- To me, soul food is food that touches the heart and soul.
It is traditional African-American cuisine.
It was a term used to, to make us gather,
to bring us together and to give us pride
in what we had and what we were doing.
It is up to us to uphold those traditions
and not constantly run away from them.
So, the dish we're gonna start out with now
is the collard green tortellini.
It's gonna be served with a smoked pork hock.
We're gonna start with the pork hocks.
You have to be careful with them
because they do have a tendency,
when they are pre-smoked, to be a little bit salty.
The biggest misconception about soul food is that it is
unhealthy, not good for you
and that it's garbage.
That it's trash.
It's just not true.
There are so many variations of greens,
but one that's super true to the South
is the collard green.
Depending on where you get them,
depending on what time of year, they're a tad bit bitter.
One of the ways to keep it from being bitter
is making sure you don't leave too much stem.
And after we take them off the stem,
we're going to rinse and rinse and rinse.
I did not grow up on collard greens.
I grew up on mustard, curly mustard, slick mustard
greens and turnip greens, in the Midwest.
So it's a little bit of a regional thing.
Here in the south it's, you know,
pretty much collards, that's it.
I'm constantly looking for new ways
to experiment with what is considered
traditional soul food ingredients.
I thought about tortellini and, you know,
the cheese and spinach combination,
and thought, it's just as easy to substitute collard greens.
I like to use duck fat.
It's got a lot of flavor, it's natural.
Some celery, green peppers, red peppers
and some garlic cloves.
All of this is, really, just about seasoning the greens.
My chopped greens, that have been rinsed,
are starting to go in.
I'm gonna pull some of the broth,
the water out of the ham hocks.
The collard green is a very hearty green,
so it can withstand hours of cooking.
That is the thing about soul food, you know.
People think that it's very simple.
It's easy, but the techniques are techniques
that have been handed down through generations.
And it's really nothing that's very simple about it.
You know, not at all.
I view the food of the South really as soul food.
Because I think the people who were making it originally,
were black people.
We were told for so long that our food was not so good.
We start believing it wasn't any good ourselves.
Now we've gone full circle
and we're understanding what makes food great.
So the collard greens' ready.
They have been chilled, cooled down
so I can handle them.
I'm squeezing the greens to get as much liquid out as I can.
It is my preference to use whole milk ricotta cheese.
I believe if you're gonna do it,
you might as well go all the way.
I'd rather have a few less with great flavor,
than have okay flavor and be able to eat more.
That's where I'm at in life, right now.
Before I became a chef,
I was a international flight attendant.
The connection between food and culture,
it became one of the, the best reasons for me to,
to be a flight attendant.
To explore cultures in their food.
I learned how to make tortellini
from an Italian lady.
Friend of mine when I was living in Italy.
Of course this is like an easy, kind of cheater's way
of doing it because she did everything from scratch,
always, even her pasta.
And she was definitely much quicker than me.
We've cooked the ham hocks
and we're going to pull them out
and take the meat off the bone.
And then we're going to hold onto the broth,
'cause we're going to finish the dish with this broth.
We all progress and so does our food.
And it's no different with soul food.
It smell, it smells amazing, doesn't it, yeah. (laughs)
So, that's our ham hocks, all chopped up.
I'm gonna take the skin,
I'm gonna clean up a little bit of the fat on the skin
and then we're gonna deep fry it.
Am I scared of the oil popping?
No. (laughs)
It's like, if I'm gonna be scared,
it's no place in the kitchen.
I tell people all the time, I don't have tattoos,
but look at me, I got burns everywhere.
A little bit different.
They're not very colorful, but I definitely
own, these are the story of my life.
We're gonna go ahead, drop the tortellini.
I'm gonna ladle some of the broth over it.
Put some ham hock on there,
some of the crackling.
So, that's the collard green tortellini
with the smoked pork hock, the pork broth
and a little bit of crispy pork skin on top.
This is red bucket chitlins.
Or chitterlings.
Chitlins are
the intestines of pigs.
And we are about to clean them.
You can buy these pre-cleaned
but this is the old fashioned way of doing this.
