What goes into a biscuit?
For Irene Wong, it’s more than flour, buttermilk, butter and sugar, carefully laminated and cut into hearts, her favorite shape. And it’s more than her years of trial and error, perfecting seams and techniques to reduce gluten development.
It’s her childhood memories of Pillsbury biscuits. It’s Covid-era offerings of gratitude to healthcare workers. It’s recent memories of Martha’s Vineyard farmers’ markets and mornings working in the commercial kitchen of North Tabor Farm, watching the layers of pastry swell in the oven.
“That, to me, is the best joy I can give to somebody,” said Ms. Wong. “A simple little biscuit.”
Ms. Wong is this year’s chef in residence at North Tabor Farm in Chilmark. She is also the creator of On The Road, a new Netflix show that premiered on Tuesday.
The show was produced by America’s Test Kitchen and features eight different episodes, six of which Ms. Wong executive produced, wrote and directed. Each episode brings viewers to a different American foodscape, from the indigenous food celebrations of Oregon tribes to the Mexican-American barbeque traditions of Texas, to the oyster farms and clam bakes of coastal Massachusetts, where Ms. Wong filmed with Duxbury oyster farm Island Creek Oysters.
“We got there at four in the morning, because we had to get out on the boat when the tide was low,” she recalled. “Skip [Bennett, the farm’s founder] was on the boat. The sun was just coming up as we were heading out to the oysters. And there he is, pulling oysters out of the water and shucking them.”
In another episode, Ms. Wong tells the stories of two second-generation chefs who took over their immigrant parents’ restaurants, and have since received national acclaim.
“That echoes what my grandparents did,” said Ms. Wong. “They came to the U.S. and opened a restaurant…because they just needed to make a living.”
And even though Ms. Wong didn’t take over the business, “that love for food and communicating through food was passed on to me,” she said. “I’ve taken that and then built something of my very own.”
Ms. Wong’s own story has played out this season at North Tabor Farm, where she has been transforming the farm’s bounty into dips, pastries and pizzas for the farmstand and farmers’ market. It’s her first job as a cook, her first long-term stint on Martha’s Vineyard, and the first time she’s made 100 heart-shaped biscuits at a time — which sell out in half an hour at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market.
“I love feeding people,” she told the Gazette, her hair in her signature baseball cap, a towel around the belt loop of her jumpsuit, and her cat, Baci (like the Italian chocolate kiss), meowing from the window of her apartment at the farm.
A New York City native, Ms. Wong attended New York University Tisch School of the Arts for journalism and film. After college, she worked at the research department for Good Morning America, always jealous that she wasn’t working on the segments with guest chefs and cooking demos. Her mentor Bob Tuschman, now the senior vice president of the Food Network, convinced her to join the Food Network as a field producer.
Over the next two decades, Ms. Wong traveled around the world, both with Food Network and her own production company. She met chefs at their homes and restaurants, stylized food for demos and gave crash courses in on-screen cooking, all while capturing the sounds, stories and emotions that go into making each dish.
“People are so proud of the food they make,” she said. “And even though everyone will speak a different language and the ingredients are different, the thing that is consistent is the love and passion that goes into it.”
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shifted the focus of food television to in-studio cooking and competition shows. The traveling shows, and consistent work for Ms. Wong, dried up.
For the first time, Ms. Wong stepped in front of the camera, filming “talking head” cooking demos for social media. That comes with its own challenges: In less than three minutes, Ms. Wong must explain the context, story and techniques of her chosen dish. It’s a far cry from the controlled studio and prepared shot lists of her career.
“It’s like, okay, I’m about to make egg salad. If I don’t roll the camera now and hit record, it’s never going to happen,” she said. “I’m in a jumpsuit. My clothes are stained. My nails are trashed. My hair is always in that baseball cap…I’ve kind of learned to embrace that reality.”
She’s documented her time on Martha’s Vineyard, from quahauging on the ponds to her latest tomato-recipe adventures (tomato jam, tomato galette and slow-roasted tomato topping for stracciatella cheese), to the farm crew’s watch party for her Netflix show, complete with blueberry slab pie, lasagna and focaccia.
Over the last half a year, Ms. Wong has accumulated thousands of followers on Instagram. It’s her dream to write a cookbook — she’s been reading them cover to cover since she was a teenager, absorbing the techniques, formats and vocabulary of sharing recipes with an audience.
“Wouldn’t the girl who’s been collecting cookbooks since she was a child finally get to put her own book on her shelf? Yeah, that is a dream of mine,” she said.
Still, it’s a ways off. And Ms. Wong isn’t sure where she’ll work next when she returns to New York City in November.
What she is sure of is that her future cookbook will include a recipe for her heart-shaped biscuits, and the memories that accompany them. Baking them for the North Tabor family in February before accepting the job, and selling hundreds at the farmers market. Delivering biscuits and honey butter to nurses at the height of the pandemic. Her mom making Pillsbury Grands Flaky biscuits for Thanksgiving, a rare American food amid the Chinese cooking of her household.
“Once in a while [my mom] would make it for breakfast for us, and I remember so clearly having the biscuit and peeling off one layer at a time,” she said. “That’s how I would eat it, one layer at a time.”
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