Special Sauce with Ed Levine

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1. Special Sauce: Matt Rodbard and Max Falkowitz on Becoming Food Writers [1/2]

   8 augustus 2019 · 30 min

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   In the next two episodes of Special Sauce, we take a deep dive into the challenges and triumphs of building a career in food media. I invited former Serious Eats editor/current contributor Max Falkowitz, and founding TASTE editor Matt Rodbard to share their perspectives. As two people who have co-written cookbooks with chefs, been on staff as editors and writers at food publications, and freelanced extensively, I thought they’d offer unique insights into what it takes to become food writer. And sure enough, they had no shortage of thoughts to share. Lees meer

   Max started us off with a hilarious tale about life at the Falkowitz family table: "So my dream story is to write one of those really tender, loving, emotional pieces about my dad's pasta sauce, which he spends all day making. He has these giant cauldrons that his aunt used to only used to boil gefilte fish in and they're probably 30 gallon cauldrons. He chops up all of his olives and he browns his ground beef and he gets special types of tomatoes and he spends all day making the sauce. He invites his old college buddies to have the sauce. It's a whole thing, and the sauce is terrible...It's so bad. It tastes like canned olive juice...which is effectively what it is. Both of my parents are wonderful cooks, and they were for the most part raising me as independent single parents and did a fantastic job and gave me a life long love of food, but they have their missteps and one of them is the sauce."

   Matt's advice for aspiring food writers is quite simple: "Write all the time. It's like a muscle. It's like riding a bike. I mean, it's cliché, but it's true. You have to stay in shape. I think that's why I said the Yelp review was such a good thing to start with, because I was Yelping literally every meal I had and I think often with Twitter and with Social, people assume that's writing, but it's not writing. That isn't writing. That's something else."

   Max added this bit of pointed counsel: “Give a fuck. There's so much wr…

2. Special Sauce: Lazarus Lynch on Writing Son of a Southern Chef [2/2]

   1 augustus 2019 · 29 min

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   In part two of Ed Levine's conversation with Lazarus Lynch, who goes by more titles than any 25-year-old has any reasonable expectation to have (cookbook author, performer, singer...the list is incredible!), they delve into how Lynch decided he wanted to write his book, Son of a Southern Chef: Cook with Soul. Lees meer

   Lynch tells Ed that he came up with the title in his junior year in college, long before he even thought about what the book would contain, during a meeting in which a campus advisor asked him to think about his dream profession. "And I remember I kept bringing up my dad," Lynch says, "and I...went to my room that evening and woke up the next day with 'Son of a Southern Chef' sort of on the tip of my tongue."

   And while Lynch adopted the phrase for his overall brand, producing a cookbook was just a natural extension of the many projects he'd already undertaken. But the process of writing the book was a bit mystifying, particularly since he didn't see any other book like it on the market- one written by someone who was in their early 20s and, as Lynch says, "who just came out of college, who's a part of the LGBTQ family, and who's talking about soul food." Add to that the skepticism he initially faced from publishers, many of whom rejected the book pitch out of hand. "We sent it out to about ten different publishers," Lynch says, "and...everyone was like, 'No, no, no.'"

   Eventually, he found a publisher, and had to navigate the process of getting the book written and edited, but to hear more about what that was like, and how the book changed over the course of its writing, you're just going to have to tune in.

   --

   The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/08/special-sauce-lazarus-lynch-2-2.html

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3. Special Sauce: Lazarus Lynch on Cooking on Camera and Being Okay With Who You Are [1/2]

   26 juli 2019 · 28 min

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   Singer, author (Son of a Southern Chef), and food personality Lazarus Lynch is not your typical cookbook writer or social media star. As an openly gay young Black man, Lynch is blazing his own trail in the food and media worlds, so I couldn't pass up the chance to talk to him for Special Sauce. Lees meer

   Lynch started his food TV career in college, where he enlisted friends to hold cameras and other equipment for his cooking show in exchange for free food. "We put it on YouTube. I didn't think anyone was going to watch it. And suddenly people on campus started to notice it, pay attention to it, and then [online food video network] Tastemade came calling." The next thing Lynch knew, Tastemade was flying him out regularly to LA to shoot his show.

   Who inspired him to pursue a career in cooking on camera? "In the early days of watching Food Network, I would come home [from school] and turn on the Food Network- it was everyone. It was Bobby Flay, it was Emeril Lagasse, I mean, it was Ina Garten. It was all of the ones that we see, or that we know to be sort of the Food Network people. And that was my education, really.... I didn't know about the powerful women in soul food, like Edna Lewis or Leah Chase. I didn't know. I didn't know that they existed until much, much later."

   Lynch came out to his parents in college. His father was immediately accepting, but his mother, a product of a strict Catholic upbringing, found his sexuality challenging. It took three conversations over the course of five years for her to come around. He told her, "I think that part of my purpose in your life is to help you evolve in accepting people of all different places, and whoever they are. That's part of what I'm here- to grace you in that process of learning and knowing. And you're here to support me in being my best full self. So, we had a very compassionate, loving conversation the last time we talked about it."

   Despite the difficulty of those talks, the payoff for Lynch in increased self-conf…

4. Special Sauce: Alvin Cailan on What “American Food” Means in 2019 [2/2]

   19 juli 2019 · 29 min

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   In part 2 of my extraordinary chat with chef-restaurateur-activist Alvin Cailan, we delved deeply into his socio-political motivations, but we still managed to fit in some laughs. Lees meer

   Cailan says he's always been motivated to confound the pessimism he frequently encountered growing up, akin to what former President George W. Bush described as "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

   "I grew up in the early 1990s in the rebellious era of gangster rap and...the rise of the immigrant voice," Cailan tells me, and that spirit helped him push back against the people in his hometown of Pico Rivera in California, who would tell him his ambitions were fantasies. "Everyone tells you, 'Oh, you can't do that.' 'Don't even think about going to UCLA or USC.' My whole entire life I've always been fighting for,'I can do it, too.'"

   That can-do attitude basically led to the creation of the popular web series he hosts on First We Feast, The Burger Show. After convincing the producers of the FOX cartoon Bob's Burgers to allow him to run a pop-up that offered burgers featured on the show ("I had seven days, seven chefs, seven pun burgers and we did out of my incubator in Las Angeles."), Cailan became known for his burgers. Or, as he puts it, "I became the burger dude. People started asking me to go on their shows, their podcast, whatever. Finally, [the producer] Justin Bolois...asked me if I can host this show he's working on." And he couldn't pass it up. "I love burgers," Cailan says. "I never really intended to be a TV or personality."

   The Usual, one of Cailan's restaurants in New York City, has an unusual sandwich board sign in front: "American comfort food cooked by children of immigrants." I ask him what the story is about that. "I want people to know, when they're coming here, they're going to have food cooked by people of color and it's American comfort food, but influenced by our ethnicity and our culture...It's American food in 2019."

   I also get Cailan to explain to me why you…

5. Special Sauce: Eggslut’s Alvin Cailan on Ruckus-Causing as a Career Path [1/2]

   11 juli 2019 · 30 min

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   Every now and then on Special Sauce, I just hit it off with a guest, feeling immediately as if I've known them all my life. That's what happened when I talked with Eggslut founder, chef-restaurateur, and ruckus-causer Alvin Cailan. Lees meer

   Cailan, who grew up in an LA suburb, got his first kitchen job while still in his teen years, washing dishes at a retreat house run by the Catholic Church. His very religious mother thought it would keep her wayward son out of trouble, and it worked- sort of. "[I was] in my car on my breaks...getting stoned, and the next thing you know, a nun would knock on your window and was like, 'Hey!' And I'm like, 'Oh, my God'.... And so I slowly started to change, because their way of fixing that was giving me more responsibility.... At first, I was hired as a dishwasher, and the next thing you know, I'm the janitor. Next thing you know, I'm the prep cook, and the next thing you know, I'm on the line cooking food."

   After college, Cailan went into construction management, but his heart remained in cooking, big time. "It was very tough, because every day I would look up recipes, and then every Friday, when I'd get my check...I would go to the gourmet grocery store, I would go to Costco. I would break down whole tenderloins, and I would buy pork butts, and I would smoke them all weekend, and that was the thing I wanted to do. I was like, this is what I'm supposed to do. And one day, after wrapping up an invoice for $40,000 for a reconstruction of a bathroom, I think that was probably the line in the sand. I was like, I've got to do something different."

   Cailan moved to Portland, Oregon, where he worked in fine-dining kitchens and learned how to make charcuterie at Olympia Provisions. But, impatient to start his own project, he saved up some money and started Eggslut in 2010, serving a variety of gourmet egg sandwiches from a food truck. "I was approaching 30 years old, and I was like, man, I really need to step up my culinary game.... I wasn't rea…

6. Special Sauce Live, Ed Levine Edition: Serious Eats Lives! [2/2]

   3 juli 2019 · 29 min

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   Welcome back for the second part of Special Sauce with Ed Levine, featuring Ed Levine! Lees meer

   This week we pick up where we left off, with Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group and Ed's longtime friend, serving as a special guest host, asking Ed about many of the events that are described in his memoir, Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption, which has been named

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7. Special Sauce Live, Ed Levine Edition: A Serious Eater Is Born! [1/2]

   27 juni 2019 · 28 min

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   At the end of every week, Ed Levine- a.k.a. Serious Eats founder, a.k.a. Serious Eats overlord, a.k.a. "missionary of the delicious," a.k.a. Ed "The Good Ones Eat Through the Pain" Levine- hosts intimate conversations with food lovers of all kinds, diving deep into the ways in which eating and sharing meals has shaped his guests' lives. Lees meer

   For this and next week's episodes of Special Sauce, we turned the tables on Ed and had Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group and Ed's longtime friend, grill Ed in front of a live audience at Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan. The event was held in part to celebrate the release of Ed's memoir, Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption, named one of the best cooking, food, and wine books of 2019 so far by Amazon.

   The evening started off with a bang, as Meyer admitted at the outset that he was going to be a combative interviewer. He noted that he'd been hankering for a chance to interrogate Ed about his business decisions, in much the same way Ed questioned the integrity of Meyer's business when he wondered, quite publicly, about Union Square Hospitality Group's inability to make good French fries. Or, as Ed so diplomatically put it at the time, "Why Do the French Fries at Blue Smoke Suck?"

