Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, you know what’s hilarious? 

Dan Pashman: What?

Sohla El-Waylly: So the whole last few weeks of my pregnancy was like, really rough. So the whole time I just watched Top Chef. It's my comfort television. And the entire labor we watched Top Chef.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Every time a nurse would come in, they'd be like, is that Top Chef?

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: We rewatched all 20 seasons. 

Dan Pashman: Oh my god.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] I know! That sounds ... 

Dan Pashman: Did you have it on 24/7? That's im ...

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, the labor was, like, 19 hours, so it was on 19 hours. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Oh my God. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. When it was time to push, they were like, should we turn off Top Chef? 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: You're like, wait, I just wanna see who wins this challenge! 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Today, I’m talking with chef, recipe developer, and Youtube star Sohla El-Waylly. Sohla has a new cookbook out this week called Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook. It’s highly anticipated, because Sohla’s got a reputation as a complete food nerd with a deep knowledge of flavor and technique, and a passion for showing you that you too can do it. The book is a tome, over 650 pages, jam packed with photos and explanations, all presented with Sohla’s trademark enthusiasm.

Dan Pashman: We’ve had Sohla on the show here a couple of times over the years but I’ve never had a chance to really dig into her back story, to understand where her passion for cooking and helping others to cook, comes from.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: It started when Sohla was growing up in California’s San Fernando Valley, in a first generation Bangladeshi-American family. I asked Sohla to read an excerpt from the introduction to her new cookbook.

Sohla El-Waylly: I had that stereotypical, overprotective, first gen, Asian-American kid upbringing. I wasn't allowed to talk to boys who weren't my cousins. I couldn't go to dances, and I definitely didn't date living under that roof. But my parents were really relaxed about other things. They were okay with me staying up all night baking cheesecakes. They let me paint not just my room, but nearly every room in the house with whatever technique I picked up that week watching home renovation shows. And neither one blinked an eye when I regularly started tiny fires in the backyard. It was my Amu’s fault because she told me about how, as a young girl, she'd dig fire pits in her yard to cook rice and lentils in makeshift walnut shell pots. So I did, too. 

Dan Pashman: How much rice and lentils can you fit in a walnut shell? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Like ... like a pinch. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: And a child's pinch, you know? So maybe three grains of rice? 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Sohla El-Waylly: And a couple of split lentils. It's a comfort food kind of thing. My mom would make it a lot when it rained. And we would always have that with fried potatoes.

Dan Pashman: Mmm.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mojo potatoes in the style of Shakey's. That's not a traditional Bangladeshi thing.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: It was just our comfort food. 

Dan Pashman: Sohla’s mom was, and is, an incredible cook, and she enlisted her daughter from a young age to help her in the kitchen. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I didn’t have a whole lot of toys. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: So yeah, I was just helping with a lot of simple prep. Washing stuff, washing rice was one of the first lessons that I think probably every single Asian kid can relate to. Picking through lentils — which nowadays when you buy lentils they're clean and there's no rocks, but I'm a million-years-old so back then there were little pebbles in there and so we'd spread it out on a tray and I'd spend an afternoon picking the rocks out. 

Dan Pashman: And what kind of a cook was your mom?

Sohla El-Waylly: My mom is very precise. She's a home cook, but you wouldn't know it based on how she works. She does a lot of prep lists, game plans. Out of our home kitchen, my mom would regularly have dinner parties for, like, 100 people on the fly. 

Dan Pashman: A hundred? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. We always had a huge stack of folding chairs in the garage so they could, like, throw these spontaneous dinner parties. And I would always sit down and do the gameplan with her. It was our favorite thing to do. 

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: We would talk through the menu together, even when I was really little. And then we'd do a grocery list and break it down based on, like, the aisle. So I learned about how you design a menu, how you decide what foods are going to go together, and how you decide what you're going to feed for a particular crowd. So that's — I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her growing up, and that's really my first culinary education. 

Dan Pashman: Sohla’s second culinary education arrived via daytime TV.

