An Interview with Thy Tran, Asian Culinary Educator
Sunday, April 22, 2012We briefly caught up with culinary writer & instructor, Thy Tran, and chatted about her upcoming series of cooking classes in OACC’s kitchen. As someone who’s worked in the food industry for the last 18 years, including restaurants, cookbook publishing and culinary academies--Thy has a special philosophy about learning in the kitchen that shapes her teaching style.
What’s your favorite part about teaching home cooks?
Definitely seeing that “a-ha!” moment in students. At its best, it’s a full-body experience involving all the senses, when they understand not only the rationale behind a new technique but also appreciate the flavor and texture and transformation of food. When get their hands literally around a new ingredient or connect meaningfully with others in the kitchen or at the table later. Sometimes, it’s simply making a dish that they’ve eaten but never cooked. One of my favorite times was watching a woman finally forming, after several tries, a dumpling that her father had made when she was little but had never taught her. Even through her frustration with mastering the rolling and shaping, there was this excitement in her eyes as the cooking connected with the memories.
How did you decide on these topics? Like flatbreads--that isn’t something we usually associate with Asian food.
I think it’s important to remind people about the incredible diversity of Asian cuisines and the forces that shaped them, like the difference between Southern Chinese and Northern Chinese food based on history and climate and culture. I also believe there are fundamental techniques to learn that can be applied across a multitude of flavor profiles. The ingredients in basic dishes, especially the science involved, help people incorporate new techniques into their day-to-day cooking. Something as simple as understanding the behavior of wheat flour under different types of liquid and heat helps cooks appreciate a wide variety of dishes.
You also don’t seem to focus on one cuisine. Each class combines the food of different countries. Is there a specific reason you decided to arrange the menus that way?
Well, I could make a political argument that most of these foods predate national boundaries. But a more practical reason is just that I think it’s much more important to show the commonalities between how people cook and eat than divide their culture into distinct categories or columns. Like we could ever really say, without ignoring the rich and complex history of our foods, that this dish is Chinese and that one Japanese and that other one Korean.
If you could take only one kitchen tool with you to a desert island, what would that be?
Oh, that’s a hard one. It’d be a toss-up between my meat cleaver and my cast-iron skillet. I’d probably try to sneak in both.
--End of interview.
Thy Tran will be conducting her Asian culinary workshop series - Cooking with the Senses: Fundamentals of Asian Cooking - from May 5 to June 16, 2012. Register for one or more workshops, or the entire series today!
http://cookingwithsenses.eventbrite.com/
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