   Despite saying that he should "have his head examined" for helping Ed sell his book, Meyer did a fine job filling in for Ed, asking him all the questions that Special Sauce listeners have come to expect, such as "What was it like at the Levine family table?" Ed revealed that his grandmother's cooking was what sparked his intense love of food, and he identified the source of his missionary zeal as his parents, who originally met at a Communist Party meeting and bequeathed their passionate intensity, if not their politics, to all their children.

   Part one of the conversation begins with Ed's childhood and ends with his college years, when he discovered a love for music that rivaled his love for food, even as he…

8. Special Sauce: Nik Sharma on the Kitchen as Laboratory [2/2]

   20 juni 2019 · 31 min

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   This week, in part two of my conversation with chef and food writer Nik Sharma, we dug into the science-based approach to cooking that informs his terrific new cookbook, Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food. Lees meer

   Given Nik’s background in medical research, it made sense to learn that he thinks of his kitchen as just another lab. All of us, he pointed out, experiment in one way or another in the kitchen, even if we’re just tweaking a family recipe. In his case, though, Nik explains that he “had that training to do that…one of the things I really like about recipes, [is that] the way they're written is exactly the way I would prepare my buffers in biochemistry or in genetics… We call them recipes, we pretty much use the terminology, everything is arranged by volume or when it has to go in.” He even admits to using lab notebooks when he’s developing a recipe. It’s that analytical approach that he says allows him to make each iteration of a recipe better.

   That said, Nik shied away from making Seasons read overly scientific. Instead, “I kind of wanted to introduce myself to people,” he said. “At the same time, I wanted to be really approachable, so someone who is intimated by being too science-y kind of understands that the simplest things that they're doing in the kitchen actually have a scientific basis to them.” He talked about something as simple as bruising an herb like mint to extract essential oils and introduce them to a cocktail. “You know, you're breaking those cells to release those essential oils so then they get solubilized in whatever solvent they're in, so like water.”

   The moral of Nik’s story? Even if science intimidates you, “what you're doing in the kitchen is a form of science,” and even when it goes awry, learning from your mistakes is half the fun. Nik believes, like Bob Dylan once sang, "There's no success like failure and failure's no success at all.” When it comes to cooking, he told me "I want people to understand that when you walk in to the kitc…

9. Special Sauce: Nik Sharma on the Stories Told by Seasoning [1/2]

   14 juni 2019 · 33 min

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   Cookbook author (Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food), blogger (A Brown Table), and newspaper columnist (A Brown Kitchen) Nik Sharma made the perfect Special Sauce guest. Why? He has a great, dramatic story, and he isn't afraid to tell it like it is (or was). Lees meer

   Sharma grew up in India, and as a man who recognized that he was gay at a young age, he had a tough childhood. "At least back then, it wasn't talked about. I'm talking about in the late '80s, early '90s, when I kind of realized something was different about me. It was difficult, because I had nothing to compare anything to. The only stuff that I heard about in terms of gay life was about Indians who were either getting arrested, or bodily harm, or even being killed. So for me, that was quite terrifying. As a child, then you start- you think there's something wrong with you."

   Sharma resolved to leave India, initially coming to the US to study to become a medical researcher. But his interest in food eventually drove him to the blogosphere. "I'm really passionate about flavor," he told me. "I’m really curious to see how people in different parts of the world approach the same ingredient or the same technique. I find it fascinating, because a lot of it is also a reflection of society, the socioeconomics of a country.... I find that fascinating, and I wanted to reflect that in my work. I started reading a lot, and also cooking and experimenting with flavor. That's what I started to do with the blog and bring that in."

   Though Sharma's blog brought him enormous pleasure and a devoted following, it also brought him lots of uninvited blowback about his sexuality and the color of his skin. He found himself at a crossroads. "I think one of the things people forget [is] that when you write or you do something and you put it out there, you're making yourself vulnerable.... Fortunately, I took a step back, just to reevaluate my decisions in life at that point, whether I really wanted to do a blog. I said, ‘Well, you kno…

10. Special Sauce: Priya Krishna on Cooking and Being "Indian-ish" [2/2]

    6 juni 2019 · 30 min

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    In part two of my delightful conversation with Priya Krishna, she delves into her book Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family in so many unexpected and revealing ways. Lees meer

    "Indian-ish" is not just the name of the book; it also describes her mindset and worldview. "For my whole life I always felt Indian and American but not quite fitting into either of those molds," Krishna says. "It was like I was too American to be Indian and too Indian to be American. But I think that as time has gone by I have found ways to really feel proud of that tension. You know, in my book I talk about how we wear our kurtas with jeans and we listen to Bollywood music alongside our top 40 hits and...these are all equally important parts of what we do. I love Indian food, but I also love Italian food and I don't think that those things need to feel mutually exclusive."

    Krishna admits that she is no expert on Indian food. "I don't want to pretend to be an authority on Indian food because I'm not," she says. "I didn't want this book to be like, 'This is your guide to Indian food.' This is a guide to the food that I grew up eating."

    Krishna is very comfortable being a missionary for Indian food we can make every day: "I feel like food media just, there is still this mentality that American cooking encompasses Western cuisines and everything else is the other. I still think Indian food is treated as this sort of strange esoteric thing and I really want to change that. I admire people who are doing that for other cuisines. I absolutely adore Andrea Nguyen, who just authored Vietnamese Food Any Day. I hope to do what she's doing for Vietnamese food for Indian food."

    As an example, one of the things Krishna hopes to educate people about is the importance of chhonk, which Priya rhapsodizes about in the book. As she describes it, chhonk is "this this really fundamental technique in South Asian cooking and basically the idea is that you're heating up some kind of fat, whether th…

11. Priya Krishna on Special Sauce: How Indian-ish Came to Be [1/2]

    30 mei 2019 · 31 min

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    I knew that Priya Krishna, author of Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics From a Modern American Family (I am predisposed to like any book with the word antics in the title), was smart and funny and focused, since I'd read her book. But I still wasn't prepared for the delightful, incisive, and revealing chat we had on this week's Special Sauce. Lees meer

    Perhaps the most obvious question to ask was what "Indian-ish" means. Krishna explains that the concept was inspired by her mother and the book's coauthor, Ritu Krishna, whose cooking Krishna describes as "rooted in Indian flavors, but [it] kind of pulls inspiration from all the foods she was encountering from her travels as a businessperson, to what she watched on PBS cooking shows, to just going out to restaurants."

    The result was a balance between the practical and the creative. Krishna says her mother "had limitless ideas for how flavors went together. She had this amazing intuition, but she also didn't have time, so her recipes are this perfect marriage of 'I have all of these amazing ideas, but I've got 20 minutes to put dinner on the table, so what do I do?'" It was another editor, and not Krishna herself, who first recognized the potential for a cookbook on that theme- one that would, Krishna says, "dispel this notion that a lot of people have that Indian flavors and Indian food, that making that at home is hard or complicated."

    Before she began her writing career, Krishna grew up the daughter of immigrants in Texas, who were intent on her having a classically "American" adolescence. "I feel like it's many immigrant parents' desire, by raising kids in the US, that they will lead different and hopefully better lives than they did. That's the reason why so many immigrants settle down in a new country. I think that my parents, even though they had these stringent rules, they fundamentally believed that and understood that, and they wanted us to go to prom and go to college, and to have a college experience. They turned a b…

12. Special Sauce: Joe Yonan on Charting Your Own Path [2/2]

    24 mei 2019 · 35 min

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    In part two of my far-ranging interview with Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan, we talked about his career in journalism and the ever-evolving world of food media. Lees meer

    Joe told me about his winding path to food journalism. After years of reporting local news, he eventually made his way to the Boston Globe. There, he became travel editor, but found himself yearning to write about food, instead. How did he manage to acquire one of the few coveted roles as staff food writer? He told his editor, “I’m going to leave… if anyone's listening and you're able to do this, make yourself indispensable and then threaten to leave."

    At a certain point, it felt like his career at the Globe was stalling. So when the Washington Post came calling in 2006, Yonan listened. “I just said, ‘I really want to do it.’ I mean, it also was more resources, bigger staff. I thought naively at the time that the Post was in so much better shape than the Globe was.”

    Little did he know, Joe was about to take on the monumental task of shepherding the Food section into the digital age, transferring thousands of recipes from the papers archive to the Post's online database. Since that was shortly after I launched Serious Eats, Joe and I would have long conversations about where food media was going. "You know, Ed,” he said, “I remember your advice having something to do with my mindset back then… I knew what you were up to with Serious Eats… I remember you told me about Twitter. I mean, you didn't tell me about it, but... I remember asking you. I was like, "You know, I don't know. Should I bother with this? Should I bother?" And you said, "You absolutely should bother."

    Finally, we got around to talking about Serious Eater, which Joe had just finished reading on the train up from DC. "It's so much more dramatic than I had expected. I think for me what resonated was the passion and the drive to make something work in the face of all of these obstacles. I mean, just one obstacle after another. And just…

13. Special Sauce: Food Editor Joe Yonan on Finding the Color of His Parachute [1/2]

    16 mei 2019 · 36 min

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    It's always fun to have a longtime friend on Special Sauce because I always learn so much about the person sitting across from me, no matter how long I've known them. And that's just what happened when I sat down with Washington Post Food Editor Joe Yonan. Lees meer

    Yonan spent the first ten years of his career writing, reporting, and editing for suburban newspapers in the Boston area, during which time he learned a lot of valuable lessons about telling stories. "You know one of the things that reporting does," Yonan notes, "especially if you start out in a small place, is that you have to learn how to make a water-and-sewer board meeting interesting and relevant to people who have no interest in it."

    Eventually, he got tired of hard news coverage, and so he did what many other people at the time did: He read What Color is Your Parachute?, the enormously popular self-help book. "You're supposed to sit in a quiet place and have a pen and a pad down and you're supposed to close your eyes and imagine yourself both working and happy, believe it or not," Yonan says, recalling one of the exercises in the book designed to help you find your calling. "And I got all set up to do it, I had the pen and paper and I closed my eyes and in five seconds I was like, 'Oh, it's food.' Food makes me happy, food has always made me happy."

