Comfort Foods

(bright music) - [Beryl] A great way to learn about one another is through food.

Today on Pan Pals, the theme is comfort food.

- I've never put a whole chicken in the soup like this.

(gasping) What the heck?

- This is my dough.

It feels pretty doughy, actually.

- [Beryl] Maddie, who is originally from South Korea, is going to be swapping dishes with me.

My name is Beryl and I am a Jewish American living in New York City.

We sent each other our recipes and a video message and we are going to be cooking one another's dishes for the first time.

So let's start.

- [Maddie] Dear Beryl, my name is Maddie, and today you'll be making Korean Sujebi.

I'm from Seoul, South Korea, and my culture is a huge part of who I am.

My family and I moved to the States and now I live in New York, so I try to stay in touch with my roots through cooking and learning more about Korean food history.

Sujebi is a comfort dish.

It's often made in the Korean home and it's easy to make.

- This is taking forever.

- [Maddie] The noodle that you get in the end is not exactly noodles, but like flakes of dough.

I learned it from my mom when she let me and my sister pulled the dough apart.

Making sujebi is one of my core memories of cooking as a kid and it probably is for a lot of Korean or Korean-American people.

The hardest part about making this dish is that because the dough can be pretty sticky, you might find it really hard to pull it apart, but in that case, add some more flour so the dough isn't as sticky anymore.

- More flour.

- [Maddie] You make a simple vegetable soup, seasoned lightly, and tear apart a potato-based dough and boil it until everything's cooked.

Look out for the texture of the dough to see if it's fully cooked, because if you eat uncooked sujebi, that's not really good for your stomach.

So you can either check if the dough looks slightly transparent in the soup, or sneak in a taste to see if it's fully cooked.

- Chewy.

- This dish is especially important because it's not that easy to find restaurants that have sujebi, and for immigrants like me, I think it's important to incorporate dishes like sujebi into the everyday meal to stay connected to our roots and preserve our food culture outside of Korea.

Sujebi reminds me of the steam on the windows on a rainy day.

It tastes like a warm hug.

I have a feeling Beryl might say this about her comfort food too, but doesn't all comfort food taste like a warm hug?

Beryl, I really hope you enjoy making sujebi as much as I did growing up, and I really have a feeling you're gonna like the soup.

Can't wait to hear all about it.

Love, Maddie.

(cheerful music) (Beryl chuckling happily) - That was a really cool experience.

I'm excited to try this 'cause it kind of combined a couple of different cooking techniques that I understand into one kinda cool dish.

Hmm, it's kinda got that like egg drop soup feel to it, I think 'cause of the steamed egg in there.

The dish was really fun to make.

There were definitely a couple of moments where I felt a little bit nervous.

She says to grate it really fine.

(grater clanking) Is that this side or this side?

I do think I grated it at the right size.

It makes sense that this will be a dough and you don't wanna use the wider part.

Making the dough, I also felt uneasy about how much flour I was supposed to add, 'cause if you don't really know what the consistency is supposed to be, I think that can be really difficult.

Ooh, I hope that wasn't too much.

I think that's right.

But I think that I did it right.

I think I need flour on my hands.

There's a really interesting difference when you're eating a dish yourself and when you're eating a dish that has a story behind it, and it's nice making this comfort meal of Maddie's and understanding kind of the feelings that she has behind it.

And it's super interesting because my comfort food is also a soup.

I guess soup is pretty comforting though, right?

Hmm.

Something that was really surprising to me was that I had almost all of the ingredients in my house to make this dish.

I was expecting that I was gonna need to buy a whole bunch of new stuff.

I actually only really needed to get bok choy.

Bok choy baby.

I think that was pretty cool because I was able to cook a Korean dish from my house with stuff that was already there.

This was definitely comforting.

I totally understand Maddie's reason for picking this dish, and I'm really excited for her to try mine.

(cheerful music) Dear Maddie, my name is Beryl.

I live in New York City and today, you are gonna be cooking matzo ball soup.

My background is Ashkenazi Jewish and Italian, and Ashkenazi Jews, if you don't know, are Jews that came from Eastern Europe.

So my dad's side of the family is from Poland, and my mom's side of the family is from Italy.

Matzo ball soup is this really warm and comforting chicken-based soup that have these sort of dumplings in it that are called matzo balls.

There are a couple ways to make this dish.

One way is with a lot of time and love, as my grandmother would say, but there's a faster way that uses chicken stock that's pre-made and matzo mix that also comes in a box, and that's the way that I usually do it.

- Pour 10 cups, 10 cups of water into pot.

Oh, okay.

- [Beryl] This is a common dish that is served at the start of Passover, a Jewish holiday that celebrates the Jewish people's escape from slavery in Egypt.

When the Jews were escaping, they didn't have time for their bread to rise, so they ended up with matzo, this unleavened bread.

The use of matzo in our meals is meant to remind us of past hardships.

In this, the matzo is ground up and used as the base to make this fluffy dumpling.

In a way, this dish really transforms something created out of hardship into something very warm and comforting.

- Hmm.

- A nice little insider tip when you're making the matzo balls is to wet your hands when you're rolling them, because the dough can be a little bit sticky.

My mom and my grandmother used to make matzo balls around the size of golf balls, but I have seen some that are baseball-sized, which are great, but they don't need to be that big.

On the surface level, the dish is really basic.

There's not too much going on, but I think that within that simplicity, there's still something really special about it.

The dish doesn't need to be really fancy to be really comforting.

In fact, I think that's what makes a good comfort food.

It needs to be simple to make, and it needs to just make you feel taken care of, and it's really cool to know that you'll be trying it, and I hope that you can feel that same comforting, feels like a hug feeling when you taste it.

I hope you have fun.

Love, Beryl.

(cheerful music) - Ooh, they're so fluffy, oh my gosh.

I'm really shocked.

Hmm, they're so comforting.

I feel like this is what my body's been waiting for the entire day.

I've actually never cooked this before, so I didn't expect them to become so big.

(gasping) What the heck?

I was really shocked to see them like double the size.

From my understanding, stock is something you boil for a really long time to get the flavors out.

I never use stock, 'cause like Korean recipes are just seasoned with the sauces.

This is nice.

And honestly, I have never in my life put in like such a big hunk of meat into soup like that.

This is normal, but I think I might start doing it because how convenient, like and then you take it out and you shred it, like it's a new concept for me, honestly.

I'm already thinking of ways to incorporate matzo ball in some things.

We'll see, we'll see.

I feel like I would love to eat matzo ball soup with some kimchi, for sure.

- Since Maddie and I both live in New York City, I had to pop by to sneak a taste.

I'm just gonna try a little bit.

- Okay.

- I'll be the judge.

- Moment of truth.

Have I been eating matzo ball soup?

- Oh my God It's really good.

She did great.

You did great.

- Yay!

Thanks for the recipe.

- I hope you enjoyed this episode of Pan Pals.

Let me know in the comments, what is your favorite comfort food dish?

And if you liked this show, then you should check out the new season of the Great American Recipe.

The show features 10 talented home cooks in a competition that celebrates the diversity and flavors of food across the United States.

You can watch the first episode here on the PBS Food YouTube channel, and the rest of the season on the PBS app or on your local PBS station.