What Do Kids Eat Around The World? | Pan Pals 🍳

Cooking for kids is not always easy and getting them to eat what you've made can feel like you're approaching the toughest food critic in the world. Can you give me a smile? But when you find a dish that lands, that's worth sharing. It's so good! Oh wow. My name is Beryl and this show explores how our foods can bring our different cultures together and this is our Kids Meals episode. Today I've paired up two dads, Steve and Christopher, to swap their kids' favorite dishes from their cultures. Chris's son loves his dad's Cote d'Ivoire and jollof rice, so Steve will make that for his girls. What you do is you cut off the head. And Chris will make Korean kimchi fried rice, a fan favorite in Steve's household. Yay! Ezra, are you excited? What's your experience in cooking Korean food? None. How do you smell like? You smell like hot dogs. I'm so curious as to how this is going to turn out. This weird marriage of Italian tomato sauce and like an East Asian curry. And I know that that's nowhere near West Africa. How will the kids react? Let's watch and see. Dear Steve, my name is Christopher Gipley and you are going to make West African jollof rice. My family and I come from the Ivory Coast and French is called Cote d'Ivoire. My absolute favorite West African dish I like to make for my son is jollof rice. And I'll show you one pepper and you can do the other. Sound good? So what you do is you cut off the head. And then you pull its guts out. Jollof rice is a well-known West African dish. Two special ingredients to make jollof rice is definitely the tomato paste as well as the red peppers. Have you ever cooked West African food before? I have never cooked West African food before. I've never made any African dish before. It's actually quite easy to make and it's perfect to make this dish with your family. My son loves this rice because not only that it's super tasty, but he also likes helping. So his favorite part of the whole process is blending the peppers. Just clicking on the machine, he likes seeing like all the other vegetables just like blending it together. He thinks it's very amusing. Oh, Penny's here. Hey Penny, want to have a sniff? Smells good, right? I love it. I want to smell it too. Hey, Beryl, come on. It's so aromatic, so fragrant. That's delicious. I'm getting a lot of ginger. Yeah, me too. I like that. My grandmother taught me this dish. While making the dish, the aroma, the smell, as well as just the ambiance remind me of home. It does smell really nice. Yeah, very fragrant. Bay leaf is just one of those things where if you don't have it, something is missing. I feel the opposite. I think bay leaves are a scam. Oh, no, no, no, no. I completely disagree, Beryl. Wait, what? No, bay leaf really adds so much depth of flavor. You always have to wash your vegetables before using them. And you're always, always, always, no matter what, you have to wash your rice. You have to make sure your rice is not muky. And that's one of the secret for a perfect jar of rice. I usually cook rice in this machine right here, the rice machine. But today, we're cooking it over the stove. So it's something a little different, something that I don't normally do. So let's look at the next steps. In a large pot, actually, Penny, why don't you do it for me? Second line. In a large pot, medium high heat, heat oil. Once oil hot, add onion, garlic, tomato paste, tomato puree, salt, and bay leaves. I am 100% certain that you and your kid will enjoy making this dish. Because not only that it's easy to make, but it's very, very delicious. Cover with a lid and stir occasionally for five minutes. Okay. For five minutes? Yeah. That's a lot of tomatoes. The base is usually made with tomato paste. And then you go ahead and you just add all your other ingredients. Oh, wow. This smells really nice. How are you feeling about the ratio of tomatoes? Right now, I think there's way too many tomatoes. However, I will trust in the process. It's good though. Yeah. Good sauce. Cook your rice with all the broth of the veggies and the meat that you've cooked. I really hope this dish inspires you for the next time you get together with your kid and make a dish. And I hope that you actually love this dish as much as myself and my son loves it. Love, Christopher. Let's try this. Oh, hi Koji. That's delicious. It's a dish that I feel is pretty simple for a kid to like. That's so good. Oh, wow. Yeah, I would love to pair this with a chicken dish. I think it'd be absolutely stunning. Definitely fussed the rice too much because I wasn't sure if I was doing it right. So I kept opening in the lid, kept stirring it a little bit. And also since there was so much tomato base, it burned on the bottom very easily. I can smell a little bit of burning on the bottom. So I'm going to save the rice by doing a brain transfer. So what we ended up doing, we transfer the rice into