    I met Yonan when I went to Boston to promote my pizza book in 2005, and I took him on a Boston tour de pizza for the Globe's food section, and during our conversation he reminded me of a sage bit of wisdom I gave him way back then, which I'd completely forgotten. "I don't know how many places we went to," Yonan says, "I mean, it was ridiculous. I remember at one point we're on place eight or nine or something, and I am suffering physically...Do you remember what you said to me? I've repeated it hundreds of times since then. You said to me, 'Joe, the good ones learn to eat through the pain.'" For anyone interested in writing about food, becoming any kind of j…

14. Special Sauce: Jason Wang on Building a Xi'an Famous Foods Empire [2/2]

    9 mei 2019 · 34 min

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    In part two of my conversation with Xi'an Famous Foods cofounder Jason Wang, he and I talked mostly about the struggles and challenges involved in first getting the business off the ground, and then expanding. Lees meer

    The restaurant's original location, in a subterranean food court in Flushing, Queens, had a napkin problem. Money there was so tight, Wang said, "We had to cut back on things.... Back in the days, I'll be honest with you, we didn't give out napkins. We didn't have a napkin dispenser.... People were like,'Oh, you guys are so cheap, you don't give napkins out.' Fights started out because of napkins in Flushing."

    Wang knew it was important that both Chinese and non-Chinese customers enjoy the food. "It's important for our food to continue to appeal to Chinese eaters that are in the US directly from China....They know what the food is supposed to taste like. If we have their, sort of, following, that speaks to the authenticity of the food. If we have other folks that are in New York City, we're lucky to have a lot of guests who are more adventurous. They're willing to try different things, try something new every night."

    The keys to the restaurant's success? "Our food is very approachable. It's very reasonably priced. People can try without feeling like it's a big risk. It looks, smells good, people talk about it, so they'll come. Now, when they do come, there's a positive feedback effect that goes on. The Chinese people will see the American eaters, and the American users will see the Chinese people there. They'll look at each other, and the Chinese people will be like, wow, Americans like this stuff? That must mean it's high-quality, it's well packaged, because that's what the perception, the stereotype of Western products is.... Then the Americans will see the Chinese people, they'll be like, there's, like, a Chinese grandma that's just sitting there eating. She doesn't speak any English.... Yeah, it's legit."

    As Jason and his dad, who cofounded Xi'an Famo…

15. Special Sauce: Jason Wang on the Origins of Xi’an Famous Foods [1/2]

    2 mei 2019 · 34 min

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    One of the many reasons I love doing Special Sauce is I get to interview people who shed light on various parts of the food culture I know very little about. People like Jason Wang. Wang and his father, David Shi, are the co-propietors of Xi'an Famous Foods, the fast-casual Chinese food concept that introduced New Yorkers to dishes like as lamb burgers, liang pi "cold skin" noodles, and the legendary lamb face salad that's unfortunately no longer on the menu. Wang emigrated with his family from the city of Xi'an, China, when he was eight, and life was not easy for the Wang family. "My father's work life in the U.S. is kind of what you would imagine it to be [for] someone who is a middle-aged immigrant from China who doesn't speak any English," Wang says. "There's only a few things that he could really do in this country, and one of those would be working in a restaurant." Wang's father would be away for weeks or even months at a time working at restaurants all along the Eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, the family lived in Queens, NY, in the basement of someone else's home. His dad "would take a bus somewhere, and someone would pick him up from the restaurant [he was employed by], and he would basically live in the boss's house with the other workers," Wang says. "So in middle school and high school, I wouldn't see him for at least one or two weeks [at a time]." Wang's family really wanted him to get a college education, and his mom and dad ended up saving up enough, when combined with some scholarship money, to send him to Washington University in St. Louis. While he was away at school, his father finally was able to leave his itinerant restaurant work behind. Shi had saved up enough money to open a bubble tea franchise in one of the subterranean food courts that dot the Chinese-American enclave of Flushing, Queens. And that's where X'ian Famous Foods was born in 2005. Lees meer

    Besides selling bubble tea, Wang says his father also "sold some food on the side from our hometown,…

16. Special Sauce: Kwame Onwuachi's Journey From Setbacks to Success Story [2/2]

    26 april 2019 · 27 min

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    When we last left chef and memoirist Kwame Onwuachi, he had dived back into his catering business in New York City. Business was decent, but he’d begun to see holes in his game. "The food tasted good, but was it completely hot when it hit the table? I would roast the meat perfectly, but by the time I got to the table it'd be a little overcooked. The sauce that I thought would be really good, when I reduced it down, it was a little bitter. It was like these little things I didn't know what was going wrong, and I needed to get to the bottom of it. I needed to scratch that itch, and education was the next step for me." Lees meer

    Onwuachi went to the CIA to hone his craft and then went on to extern and work at fine dining institutions like Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. But he ultimately found his own cooking identity through the now-defunct pop-up dinner company, Dinner Lab. "I cooked a dinner for it. It was a culmination of my life story. It was labeled Candy Bars to Michelin Stars. I cooked everything from the cheesecake [his sister's recipe] that I made to…the Butterfingers I sold on the subway (we did those as mignardise)…It was an anecdotal tale through the food of my life."

    Eventually, Onwuachi opened the high-end restaurant Shaw Bijou in Washington, DC. His inexperienced restaurateur partners told him money was no object; that, in fact, they didn't care about making money. Onwuachi naively believed them. "Yeah, it was like adding gas to a locomotive. I mean, we were adding coal. It was just like, keep going, keep going, we're powering the engine. I was so deep in it, there was so much going on. It was the first time dealing with a lot of press, and I was really, really young. I came from the South Bronx and I'm catapulted into the stratosphere of the dining culture across the country, and I was trying to just do anything to stay afloat really."

    The restaurant failed after less than six months, its demise hastened by a less-than-stellar review in The Washington Post. …

17. Kwame Onwuachi on Special Sauce: Notes From a Young Black Chef [1/2]

    19 april 2019 · 21 min

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    This week's Special Sauce guest, chef-restaurateur (Kith/Kin in Washington, DC) and memoirist (Notes From a Young Black Chef) Kwame Onwuachi, has led an interesting life, to say the least. How interesting? By the time he was 21, the now-29-year-old had already started a catering business and cooked on a ship cleaning up oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico- all after discarding a previous life that included membership in a gang and selling "nutcrackers," or homemade alcoholic punch, on the streets in the Bronx. Lees meer

    Early on, Onwuachi discovered the satisfaction he could derive from cooking for other people, by helping his mom with her catering business: "Yes, serving food to actual paying customers...there's a certain high about it. You know, like being in the weeds, you know, prepping, putting stuff together, and then reaching that finish-line moment when you're serving it to the guests, and all is well. They're happy...and you can see the genuine joy that they get when eating the food. I love that moment, and I got addicted to it."

    The entrepreneurial spirit he inherited from his mother had a way of colliding with some of his more destructive adolescent impulses. He would bounce back and forth between cooking gigs and less savory endeavors, including selling drugs, until he found himself at a crossroads around the time of Obama's first inauguration: "Obama is walking across the stage accepting his presidency. At that moment, for some reason, it clicked for me. Because...I went out and I voted for him, but I was like, 'There's no way we're gonna get a black president. There's no way this is gonna happen. No way.' And when he walked across the stage, I was like, 'What am I doing? This man defied the odds. Fifty-five years ago, we weren't even allowed to eat in restaurants; like, that was [when] the last restaurant was desegregated. Now this man is walking across the stage. That's huge. And I'm sitting here selling drugs?'"

    After that realization, Onwuachi ended up start…

18. Special Sauce: Allison and Matt Robicelli on Moving to Baltimore [2/2]

    11 april 2019 · 37 min

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    When we last left the irreverent Robicellis in the first part of their Special Sauce interview, they had decided to leave Brooklyn, their beloved hometown. I wondered why Allison and Matt decided on on Baltimore. "It feels like the New York I grew up in," Allison says. "It is an inherently broken city. Everything is broken and if you're a creative type like me, there's nothing more electric than that. Because everything is a possibility. Everything about your life has stakes. Everything is fun, you know?" The move to Baltimore actually made the Robicellis' podcast, the Robicelli Argument Clinic, possible. Allison says, "When I was in New York, we talked about doing a podcast for a while, and everything was like, 'Well you need to pay this person all this money, and we need to monetize, and who are our sponsors?'" But that changed after the move. "In Baltimore," Alison says, "you meet other people who are like, 'Let's just do this stuff because we want to.' The art scene there is incredible. Everybody has something to say. Everything influences you." But moving was important for their personal lives, too. "It was really important for us to bring our kids to a city that had problems," Allison says. "Brooklyn was so messed up when I was a kid. I mean, we had, like, 21 hundred murders when I was in fifth grade. We had riots and all these things. And I'm like, 'If I teach my kids just to sit on Facebook and ignore these problems, or just have ideas about these problems while they're in a gated community, that's bullshit. I want my kids to be better than us.'" Baltimore has been great for the kids for many reasons. "The way that they think, their empathy level, their ideas of how to be people and how to be solutions to problems and how to think big. The school that they go to, we've got kids there who...We raised money for a washer/dryer, so kids would have a place to do laundry for those who couldn't afford it. You know? And in Brooklyn, people would raise money for lac… Lees meer

19. Special Sauce: Matt and Allison Robicelli on Cupcakes and the Bonds of Suffering [1/2]

    4 april 2019 · 36 min

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    Sometimes our Special Sauce guests are just so idiosyncratic, so entertaining, so thoughtful, and so zany, I find myself alternately laughing and near tears for an hour and a half straight. That's what happened when I had Matt and Allison Robicelli on the podcast. Lees meer

    Allison is a longtime baker, cook, and James Beard- nominated food writer; Matt is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has cooked at City Bakery and Lutèce. Together, they opened the acclaimed bakery Robicelli's in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (which closed in 2015), and wrote a cookbook, Robicelli's: A Love Story, With Cupcakes. But before all of that- before they ever met, in fact- each of them faced life-changing events that indirectly led them to pursue their culinary interests professionally: Allison was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Matt was a paramedic who suffered injuries while responding at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

    Neither had even reached their 21st birthday at the time, which helped them bond when they finally met. "I think one of the reasons we got along so well was because after I survived cancer, it's really hard to relate to somebody who's 22 and didn't go through that," Allison says.

    Nowadays, Matt and Allison run a culinary consulting business, co-own a couple of New York food businesses, and host their own podcast, The Robicelli Argument Clinic, whose name is self-explanatory: "We just quibble a lot, and we argue," Allison says. "We've been together for 14 years, and somebody was like, that's entertaining. Cut to tape. That was it. So we decided to do a podcast of just- we have these ridiculous arguments, just any kind of food topic. We just want to have more fun."