They have a terrible smell,
while they're cleaning and even while they're cooking.
So, we've dumped the chitlins in the sink.
And then we're gonna put some water, add some water
to the sink of the chitlins and just rinse them off.
That's how we're gonna get them started.
So this is a long intestine.
It's not the most attractive looking thing either
and they're not really attractive when you cook them.
Offal cuts, in my opinion, they represent survival.
They were castoffs thrown away, but you know,
the less fortunate, the slaves,
that was all they had to survive.
And they were so creative in
taking an intestine and cleaning it
and adding spices and veggies and herbs to it.
You know, it's kind of a rite of passage.
My mom taught me, her mother taught her.
You see your outside,
which looks fairly clean.
And then the inside, which is a hot mess.
The thing about this too, is there's a calming-ness to it.
It's kind of therapeutic.
This also works a little better
when Aretha Franklin's playing and you got a cold beer.
(Deborah laughs)
You know, when I think of the culinary history of America
I will argue with people that the,
the south represents, really,
the beginning of the culinary world for American people.
And primarily devised from the people who were cooking it,
which were slaves, you know,
forced to be here and forced to cook for their masters.
The rest of the world
understood the importance of not being wasteful
a little bit before we did, here in America.
You know, the biggest
eye-opener was traveling and going to markets
and seeing chitlins and not believing my eyes.
Wondering, okay, what else could it be?
'Cause it looks just like a chitlin.
I can't believe this, you know.
Because I'd been told for so long
it was really food that only Black folks were eating.
They're not as popular as they were when I was a child
and cleaning them, definitely there's an art to it.
Unfortunately it's a art that seems to be, be dying
but it's, you know, a part of our history.
So, I think it's important for the younger generations to
at least have an idea.
I think we started at 9:30, it must be noon now.
And I've got veggies here already.
Rough chopping this because it's only a flavoring element.
Got green peppers.
I put some serranos in there, give it a little heat.
And some celery.
So, all of this is just going into the pot.
I've also got a little apple cider vinegar and then spices.
We've got kosher salt, Lawry's seasoned salt,
granulated onion, granulated garlic.
So, got our chitlins in our pot.
So, I've got water, just enough to cover it.
These are going to cook down to literally nothing.
So, I've got vegetables at the bottom,
seasonings at the top,
in the middle they're all gonna meld together.
The labor does justify the taste of chitlins to me,
primarily, I think, because
we grew up knowing it was special.
These have been going for about three hours.
They're done, they're done.
So the thing about chitlins, a very small amount.
That 10 pounds becomes about five pounds,
after you've cleaned it.
And then once you cook it, the 10 pounds,
that you started with, by the time they cooked,
you're down to two pounds now.
And when you're down to two pounds
you don't let your neighbors know you have any
because you don't want to share.
Now, as a condiment, I like a little heat.
We also like a vinegar addition.
So, we found that chimichurri is a good condiment for it.
This is actually a little blend of paprika and cayenne,
for a little bit more heat.
And then that's pretty much the dish.
My daughter refuses to eat chitlins.
Hey Kay!
Now, my daughter is the general manager of our restaurant.
It was very hard to come out to my daughter.
She was young.
You know, the idea of her having to bear
the responsibility of my decisions was so, so scary for me.
I did, you know, sit her down.
I had the conversation with her
and I, I cried, you know,
hard.
And she consoled me and, you know, let me know it was okay.
You know, once I got a divorce, for years,
it was just me and her.
And that bond is super, super strong.
Being queer, it has empowered me.
It's helped me to shut out the naysayers,
no matter what I can shut them out, you know,
and stay true to who I am and keep going.
I'm spending more time thinking about is my food good,
than do they know this and do they know that?
You know, for African-American chefs, I'm like,
you have to be proud of what we accomplish,
and their struggles, what they go through.
Okay, we took pig intestines and made them delicious.
Respect the technique, respect what, went into it.
And don't allow other people to put it in your head,
that what you grew up with, what you ate is nothing.
The world's not, it's not equal.
It's not equitable.
And we all should push toward making it so.