Sohla El-Waylly: My mom worked every day and sometimes she couldn't pick me up from school, so she'd drop me off at an aunty's. And this aunty was really into food, but she was really into Western food. I believe Martha Stewart was on every day at 4:00. 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): Hello and welcome to Martha Stewart Living. It's Easter next week, and today's program is filled with recipes and ideas ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: Her kids hated it, so they would, like, leave the living room. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And it was just me and her watching Martha Stewart and I'd be taking notes. And it was really exciting because she would try and cook all those things that we would watch on Martha Stewart. 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): On our program, we'll show you how to make the most mouthwatering French toast you’ve ever tasted ... 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): A great way to make simple drop biscuits ... 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): Today, we’ll be making mile-high lemon pie ... 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): I’ll show you how to make luscious pound cake ...

Sohla El-Waylly: So that was where I learned about things like chocolate chip cookies and brownies and more American kind of stuff, like how to roast a chicken. 

CLIP (MARTHA STEWART): If you really want to be successful with chicken, you should cook it classically, like your grandmother ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: My mom was not really into Western food. Like she hates pasta to this day. She thinks it's the stupidest thing in the world. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: She's like, why would you eat pasta when you've got rice? We've got this beautiful sella basmati rice! 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Sohla El-Waylly: So it was fun to get all these different culinary perspectives from a really young age. 

Dan Pashman: Those afternoons Sohla spent watching Martha Stewart marked the beginning of a life-long love affair with cooking shows and reality TV — especially cooking competition shows like Top Chef, which as she said earlier, she watches with her husband Ham. He’s also a chef. 

Sohla El-Waylly: When Ham and I watch it, every single time, even if we've watched a challenge a million times, we like, talk about what we would do if we were in the challenge. So it's like a fun little brain exercise. We don't like, passively watch it. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's a very active activity. 

Dan Pashman: It's almost like sports fans.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Like you're rewatching like, great, great games in sports history and then you're like, oh, what a terrible call by that coach, they should have run a different play!

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. Like there's this one scene that we love from Top Chef that we watch all the time. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: Okay. I want to hear about this. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's the season where Hung won, and they do a relay race and like, basically there's two teams and they each have to prep four things.

CLIP (TOM COLICCHIO): One chef will shuck 15 oysters, one will finely dice five onions, one to break down four chickens ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: And one of the things they have to prep is breakdown chickens.

CLIP (TOM COLICCHIO): It’s good. Move ...

Sohla El-Waylly: And Hung breaks down these chickens so fast. Like, I've never seen anyone break down a chicken that fast. 

CLIP (CONTESTANT 1): Hung came in with the knives and he butchered down that chicken in like, 2 minutes, man. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And everyone around him is in shock at how fast he breaks down the chickens. 

CLIP (CONTESTANT 2): He destroys those chickens. And even Tom is like, you gotta be kidding me. 

Sohla El-Waylly: So we rewatch that over and over again because it's just — we just love seeing someone with that much like, pure skill. I also like people — watching them struggle and get over their struggles. It just feels like real cooking. 

Dan Pashman: But long before Sohla started watching Top Chef, she was tackling ambitious cooking challenges of her own. She remembers one time, when she was maybe 9 or 10, she got it in her head that she wanted to make a genoise for Mother’s Day. It’s a light sponge cake.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's a recipe that requires a dozen eggs. So that was a big deal, you know, to clean out all the eggs in the fridge when you're a kid. And you have to fold it really well, whip it — to get it like, really light and airy.

Dan Pashman: It's got a very specific technique. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah. And I didn't understand that, so it was an omelet. And ... 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Sohla El-Waylly: It was a sweet omelet — an omelet you don't want to eat. So I was just sitting on the floor crying, which is how a lot of early cooking experiences ended up — on the floor crying, locked in the bathroom crying, you know? And then my dad came home after a long day of work and he just sees me crying. He asked me what was wrong and I was like, "Oh, I used all the eggs on this cake. It's terrible." And then he just left and he came back with a dozen eggs for me to try it again. And that was it. He didn't say anything else. He just said, "Just make it again. Who cares?", and it was still bad. It was a little bit better ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: But it was not. It was not correct. It was not a correct genoise. But it turned that, like, negative experience into a really positive one. And it taught me that, like, you just have to try again. 

Dan Pashman: There are kids who like to cook and who like to spend time in the kitchen with their parents. It seems like you had, from a very young age, like an especially strong degree of that.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Dan Pashman: Like, a lot of kids would have had to be dragged into the kitchen to pick rocks out of lentils or take notes while watching Martha Stewart. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: So what do you think it was that drew you in that was so compelling to you? 