    I asked my standard question about what life was like at Matt and Allison's respective family tables when they were growing up. Allison dispelled the stereotype that everyone has warm and fuzzy memories of their childhood dinners: "I remember a lot of yelling [in my family], I remember putting …

20. Special Sauce: Tommy Tomlinson on Asking for Help When You Need It [2/2]

    28 maart 2019 · 46 min

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    In part two of my wonderful conversation with Tommy Tomlinson, author of the impossible-to-put-down book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, we talk about how he decided he was going to have to do more than just diet to successfully deal with his weight issues. Tomlinson describes asking his friends and family about what they thought about his eating habits. "I learned a lot from them about how they would watch what I was eating. And they would be surprised that I would eat the same as them, but I was the one getting bigger. They didn't know that I would stop again at the drive through on the way home and get a second dinner or something. But I also learned about their concerns about me, and their worry that I was going to be gone too soon, those sorts of things. And then I had longer conversation on the record that I taped with my wife, Alix Felsing, and my mom, who are two people who've been with me for most of this journey." Tomlinson credits his wife in a major way for helping him confront what he calls "the one big problem" in his life. "Alix has been this incredible kind of guide for me," he says. "Without ever nagging or hectoring or browbeating me about it, she has gently and lovingly nudged me to become a better and more healthy person." Tomlinson writes in his book about something Alix once said to him, which I asked him to repeat on ai because I found it so moving. "She looked at me and said, 'You made my life.'" he remembers. "That was probably the best moment I will ever have as a human being, to know that I made her life. She has certainly made mine." I hope that exchange, which brought at least one Serious Eater to tears, gets you to check out the rest of our conversation. This episode is as moving, as wise, and as human as a Special Sauce episode gets. Lees meer

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    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/03/special-sauce-tommy-tomlinson-2-2.…

21. Special Sauce: Tommy Tomlinson on Untangling Food, Love, and Loving Food [1/2]

    21 maart 2019 · 34 min

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    It's pretty rare for a Special Sauce interview to speak so directly to me that it feels like I've been hit in the gut. But that's exactly what happened when I talked with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Tommy Tomlinson, whose book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America is a moving memoir about struggling with eating and weight issues. Lees meer

    As someone who has grappled with a weight problem my whole life, I identified with every word Tomlinson wrote and every bite he took, and I often felt during our conversation that he was speaking about my own experiences with food.

    For example, here is Tomlinson on how food makes him feel: "I've never done hard drugs, but the feeling that I've heard people describe when they shoot heroin, for example that incredible rush and that warm feeling that goes over their body, is very similar to what I believe I feel when I have like a double cheeseburger from Wendy's. It's just this burst of pleasure and good feeling."

    Tomlinson is similarly eloquent about how he started to make the connection between obesity and food: "I didn't really connect being overweight with eating because I was eating what everybody else in my family was eating. I just wasn't working the way they were working to burn off calories. And as I got older, I started to realize even more deeply that I had these two lives. I had this one life where I was successful and doing well, had good friends, had people who loved and cared about me. And had this second life where I had this addiction that I could not control. And...up until basically this book and me trying to figure it out, I never could reconcile those two things. And so, sure, I knew from early on that I had some fundamental issue, I just never could figure out what it was."

    And here he is on the fraught relationship between food and love: "And then there's stuff that's very common in food which is it's about love and affection. Your family has made this gift for you of…

22. Special Sauce: Osayi Endolyn on the Legacy of Southern Fried Chicken [2/2]

    14 maart 2019 · 28 min

    Afspelen
    The superb young food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn is back again for this week's episode of Special Sauce. This time our far-reaching conversation includes a discussion of a brilliant piece on fried chicken Endolyn wrote for You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another, a fascinating anthology edited by former Lucky Peach editor Chris Ying and Noma's Rene Redzepi. Lees meer

    First, we talked about the fundamental premise of the book. "It's obviously not true that food always brings us together, and it's obviously not true that food necessitates a further reflection on a culture, right," Endolyn said. "A lot of us eat tacos or hummus without thinking anything more about where those dishes come from. But, if you took the premise that, we are more alike than we are different, and looked at food as the medium to do that, where could you go? And this book wanted to explore migration and immigration in ways that maybe we weren't always welcoming of having those conversations."

    Endolyn picked fried chicken, one of my favorite foods on the planet, as her subject. She used the Australian Chef Morgan McGlone as a jumping off point: A classically trained chef, McGlone learned to make hot fried chicken while working for Southern uber-chef Sean Brock before returning to his native country to open Belles Hot Chicken, a mini-chain of hot fried chicken restaurants based in Melbourne. That cross-cultural recognition became the metaphor that shaped Endolyn's story. To quote briefly from her piece: "No matter where it’s cooked, American fried chicken carries the learning and effort and skill of a people who persevered against unfathomable odds. That Southern hue follows fried chicken all the way to Melbourne and Sydney, too. And therein lies an incredible opportunity. If everyone can agree to share fried chicken, then perhaps that’s a step toward sharing the weight of its complex legacy as well."

    I asked Endolyn about fried chicken's legacy, an…

23. Special Sauce: Osayi Endolyn on Nigerian Food, Writing, and Identity [1/2]

    7 maart 2019 · 32 min

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    On this week's episode of Special Sauce, Ed speaks to Osayi Endolyn, a Florida-based food writer whose work regularly appears in major food publications across the country, and whose column in Gravy, the journal published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, earned a James Beard Award in 2018. Lees meer

    Ed and Endolyn's conversation starts off exactly where most Special Sauce conversations start off, namely with Endolyn talking about her family and the food they used to eat when she was growing up. But Ed wasn't prepared for just how fascinating Endolyn's family history is. For example, her grandmother, Ruth Harris Rushen, was something of a trailblazer, as she was the first woman and first African-American to sit on California's parole board.

    Endolyn's family table had a mix of what she calls "California working mom cuisine" - tofu and noodles, roasted chicken and vegetables- and Nigerian dishes prepared by her father, who immigrated to the United States in his early 20s. Endolyn describes her father as somewhat mercurial, but a talented cook. "The food was glorious," she says. "Dinner was sometimes fraught and tense, but the food was really good." The quality of the food was somewhat surprising, particularly since her father, like many immigrants, had to figure out by himself how to prepare the familiar foods from home. And, of course, her father's cooking left its mark on her. "So," Endolyn says, "I think a lot about migration now and what people bring with them and what they leave behind."

    Endolyn's current focus on the intersection of food and identity is something of a happy accident. She was living in Atlanta and looking into the roots of Southern cuisine, and saw parallels between food in the South and the food her father would make at home. The realization seemed to expose how writing about food could be about so much more than writing about what's on a plate. "Food can actually be this lens from which we can explore so many different things," Endolyn says. "Why ce…

24. Special Sauce: “Is Deep Dish Pizza a Casserole?” And Other Pressing Pizza Questions [2/2]

    28 februari 2019 · 32 min

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    Welcome back to part 2 of Ed Levine's Special Sauce conversation about pizza in the wake of the revelation by pizza historian Peter Regas about the true origins of New York City pizza. Lees meer

    If you recall from last week, Regas has demonstrated that Lombardi's, which was long thought to have been the first pizzeria in New York, was in fact not the first. This week, Regas shares a little bit of what he's discovered about the origins of Chicago's iconic deep dish pizza. As is par for the course with any discussion about deep dish among pizza-heads, this bit of history is accompanied by a lot of talk about whether deep dish is or isn't a casserole. (It's a casserole, folks!)

    Ed then gets Regas and Sasha to talk about their favorite pizza joints in Chicago and New York and beyond, which they do with only a little bit of reluctance. A few of the names you might recognize, as either a local or a pizza enthusiast: Coalfire, Spacca Napoli, Mama's Too, Speedy Romeo's...did I hear someone say the Illuminati?

    In the second half of the episode, Ed has on J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who needs no introduction, and they talk about Regas's revelations and the nature of history. Kenji also gives us a preview of some new menu items on the menu at Wursthall, his restaurant in San Mateo, Calif, where he's planning on doing flammkuchen, which is a kind of-not really German pizza, and he shares a little bit of why he enjoys making pizza and pizza-type things so much. "Because you're interacting with a live thing," Kenji says, "that certainly takes a lot more skill than working with something like sous vide...There's nothing precise at all in the pizza oven. So, when you get it right, it's pretty nice."

    That's just a small taste of all the pizza talk packed in this episode, and we hope you give it a listen.

    --

    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/03/special-sauce-peter-regas-pizza-origin-story-2-2.html

    Learn about your ad c…

25. Special Sauce: Uncovering Pizza's US Origins [1/2]

    19 februari 2019 · 42 min

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    We rarely deal with breaking news on Special Sauce, but when said news concerns pizza's US origins, exceptions must be made. As soon as I learned that Peter Regas, a Chicago-based statistician by day and pizza obsessive by night, had discovered that there were pizzerias operating in Brooklyn and Manhattan years before Gennaro Lombardi opened what has long been thought to be the country's first pizzeria in 1905, I knew we had to have him on the podcast for an extended interview. I even brought in reinforcements: New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, and Serious Eats senior editor and veteran pizzaiolo, Sasha Marx. Lees meer

    Here's a taste of what Regas shared with us: “What we know there is a man named Filippo Milone who had probably come, it's not clear, but he'd probably come around 1892 to America from Italy...The first indication that we have hard evidence of him owning a business is at 47 Union Street, again in Red Hook…That would be then in the early part of 1898....Then what we have at Spring Street, 53 Spring Street [the site of Lombardi's original location], we have a permit that's applied for in the summer of 1898. That's for a bake oven. The man that appears in the next directory cycle, which would be the early part of 1899, is...Phil Malone, Filippo Milone, it's the same man.”

    Pete Wells told Regas that when he heard the news, he tweeted that "it was like if we found out some other dude wrote The Federalist Papers and The Declaration of Independence and then, like, gave them to Madison and Jefferson and we never knew it. It was some guy named Tony all along.” Wells urged Regas to continue his research, telling him, “Follow the mozzarella, Peter.”

    Pizza nerds (and even plain old pizza enthusiasts) will rejoice in the conversation that ensued. To get started on your own mozzarella journey, check out this week’s episode, and stay tuned for part two next week, when Regas expounds on his discovery and Kenji weighs in on all things pizza.