triage, to rice triage. While we cleaned up all the burnt bits and then put the rice back in. And I think just all that moving around kind of broke up the rice a little bit and the starches came out into the liquid a little too much. What would you do to make this more like Korean? No, but I wouldn't make it Korean. I will leave it exactly as is. I think the jollof rice has its own background, its own history, its own story. And I would love to make this again. I would change it up a little bit next time for sure. But I think it tastes really good. Oh my god. Do you approve as a kid? Yes. Hi Christopher, I'm Steve. Today you're cooking my kimchi fried rice. I was born in Korea and I moved here when I was four years old. We ate Korean food every single day growing up. Kimchi fried rice is such a basic staple of Korean cuisine because a lot of Korean families will always have kimchi on hand and rice on hand. And really those are the two only ingredients that you need to make kimchi fried rice. All right, so we're going to be dicing the spam. Do you eat spam a lot? I love spam. Spam is really good. He's like, give me some spam. Yeah, Bentley's going to be famous. If you're going to add a meat, you should cook that first. I usually go for spam. I think spam has the right texture. My kids always ask for things with spam. I haven't had this for a while. Okay. It's right over there, yeah. The other component to that is kimchi. I love kimchi. Kimchi is a fermented cabbage. It can be made spicy or not spicy. But the kimchi that we're using is the classic version that uses hot chili flakes. I learned how to make this dish in all the Korean food I make from my mom. I always used to watch her cook when I was young. And I always helped her out in the kitchen. Can I bring in Ezra? Yeah. Yeah, get him. Ezra, short time. Yay. Ezra, are you excited? Yeah. My kids like to help me in the kitchen now. And so it's kind of a generational thing. It's a recipe that we didn't ever write down. It's just something that you sort of freestyle. How do you smell like? You smell like hot dogs. No two kimchi fried rices look exactly the same. Now we're cooking. Somebody did not dice their spam. I think that one belongs in that. It's important to taste as you cook. My trick in making kimchi fried rice is to fry the kimchi first. I feel that when you cook it first, it brings out a whole depth of flavor that you don't get if you just mix all the ingredients and cook it all together. So I never fried kimchi before. Does it taste different? It is less salty. And it has a little sweetness to it. You can use fresh rice if you want, but leftover rice does work better because it's drier. How does it smell like? You smell like spaghetti. This is just the way that I show them parts of my Korean heritage. I mean, I cook for my kids every day because I have to. Crispy bottom ASMR. Cooking is my love language. So I put a lot of effort into it. And I want the people that eat it to enjoy it. Sorry. Add two teaspoons. Did I just hit your head with the sesame oil? I think you're going to love this dish because it is the essence of Korean food in one bowl. This is a great family meal. It's super easy to make. It's delicious to eat. I hope you and your kids love it. Love, Steve. It smells so good. This is so good. This tastes super delicious. It has this like smokiness to it. A slight kick from the kimchi. Did I say sweetness already? No, it has like a little sweetness to it, I guess. I guess caramelizing the kimchi. I love kimchi because my step-mom is Hawaiian. So she introduced this. We always have like a big tub on the fridge. Lunchtime, snack time. We just like go ahead, just get a big fork and just like eat the kimchi. I usually use the cube bouillon. This one was like so... I feel like it has like more flavor to it. It's like so smooth as well. It blends well with the food. I like this. It's super different. Yeah, wait. I also want to taste this. Oh, it's salty actually. Has this inspired you at all to kind of look into Korean food? Absolutely. Like literally, I want to go online and be like, or maybe text Steve and be like, what do you have? What can I make next? And I think that my son too will definitely enjoy this. I'm excited. Cheers. I want to eat this every day for the rest of my life. Steve, I need more recipes like this. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Pan Pals. Let me know in the comments, what was your favorite dish when you were a kid? Mine was meatloaf. And if you like home cooking, you should check out the latest season of The Great American Recipe. The show features eight talented home cooks in a competition that celebrates the diversity and flavors of foods across the U.S. You can watch the first episode here on the PBS Food YouTube channel and check out the rest of the season every week on the PBS app and your local PBS station. Check it out in the links in the description.