Sohla El-Waylly: You know, I think a big part of it was that I didn't get along well with my family, or like, the people in our close community. I grew up in a very conservative community. So I felt — from a really young age, I knew I didn't, like, fit in, and I felt very separate from everyone. I knew really early on that religion wasn’t for me. I asked a lot of questions at the mosques, which didn’t go over well. But the one time where I didn't feel like everyone hated me was when I was cooking something. You know, even at the mosque, you show up with a tray of samosas, no one cares. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: So food is the one thing where our family could get along. Even now, when I haven't talked to my mom for a while, she'll call me and just ask me about food and it's just how we reconnect. And I think I learned early on that you can connect with anybody, no matter how different you are and how differently you see the world, over a good meal. We could be fighting and screaming over something and then I'd make a chicken parm at my pretend restaurant called "Mangez Moi", and we'd all sit down and have a nice time. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And I didn't realize how bad the name "Mangez Moi" was until I took French in high school. [LAUGHS] I was like oh that’s not… 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] For our non-French speakers, it means "eat me", but ...

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHING] Yeah …

Dan Pashman: By the time Sohla was a teenager, cooking was all she wanted to do. It seemed like a career she could pursue, maybe a way out of the conservative religious community she grew up in. But for her family… 

Sohla El-Waylly: I mean, they loved that I cooked because they didn't think it would become a career, right? They were like, she's going to be an excellent housewife. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Right.

Sohla El-Waylly: No, they're very traditional. So, you know, they wanted me to get an arranged marriage and have a whole bunch of kids and just be a housewife. 

Dan Pashman: Sohla’s parents also knew firsthand how hard a life in the food industry could be. Her dad worked at Taco Bell for 25 years.

Sohla El-Waylly: He started out just, you know, as one of the cooks, eventually became the manager.

Dan Pashman: Later, her dad bought a Baskin Robbins franchise that he and Sohla’s mom still operate today. Sohla says it was an all-consuming job for her dad, so he wasn’t home a lot.

Sohla El-Waylly: I love how much they work. I think it's amazing to work 14 hours a day somewhere. But I think their goal was for us to never work that hard. Like, it's not what my dad wanted to do. So like, he didn't come to America thinking he was going to be a Baskin Robbins owner, but he’s put everything into it and if you want to sit down and talk to him about like, how to make the perfect cappuccino blast, he'll talk to you for hours.

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And I think that’s really cool! So I think the main thing I took away from that was just like, being passionate with what you do, no matter what other people think.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: When she was a kid, cooking had brought Sohla and her family together. But as she got older, it started to become a wedge. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I really didn't want to go to college at all. I just wanted to cook, but it didn't seem like, really possible, you know? Especially when you're that young, you don't really feel like you have a say in your life. So I just went to college anyways and I hated it. I really hated it. I really struggled to get along with anybody because I just didn't want to be there. I was so depressed. 

Dan Pashman: At the end of freshman year, Sohla dropped out.

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: And then I had like, a year — a really terrible year. I just worked random jobs. I didn't have a steady place to live, you know? So sometimes I was living on people's couches. Sometimes I was living in a car. I got married to some random guy that I met who was younger than me! So it was a — [LAUGHS]. We were both stupid. We were both stupid and poor and just, like, living in weird situations. Uh …

Dan Pashman: So like, what did your parents think that you were doing? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, I just left. I lost contact with everybody. I didn't want anyone in my life, you know? I just wanted to get away from everything. 

Dan Pashman: After about a year of couch surfing and working odd jobs, Sohla decided to go back to college and finish her degree. She hated every minute of it, but she made it through. Then, despite the weight of family pressure, she started looking around for a job in a restaurant. She’d known her whole life that she wanted to be a chef. Now she was finally going for it.

Sohla El-Waylly: It took me a really long time to finally decide that I was going to do this, like, seriously. And I think it was just coming to terms with the fact that it meant I was going to disappoint a lot of people. 

Dan Pashman: And once you made that decision, how did you feel about it? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Very scared. Very scared. [COUGHS] And it was very hard to stick with it because my parents deployed all the aunties and uncles to call me and tell me how I was ruining my life and ruining their life. And, you know, it's like you really have to, like, turn all of that off and focus. And I think all it did was make me focus more. 

Dan Pashman: Sohla’s goal was to work in fine dining, but she struggled to break into that corner of the industry at first.