    The full transcript …

26. Special Sauce: Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo on the Importance of Kindness (and Salt) [2/2]

    14 februari 2019 · 36 min

    Afspelen
    On this week's Special Sauce, Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo talk a lot about a lot of things, including their cookbook, the aptly titled Kindness and Salt: The Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors. Lees meer

    I asked them to dissect the unusual title, starting with "kindness." Doug explained, "It's a big part of what we do...We try to be kind in everything we do, in our relationships as a staff and also with our customers. So that would have to be a part of our book. That's our philosophy."

    But what about the salt? Doug said, "The salt is sort of shorthand for just cooking...cooking with flavor and cooking with common sense and cooking with salt, literally...and salt has a double meaning, because sometimes we all get a little salty."

    When I asked about the subtitle, Ryan noted, "That was our working title for the book pretty much since the beginning." And Doug pointed out, "That nicely encapsulates what we do."

    I wondered whether that philosophy of caring for friends and neighbors extended to their kitchens, where in restaurant culture in general there has long been a traditional of verbal abuse. Does Ryan scream? "No," Ryan said. "Not at all. Well, it depends, but, I mean, you have to really be doing something like that's just really idiotic and just not respectful of the food or the restaurant to really make me mad. But on a day-to-day basis, no, I don't walk around yelling, and I know a lot of chefs do. That's kind of one of the biggest things I learned from working in kitchens is what I didn't want to do when I became a chef, and that was pretty much one of them."

    Ryan and Doug also talked about the importance of the person greeting customers at their restaurants. "The person at the door has this dual responsibility. One is just friendliness, but the other one is this sort of mad air traffic control situation where you're trying to shuffle everything around and make it work and promise people they're gonna sit down in 15 minutes and they really will or an ho…

27. Special Sauce: Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo on the Neighborhood Restaurant [1/2]

    8 februari 2019 · 30 min

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    I am constantly on the lookout for good neighborhood restaurants. The kind of restaurants that treat me like a regular even if I'm not; where the host greets me warmly even when it's really crowded; where the food is consistently serious and reasonably priced; and, most of all, where I feel well taken care of at all times. So when I read Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors by Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo, who own Buttermilk Channel and French Louie, two terrific neighborhood restaurants in Brooklyn, I knew they'd be great guests to have on Special Sauce. And I wasn't disappointed. Both Doug and Ryan fell in love with restaurant work right away. For Ryan it was antidote to high school; he started washing dishes at a country club when he was sixteen. "I hated high school," Ryan says, "I wasn't into sports. I got into the kitchen, and I felt right at home." On Doug's first day in a kitchen, he was asked to go through a crate of live lobsters and separate the bodies from the claws. "So I never had seen that done anywhere else before, but it's not easy to take a lobster's claws off while they're still alive and it's a pretty messed up thing to do," Doug recalls. "And they were flopping all over the place and snapping at me. That was a trial by fire...But I loved it." When they decided to open a restaurant in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn together, they had a specific kind of restaurant in mind. As Doug says, they wanted it to be "sort of a hub of the community as well as being one restaurant for all occasions. So a place where you can go with your kids and also come back for a fancy dinner. That's when I know we've really succeeded, is when see those same parents who came in with a high chair and they're back for their anniversary." And while that may seem like the perfect definition of a neighborhood restaurant, I asked Doug to expand on the idea, and he said, "I think it's a place that if you live near the res… Lees meer

28. Special Sauce: Chef Anita Lo on Cooking for Yourself [2/2]

    31 januari 2019 · 19 min

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    On this week's Special Sauce, Chef Anita Lo talks about her new cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. To Anita, cooking for yourself is a journey of self-discovery. "I think cooking can be self re-affirming," she says. "I mean if food is culture and you're cooking what you like to eat, it's about you. It's about who you are...Food is identity." Lees meer

    She also says cooking for yourself is therapeutic and thought-provoking. "I've had a lot of people say to me that this book made them think about how far they'd go to cook for themselves and why they wouldn't do that," she notes. "That's interesting to me. I mean it, we need to take care of ourselves. If you don't take care of yourself, there's no way you can take care of other people."

    Anita also obliged me by outlining for me in detail what exactly would happen on Anita Lo Day all over the world, including a long list of activities that starts with with, "People are eating. People are eating with abandon."

    In other words, they're eating seriously.

    To find out what else they're doing, you're going to have to listen to the always thoughtful Anita Lo on this week's Special Sauce.

    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/02/special-sauce-anita-lo-2-2.html

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29. Special Sauce: Chef Anita Lo on Cooking for Michelle Obama [1/2]

    25 januari 2019 · 26 min

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    This week on Special Sauce with the terrific chef and fine writer Anita Lo. Anita had Annisa, a great restaurant in Greenwich Village, for 16 years before closing it in 2017. She was part of the first wave of women chef-restaurateurs in New York. Anita was also the first woman who cooked a State dinner for the Obamas at the White House. Finally, she is the author of the recently published elegant and pithy cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One This week's episode focuses on Anita's cooking experiences at other people's restaurants, sexism in the restaurant biz, and cooking at the White House. Lees meer

    With politics being front and center these days I had to ask Anita about cooking a state dinner for the Obamas and President Xi of China. I asked if she got to hang with the President and First Lady. "Yeah it was awesome. We got a picture with them. I shook their hands. It was sort of like a wedding line. The Obamas and the Xis were there, and then we all walked through and shook their hands and took a pictures and went out the other door."

    Anita really cut her teeth in the restaurant biz in New York in the nineties in the kitchen of the first incarnation of Bouley, chef David Bouley's influential Tribeca restaurant. I asked Anita if she felt that she was a victim of the rampant sexism there that pervaded so many fine dining establishments at that time. She calmly replied, "Certainly, on some level, but at the same time, my mother had been a doctor and there were very, very few female doctors at the time when she became a doctor. I think she was the only female doctor in her hospital, or at least in her hospital wing. That was my role model, so I knew you just had to endure..."I did get some sort of nasty banter that was meant to make you not feel welcome...Yeah, we still have a long way to go, certainly (in that regard)."

    I asked Anita if being a women chef-restaurateur makes it harder to find investors. She nodded her head and said, "I just think we're wire…

30. Special Sauce: The White Moustache’s Homa Dashtaki on Staying Small and Flourishing [2/2]

    18 januari 2019 · 30 min

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    On this week’s Special Sauce I continue my delightful conversation with The White Moustache founder Homa Dashtaki. Lees meer

    I asked her how she makes her sinfully rich yogurt. Homa said, "There's nothing I'm doing different than the way I would teach you how to do it at home. And you can make White Moustache yogurt at home, and it's a very magical process, but it's so, so simple. It's just a matter of boiling the milk, letting the milk cool to a certain temperature, and then very mildly letting it incubate. And we are now making yogurt in a vat, in a 79-gallon vat, and we just mimic that process."

    She paused before continuing: "And in that vat is the only time that machinery is ever used. It is entirely handled by human hands after that. We take it out of the vat in five-gallon batches, and then it goes into 2 1/2-gallon batches, and then it gets put into an eight-ounce jar, where we put the fruit in on the bottom by hand. And our seasonal flavors of like summer peaches and quince are so much fun to make, and we try to make them as authentically as possible. And this is where my dad and I are screaming at each other, 'Yeah, peel the peaches!' 'No, don't peel the peaches! Leave the skin on.'"

    Homa and her father often argue about whether to automate their production, which led her to talk about what her ultimate goal was, which I found surprising. "White Moustache was such a miracle to begin with," Homa says. "Maybe we hold onto that, maybe we're not a food business, maybe we're an advocacy business. Maybe we kind of set an example for how you don't have to get really big and sell to PepsiCo. Maybe you can stay small and flourish."

    Who or what determines what’s going to happen to White Moustache? Homa suggests it's not up to her or her dad. But for the full answer to that question, you’re going to have to listen.

    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/01/special-sauce-homa-dashtaki-2-2.html

    Learn ab…

31. Special Sauce: The White Moustache’s Homa Dashtaki Makes the Best Yogurt in the US [1/2]

    10 januari 2019 · 35 min

    Afspelen
    I have a confession: Until Daniel Gritzer told me about The White Moustache a couple of months ago, I 'd never heard of it, much less its founder, Homa Dashtaki. Now, after interviewing Homa and trying her yogurt, I can tell you that Daniel was right when he said it would change my life. First of all, the yogurt is so tasty, so thick and creamy, that I can't think of a reason not to eat some every day (which I've done ever since first trying it). Secondly, Homa is a force of nature, someone whose point of view and story might be better than her ridiculously good yogurt, as you'll find out in her two episodes of Special Sauce. Lees meer

    Homa even arrived on this earth in dramatic fashion. "I was born the day of the Iranian Revolution," she tells me. "So the day that the Ayatollah arrived in Iran I was born, and my mom had to go to the hospital in a police escort because there was a curfew, and that's probably why I'm so wired to like chaos all around me."

    After emigrating as a child to Orange County, she ended up going to law school and, yes, practicing corporate law for a while. Why? "Oh, I loved the whole idea of it. You would tell me what you wanted, you'd put down on paper, everything would be clear," she recalls. "And I remember when I first found out about prenups, I remember everyone was very negative about them. I'm like, 'How wonderful! When you're getting into this really intense relationship that everyone would just be above board, you either know how great it's gonna be, or how fucked you're gonna be. It's all laid out.'"

    Her legal career was cut short after she was laid off from her firm. And, after a period of self-described drifting, she found herself drawn to one of the foods that was a staple of her childhood. "We picked making yogurt because to me it was easy, I was being lazy about it," she says. "I'm like, 'There's only one ingredient, milk, right? Now how hard can this be?'"

    It turned out that Homa fell in love with making yogurt. "I don't know if you…

32. Special Sauce: René Redzepi on Apprenticeships, El Bulli, and Being a Better Leader [2/2]

    3 januari 2019 · 21 min

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    In this week's Special Sauce interview with René Redzepi, he describes his journey from being a 15-year-old novice cook to culinary visionary, which started when he was an apprentice at Pierre André, a Michelin-starred, classic French restaurant in Copenhagen. "I spent four years with [chef-owner Philippe Houdet], and it was an incredible time," Redzepi says. "I mean, I basically went from being a child to being an adult like overnight. Just like that you're working 85 hour weeks and with responsibilities." Lees meer

    Those four years were incredibly important to Redzepi. "I still think of him so much, when I think back to these moments that make you, and that give you the courage and the power to believe in yourself further on."

