TPT’s new season of ‘Relish’ is back with longer episodes – and lutefisk

At a church lutefisk dinner, Yia Vang, the prolific chef and burgeoning TV star, came face-to-face with his audience.

“I can’t tell you how many people came up and were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re him!’ ‘Are you him?’ ‘We watch you every Saturday at 2 p.m.’ I was like, oh, my gosh, I think I found my people,” Vang recalled.

He was there, with a production team from Twin Cities Public Television, to film the latest season of “Relish,” which was released last week for streaming online.

Co-producers Brittany Shrimpton and Amy Melin launched the show about the diversity of Minnesota cuisine in 2019. Episodes back then were quick 5-minute bites that only streamed online. But over five seasons, “Relish” has grown to become a full-fledged 30-minute show that also airs on a traditional television station.

And Vang, as host, has become a household name — among a certain PBS-watching set, anyway. “I’m like, I need to do stuff where women in their 30s think this is cool,” he joked.

In that church basement, the adoration of his fans was palpable. At one point, Shrimpton had to shield Vang from the crowd to get him out of the building.

“Is this how Taylor Swift feels all the time?” Vang laughed, before he was pulled away from a conversation to take selfies with yet more fans. But this time, he was at his own restaurant, Union Hmong Kitchen, to celebrate the release of the fifth season of “Relish” with the chefs and food purveyors featured in each episode.

In its new format, each episode focuses on two foods from vastly different cultures that, it turns out, have something in common. Lutefisk, the Scandinavian dehydrated fish, for example, is paired up with smoked Ukrainian sausage from Kramarczuk’s, the venerable deli in northeast Minneapolis.

“You may think they have nothing to do with each other, but they have a very similar origin story of sorts,” Shrimpton said. Both are about food preservation, and, when served today, are also about the preservation of a culture.

“It’s all connected,” she said.

Other foods that get the spotlight this season: chutney, guisado, pho, empanadas, collard greens, pasties and hand-harvested wild rice.

Conversations about these dishes, guided by Vang’s natural curiosity and sense of humor, can be hilarious, delicious and deeply meaningful. Most important, they showcase Minnesota’s rich diversity and the contributions of the immigrants and refugees who settled here.

The founders of Kramarczuk’s came to Minnesota as refugees from Ukraine, “like what’s going on today,” said Orest Kramarczuk, the second of three generations in the 70-year-old family business.

When he was growing up, Minnesota was a “food desert,” he said, speaking at the event at Union Hmong Kitchen. “It was all meat and potatoes. And I look at the food scene today and I go ‘Wow.’ This is a testament to the diversity of our country and our society and the strength of this country and the strength of this community.”

When “Relish” first aired, most episodes were filmed in a chef’s home kitchen. Now, with more time in each episode, and the help of a director of photography, Jack Davis, the show is able to feature a second location and dig deeper into the ingredients. They visit the Olsen Fish Co. in Minneapolis, explore St. Paul’s El Burrito Mercado with co-owner Milissa Silva and go foraging with Linda Black Elk, an ethnobotanist and educator with NATIFS, the Native-led nonprofit.

“The storytelling that we’re doing now is slightly different,” Melin said. The new episodes are “what I dreamed of when we started this.”

For Vang, the show has been a gateway to new relationships and new (to him) flavors. Back in that church basement, he tried lutefisk for the very first time.

“I doused mine in butter,” he said. “It tasted just like melted butter. I’m not mad at that.”

All six episodes of the fifth season of “Relish” are now available to stream online at tpt.org/relish and on the PBS app. They will premiere on TPT2 and YouTube in the fall.