Ed Meets Vivian
Special | 4m 19sVideo has Closed Captions
Chef Ed Kenney visits two fish markets in Hawai’i and Japan and shares his insights.
PBS chefs meet on this segment - celebrity Chef Vivian Howard of "A Chef’s Life" fame visits Hawai’i to make cooking magic. She stops in to visit Chef Ed Kenney at his restaurant, Mud Hen Water, where she is introduced to ‘uala (sweet potato), ulu (bread fruit), and taro among other foods.
Ed Meets Vivian
Special | 4m 19sVideo has Closed Captions
PBS chefs meet on this segment - celebrity Chef Vivian Howard of "A Chef’s Life" fame visits Hawai’i to make cooking magic. She stops in to visit Chef Ed Kenney at his restaurant, Mud Hen Water, where she is introduced to ‘uala (sweet potato), ulu (bread fruit), and taro among other foods.
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Learn about host and chef Ed Kenney, explore recipes from the show and more.(upbeat music) - [Ed] Good morning!
- [Vivian] Good morning.
- [Ed] Welcome to Mud Hen Water.
- [Vivian] Thank you.
- Or, to Hawaii I should say.
- Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Hawaii has so many culinary influences based on immigration but what would you say are the cornerstone of Hawaiian food before all of those influences?
- Yeah, Hawaiians had a really simple food, obviously fish.
Center of the plate was taro.
There's only three starches.
There's no grains grown in Hawaii, so there's uala, which is sweet potato, ulu, which is breadfruit, which you had the other day.
- Yeah, which was wild to me.
- [Ed] Yeah.
And taro.
Tonight we have a big event.
- Yes.
- I'm excited to cook side by side with you.
We're actually gonna be cooking all day but I thought we'd start out the day getting energized.
There's a lot of things here I'm sure you've never had before, but then a lot of it may be familiar as well.
- I'm into it.
- Nice.
I guess we'll just start with this.
What does that look like?
- [Vivian] Poke?
- Yeah!
- Poke's transcended Hawaii.
- Has it made the wave to North Carolina?
- Yes, and I'm afraid we're doing awful things to it, I'm sure.
- Well, pass me a chopstick.
- One chopstick, or two?
- Two.
- Okay.
(both laugh) - Give that a try and tell me what you think.
- Do I need to get some of this?
- Yeah, just try a little bit.
- That's not poke.
(Ed laughs) - Yeah.
- Those are beets.
- They're beets, very good.
- Wow, that was really messing with my mind.
- The night before we opened, we have that hearth, on a practice run we threw a bunch of beets on the embers.
Came in the next morning and they were smokey, succulent.
Had no idea what we were gonna do with them.
Cut them up into cubes and we said God that looks like tuna.
- It does, it looks like tuna, and ends up being a really beautiful beet salad I guess.
- Mmhmm, and we've got some smoked macadamia nuts, pickled limu, which is a native seaweed.
- Macadamia nuts are your nut here.
- They're actually invasive.
- Oh they are?
- [Ed] Yeah, they were brought in as a agricultural crop.
(music) - Let's try this, you've had Poi?
- Mmhmm.
- It's kind of that bland paste.
- It's really hard for me to understand-- - Yeah.
- --what it is.
- It's the first food that I ever ate growing up as a kid.
This is called pa'i'ai.
The taro's been pounded, but prior to adding enough water to become pois it's what's called pa'i'ai so this is finger food.
- Okay.
Mmm, it's good!
- Lots of times when people first have pa'i'ai they say it's like mochi, so we decided to treat it like mochi, so this is, we call this yaki mochi and it's like Japanese street food where they grill mochi and then put it in the nori with shoyuan sugar.
- There's something very smokey, is that from grilling it?
- That's from grilling it, and probably the seaweed, or the nori.
So this is native food that we're treating kind of in a Japanese way.
This, if you've had a poached egg before-- - I have, we have those in the South.
- Yeah.
But this is what I'd like you to try, this kind of green-- - What is it?
Wow, that's-- - Doesn't really quite cook down.
- Mmm, that's good!
But I have no idea what it is.
- So this is lu'au, which is the leafy part of the taro plant.
This you'll find at most Hawaiian food restaurants but it seems like everybody these days uses canned coconut milk.
I went to Tahiti and you would get thrown off the island if you even thought about using canned coconut milk, so we've started juicing coconuts every day.
It's a pain in the butt.
- I get it!
- Yeah, husking it, breaking it, grating it, juicing it, but it makes all the difference in the world in this finished dish.
- Oh it's got this subtle, mellow, like coconut but very green, flavor.
- Yeah.
And then in this Opah, which is Moonfish.
What I like about this fish is it's one of those other fishes, it's a bycatch.
There is no target fishery that goes out specifically for Opah, they're going out for Tuna or Swordfish.
In the past they would throw it back but now we actually can eat it, and it's so yummy and fatty and-- - We have bycatch situations in North Carolina too.
Triggerfish is one, do you have Triggerfish?
- Uhuh.
- That's one of the things that, when we opened our restaurant eleven years ago it was a trash fish and no one would dream of serving it and now it's like, - It's sexy.
- Everyone appreciates it, yes.
(piano music)