    But what really blew Redzepi's mind as a young cook was a meal at El Bulli. "I was with a friend and Ferran [Adria] was there, we ate and it was just mind blowing to me at the time," he recalls. "So different to anything. I thought everything was French food and suddenly you see yourself in Spain and it's like, I cannot believe what's going on here. What is this? It broke everything for me. So I went up to Ferran immediately after the meal and said, "I want to work here. Can I come and work here?" And, after writing Adria a letter, he did.

    Following a stint at the French Laundry Redzepi returned to Copenhagen and opened the original Noma in 2003. He believes that Noma's location has played an important role in its development. "One of the reasons why I think Noma's become what we are is we were lucky to be in a small town where nothing was really happening," he says. "We were the last stop on the subway, culinary wise, and suddenly all this attention started happening and everybody sort of chipped in...the community sort of embraced it."

    Redzepi is candid about the fact that the restaurant's original success was not due to his leadership skills. "I spent years being an outrageously bad leader," he confesses. "I was a screamer for many years, I wa…

33. Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on What They Hate About the Holidays

    18 december 2018 · 35 min

    Afspelen
    Stella Parks and Daniel Gritzer are back for the second part of our Ask Special Sauce holiday edition, and we tackle some of the most pressing issues many of us face when cooking during the holidays. Lees meer

    For example, take the sticky subject of royal icing, which, according to Stella, is great for making a bunch of holiday-appropriate treats far in advance."You can make a bunch of frosted snowflakes, and they'll keep for weeks, without any kind of loss of quality, because there's nothing really perishable happening," Stella says. "The high sugar content of the frosting ensures that there's not really any bacterial activity coming from the egg whites."

    Mr. Gritzer offers up some advice for prepping and storing fresh herbs, including the importance of using a salad spinner to wash and dry them. The key to storing tender herbs like cilantro and parsley? "Treat them like fresh-cut flowers," Daniel says. For further instructions, you're going to have to listen, but I will give you a hint that the next thing to do involves herb millinery.

    Daniel also answers the vexing question of how to cook a beef tenderloin to satisfy both the people who like their meat rare and the folks who like their meat medium, which I will similarly leave for you to discover.

    Finally, I asked both of them to tell me what they don't like about the holidays. Daniel's answer won't surprise you; his is a fairly common complaint. But Stella's, on the other hand, is most decidedly not commonplace. In fact, it's a hilarious, Grinchian shocker. But this is one gift I'm not giving away. You're going to have to find out for yourself by checking out the episode.

    Happy Holidays, Serious Eaters, from all of us here at Serious Eats World HQ!

    https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/12/special-sauce-holiday-cooking-part-2-2.html

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34. Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on Combustible Artichokes and Making a Better Cookie

    13 december 2018 · 36 min

    Afspelen
    I had such a good time answering your Thanksgiving questions with Kenji and Stella on our recent installment of Call Special Sauce, we thought we'd do the same thing in a two-episode series leading up to the end-of-year holidays. This week and next, Daniel Gritzer joins Stella to answer your holiday cooking and baking questions, and I can tell you that I learned a lot. You'll want to listen to the episode or read the transcript to hear Stella's and Daniel's complete answers, but here's a preview: Lees meer

    If you're among the few Serious Eaters who haven't heard of roasted sugar, one of Stella's genius inventions, Stella offers a quick definition: "So toasted sugar is just plain, white, granulated sugar that has been tossed into an oven for some period of time, and that period of time, it's kind of like toasting bread crumbs or toasting almonds or something, where you can give it a little bit [of time] or a lot to pull out different flavor profiles, like a light toast or a dark toast.... The sugar starts to thermally decompose, which is to say, it starts to caramelize without ever melting, and so you end up getting this kind of dry, granular, lightly caramelized product."

    What's in it for the baker, you might wonder? One advantage is that using roasted sugar in your holiday cookies makes them less sweet: "It's still mostly sucrose, so it behaves like sugar in any recipe that calls for white sugar. It's a total one-to-one swap, but because some caramelization has taken place, it doesn't taste as sweet, and it does bring a little bit more complexity, some toastiness, some nuttiness, and that sort of thing coming into a dough."

    To improve on classic holiday sugar cookies- you know, the kind you roll out and cut into shapes and frost with colorful icing and pack into tins as gifts- Stella advocates a slight substitution: "Most cookies are all-butter cookies, but instead of using pure butter in this recipe, I substitute a little bit of it with refined coconut oil. And refined …

35. Special Sauce: René Redzepi on Opening Noma at 25 [1/2]

    7 december 2018 · 29 min

    Afspelen
    It was a thrill to sit across the table from René Redzepi to record this episode of Special Sauce. The pioneering chef-restaurateur is the force behind Copenhagen's Noma, which has been declared the best restaurant in the world no fewer than four times. As you might easily imagine, our conversation was far-reaching and revealing. Lees meer

    Redzepi and I started off by talking about his new book The Noma Guide to Fermentation, co-authored by Noma's fermentation lab director David Zilber. Fermentation, he told me, is "basically adult Legos you play with. And then as we started fermenting, it was like two basketfuls of them and it's up to us as cooks to figure out how to build with them and what goes what, where, and how. And once you figure that out, cooking becomes easier and more delicious." René is a true believer in experimenting with fermentation, and recommends home cooks give it a shot. He told me that he thinks once people "discover and figure out how to use fermented products in their daily lives, [their experience] cooking will be better and easier."

    Our conversation transitioned from fermentation to Redzepi's childhood, which was partially spent in Macedonia. "It was a very rural lifestyle," he explained. "If you wanted to visit a neighbor, you went on a horse....No refrigerators at home, every single meal was cooked. They were farmers, they worked the land. If you wanted a glass of milk, you milked the cow. If you wanted butter, you had to churn the cream." Redzepi said his extremely modest childhood helped fuel his passion, adding that "the reason why I have had the drive that I have is because when you grow up with nothing, and even going hungry to bed often as a child, this urge to make it was just a really, really powerful urge I had when we first started. I wanted to make it no matter what."

    How did that drive propel him to open Noma 15 years ago, at the tender age of 25? And why did he close up shop at the height of the restaurant's acclaim? To get the ans…

36. Special Sauce: Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook on What Makes Israeli Cuisine Unique [2/2]

    29 november 2018 · 33 min

    Afspelen
    In part two of my enlightening and heartfelt conversation with Chef Michael Solomonov and his partner Steven Cook, authors of Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious we took a deep dive into- what else?- the soul of Israeli food. Lees meer

    First of all, I became really envious when they told me about the kind of research they did for the book, which involved going to over 80 restaurants in eight days. That's my kind of trip!

    And, apparently, when you eat at that many restaurants, you end up discovering a lot about a place. Cook noted that in the book they try to explain where many of the culinary traditions in the country came from, and what makes them Israeli, by documenting "the stories of all these cultures that have come together in the last 100 years, and evolved the cuisine that was already there, and brought in new traditions." As Solomonov notes, too, part of what's unique about the country is that "most Israelis are a few generations away from their family coming from a totally different part of the world," which makes for an interesting mix of food traditions.

    But Cook also had one observation that stuck with me about what makes Israeli cuisine unique. He said, "Because of the way that so many different cultures have established themselves in Israel, within the last several generations, I think that there's an attachment to tradition that is really special, and something that we see probably less of in America. As food obsessed as we are now, it's about what's new and hot. It's not about doing something, perfecting something over generations, doing one thing, handing it off to your children. And that's really an inspiring way, I think, to think about food, and I think it comes through in how it tastes."

    I learned so much from these passionate, smart advocates for Israeli food, and I have a feeling that many serious eaters will feel the same way after listening to this week's Special Sauce.

    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious…

37. [Rerun] Ask Special Sauce: Kenji and Stella Troubleshoot Your Thanksgiving (2017)

    21 november 2018 · 39 min

    Afspelen
    When I was mulling over what we could do on Special Sauce for Thanksgiving, I immediately thought about stress reduction. Making the big dinner can be stressful for any number of reasons, and while we design all our Thanksgiving offerings with an eye to making the holiday as hassle-free as possible, I decided to continue with that theme in this special edition of Ask Special Sauce. I invited Kenji and Stella on to answer as many questions from our community as we could, since they know a lot about a lot of Thanksgiving-related topics. The two of them delve into a myriad of tips and tricks, from figuring out what to do with leftovers and accommodating your guests' allergies and dietary restrictions, and they discuss the differences between stuffing and dressing. (Kenji even has an ingenious solution for people who would like to cook their stuffing in their bird without overcooking the meat.) We will also provide a full transcript of our conversation on our website, for those of you who'd prefer to read it, and have included highlights and links to the recipes mentioned in this episode below. There are so many people that I have to thank concerning Special Sauce. I'm thankful for everyone who makes the podcast a joy to create. Our producer, Marty Goldensohn, our associate producer, Marissa Chen, everyone here both at CDM Studios and the other Serious Eats' Special Sauce home, the Radio Foundation. And a big thank you especially to our listeners, whether you're new to the podcast or tune in weekly. Without you, there would be no Special Sauce. Happy Thanksgiving, Serious Eaters, from me and all of us here at Serious Eats! Lees meer

    3:23 Kenji addresses a question about make-ahead savory foods for the holidays.

    Recipes: Warm Brussels Sprout Salad with Bacon and Hazelnut Vinaigrette, Make-Ahead Roasted Squash and Kale Salad

    6:27 Stella’s tips for make-ahead desserts.

    Recipes: Pumpkin Layer Cake, Pumpkin Pie, Cherry Pie

    8:28 Kenji explains how to get the most out of kitchen s…

38. Call Special Sauce, Thanksgiving Edition: Kenji and Stella on Good Gravy and Loving White Meat

    16 november 2018 · 1 uur 4 min

    Afspelen
    For the last couple of Thanksgivings, we've done call-in episodes of Special Sauce with Stella and Kenji to answer the holiday-cooking questions stumping the Serious Eats community. We love producing these episodes, and our audience seems to love listening to (or reading) them, so we've decided to make it a Serious Eats holiday tradition. Lees meer

    This year, we were treated to a mini treatise from Kenji on gravy, which, I'm not ashamed to admit, has vexed me so much over the years that I've resorted to tubs of the store-bought stuff. Kenji broke down the basic process of making it, then described one of his favorite secret ingredients: "The other thing I like to do with my gravy, which some people consider cheating—whatever, I don't care—is that we add a little bit of soy sauce to it. This is actually something that my grandmother did, my mother did. This is an Alt family, a Nakanishi family tradition, actually.... When I do it, I actually put enough to make it taste a little bit like soy sauce, just because I like that flavor, but even if you don't want that flavor, even just a little splash of it, I find, it gives it a nicer color, and it also really deepens the flavor and brings out some of the other, more roasty flavors in the turkey."

