TJH Speaks with Chef and Cookbook Author Paula Shoyer

On Instant Pots, Cooking Classes, & Kosher Food Trends

TJH Speaks with Chef and Cookbook Author Paula Shoyer

BY SUSAN SCHWAMM

You’ve been giving a lot of cooking classes over the past year. Tell us how that got started.

It kind of happened by accident.

Sometime around Pesach, a few organizations contacted me to do some virtual events for them. We didn’t know how long this pandemic was going to be going on for. I did some classes for different shuls and organizations, JCCs and Chabad. But then a parent contacted me, probably in early May, saying that their kids’ programs were all canceled for the summer. She wanted to know if I would consider doing a virtual cooking and baking program.

It was a great opportunity. I started with one group, and then I ended up teaching ten sessions throughout the summer. Some were cooking; some were baking. Some were two sessions a week, a morning class, an afternoon class. I got really busy doing those classes. Then I realized in July that everybody was going to be stuck at home this fall. So I started my dinner prep series.

Tell us about that.

For the dinner prep series, teenagers work with me – virtually – at 4:30 p.m. after school until about 6:30 p.m., and they make an entire meal for their family.

What a great idea! I’d love for someone to work with my kids to prepare supper.

Oh, I’d be happy to! It’s so funny. The parents always joke with me: “Are you teaching them how to wash the dishes, too?” But the truth is that kids are slower at doing certain things in the kitchen, and it could take all of the two hours to make a meal. Granted, there are some kids who are more advanced than others, though.

Initially, we started with some vegetarian classes. Then I moved into some chicken dishes. My next series we’re doing chicken scallopini and spaghetti and meatballs. I’ve had groups that keep signing up for more sessions because the kids look forward to it every week. And the parents love the idea that their kids are learning how to cook, and they’re cooking for the family.

I’m working on two more sessions coming up soon. This Sunday, I’m starting a six-week advanced French pastry class where we only do one to two recipes each time. Most classes are doing one, and I keep the class really small. I’ve maxed it out at six students so that every student gets everything perfect. We’re starting with crepes on Sunday. We’re going to be making a tart, a layer cake, eclairs, napoleons....

These classes keep me busy. And I’m also doing my other classes – for shuls or organizations. For example, this Motzei Shabbat, I’m doing a group in Stanford, Connecticut, where we’re doing sweet and savory babkas. We’re doing a chocolate babka and a pizza babka which I just invented last week. It’s highly addictive and very dangerous to have around the house because I ate the whole thing.

It sounds pretty dangerous.

I know. It’s so delicious.

I’ve discovered over time what different age groups can learn, what kinds of recipes are great for doing on Zoom and which ones aren’t. Popular classes for adults have been challah and babka and black and white cookies. I’ve also been doing a lot of healthy meals. Some classes are demos – where I show them how to make something – and some classes are when the participants cook along with me. It depends on the group and how much time they want to devote to an event.

Do you have to change your techniques because you’re teaching kids to cook and bake as opposed to teaching adults?

Well, first of all, with kids’ classes you have to be extremely patient.

With adults, you have an expectation that the adults are going to have some basic skills – but sometimes they don’t. I don’t assume anything from kids.

You know, I was doing one of my dinner classes with the kids two weeks ago. I don’t remember what we were in the middle of doing, but we were doing a recipe that most of the group was working on really slowly. And then one of the girls in the class announced, “Oh, while I was waiting for the class to continue, I made mozzarella sticks.” One of the boys said, “How’d you do that?” I said, “Oh, I’m sure she just took them out of the freezer and warmed them up.” No. She took string cheese out of the fridge. She dipped it in a combination of eggs and she made a batter for it, and then dipped it in panko and baked them in the oven while five of her peers were still trying to finish the recipe. It was so adorable.

But with the kids’ classes, I don’t assume anything. I teach them to clean leeks or green onions. I show them how to chop and sauté, how to control the temperature on the stovetop. When we make salads, I show them how big the pieces should be when they’re chopping vegetables. I show them how to chop efficiently, so they’re not chopping one celery stalk at a time. I want them to finish the class feeling comfortable that they could open up a cookbook, they could pick a recipe online, and have some basic skills to understand what’s being asked of them.

So far, I’ve done over 106 virtual classes since the pandemic started.

106?

Yeah. Isn’t that something? 106 with no end in sight. I would say that half of the classes were for teenagers because these kids were stuck at home this summer with no camp. I keep the kids busy. I remember having one class where we made scones. And I was like, “You know, while we’re waiting for

this to finish cooking in the oven, everybody go get a glass of water or a cup of tea. Let’s have scones together.” But we never even do that.