Sohla El-Waylly: I got a lot of jobs at, like, you know, chain restaurants, but you don't do a whole lot of cooking at places like that. You have a set menu, a lot of things are in bags, a lot of things are pre-portioned. You’re not making dressings. But I really wanted to go to a place where you're making, like, everything from scratch, and eventually, this one pub owner gave me a shot. It was a pub on Ventura Avenue called the Fox and Hounds. The owner was a former bouncer there. And someone took a chance on him, so he was really into taking chances on people. The whole team there were people who, like — it was just like a crew of misfits, you know? He was just, like, a really nice guy who believed in everybody and he got the best out of everyone because of it. So it was the first place where I like, cooked hot food from scratch. 

Dan Pashman: Sohla’s job was to cook full English breakfasts for the soccer fans who came to the pub to watch matches.

Sohla El-Waylly: And because this was in L.A., sometimes the games were like at 3 a.m. because they're, you know, somewhere else in the world.

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And there'd be all these, like, really intense soccer fans who want this, like, full English breakfast, which — an English breakfast has a lot on it. You've got bangers, rashers ...

Dan Pashman: Bangers are sausages, rashers is ham or bacon. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Mushrooms, grilled tomatoes. And like, I didn’t know how to set up a line. So normally when you pick something up in a restaurant, you like prep stuff out, like you have your tomatoes sliced, you have your mushrooms cooked, you're just heating it up. And I didn't know anything, so I was doing everything to order. 

Dan Pashman: So every time someone ordered an English breakfast, you started slicing mushrooms? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes. It was terrible. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes. I learned quickly, though, because that first shift, I just cried. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

[LAUGHING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, Sohla locks eyes with the love of her life — over a pile of chicken carcasses. Stick around.

MUSIC

 

+++ BREAK +++

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. And in case you missed the special announcement we dropped into the feed a few days ago — big news. My cookbook is now available for pre-order! It’s called Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. It’s a collection of non traditional pasta sauces, so this is not your nonna’s cookbook, okay? You know, after cascatelli came out, so many people sent me pics of what they were making with it, and so much of what I saw was the same few recipes. So I set out to make a cookbook to show you that there is so much more that you can and should be putting on your pasta.

Dan Pashman: Now, pre-orders are a really good way to support any author because they show publishers and booksellers that they should care about this book. So I hope that you’ll pre-order it. And if you want to pre-order a signed copy that’s part of a special holiday pasta gift box from Sfoglini, we got that too. If you order now, you'll get the six boxes of pasta, plus a special postcard with a sneak preview recipe immediately in time for the holidays, and the signed cookbook will arrive in March. All the info is at sporkful.com. Thanks.

Dan Pashman: Now back to my conversation with chef and Youtube star Sohla El-Waylly, who before the break was frying up full English breakfasts at a pub in L.A. It was the owner of that pub who encouraged Sohla to apply for culinary school. In 2008, she left California, flew across the country and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, also known as the CIA. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I was the most intense person in culinary school. Like, I was there for a reason and it was to prove everyone wrong. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: Hey, that's often the best motivation. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, it's kind of like — it’s become my mantra so much that Ham actually makes fun of me. And I'll just like — I'll change the baby's diaper and I'll be like, "I did it! No one said I could do it, but I did it!". 

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: He’s like, okay.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: So Sohla took culinary school extremely seriously, but her time at the CIA wasn’t quite what she was expecting.

Sohla El-Waylly: I chose the CIA because I grew up watching that program on PBS, ``. So I was really excited about it. But culinary school is kind of terrible. 

Dan Pashman: Why? 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's a little bit of a scam. The classes are really overcrowded and cooking is all about practice and they don't give you enough products to actually practice. For when we learned how to butcher a chicken, I had to share a chicken with a partner. How do you — how much do you learn about butchering a chicken with half a chicken?

Dan Pashman: Fortunately, Sohla found someone else in culinary school who wanted to butcher more chickens.

Sohla El-Waylly: That's where I met Ham and this is what we bonded over. We both really wanted to get good at chicken, so we just bought a whole bunch of chickens ... 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And did it ourselves! [LAUGHS] You know? And that's when I knew. I was like, oh, we're getting married.

Dan Pashman: So culinary school wasn't a total waste. 