    Meanwhile, Stella had reassuring words for cooks who think the best-tasting pumpkin pie depends on fresh roasted pumpkin. If roasting your own sugar pumpkins and scooping out the flesh adds to the coziness of your Thanksgiving experience, she says, then go for it. But "if you don't enjoy that process, if you don't feel like, man, this is really improving my day and my dessert experience, there's not really any huge benefit, because the companies that make canned pumpkin are using the most delicious type of squash product, pumpkin product, that they can. They have scientists and engineers and farmers, all working together to produce this one glorious thing. It's like, let them do their job." The upshot of all of this being that "if you'v…

39. Special Sauce: Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook on True Partnership [1/2]

    8 november 2018 · 34 min

    Afspelen
    When we booked multiple James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Solomonov and his business partner Steven Cook on Special Sauce to talk about their new book [Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious](a%20href=%20) and their restaurants ([Zahav, Dizengoff, Federal Doughnuts, among others), I thought they'd talk a lot about a typical chef-restaurateur partnership and contemporary Israeli food. I couldn't have been more wrong. What I heard instead was an incredibly moving story of a friendship made stronger by struggle. Zahav was no overnight sensation, Cook is no ordinary restaurateur, and Solomonov is not your everyday rock star chef. For example, here is Solomonov speaking about the nature of his relationship with Cook: "It is a true partnership and we are equally on the hook for things when they go wrong. We've learned how to grow together and how to remove ego...and at this point we've done this long enough where if we don't like something we're comfortable talking about it. Like it's safe. We encourage it. With our team and certainly with our managers. The last thing that we want are for people to just agree with us." Zahav's success was by no means assured at the outset. Israeli food was not exactly trendy in Philadelphia, or anywhere else for that matter. The first year was fraught with peril, but the peril ended up inspiring Solomonov and Cook to experiment with the cuisine and be less hemmed in by tradition. As Solomonov says, "We had no salaries and we were going to close the business and we were squeaking along to really make payroll, to stay open. It forced us to be really diligent and to think about our priorities. And actually, in a way, it freed us too. That was when Zahav, the food or the way that we cook now, sort of came to fruition." Or, as Cook puts it, "There's nothing like the desperation of impending failure to sharpen your focus." Solomonov and Cook were incredibly candid about Solomonov's well-publicized struggles with substance abuse; Solomon… Lees meer

40. Special Sauce: Sam Sifton on Food in the Internet Age [2/2]

    1 november 2018 · 27 min

    Afspelen
    In part two of my repartee-filled interview with New York Times food editor Sam Sifton, we delved into the intersection of food and technology. When I asked Sam how he thinks the internet has impacted the food media landscape, he said "I think it has changed food for the better and for the worse. You know, there's something kind of delicious as a critic, at least in the first years of being able to go to the internet, to get the photographic notes that you would've taken if you weren't raised like a gentleman....You know, this is everybody obsessively photographing their food but, after a few years of that, now chefs are creating dishes that are meant to be photographed. That's a problem, right? The sort of Instagram-bait platings are a problem, so you've got to kind of be careful about it but, on the whole, I can go on my phone and get a reservation in two seconds and order a car and get there and take pictures of the food and then get a news alert or have the president send an alert to my phone, as he did today. That's amazing! That's cool! That's great!" Lees meer

    And, since Sam wrote a cookbook exclusively devoted to Thanksgiving, I also had to ask him for his top tips for the notoriously challenging holiday meal. "Okay, three things that you need to know about Thanksgiving that you don't really know already," he said. "Number one: everything is going to be fine. It really is. I promise you. It's going to be fine. Two: you need more butter than you think. You really do. Three: Thanksgiving is not the time to litigate that issue [Whatever the hot-button of the moment happens to be]. It really isn't. Let it go. Let it go for the meal."

    For a whole lot more New York Times food wisdom, including the origins of the newspaper's cooking app, and a great deal of fun food-gabbing, check out this week's episode of Special Sauce.

    The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/11/special-sauce-sam-sifton-part-2.html

    …

41. Special Sauce: Sam Sifton on Food as the Universal Language [1/2]

    26 oktober 2018 · 38 min

    Afspelen
    Sometimes my Special Sauce conversations function as a reunion, and this week's episode represents one of those times. Almost 20 years ago, my guest, Sam Sifton, was my editor at the New York Times food section, and, as such, the person who encouraged me to take deep dives into iconic foods like burgers and pizza. Those deep dives have in fact become the hallmark of Serious Eats, sometimes taking the form of recipes and cooking-technique articles, and Sam is now in charge of just about all of the food coverage at the Times, including its cooking app. Lees meer

    I asked Sam about the genesis of his passion for food. "I'm a New Yorker, born and raised in New York, and my distinct memories of the Sifton family table as a kid involved exploring the city. I, like a lot of knucklehead kids of the '70s, was dragged off to music lessons, despite a distinct lack of aptitude in the musical arts, and did that on Saturday morning, after which we would drive around—my brothers and my father and I, sometimes with my mother along—we would drive around in the family station wagon, hitting various neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn to pick up ingredients for a sandwich feast, or a fried chicken feast, or whatever we were going to eat over the course of the weekend. I think that's when this mania of mine began, was during those trips."

    Though he is now a serious home cook (and has in fact written a Thanksgiving cookbook), Sam has always been a serious eater. "...I was a kid who liked to eat, and as a New York kid was able to eat widely and have wide-ranging opinions about the foods that I could afford, which were, what—slices of pizza, meat buns from the Chinese place, and the like. I was always up for a debate about where the best slice is."

    As you'll hear, despite the variety of important positions he's held at the Times, Sam has always been drawn toward participating in some kind of debate. "I think I gravitated toward opinion, for sure, and toward exploration, and as my career as a…

42. Special Sauce: Kenji and Daniel Talk About Smashing Stuff

    4 oktober 2018 · 31 min

    Afspelen
    On this episode of Special Sauce, I asked Daniel Gritzer, our managing culinary director, to come on and talk about the work he's been doing recently, and about where he thinks the site is headed from a culinary point of view (I hope to have Daniel and other members of the culinary team on the podcast more regularly in the future). And just to spice it up a little, I had Kenji López-Alt, on, too. Lees meer

    We spent a fair amount of time talking about a magical and ancient cooking implement: the mortar and pestle. Daniel has done a lot of research into mortars and pestles, and Kenji has frequently extolled their virtues on the site. (If you follow Kenji on Instagram, you'll have seen photos of Alicia, his adorable daughter, pounding away on her own mini mortar and pestle alongside her dad.)

    The first thing I wanted to find out was what Daniel found so interesting about them. "It's a kitchen tool that we take for granted," Daniel said. "Mortars and pestles predate knives, right? Mortars and pestles go back to when we were still cutting things with chipped stone tools, they're that old."

    Part of what Daniel was trying to figure out was whether his long-held suspicion that some of the mortars and pestles sold in kitchenware stores were just terrible at doing what they were supposed to. "I collected as many mortars and pestles as I could reasonably get my hands on," Daniel said, and he put them through their paces. "Making things like pesto, Thai chili pastes, grinding spices, mashing garlic to a paste." And he discovered, just as he suspected, that not all mortars and pestles are created equal. "This ceramic one that I picked up at a store that will not be named was just horrible, it didn't work for anything." Although Daniel did soften that criticism after noting that a reader had observed that it was a science lab mortar and pestle, one that's not intended for culinary purposes. "That thing is good if you're mashing up mouse brains to do some sort of experiment."

    And a goo…

43. Where’s Kenji?!? (Here. He’s Here.) [1/1]

    20 september 2018 · 37 min

    Afspelen
    I decided to kick off the new season of Special Sauce by checking in with Kenji. It won't surprise the Serious Eats tribe that he's been a little busy lately. You probably know about Wursthall, the restaurant he opened with two other partners in his adopted hometown of San Mateo, California. But you may not know that he's also working on his very first children's book and the sequel to his best-selling book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, all while juggling the demands of being a relatively new father. Lees meer

    One of the first things I asked Kenji about is whether his absolutely adorable 18-month-old daughter is as into cooking as his Instagram feed would indicate. "Oh, yeah. I mean, we cook every day together," he said. "I made her a little helper stool so she can climb up and get at counter height, and she has a little wooden knife... She loves it. She likes to whisk things, she makes pancake batter. She pounds things in the mortar and pestle. She dances along when you chop quickly." I have no doubt Alicia will be reverse-searing steaks any day now.

    I also asked him to talk about his children's book and why he wanted to write it. "I want to have a good legacy and I want to add joy to the world," Kenji said. "This seemed like a way that I could do [that], in a way that was both very personal to me but also could be shared." But, of course, because this is Kenji, part of it was also because it presented a challenge. "This is something I've never done before. I can tell you, writing a kids' book is not easy. In a way, it's even more difficult than writing The Food Lab." And then we talked about his other book project, the sequel to The Food Lab, which he descibed as being more focused on how he cooks at home. "It'll be a much less American-centric book," he said. "Techniques from all around the world, ingredients from all around the world, and essentially breaking down those techniques and ingredients and showing everyday home cooks how they can use th…

44. Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie, Part 3: Pie Hard With A Vengeance [3/3]

    30 augustus 2018 · 41 min

    Afspelen
    In part three of my pizza nerd-cast with Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, we go seriously deep into New York pizza, specifically the state of the NYC slice in 2018. Lees meer

    Scott observed that some of the best pizza in town is being made by a new generation of pizza makers, ones that have no connection with older pizzerias. As he puts it, "They're not someone who learned their recipe from somebody else. They're people who are taking it upon themselves to figure out how to do it and do it right."

    When I mentioned that the quality of some of the old-school slice joints had become markedly worse, Adam reluctantly agreed.

    "That's tough 'cause I came here from Oregon...and we had no slice culture. The first six months I was here, I probably ate a slice everyday, 'cause I could," Adam said. "But eventually I burned out on it, and then...the next time I ate a slice again, I was like 'What did I think was so good about this? This is like rubbery cheese.'"

    Of course, I had to ask both of them for their definition of the New York slice.

    Adam said, "Thin crust, it's crisp, yet flexible, it's got tomato sauce and cheese, but they're balanced and they're balanced with the crust. Like, you don't have too much sauce, you don't have too much cheese."