One of my popular classes, which I think I’m going to actually schedule to teach for adults, is when we make homemade pita. We make tehina and Israeli salad, and we make chicken shawarma in the oven. Making homemade pita is so much fun and so easy and foolproof. I haven’t had a single kid say, “My pita didn’t come out good.”

How different is it to host a cooking demo

or a cooking class on Zoom as opposed to hosting in-person classes?

For my in-person events, I would be in the kitchen at 10 a.m. in the morning and I would cook for four, five hours with a few people helping me for 30, 60, 80 or 100 people. It’s a lot of work.

The prep for a Zoom class is much less. But what’s really been wonderful is that the audiences on Zoom are bigger. I’ve done Zooms for 400. I did a babka bake for 430 people. I had a group of JCCs on a Zoom demo with around 600 people. I’m reaching more people. During the Zoom, some communities are really engaged and ask great questions throughout. And other times, I’m speaking for an hour and a half.

I don’t know how you do it.

I’m very chatty. I’m from New York. I tell stories of my grandmother and my inspirations and how to bring your food memories into the food you serve.

When you’re in the room with people, you feed off their energy. I’m just pumped up being in the room with all these people, and people are calling out questions. It’s more interactive. But when you’re on Zoom, you have to provide all of the energy. People are mostly sitting. They’re not always cooking with you. So I have to amp up my kind of big personality. I smile even more to pull people into my space.

When you’re doing Zoom, you have to really love what you do. You can’t be a person who’s just going to get up there and talk, especially with cooking and food. The people who like to cook and are interested in food, they’re energized people. Most people bake to share. We don’t bake because we want to eat an entire cake on our own. We bake because we’re celebrating or comforting, and we bake to share it with people. People who come on a baking Zoom, they’re already in a good mood. They’re happy people. And I try to bring them in and connect with them.

Paula, you recently came out with your fifth

cookbook, The Instant Pot Kosher Cookbook. What was the impetus behind writing this book?

It’s funny because my publisher had come to me to write a different book, which I may just end up writing one day.

In any case, people were always asking me for Instant Pot recipes but I never really wanted another piece of equipment for my kosher kitchen.

But then I bought one. The first recipe I made in it was a flanken short rib with Korean flavors, and it was so good. Then I made a split pea soup, and it came out great. I said to myself, “Boy, this food is really good and moist and was done so quickly.”

So, I was sold, and then somebody told me about the kosher Instant Pot Facebook group. When I joined – which was more than two years ago – there were around 8,700 members of the Facebook group.

I started reading through their comments, and I realized that they were sick and tired of taking recipes that people posted or that they found online for Instant Pots and adapting them for kosher. I said to myself, “Oh, I should write a cookbook.” At that point, honestly, I had literally used the Instant Pot three times. I sat down, and I invented, off the top of my head, 100 recipes on a piece of paper. I sent those recipes out to my publisher, and they said, “Yes. We want to do this book.”

Then I proceeded to become an expert in Instant Pot recipes. It’s the old story of you have to fake it until you make it, which means that anybody can do this. You don’t have to be an expert chef. Every recipe in the book tells you press this button, then press cancel, then press pressure cook, and set it to this knob – where to turn the knobs. Every recipe you can pick up in this book tells you exactly what to do.

Oh, and by the way, that Facebook group now has 14,300 members.

That’s unbelievable.

It’s a really active community. I can’t even keep up with all the questions and all the people sharing. Just today, somebody posted about stuffed peppers. I think I’m going to try that maybe tonight, but I want to add some sauteed onions or something else to it.

I love the sauté feature of the Instant Pot – I can sauté things and brown things. I can throw all my ingredients in, add my liquid, and let it just cook. I love how you don’t have to stand over the pot. I don’t have to stir anything. I stick everything in, and I go back to doing something else.

Was it hard to adapt these recipes for the Instant Pot?

Not really because once I had a framework for different kinds of things and how long they cook for, I was able to create a few recipes for that type of food. For example, once I knew how long chicken on the bone needed to cook, I could come up with five recipes for chicken on the bone with all different ingredients.

The biggest challenge with the Instant Pot is tomato sauce.

Why?

If tomato sauce is sitting on the bottom of your pot, it often burns. The device is trying to come to pressure, and the burn notice will go on. You have to work around it.

One of my favorite recipes in the book is what I call a flanken Bolognese. It’s like a beef Bolognese sauce, but instead of just using ground beef, I take flanken and I cut it up in little pieces. You’ve got the meat and onions at the bottom. Then I put in spaghetti. And then I pour tomato sauce and water over the spaghetti and meat and close it up, and the spaghetti cooks with sauce at the same time. When it’s cooked and when you open up the pot, you can just stir it and you’ve got your pasta and meat sauce in one pot. You don’t have to wash two pots. You don’t have to drain the pasta. Super simple.

