake. It makes it really moist, and it allows the frosting to stiffen up a little bit. It is so good.
Jessie Sheehan:
It sounds incredible. I have a question, forgive me for not understanding, but is the three-day cake a Southern thing?
Arlyn Osborne:
It's a Southern thing, yeah. The three-day coconut cake is a Southern thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
How have I never heard of a three-day coconut cake? And they're always made with a sour cream frosting?
Arlyn Osborne:
It's usually a sour cream. I think there's some different variations. Some people use cool whip in it. I'm very particular about the shredded coconut. I like just the unsweetened kind so I can control the sugar, but I think a lot of people like it sweet.
Jessie Sheehan:
So would you do sour cream, coconut and sugar to sweeten it?
Arlyn Osborne:
And sugar to sweeten it. Unsweetened shredded coconut, sugar.
Jessie Sheehan:
But a traditional might be just the sweetened coconut and the sour cream. No sugar.
Arlyn Osborne:
And the sour cream, no sugar. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Fascinating. And Cool Whip coconut cake.
Arlyn Osborne:
Cool Whip is in there somewhere, I think. I don't know.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell us about mochi-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. Oh, my gosh.
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes. So I love mochi.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Who doesn't?
Arlyn Osborne:
Yes. I love chocolate chips, chocolate chip cookies. Who doesn't? So I knew that I kind of wanted to make a cookie that was really chewy. Plus, I am a very big chewy cookie person. I just have no room in my life for a cakey cookie. I think a crispy cookie is fine, just depending on the vibe, but I just love a chewy cookie. And mochi is something that I grew up eating, and I just love that chewy texture, and there are a lot of Filipino foods that also have that chewy rice texture. So putting those together felt like I'm going to create the chewiest chocolate chip cookie there ever was.
Jessie Sheehan:
Brilliant. I love that idea so much. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Arlyn.
Arlyn Osborne:
Thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Arlyn Osborne:
Thank you so much.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugrà Premium European Style Butter and California Prunes for their support. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and tell your baking buddies about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is Londyn Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.