This Is TASTE 736: Hello Home Cooking with Ham El-Waylly
Feb 25, 2026
Ham El-Waylly, New York chef and cookbook author blending New Orleans flair with third-culture roots. Paula Hood, former Charlie Trotter colleague now leading scholarships for young restaurant pros. They chat about multicultural recipe play, preserving family recipes, cookbook photography and promo quirks, practical home-cooking tools and techniques, and scholarship opportunities for culinary and hospitality students.
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Context Makes Unusual Recipes Coherent
- Ham argues context matters: recipes that seem odd make sense when you read the headnote explaining childhood memories, ingredient access, and learned techniques.
- He used the book's essays to restore context lost on social media's short clips.
Mom's Madonna Notebook Guided Recipe Choices
- Ham found his mother's Madonna notebook of clipped and handwritten recipes during the pandemic and used its multilingual pages to reconnect with family flavors.
- He included two unmodified 'good' recipes—banana bread and lemon loaf cake—to preserve those time-capsule tastes.
Beijinho Swiss Roll Was Hardest To Nail
- Ham struggled to capture the exact nostalgic bite of beijinho when converting the coconut-and-clove truffle into a Swiss roll.
- When the first bite of the roll transported him like the original beijinho, he knew they'd nailed the recipe.
