- Hi guys, I'm Antoni Porowski,
and I'm in studio with The Hollywood Reporter.
- Welcome back.
- Thank you for having me.
- It's so great to see you.
- It's great to see you, and I'm already thinking
this is sort of like a continuation of the last time
we were together because we talked about Persian food.
- We did talk about Persian food.
- Did you notice the two Persian
recipes in the book? - I did, I did.
And you're here to talk about your cookbook.
- I am.
- And there are two Persian dishes in here.
Now it was tahdig for sure with the potato,
which not a lot of people do.
My mother does it.
- I love it with the potato because it's like
a sweet extra crispy layer that you can add.
- And I call it the pomegranate sauce.
- Fesenjan.
How do you say it better than I do?
- I don't know.
I'm probably getting it wrong.
But it's traditionally made with duck,
and I make it with chicken just to make it a little
easier and less intimidating
because some people are weirded out by duck
even though it's delicious and everyone should try it.
- It is delightful.
I love duck.
- Big fan.
- You're here to talk about your cookbook.
Now, first of all, can you believe you have a cookbook?
- It's very, it's kinda surreal to see.
I get emotional a lot, that's not saying a lot,
but I did, like when I opened it up
and the publisher sent me the first copy,
I looked at it and I was like, holy crap,
this is like months and months of work and testing
and going back and editing all in a book,
and it's out there for everyone to see.
- Now, it's more than a cookbook.
You talk about your journey growing up,
how you fell in love with food.
Tell us a little bit about that.
- I've been deeply obsessed with food since I was a kid.
My father and my sisters and my mom,
everyone is the exact same way,
and when I was actually approached to do a book,
first I was shocked that they wanted 100 recipes.
I was thinking, how am I possibly going to come up with 100?
But when I started sort of thinking about it
and my brilliant editor Rux Martin,
she not only looks like Grace Coddington
but she is like the Grace Coddington of the culinary world,
if you get that reference, she's amazing.
She has big poofy hair, she lives in Vermont.
And basically she was like, we want you to treat.
Because I was like, are we gonna make this
like a back to kitchen basics book?
Is it gonna be a little bit more about my Polish heritage?
And she was like, it doesn't have to be one thing.
Just like you, we want to keep it sort of
like autobiographical and you can just kinda go
wherever you want with it.
Recipes that didn't make it into Queer Eye, I put in there.
So I just treated it as sort of like
starting from the beginning,
like dishes that I remember when I was a little kid
and my parents would prepare for me, the Polish food that
I loved and that I was ashamed of when I got older
because being Polish wasn't really cool all the time.
But then I revisited and stuff I made when I was like
a broke ass student to the food that I make now
to some Queer Eye behind the scenes stuff
that never made it,
so I put it all in there. - The testing phase seems
so fun, yet so hard.
- Testing is fun, but it's.
So basically, we did all of this,
and I say we because there's such a team of people behind it
just like Queer Eye.
The way the timing worked out, because that's how life is,
I had to basically come up with all of the content for it
while we were filming our Kansas City episodes.
We would film 10-12 hour days,
and then I would show up at home
and have to test out three recipes.
And I had a lovely friend of mine, Mindy Fox,
who's my co-author, she was on the East Coast,
and then Beth Barden, who was a recipe tester,
she did catering for Queer Eye,
she helped with the Queer Eye book,
and she became a very near and dear friend,
she has an awesome restaurant called Succotash,
and they have the best Swedish pancakes ever
with lingonberry sauce that her grandmother made for her
when she was a kid.
- Shameless plug.
- It's so good.
If you're in KC, check it out.
And then she would be waiting for me with three recipes
that I would text her during the day,
and she would figure out quantities to put in.
Because I'd never measured anything in my life.
Everything is like an Antoni handful, which is massive,
which is probably like two cups for a normal human being.
And then, so I didn't really know.
And she was kind of good at like reading my mind
and figuring out what it was.
So I would make three dishes, she would make three,
and then we would taste them all.
The most aggressive night was
I get meat sweats whenever I have meat really late,
and there was one night where we did
the chicken peri livers, the roast chicken,
the steak, the shrimp on a skewer,
and the Mykonos pork chop.