What would you tell someone who doesn’t have an Instant Pot, like me – why they should get one? Just like you said to yourself, “Do I need an extra kosher device in my kitchen?”

I know. I resisted it for so long because I was like, “C’mon, really? Why? I have two sets of dishes and so many other things in my kitchen.”

But honestly, the flavor of the food is so delicious. And the bowl cleans so well, the inner pot that you put inside the device. It goes in the dishwasher and cleans so easily. It doesn’t smell up your kitchen. We’ve all had erev yom tovs when you’ve got every burner covered. Now I’ve got an extra way I can cook my soup instead of on the stovetop.

As kosher eaters, a lot of the food we love is soups and stews. Those cook so well and so quickly in the Instant Pot.

It does take time for the device to come to pressure, so every one of my recipes will tell you time to pressure and cook time. This way, you know exactly how long each recipe will take.

I love making rice in the Instant Pot. I even have a great chicken wing recipe – my barbecue chicken wings with everything bagel spice. I stick the chicken wings in the Instant Pot, and they boil there for just a few minutes. And then I dump them onto a baking pan, pour barbecue sauce on top, sprinkle everything bagel spice and pepper on top, and then put the wings in the oven to broil just to get that kind of crunchiness, which you can do at the end.

You’ve been called the “Kosher Baker.” Can you bake in the Instant Pot?

There are so many recipes that we bake in the oven with a water bath, like a flourless chocolate cake or cheesecake where you put your pan in a pan and then fill up water around it. For those kinds of recipes – cheesecakes, molten cakes, flourless chocolate cakes, flans, pot de crème – the Instant Pot is really magic because you can put your little ramekins and your pans and your chocolate molten cake right on the rack. And there’s water underneath and it steams very quickly. I have honey cake and sponge cake recipes in the book as well. So you really can actually bake cakes in it.

I’ve also made applesauce and berry compote in the Instant Pot. And I love my Instant Pot rice pudding. It’s really hard to resist. Custards really come out great in the Instant Pot.

I actually have two Instant Pots for meat and one for dairy. Some people use it for vegetarian dishes or for meat dishes; it depends on the preferences of the household.

How long does it take, in general, for certain dishes to cook?

Soups are great. If I’m doing a vegetable soup, the cooking time is 5 minutes. But remember, it could take 20 minutes to come to pressure. But still, in 25 minutes, it’s done. Carrot soup is done in like 15

minutes. If you put a grain in it, then the cooking time’s going to be more like 16 minutes. If I put meat in a soup, I’m going to cook it a bit longer –more like 30 minutes.

My chicken recipes are around 25 minutes. Beef you’re going to cook longer because it just needs to get tender. Smaller pieces of beef can take around 35 minutes, but a whole roast beef would take probably an hour.

This is your fifth cookbook. What lessons

have you learned along the way in terms of your cookbooks?

I put out my first cookbook, The Kosher Baker, around ten years ago – in 2010.

Then I put out The Holiday Kosher Baker, the New Passover Menu, and Healthy Jewish Kitchen.

What I’ve learned along the way is to really stand in the shoes of a home cook in their kitchen and think about how many steps they want to take to complete a dish. I have to remember that whatever one recipe they’re making of mine is only part of their meal, so I’m not going to put in a side dish that takes so much time in my book.

I also think about how many pots and pans and utensils people want to wash when they’re done.

I remember my grandmother taught me to make her stuffed cabbage when she was 88 years old. She came to my downtown D.C. apartment when I was a young married woman with a tiny kitchen. She had three different pots going. Every surface of my kitchen was covered with this, with that, with the cabbage rolls, the cabbage. It was just a mess. Since then, I streamlined her entire recipe to the pot that the cabbage cooks in with all the sauces. She had two sauces going that you had to combine and she had a pot for the cabbage. People don’t want to do that and use every pot in their kitchen to cook one dish.

I feel like food should be delicious and interesting, and it should look like you spent hours in the kitchen preparing it but you didn’t.

One of my best recipes from my Healthy Jewish Kitchen cookbook was my mango coleslaw. I got tired of using mayonnaise; I didn’t use any mayonnaise or processed ingredients in that book. For that recipe, I pureed a mango, and then I added a bunch of ingredients – jalapeno, red onion, vinegar, honey, lime juice – and made this amazing dressing. Then I chopped up the cabbage, and I dumped the sauce on top. It is the most unique coleslaw. I’ve done it for so many events. Everybody loves this recipe. It’s interesting. It’s different. And it’s delicious. But most of all, it’s not complicated. It’s just throwing a bunch of things in a blender and cutting a bunch of things and putting them in a bowl. You can even buy the pre-shredded, pre-washed cabbage, too, and dump the sauce on top. So, I really try to create interesting dishes that are not fussy.