    Scott's was slightly different: "A New York slice is low-moisture mozzarella, gas oven, served on a paper plate, but the slice is bigger than the plate."

    Since we were talking slices, Scott also had some thoughts about getting a slice reheated, which was accompanied by a bit of hard-won wisdom about pizza in general. "It's not going to be the same after the reheat," Scott said, "but that's sometimes part of the game. It's like toasting; sometimes you want a slice of bread, and sometimes you want toast. They're different. It's not just like breadier bread. You know what I mean? So, you gotta know your pizzeria. If their fresh pies come out the way that you like it, great, but some places you will want the reheat. You just gotta know your pl…

45. Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie, Part 2: Pie Harder [2/3]

    23 augustus 2018 · 30 min

    Afspelen
    The self-described pizza nerds Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener are back with me on this week's Special Sauce to continue our deep dive into our favorite food. Lees meer

    Scott took great umbrage at the widely disseminated origin story of the Margherita pizza, in which a pizzaiolo created a pizza with the colors of the Italian flag–red (tomato sauce), white (mozzarella), and green (basil)–to impress Queen Margherita of Italy. "Well, number one, tomato and cheese were both on pizza at least 45 years before that Margherita pizza is said to have happened...So, [it's a] complete myth that the pizza Margherita was the first time that the cheese pizza was invented. I'm responsible, in part, for spreading [it]," Scott conceded. "Every year on the date that's thought of as the anniversary, I always, starting probably nine or ten years ago, would put up a blog post...If you track them, the post changes and every year I got more skeptical about that story."

    We also explored why the myth of the superiority of pizza in Naples continues to this day. Scott pointed out that it probably has to do with the fact that Naples is seen as the origin point of all pizza. But he also made the interesting observation about how Neapolitan pizza is distinct from a lot of other styles. "It's such a defined product that the margin for error is so small," Scott said. "When it's done well, when it's done correctly, I should say, it's all the same."

    Adam agreed. "I never thought about that, but that makes a lot of sense and that's why I find [Neapolitan pizza] a little bit more boring. I like toppings on pizza, I'm sorry...When I first moved [to New York] I was a big proponent of, 'You gotta try a plain pizza, a plain slice first to really get a feel of what it is,' but I got so bored eating plain slices and Neapolitan Margheritas that I almost can't do it again."

    We also tackled some less controversial topics, such as what Adam and Scott think is responsible for the heightened interest in pizza all over the …

46. Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie [1/3]

    16 augustus 2018 · 44 min

    Afspelen
    For the next three weeks on Special Sauce I will be geeking out about pizza with Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, two of the smartest, most passionate, and most knowledgeable pizza nerds on the planet. Adam Kuban is the founding editor of the seminal food blog Slice.com, which Serious Eats acquired right before we launched in December of 2006, and as part of the deal, Adam became our first managing editor. Adam currently runs Margot's Pizza, a mostly monthly pizza popup in Brooklyn. Lees meer

    Scott Wiener is the founder of Scott's Pizza Tours, the author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box, and is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the largest collection of pizza boxes on the planet.

    Of course, I asked the two about their love for pizza. Scott said part of its appeal is that it has a wide reach. "It's the food eaten everywhere, and everybody understands it, and it's just sort of an open invitation for conversation...When somebody says, 'Oh, such and such place is hands down the best ever,' nobody ever says, 'Oh. Okay, cool. Thanks. You want to go play some hockey?' No, it's never like that. It's always a conversation, and nobody's ever right, and nobody's ever wrong. It's like this friendly thing you can talk about."

    Scott's love of pizza led to him creating Scott's Pizza Tours, which in turn set him on the path to collecting pizza boxes, and he now has 1,400 and counting. "I just figured, I have to understand every aspect of [pizza]," Scott said. "I was driving out to Long Island to see pizza oven factories, and tomato farms. I needed to know as much as could about everything. When I started noticing beautiful-looking pizza boxes, I had all these questions...Why go through all the trouble of putting this sometimes beautiful art, and sometimes absolutely atrocious art, onto a box that's just gonna get thrown in the garbage?"

    Adam's love for pizza has found its expression at Margot's, which is so popular that all the seats sell out in a matter of seconds…

47. Sam Kass on How What You See Shapes What You Eat [2/2]

    9 augustus 2018 · 21 min

    Afspelen
    In part two of my interview with former Obama personal chef and Obama White House food activist Sam Kass, I got schooled big-time about the role visuals play in how you eat at home. "The first lesson that I learned, that I think is maybe most helpful for people, is you eat what you see. How you set your home up can have a transformational impact on what you actually consume. Basically, the things you're trying to eat more of, you should put out in plain sight, and the things you're trying to eat less of, you should put on the top shelf or the back of the freezer, in the bottom of the drawer, because you see the bag of cookies on the counter, and then you say to yourself, 'Oh, I'd like a cookie.'" That's what Kass taught the Obama family, and if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me and probably for most serious eaters as well. Though he served as one of the leading figures in the good-food movement, via his position as executive director of Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative, Kass doesn't have time for the purists: "It pisses me off, to be quite honest with you, that we make people feel a certain way about how they're wrong when it comes to how they're eating. This book"—Kass's recently published Lees meer

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48. Sam Kass on Cooking for the Obamas [1/2]

    3 augustus 2018 · 34 min

    Afspelen
    All right, I admit it: I've always fantasized about having one of the Obamas as a guest on Special Sauce. And while I haven't given up hope entirely, I realize that Sam Kass, my guest on Special Sauce this week, might be as close as I get to that particular dream. Lees meer

    Sam is an author and food policy activist, and I first heard about him when he was tapped by Michelle Obama in 2013 to be the executive director of her Let's Move campaign, which focused on changing attitudes about food and nutrition in America. By that point in time, Sam had already been working at the White House for about four years, both as a chef and as an advisor.

    Sam has since taken some of the lessons he tried to impart there and written the cookbook Eat A Little Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World, which is also something of a gentle food manifesto.

    We started the conversation off with what it was like for Sam growing up, and he said that he started cooking for his family when he was nine; part of his allowance was even budgeted for the shopping. But he didn't really use recipes. "I would just make it up," Sam said, "I remember I cooked chicken thighs with a bunch of dried herbs and some onions, and maybe some mushrooms that I just sort of threw together. It came out actually really well...I got lucky, I think. Because then I tried to do it the next time, and put so many dried herbs into it that it was basically inedible."

    Such is life as a nine-year-old chef.

    As we talked, it seemed like Sam and I were bonding quite nicely. Well, at least until I brought up Chicago's deep dish pizzas, which turned out to be a sore subject. Here's a bit of the transcript:

    Ed Levine: How did you feel about Chicago pizza? Were you a lover of deep dish pizza?

    Sam Kass: Of course. Are you kidding me?

    Ed Levine: I ask that because when I, I wrote a pizza book. A book all about pizza. In it I uttered some blasphemous statements about Chicago pizza.

    Sam Kass: I'm amazed you're still alive.

    I hope y…

49. Rick Bragg on Why Cooks Are the High Priests of Good Living [2/2]

    25 juli 2018 · 35 min

    Afspelen
    On this week's episode of Special Sauce, the Pulitzer Prize–winning but ridiculously down-to-earth Rick Bragg digs deep into his mom, the subject of his latest book, The Best Cook in the World. Lees meer

    For one thing, Bragg's mother was not in the least interested in trendsetting: "Well, the first time she ever heard the term 'farm-to-table,' the puzzled look on her face—like, 'Well, how else are they gonna do it?...' They had it back in her day, too. They called it a flatbed truck."

    Bragg's mother wasn't initially keen on the idea of a book about her cooking.

    "Well, it wasn't that she didn't so much like the idea of telling the stories of her food. She didn't like the ego it would require to call it The Best Cook in the World.... When I told her she said, 'What would you even call it?' And I told her the title, and she said, 'I wasn't even the best cook that lived on our road.' And I said, 'Well, that may be true, but calling it The Third Best Cook on Roy Webb Road don't sing.' So here we are."

    But a diagnosis of cancer and the ensuing years of treatment helped break down his mother's reluctance, and strengthened Bragg's own resolve:

    "I began to think about what would be lost, but I did not want to imagine a world without my momma in it.... I would not do this when my momma was gone, I just couldn't bear to do it. I had to do it while she was looking me in the face."

    Did Bragg's mother, who spent many years working in kitchens of all kinds, including restaurant kitchens, consider herself a chef? "She did but she.... The word 'chef,' and believe me, I understand the culture, and I understand the hierarchy. I mean, they insist on being called 'Chef' if they're a chef, and I get it, and I understand the importance. But to her, she went about it with the same blue-collar notion that she went about everything else, and she saw it as the best thing that she could do...with the limited resources she had, for the people she loved. Some people sew, some people kill themselves…

50. Author Rick Bragg on His Mom, the Best Cook in the World [1/2]

    17 juli 2018 · 28 min

    Afspelen
    We don't often get a chance to have a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist on Special Sauce–Jonathan Gold was the first–so I jumped at the chance to have Rick Bragg, one of my favorite writers of all time, on the podcast. Of course, Rick isn't known as a food or a cookbook writer, but his new book The Best Cook in the World: Tales From My Momma's Table, is both an incredibly evocative portrait of his mother and a collection of his mother's recipes. Parts of the book read like poetry, so I asked Rick to read one of my favorite paragraphs to give readers unfamiliar with his work a taste of what they've been missing: "I did not know then like I know now that my momma never ate until we were done, or maybe I did know but was too young to understand why. I did not know then that she picked all the meat out of the soup and stew and put it on our plates. I did not hear her scraping pots, pans, and skillets to make her own plate after her three little pigs ate most of what we had, but I can still see her sliding the bones off plates and gnawing them clean after we were done saying how she just liked the meat close to the bone, that we just didn't know what we were missing. It's not that we were starving, just that the quality of life for her children inched up a little if she did without." Though his family was literally dirt-poor, Rick says meals at his family table were most often filled with joy: "Well, it was the best time of day. It was the greatest time of day. My people don't think I have a real job because I don't get dirty, or usually I don't. I don't get dirty. If you have a real job, you have to comb the cotton lint out of your hair or you have to get some Octagon soap and wash the grease off your hands. I think they think I cut out paper dolls for a living or something delicate and easy. For those folks, my folks, the reward was, especially the worldly one, was being able to come home, they ate their lunch out of a sack mostly, but being able to come home, and it … Lees meer