Go global with your holiday baking

Good Food

KCRW

Society & Culture

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fire up the oven and get creative with your holiday baking.

Kat Lieu offers 108 Asian cookie recipes that you can bring to your next cookie exchange.
Maureen Abood unlocks memories as she finds inspiration in the Lebanese bakeries of Dearborn, Michigan.
An American baker living in Berlin, Laurel Kratochvila dips into the Polish canon with black breads, bagels, sour rye breads studded with caraway, and challah.
Jūrgen Krauss, everyone's favorite trombone-playing Great British Bake Off contestant, prepares for the holidays with traditional German Christmas treats.
LA Times restaurant critic Bill Addison visits Sora Craft Kitchen, a Turkish restaurant in DTLA.

Connect with Good Food host Evan Kleiman on Substack.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is good food. Today, it is all about baking.
0:09.8	Baking is so many things, deliciousness, tradition, generosity, but also a lens into history,
0:17.7	as you'll hear in many of our conversations today. For Cat Lou, baking was
0:22.9	about forging her own path. Cat was a doctor of physical therapy who founded the online community
0:29.8	subtle Asian baking. She's behind a number of viral recipes like chewy vegan mochi cookies,
0:37.0	a pull-apart panned in milk bread that's shaped like
0:39.9	little frogs or sticky chocolate rice. Yes, you heard that right. Now she has a cookbook that
0:46.8	collects some of her not too sweet recipes. Hi, Kat. Hi, how are you? I'm good.
0:54.4	Thank you so much for coming on the show.
0:57.0	I would love it if you would tell us a bit about Settle Asian Baking, the online community you founded.
1:04.3	Just tell us a little bit about when and why you started it and why the word subtle in the name.
1:10.4	So interesting. Yeah, so subtle Asian
1:14.2	baking was a group that I founded in May of 2020, right around the height of COVID, and I was missing
1:20.4	like a lot of the Asian bakery goodies that you could easily get when you're not in quarantine
1:25.0	or like the food that my mom would make in New York City. So I used to
1:29.1	live in New York back then and then I moved to the Renton area and she was still in New York. So
1:35.1	I really wanted to try new recipes on my own. But when I googled Asian baking or Asian baking
1:41.3	recipes back in 2020, there really was none. There was no collective space for those recipes. So when you see something missing and I'm the type of person who likes to build things and I said, I'm going to make my own community. I called it Settled Asian baking as an homage to Settle Asian Traits, a meme group that grew like really big online. I think it's so very big.
2:04.3	It's all about Asian memes, Asian diaspora, how we grew up being Asian in the West.
2:09.8	And I didn't expect it to blow up the way it did because it was a private group. It went from like 500 of my
2:16.4	best friends all over the internet to like 50,000, 60,000
2:21.3	to 160,000 people like within a year. And we just share the love of Asian baking, Asian baking recipes,
	...

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