The show is hosted by Jesse Palmer, with Duff Goldman, Carla Hall and Damaris Phillips serving as judges. “ Summer Baking Championship” features 10 talented bakers from around the country competing in unique summer-themed baking challenges featuring the flavors, ingredients and celebrations of the season for a chance to earn the title of Summer Baking Champion and win $25,000, per the cable channel’s official description for the competition series. This book is about saying where it came from and that it deserves a place next to all these other cuisines.Food Network has renewed its latest “Baking Championship” spinoff, “ Summer Baking Championship, for a second season. Italian food is the food from Italian people Irish food comes from Irish people Korean food is made by Korean people. I’m not saying you have to be black to make it, but let’s call it what it is. While they’re catching up, I’m taking the opportunity to educate and say what soul food is and what it isn’t. As a culture, when you realize certain things will make money and sell, people who have power will take advantage. If you think about it, black people are in-look at all the black shows and movies. This is a cuisine that other people are learning versus something that will be in this year and out the next year. The benefit of a trend is that it shines a spotlight on a thing, but trends come and go. I want to show soul food as a cuisine and not as a trend. I have several beans in the book-green beans and white beans with coconut oil. If I’m in New York and I’m feeling homesick, I make a big pot of pinto beans, greens, and cornbread. When it becomes healthy it out of soul food into something else, so I wanted to make that connection again in a very deliberate way. There are all of these ingredients that you see now like sorghum and millet and some of these wonderful grains like hill rice and watermelon and coconut-all of these things that come out of the African diaspora, but we aren’t given credit for it. I started thinking about stripping away all of the additional fat that we’ve been putting on dishes. Going to some of these restaurants where they serve celebration foods and seeing the business owners and how they cooked, I knew I wanted some of those recipes as well, but also to talk to older people about what kinds of foods they ate growing up. I was seeking stories to confirm why I’ve fallen in love with it again.

I had already set out knowing that I love soul food, and I wanted to say that I love it unapologetically because it’s a part of my history.

Maybe it was fufu in Nigeria, and it became hot water cornbread in the South because you had corn mill, not cassava, and you had to cook it. I started thinking, If my ancestors came from West Africa today, how would they be eating? The food has changed because we’ve become so migrant, but I wanted to go back in time and sort of recreate this food and think about foods that came over with them. The book came as an idea my DNA done by African Ancestry and found out that my ancestors came from West Africa. Here’s what Hall had to day about the book-writing process, her go-to comfort food, and soul food as a cuisine, not a trend. Two years and hundreds of recipes later, she’s ready to share them with the world. To write the book, Hall teamed up with Genevieve Ko and went on a 10-day road trip across the South, visiting Birmingham, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Nashville and gathering recipes that represent each city’s culinary culture. The book consists of twists on simple snacks like ants on a log (swap out raisins and peanut butter for creamy cheddar cheese and pecans) simple recipes for the novice cook such as red cabbage and beet slaw with horseradish-ginger dressing and molasses baked chicken wings and oxtails and sea island shrimp and grits for the home chef. This means to her that true soul food consists of a plant-based diet, so she combined the recipes we all love with lots of vegetables and fruits to create a lighter version of classic dishes.

What most people know as soul food started as the food that slaves and sharecroppers made using what was available on the land. However, Hall wanted to provide an alternative approach. When most people think of Southern cooking, they think of fried, gravy slathered dishes that have more butter than anything else.

Carla hall cooking show