Sohla El-Waylly: No, it wasn't. It’s great, maybe you can meet a Ham of your own, but you're not gonna learn anything about cooking. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: Go for the ... 

Dan Pashman: The romance. 

Sohla El-Waylly: The romance, not for the food. Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: After the CIA, Sohla worked in several high end, high pressure restaurants in New York City.

Sohla El-Waylly: The place that I liked working the most was also the one where I was the most miserable. It's changed a lot because the laws have changed.

Dan Pashman: Okay. 

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: But when I worked there, the hours were from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And that's why I wanted to work there. Like, that was what pulled me in. And it's really — it was really intense. Some guys would sleep there at night. And the average length that someone would work there was about three weeks. So making it a year there, is like a really big deal. Like, only a handful of people can survive working at a place like that. And I'm really glad that I did, [LAUGHS], because there's not a lot of places these days where you can prep out your whole station and work the service. It's pretty broken up now because people are just doing eight-hour shifts. So you either have the early shift where you prep or you have the later shift where you cook on the line. And this was a place where I got to do both. And everything that I picked up on the line, I prepped. And it's pretty rare to have that experience. 

Dan Pashman: And sorry, when you say picked up on the line, that means cooked? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes, yes. 

Dan Pashman: Okay. I'm just translating the chef lingo. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, yeah. Sorry, yeah.

Dan Pashman: So ... right, because in a lot of restaurants, you have one person who cuts the vegetables or partially cooks them or carves the chicken or whatever. And then you have another person who actually takes those prepped ingredients and cooks them. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: But this was an opportunity for you to be able to follow these dishes through from the very beginning to the very end. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: What did you like about that? 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's all on you. You can't blame anyone. There's no one to rely on. You're totally like, this is your station. It's almost like you're running your own little restaurant.

Dan Pashman: In 2016, Sohla and her husband Ham actually did open their own little restaurant together in Brooklyn. They called it Hail Mary because that’s what it was — a desperate effort to realize that long-held dream of owning their own place. After they couldn’t find outside investors, they decided to use their own money to open, which is pretty unusual among restaurateurs these days, especially in New York, where the cost of opening a restaurant is steep. Their original vision was kinda an upscale diner where patrons could enjoy gourmet versions of classic American dishes. 

Sohla El-Waylly: We called it a diner at the time, but now with more perspective, it only looked like a diner. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, you did the renovation yourselves in two weeks?

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, we did. It was really poorly done.

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: It was really bad. And I remember, like, a day before we were going to open, Ham's dad came by and he was like, "These floors are terrible." And we're like, "No one’s gonna look at the floors." He’s like, "They're terrible." So we rented a sander from Home Depot and stayed up the whole night and sanded the floors and like, finished them with varnish. This is where my previous kind of home renovation experience came in handy. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And like, it smelled like varnish when we opened! That stuff takes a while to dry. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Sohla El-Waylly: But yeah, it was really poorly done. All the electrical work, like we got our lamps from China. They were like fake Tiffany lamps, and they had an extra wire that I didn't know what to do with, so I just cut them off. 

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: So ... 

Dan Pashman: And it didn't burn down! 

Sohla El-Waylly: It didn't burn down. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I still have one of the lamps. 

Dan Pashman: The menu at Hail Mary was also a bit all over the place.

Sohla El-Waylly: The theme of the food was whatever we wanted. And it didn't make any sense because Ham was going more fancy and I was going more like, Americana, so the food was just chaos — whatever we felt like making. The menu changed every day. We went through so much paper. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: One of the most popular items on the menu was artisanal pop-tarts that Sohla made by hand.

Sohla El-Waylly: The filling was like, jams made from fruit from the market that cost so much.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: You know, each pop tart had probably $10 worth of jam in it, and we charged $5 for the poptarts. And then sprinkles that I piped one at a time.

Dan Pashman: Oh my ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: Handmade sprinkles. 

Dan Pashman: You made sprinkles one at a time? 

Sohla El-Waylly: I did, because, you know, like, you could make them faster if you just make like, lines and break it. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: But I wanted them to have rounded ends so it looks more like a real sprinkle. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, my God. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And a lot of people — like a lot of people quit their job over making those sprinkles. So I ended up making every single sprinkle because people would either quit if I asked them to make them or they would do them not — you know, the ends wouldn't be rounded, and then what's the point? 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] Well, it's also just funny because I feel like so much of your ethos today, when you do videos showing people how to cook things, is very much like, don't stress if it's not exactly right, like it'll be fine, you'll figure it out, if not, you'll do it next time. It's very much like, it's all good, you’ll be fine. So it's funny to hear that coming from the same person who was like, the sprinkles can't have rounded edges. 