- [Laela] Oh my.
- Which is a lot of meat
to eat that late at night. - That's a lot.
I know what chapter you were in.
You were in the meat section. (laughs)
- In the meat section, yeah.
We gave it a simple name.
But yeah, it was nice.
It was sort of like, and it was just even
working with Beth, I never like to be alone,
and I was like cooking or having somebody in the vicinity.
And with her, it was a nice opportunity to sort of like
let her take over every once in a while
or take on certain tasks.
I'm not good at having people help me in the kitchen.
I am with other life stuff, but not with that.
I'm a bit of a control freak.
And just sort of talking over, like I don't know,
like even the pork chop, when we started talking about it,
and I was like, well, why is this important?
And I started talking about how I discovered it
in my favorite restaurant in Mykonos of all places,
like you wouldn't think that's where you'd find
the best pork chop in the world but that's where it is,
at a place called Kikis Tavern,
this awesome Greek guy who goes to the market
and makes his own salads
and has the most amazing juicy pork chop ever
with a beautiful fat cap
and just slathers it with Greek honey and oregano.
So it's like an homage to recipes that I've tried
from all over the place.
And what I realized very quickly is that
it is an autobiography.
All these dishes are important.
There's a reason why I keep making them over and over again.
- Which of the dishes in your cookbook
is like the quickest to prepare?
- (chuckles) Not ironically, it's in the dessert section,
so I don't really do desserts.
And so, I don't have a sweet tooth.
I'll always pick cheese and meat over any type of sweet.
And so, my desserts are actually all homages
to the women and a couple of men
who had made desserts for me
and I got to get in touch with them
and get their recipe and evolve it in some instances.
And there's one there that
I smoked a lot of pot in my early 20s,
and there's a nice story about it in the book.
And my very favorite thing to do
was combining two beloved products,
and one of them is like a crunchy peanut butter,
or you can use almond butter, cashew butter,
whatever nut butter you want,
it's a weird name but it works,
and then you take Nutella
which is like the peanut butter of Europe,
and you make a canele, which is just a spoon of each,
and you just keep on doing this
until you have a perfect circle
and then you put it on a bit of parchment or wax paper,
you put it in the freezer.
And you have a ball of chocolate and peanut butter
and who doesn't like that?
You can roll it around in like a Skor bar
or dust it in pretzels or anything like that.
- Wow.
Okay, now which one of the recipes
takes the longest to prepare?
- The one that takes the longest to prepare
I think would be a toss up between
the chocolate beer chili and.
No, no, it's the bigos, it's the Polish hunter's stew.
So you have to braise cabbage and sauerkraut
because it's cabbage both ways.
And then you have to cook a lot of basically Polish pork,
so kielbasa, which is like standard kielbasa,
we know what it is, kabanos, which is like a drier version
that kind of looks like a pepperoni,
with a bit of pork, and you cook everything down.
You render all the fats of it.
It gets really nice and crispy.
You remove it from the pan, you have all the fat,
and then you put in your cabbage so it cooks in said fat.
There's a bit of bacon in there as well.
And then instead of adding beer which makes it really hoppy,
I swapped it out and did like a beef bourguignon style
of adding a whole bottle of Bordeaux.
So it gets like really fruity and jammy and nice.
And then I add some dried plums and some margarine
and Bailey's and some other stuff.
And then you cook it down, and the best way to do it
is actually, my father taught me this,
if you leave it in a fridge or like even in your garage
overnight so that it's able to cut through
and then you reheat the next day and you get crispy bits,
and it's this sweet, salty, sticky stew
and you can just smear it over a nice rye bread
with cold butter.
It's the best.
- Finish this sentence, everyone needs to know how to make
an insanely good.
- French omelet.
Start simple, start basic.
Sean VanMeter reference to Queer Eye.
Know how to make a French omelet.
When someone stays at your house,
you should be able to prepare eggs three different ways.
It's sexy.
- Okay, okay.
Now if fresh food is not an option,
what's better to grab, a canned vegetable, canned or frozen?
- Frozen.
- [Laela] Frozen, okay.
