Roy Choi has 'big effing salads' and 'bomb ass beans' on his mind

When we last spoke with Roy Choi, he was on the frontlines of wildfire relief, passing out burritos to first responders from the Kogi truck alongside World Central Kitchen. Community has always been at the center of Roy's cooking philosophy. 

It's been a dozen years since he published his cookbook/memoir L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food where we got to learn a bit more about Roy and the short rib tacos that started a food truck phenomenon. Roy's back, with a new arsenal of recipes that rely on some life lessons. The man who can't resist a pun presents The Choi of Cooking: Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life: A Cookbook, co-written with Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan.

Evan Kleiman: First of all, thank you so much for coming to Good Food again. Some time has passed to gain perspective about the fires but the city still has years of recovery ahead. Where do you find yourself as a chef and your role right now in continued recovery?

Roy Choi: It was a very tough few months, obviously, and it's not over. The city will forever be changed like New Orleans was with Katrina. It will forever be a part of the shaping of our history and our future. I think it also has shaped me to be even further in my purpose. I guess I can say that I've locked in deeper to what it means to cook. 

I think this title may have been a premonition of some sorts. I didn't mean it that way but The Joy of Cooking was the first cookbook that I had ever encountered, as a kid. My parents picked it up at a yard sale. I think that through all my ups and downs, all I want to do is bring joy to people's lives. 

And then my name, which growing up as a kid, I was always made fun of. My name, in many ways, has now become my biggest strength. My name rhymes: "Roy Choi." "Choi" rhymes with "joy." I think, ultimately, as you work through all of the levels of your life, I found myself at this place in life of just wanting to bring joy. 

Roy Choi's recipe for Bomb Ass Beans was shaped by eating at friends' homes. Photo by Bobby Fisher.

It's been a while since you've written a book. I know as cooks, we walk through life, and our brain is constantly marinating on different combinations. The subtitle to your new cookbook is "Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life," which really does sum up your repertoire. Tell me a little bit about when you started conceiving this book, who you wanted to make these recipes for, and what your mission was.

Thank you for picking up on that because I'm 12 years between books. Whether you're a musician or a writer, you're supposed to come back right after the first book, within a couple years. But it took me a long time. Writer's block is no joke. I lived it. 

Finally, when I got around to writing this book, it coincided with my own life changes. I went hard for many, many years in life. I was eating like there was no tomorrow. Many cooks eat like that, you know? Our superpower is to not only taste but we can eat like Olympians. And that's just not sustainable. It wasn't sustainable. It wasn't becoming sustainable for me but I didn't want to lose that feeling. I didn't want to lose the sensation of eating like that. 

You and I have eaten at Tommy's together. I love chili tamales and chili dogs. I love biting into big, juicy, greasy things. I could drink a whole gallon milkshake. I used to drink four milkshakes at a time. There's something about that comfort that defines who I am, and I don't want to lose that. 

Then I looked on the other side of the fence of what healthy eating is, and I just didn't understand that language. I didn't understand the way that food was made, the flavor of it, the salads. I don't like eating salads. I thought about a lot of people that may feel that way as well, that want to live right but they want to live right on their own terms. I know people, personally, my friends, that don't know how to take that first step. I think this book is for us. I have the saying of like, the book is for everyone but it's specifically for some of us. 

I love that. Let's get into the cooking. I find it really interesting that the biggest chapter in the book is the veg chapter. Talk to me about carrot pancakes. 

A lot of these are disguised off of heritage recipes that I grew up with, that my mother cooked or my aunts cooked. The carrot pancake is a derivative of the bindaetteok in Korean, which is a mung bean pancake, or the pajeon, which is a seafood flour pancake. It's a play on that but adding shredded carrots. But then that's also mixed. 

Even though I have Korean heritage, I'm American, and I grew up here so it's mixed with carrot cake and it's mixed with salad bar and it's mixed with buttermilk pancake and DuPar's. So it's like all of these things. That carrot pancake is like life. It's life coming together, colliding with each other into this one thing, and then the memories of it being made in a blender. And then as a child, looking up at my mom making it in that blender, then turning around and making kimchi paste in that same blender or a milkshake in that blender. These are all memories mixed with experience and mixed with the bouncing around of culture.

"I don't like eating salads. I thought a lot of people may feel that way as well, that want to live right but they want to live right on their own terms," says Roy Choi. Photo by Bobby Fisher.

Are there any amped up pantry ingredients in that carrot pancake? Or is it pretty simple?

No, it's pretty simple. The mung beans, that may not be something you find in every market, but there are replacements for that because really, it's just a legume or a grain that you know you're putting together. The book is so flexible. That's, I think, the core value of the book. It offers one perspective or one recipe but the recipe is so malleable that it allows you to insert any other ingredients and it will come out the same way. We worked really, really hard on the malleable nature of that recipe to be able to go any direction and that's kind of what The Choi of Cooking is all about. It's really to get people to cook more and not confine them.