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: No, they have to have rounded edges. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, sorry. Sorry. 

Sohla El-Waylly: You can't have flat edges!

Dan Pashman: Yes, right, got it ...

Sohla El-Waylly: You would have been fired! 

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: But yeah, that's ... We were out of business for a lot of reasons. You know? 

[LAUGHING] 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Sohla and Ham closed Hail Mary about a year after they opened. And while Sohla can joke about it now, she’s said in other interviews that it was very painful, that she still feels like she’s not over it, and that running that restaurant was the hardest thing she’s ever done.

Dan Pashman: After that experience, she was ready for a change. In 2018, she left the restaurant world to work in food media. Her first job was at Serious Eats as a culinary assistant, which meant going from working in a restaurant kitchen, to working in an office. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's a completely different world, and also a big shift was just like, becoming more personable, you know? Because in a restaurant, you’re usually just like, talking to bread. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: You don't worry about what you're wearing or if you've brushed your hair, or, you know, if you're smiling. And working in an office with people, I had to remind myself like, you have to say hello, how are you doing? You can't just like — like in meetings, I would just want to get to the point. Like, why are we here? 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: But like, I had to learn like, no, you have to do a little small talk. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Right. What did you do this weekend? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I feel like I've gotten good at it. 

Dan Pashman: Yeah, very good! 

Sohla El-Waylly: Right: 

Dan Pashman: I wouldn't have known that it was a struggle for you.

Sohla El-Waylly: No, I had a notes app with all the things that I had to do every day, and I'd look at it every day. Like, remember to smile, ask people about how they are, look interested, you know, engage — listening cues, a big one, like nod like you're nodding right now. 

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: I had to teach myself how to be a person because when you spend most of your adult life like, in a basement peeling potatoes, you forget how to do that stuff. 

Dan Pashman: After a year at Serious Eats, Sohla went to Bon Appetit. As foreign as the world of food media was to her at first, she was a natural in front of the camera — and even though it wasn’t really part of her job to do video work, she ended up becoming a fixture in the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen’s popular YouTube videos. She wasn’t there long before injustices in that workplace became very public in the summer of 2020. Sohla spoke at length about all that in an episode we did at the time, which you can still listen to.

Dan Pashman: Sohla left the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen later that year — but one takeaway from that period was that fans on YouTube clearly wanted more of Sohla. So in the past few years, she’s gotten into a bunch of different projects. She was a judge on Dan Levy’s HBO cooking competition series The Big Brunch. She hosts a web series for the History Channel called Ancient Recipes with Sohla. And these days Sohla and Ham are regular contributors to the New York Times’ cooking section. They also co-host Mystery Menu, a Times Youtube series.

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): I'm Sohla.

CLIP (HAM EL-WAYLLY): I’m Ham.

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): This is a show where we take a mystery ingredient and turn it into a menu. 

CLIP (HAM EL-WAYLLY): Yes. 

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): A dinner and a dessert ... 

Dan Pashman: At the start of each episode, Sohla and Ham sketch out a gameplan for turning their mystery ingredient into a full meal. It’s not unlike the prep work Sohla first learned how to do with her mom all those years ago.

CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): First course, fruit cup. Second course, grand slam egg. Third course, the red eye gravy.

CLIP(HAM EL-WAYLLY): What else do you want with that? 

CLIP(SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): What do you traditionally have red eye gravy with? Grits are good.

CLIP(HAM EL-WAYLLY): Yeah. We can do grits in time.

CLIP(SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Grits and greens? 

CLIP(HAM EL-WAYLLY): Grits and grits. Okay. 

CLIP(SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Like a chard green? 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: From the kitchens of chain restaurants to places with Michelin stars to the pages of top-tier food publications, Sohla has worked in nearly every corner of the culinary world. Now she can add “cookbook author” to her long list of accomplishments. 

Dan Pashman: For the past three years, Sohla’s been working on a cookbook that comes out this week. It’s called Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, and it’s so much more than just a collection of recipes — it’s an entire culinary education. Inspired by her disappointment with culinary school, Sohla created an alternative syllabus in book form. As she told me, each chapter covers a different cooking technique, with recipes that offer opportunities to practice.