- Just,
try canned peas and try frozen peas.
You'll understand the difference.
The canned ones are brown.
I have yet to find like a proper usage for them.
And they're 99 cents.
It's not like they're more expensive.
- You sir are in great shape.
You're around food all the time.
What is your philosophy on food?
How the heck do you stay healthy?
- I am very hyper.
I'm also very vain.
So I think it's a good combination of those two things.
I do love to eat well.
I don't like to deny myself of things that I enjoy,
like I have, every weekend, I have a cheese board.
It's a non-negotiable.
It's just a thing that I have. - It's a good way to live.
- Usually by myself.
There have to be three different types of cheeses.
There's a nice cute little demo on
the full board in the book. - There is.
- But I think it's all about balance.
It's like during the week, it's about eating healthy,
and I try to stay away from.
Like everyone has their thing.
Like if I speak to Tan, for example,
his thing is sweets and bread.
He will destroy a loaf of bread.
I'm not that guy.
For me, if you give me a massive block of cheese
or a stick of butter, I can have a whole stick of butter.
No problem.
So it's like dairy fats for me, those are my trigger.
So I try to limit my dairy as much as I can during the week
so then it actually allows me to enjoy them more on weekends
which I really like.
- Yeah, there you go, it's all about balance.
Let's have some fun, let's play a game.
- Okay.
- So I'm gonna show you a photo of a celebrity,
and you tell me what you would cook for them.
- Oh, I like this, that's cute.
- Yeah, could be from the cookbook, could be just whatever.
- Okay, we'll mix it up. - Something from the show.
Number one.
- I had a chance to meet him recently.
He's the sweetest, kindest guy,
and he and Amal are like, they're the chicest couple
to ever grace the Earth.
You know what, I know what I would make for George
because he appreciates Italy
and he had a place in Como, maybe he still does,
and I'm not sure if he does or not,
but when I was there last time, I saw his place
and it was awesome.
Finocchio, fennel is really popular in Italy,
and in the south of Italy, citrus is really big.
So there's a really nice winter, like a fennel citrus salad
with paper thin basically cut fennel
and a bunch of different citrus and pistachios,
and that's something that's like really Italian
but can be made sort of, it's evergreen.
You can make it year-round.
- All right, moving on.
We've got Leonardo diCaprio.
- Leonardo diCaprio, he's very big into.
Who's the reflection of?
Is that him?
- No, that's not definitely him.
Who is that? - That's someone else,
but it looks like.
- I don't hate it.
- Okay, Leo.
He's an Italian man.
He should know how to make cacio e pepe.
And I figured out how to.
Are you familiar with cacio e pepe?
- [Laela] I know what it is.
I've never made it. - It's actually,
it's technically really weird
because there's no cream added,
at least not in a real one.
It's all about the emulsification of pasta water with cheese
and it's the temperatures of the bowls that you're using
because you want like a thick creamy sauce
that's not like offensive amounts of cream,
not that we hate that.
So I would want to teach him how to make
like a very traditional Italian dish.
Cacio e pepe for Leo.
- All right, last one, Taylor Swift.
- I know what I would make for her actually.
- What would you make for her?
- Because I have made this for her, a version of it.
It would actually be,
oh my gosh, I forgot what the name of it is,
but it's basically like a lemon and crumbled sausage pasta
that uses, you just heavily reduce white wine,
a lot of lemon, it's like a version of spaghetti limone,
which is one of my favorite things ever.
You cook out all the acid of the lemon,
but you have this beautiful concentrate of this like,
it's like limoncello minus the booze,
which is just like this lemony syrup with a zest,
and you have crumbled sausage and like a shit ton of parsley
and it's just, it's like flavorful and fresh
and still decadent because it's pasta.
But it's just, it's like,
it's the perfect pasta dish to have in the summer
because you know how in the summer
you want to eat light but then sometimes you're like,
I want pasta.
That's the one you want to have.
- All right, Antoni in the Kitchen, out now.
- That's me.
- This is you.
- Yeah.
- Pick it up, it's in stores.
And thanks so much for stopping by.
- Thank you for having me, as always.