It's interesting. I'm the opposite in terms of salad. Growing up, every single meal, except for breakfast, had salad and I grew to love the crunch. It was like my comfort food, this crunch. You have this salad... only you would have a recipe that I shouldn't say on the radio, but you have a recipe called Big [BLEEP] Salad. Tell me about it and some of your favorite ingredients and techniques that you use to get people to buy in.

Well, the Big Effing Salad is, again, for the "some of us" of who this book is for. It's for the homies, for the homies on the Eastside, Whittier, down in Anaheim, South Bay, up in the Valley, that don't eat salads. My friends. It's for Dodger Stadium. It's for the people like, well, the first thing they're choosing is not to eat a salad. Whether or not you want to believe that or not, it's true. 

A lot of people don't eat salads. I was thinking, it's a good thing to eat salads, so how do I get the large population of people that aren't eating salads or choosing to eat salads or want to eat salads, to want to eat a salad? First, I gotta make a name that captures their attention. Secondly, I gotta think if a salad did exist for people that didn't want to eat salads, what would that salad be? So basically, that salad is a salad bar. It's like a salad bar that you would find in a Sizzler or a buffet or the old Wendy's, then put that whole salad bar into a salad and that's the Big Effin Salad.

I love the ingredients. You have your lettuces but you also have all these other vegetables that give it a different character. You've got cucumber, shaved broccoli, red onions, mushrooms, grapes, avocado, apple, orange or tangerine, corn. You have all these textures.

That's the salad bar.

My mouth is watering. What kind of dressing do you choose to bring all this together?

The dressing with the recipe, I believe, is a balsamic dressing, but we offer six other dressings to go with it. We have a Green Goddess, we have an Orange Bang vinaigrette. It tastes just like an Orange Bang. It's crazy. We have a citrus vinaigrette and a spicy vinaigrette and all these things. So really, again, that salad just becomes a template for whatever direction you want to go with it.

"I think this title may have been a premonition of some sorts," says Roy Choi, who recalls his parents picking up a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" at a yard sale. Photo courtesy of Clarkson Potter.

I am a huge bean and cheese burrito fan. Anywhere I go where I think it's going to be good, I will get them, and I make them a lot at home. Tell us about your Bomb Ass Beans and how you use them to build the burrito.

That's why I love you and that's why we're friends for life and we were connected from the moment we saw each other. Because I'm a bean and cheese burrito guy, too. From fast food, you know, Del Taco and Taco Bell, all the way to East LA to everything. Even growing up in high school, I would order a bean and cheese burrito first before I would get to a carne asada burrito. 

Yeah. 100%. Me too. 

I think a lot of my memories of bean and cheese burritos come from being at my friends' homes when you're a kid and growing up and hanging out. You're always fed in someone else's home, sometimes because you're hanging out past dusk or whatever, and you just end up leading into dinner time or you're there right after school and you're on the back end of lunch. Then you've got the frijoles in the pan with the foil on top. Those are really core memories for me. 

This recipe is a combination of not only those memories and those impressions and all of the maternal figures that have passed through my life that have fed me their beans, it's also a little bit of chef technique as well. It has a bit of a confit nature to it. It's a very complicated frijoles recipe but the result is very fine. It almost comes out like a beurre blanc but it's still got the grit and the soul of the pan of frijoles. 

What I also love about this recipe is that you include poblano peppers. My second favorite burrito is a chile relleno burrito, so these beans hold both.

We are the same. We are the same person. 

You talk in the book about how you've scaled back on meat. What do you make when you get a hankering for it? And how are you preparing while keeping health in mind? Are the Kimchi Philly Cheesesteaks the new short rib taco?

Yeah, I mean cutting back on meat is… I just need to. My arteries were clogging up and I was reaching a place where I was getting very unhealthy. But again, how do you make a change when your body is forcing you to make a change but your mind and your life, you don't want to make that change? So I had to dig really deep and figure it out. It was really about just layering a flavor, extracting as much flavor out of the vegetables as I possibly could, focusing first on the vegetables and the aromatics and the chilies and the herbs, then really, really thinking deeply about these things that I really love. 

Whether it's a bean burrito or a cheesesteak, I had to figure out how I could re-engineer and construct those things so that I could still enjoy myself but not kill myself. That's where the less meat comes from, where I can add kimchi to the Philly Cheesesteak. By adding kimchi, you're upping the flavor, umami and bomb by a million. By doing that, then you can pull back the meat without missing it. So that's really where the book is coming from.

Well, it's really a pleasure. Thank you so much, Roy.

I can't believe it takes me another book to get back on Good Food. I missed you so much. I hope to talk to you again.

Let's go get a bean and cheese burrito. 

I would love that. I would love that.