Sohla El-Waylly: Whether you're a chef in a restaurant or you're a cookbook author or you're a recipe developer, the point is teaching people how to cook. Like, even as a chef, you’re not cooking everything. You’re teaching your cooks how to cook. So I think that that's the most important part, being able to communicate techniques and stuff in a clear way so that other people can do it at home.

Dan Pashman: And Sohla says making things as clear as possible was a very high priority. She even put thought into the layout of the book in order to make it as accessible as possible. Each step of every recipe is numbered, so you can follow it more easily. Each item in the ingredients list is separated with a horizontal line. The font size is also a little bigger than the average cookbook, so that it’s easy to find your place as you go back-and-forth between the food and the text.

Sohla El-Waylly: I think about how I was when I started cooking and how I didn't have that many resources back then. You just had a couple of cookbooks and then some episodes of Martha Stewart that I would, like, try to take notes through. And a lot of times it's just really intimidating and you feel really lost. And like, pie crust was a big thing that I just could not get down cause none of the recipes explained it to me in a way that made sense to me. So like, being able to help people get those aha moments and figure it out and realize that they can do it. I think a lot of times what makes me sad about people in the kitchen is that they think they can't do it because they mess something up. And it's like, no, I started exactly where you did, making really burnt chicken, and we can like, get over this together. Let's figure it out. You know? 

Dan Pashman: There’s a section on braising and stewing with recipes for coconut cauliflower korma and squid with sofrito and saffron. Another chapter covers steaming and poaching, and includes a recipe for “Snappy Shrimp with Punch-You-in-the-Face Cocktail Sauce.” In the second half of the book, which is devoted to baking and desserts, there’s a whole chapter on caramelizing. But there’s no recipe for artisanal pop-tarts.

Sohla El-Waylly: There's sprinkles in there, though. 

Dan Pashman: You did a recipe for sprinkles. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I gave people the sprinkles. 

Dan Pashman: Are they allowed to make them with straight edges, though?

Sohla El-Waylly: You can do them however you want.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: I still make them one at a time. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: How would you explain your relationship with food and cooking today? 

Sohla El-Waylly: You know, there's highs and lows. Because it is my job and something about when something's your job, you kind of like it a little bit less. So sometimes I get frustrated and I hate it and I don't want to cook. And then something will always bring me back. Like the other day, I was like, oh, I don't want to cook because, you know, we have a newborn and she's always screaming and cooking and eating is really hard. And so we got takeout from this place called DOMODOMO, and they have a little cabbage slaw with a black sesame dressing. And I was like, this is amazing. I want to figure out how to make this black sesame dressing. There's so many things you can do with this black sesame dressing. So it comes and goes, and I feel like it's very easy to be inspired because you got to eat every day. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Sohla El-Waylly. Her debut cookbook Start Here is out October 31st. Get it! It’s so good and you will learn so much and you will eat so, so well. And hey, we’re giving away a copy of Sohla’s book to one lucky winner. All you got to do is subscribe to our email newsletter by November 19th, and you’ll be entered to win. If you’re already on the list, you’re already entered. If not, please sign up now at sporkful.com/newsletter. Give aways are open to U.S. and Canada addresses only.

Dan Pashman: Also, some very exciting news to share. We’re kind of soft-launching here in the end credits for the hardcore people who are still listening. We have a new project we are working on with Sohla and her husband Ham. They’re going to be hosting a special podcast series for us that’s coming out in January right here in the Sporkful feed. They’re gonna do deep dives into the surprising stories behind dishes they love, and then they’ll put their own spin on those dishes when they get into their home kitchen. We’ll have more on the series coming soon; we can’t wait to share it with you!

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, how do you make a pizza into a meal fit for soldiers on the battlefield? That was the mission of a team of food scientists and it took years to crack the MRE pizza code. Our friends from the podcast Proof at America’s Test Kitchen share that story with us next week.

Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one, check out my interview with Yewande Komolafe, author of My Everyday Lagos, about her years as an undocumented immigrant and her new cookbook. That’s up now.

Dan Pashman: And while you’re buying books, don’t forget to pre-order my book! It’s called Anything’s Pastable, and you can find all the info at sporkful.com.