We’re all dealing with so much stress, cooking shouldn’t add to our frustrations. That’s what I like about the Insta Pot. It’s very streamlined. You put all your ingredients in there, and then you can go back to taking care of the baby. You can go back to your aging parent. You can go back to your computer and get more work done. You can just breathe.

I’ve also learned over time that people don’t want to have to go to ten different stores to make a dish. They want to have interesting food that’s made from ingredients that you can find in a regular store.

Over the past year, what are the dishes that you’ve been turning to to feed your family?

My four kids are now between the ages of 21 and 26. They were all home for a couple of months, and we started making themed brunches every Sunday. We created our own little hashtag, #brunchlikeashoyer.

Every Tuesday or Wednesday we come up with a theme, and we pick out recipes that we would try. Every week was different. I think we started with Israeli and French cuisine, and then we did a Swiss brunch. And then we did Greek food, and then we did Italian with homemade pasta – rainbow col-

I feel like food should be delicious and interesting, and it should look like you spent hours in the kitchen preparing it but you didn’t.

ored for my twins’ 21st birthday – and my son made homemade ricotta cheese. We did Eastern European, and we did khachapuri. We did a Cuban dinner on Father’s Day for my husband. That was really challenging. We had to find vegan cheeses to add to things. We made bread. We made British high tea. We did Korean, Japanese, Indian brunches. I’m sure I’m forgetting some. But it was really extraordinary because we got to learn about the food from different cultures. We got to learn new techniques and recipes, and it was a family affair. We all increased our skills. I had never made bialys before. We did that once. I had never made Japanese pancakes or fried Indian bread. It was fun for me to make things that I hadn’t made before.

You know, with the pasta, it was a big challenge. I used beets for the yellow pasta and spinach to make the green pasta. It was so much work but was so delicious.

I guess my overall suggestion is that it’s a great opportunity to challenge yourself in the kitchen. Whether it is picking up a new device like an Instant Pot or saying, “You know, I’ve always wanted to try making a souffle. Now I’m going to do it.”

It’s a great time for people to challenge themselves. You’re cooking just for your family, so if something doesn’t come out perfect, it’s really OK. How has the kosher foodie world changed in the past 10 years since you published

your first cookbook?

Well, the community has just exploded. When I published my cookbook, there were other Jewish cookbook authors out there, and Susie Fishbein’s books were already out. But we didn’t have Instagram. Facebook came a little bit later. Now, there is this incredible online community where people are joining all the time, posting wonderful recipes and recipe ideas. And a lot of them have really kind of exploded during COVID just because people have more time to create and more time to post.

Back 10 years ago, I had to sell my cookbook the old-fashioned way. I had to make sure it was in bookstores. I had to go on the road and do a lot of events on the road. But now, I’ve got social media to help promote books. So in terms of the cookbook world, that’s kind of been a game-changer in a lot of ways. That’s been great.

It’s so wonderful having a community. It’s not like we’re in our own little world anymore, and the only food we see is what we’re eating at our family and friends’ tables and what we’re eating at kosher restaurants. Now we see that there’s this whole world of Asian food or other cuisines, and we want to eat those things as well and adapt them for our kosher lifestyle.

People have become more open to different kinds of food at their table. Although, honestly, I’m still amazed how many people still make the same food every Friday night. But there are people – from all age groups – who are looking for something new. We all see the trends, and we want the trends adapted for us for kosher.

What are the trends that you’ve been seeing recently that have seeped into the kosher world?

The last couple of years really has been the Asian food. In terms of restaurants, the burger craze came to the kosher world after it was in the general world. It’s so interesting for people like us to have seen Israeli food take over the world, because we already knew Israeli food was great 20 years ago. But it’s not even just Israeli. Middle Eastern spices are really big. It’s a collage of the hawajj, hummus, and shawarma. People are using tehina more over the last couple of years in every possible way. We have kosher Vietnamese fish sauce now so we can do things with that. I’m still waiting for kosher red chili paste to be sold here. I buy it in Tel Aviv and bring it back, and it lasts me for a while or I make homemade red chili paste. Now you can even get kosher gochujang sauce. When I wrote a recipe for Korean rice bowls in my Healthy Jewish Kitchen, there was no kosher gochujang sauce. We had to make it from scratch, so I have a recipe for it. Now you can buy it, so you can skip that step.

I also feel like people are eating more vegetables. I still have issues in our Jewish community with deli rolls and people throwing salami in every other recipe. I know I’m in the minority and people really love that deli food, but I try to stay away from that trend.