This week, host Ed Levine is joined by the Baltimore-based baker Amanda Mack, who defied the odds when she opened up her family-inspired bakery, Crust By Mack, in the middle of the pandemic. Then, former journalist and podcaster turned Youtube food star, Adam Ragusea, talks about his own holiday-inspired traditions and offers some sage advice to home bakers. Later, Kenji participates in a holiday cookie swap—with a broken oven. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 23, 2020•47 min
Kenji Lopez-Alt tells all about his new New York Times best seller children's book Every Night is Pizza Night on this week's episode of Special Sauce. It turns out that for Kenji writing a 48 page picture book for his daughter was in many ways much more difficult to write than his 900 page mega-hit The Food Lab . Counterintuitive, right? Lucky listeners will also get a sneak preview of his next cookbook, which is about the joys of wok cooking at home. Kenji admitted that the manuscript he handed...
Dec 11, 2020•53 min
Special Sauce, Serious Eats founder Ed Levine's podcast, is back to stay (with new theme music, no less) with a Thanksgiving episode that explores the seemingly antithetical nature of the pandemic and Turkey Day. After all, Thanksgiving is all about gathering around the table with people you love and sharing a meal with them. The pandemic on the other hand is all about minimizing contact and connections and sharing. J. Kenji Lopez Alt, NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie, Splendid Table host Frances Lam...
Nov 23, 2020•54 min
Much has been written during the pandemic about the increased popularity of community supported agriculture, commonly referred to as CSA. On this week's Special Sauce, we had a far-reaching conversation with Maggie Cheney, one of the owners of Rock Steady Farm , which is part of a special kind of CSA. Rock Steady describes itself as a women and queer owned cooperative farm, rooted in social justice, growing sustainable vegetables, flowers, and herbs for our upstate and NYC communities. As you wi...
Jul 30, 2020•42 min
On this week's Special Sauce, Susan Spungen, author of Open Kitchen: Inspired Food for Casual Gathering and other books, regales us with her experiences in Hollywood as a food stylist and culinary consultant for movies like Julie and Julia and Eat, Pray, Love . What's it like to be on set and cooking for the likes of Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Amy Adams? Listen and you'll find out. Susan also talks about her terrific new book. She explains that the organizing principle behind the book is "...
Jul 16, 2020•39 min
On this week's Special Sauce we talk to Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill , about the huge changes being brought about in the food culture by the Covid-19 pandemic. The startling conclusions he's come to are the result of a survey he and his team sent out to more than 500 farmers . The farmers' responses made it clear that the effects of the pandemic will have catastrophic consequences for many of them. As you'll hear, the usually pessimistic Barber has some ideas that can hel...
Jul 09, 2020•34 min
On this week's Special Sauce we're once again talking about selling cheese during the pandemic with cheesemonger Anne Saxelby of Saxelby Cheesemongers and cheesemaker Sheila Flanagan of Nettle Meadow Farm and Artisan Cheese . Without a hint of self-pity, Anne and Sheila talk about the nimbleness and the optimism required to keep their businesses going. You can support both Saxelby and Flanagan by buying cheese directly from their websites, you won't be disappointed. After our inspiring cheese ta...
Jul 02, 2020•23 min
This week on Special Sauce we are returning to the topic of the horrendous toll the pandemic has taken on the food culture. Today, we’re talking cheese. In the first of two far-ranging interviews, I spoke to cheesemaker Sheila Flanagan, co-owner of Nettle Meadow Farm, and Saxelby Cheesemongers owner Anne Saxelby. This episode of Special Sauce also marks the return of our "Ask Kenji" feature. Today, given our interviewees, I thought it was only right that Kenji answer a dairy-related question, ab...
Jun 25, 2020•33 min
"A jukebox is the musical equivalent of a well-stocked pantry," says Alexander Smalls. Poetic riffs on the relationship between food and music are just par for the course with Smalls, who's both a Grammy and a James Beard Award winner (not to mention a Tony winner, too). In part two of our interview, we talked about everything from hanging out with James Baldwin and Nina Simone in Paris to the guests he'd invite to his last supper. How does a table with the aforementioned Baldwin and Simone, alo...
Jun 18, 2020•34 min
The last Special Sauce I recorded in a studio before the coronavirus pandemic hit was with the multi-talented chef, opera singer, and restaurateur Alexander Smalls. He was just about to publish his new book, Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes From My African American Kitchen . It was March 11th, and after an hour-long interview I found myself in awe of Alexander. We hugged in the green room at the studio as we said goodbye, and that was in fact the last hug I have received from anyone besides my w...
Jun 11, 2020•53 min
Special Sauce has obviously changed a lot with the advent of the pandemic. But before we changed the format a couple of months ago to adapt to the times, we'd already recorded a couple of great interviews. One of them was with my old friend, cookbook writer and food stylist extraordinaire Susan Spungen. Susan's new book, Open Kitchen: Inspired Food for Casual Gatherings , came out 17 days before New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued his stay-at-home order. Susan's bag was already packed for a na...
May 28, 2020•47 min
On this week's Special Sauce, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, who's been used to eating out six nights a week, tells us about cooking lunch and dinner for his two teenaged sons now that he's home every day. Pete explains that he's really enjoyed returning to the kitchen every day; he notes that he originally got into food writing because he loved to cook. I asked him if his sons appreciate his culinary efforts? "At least they're not complaining," Pete says, which is about the best y...
May 21, 2020•20 min
What does a restaurant critic do when there are no restaurants to review? The San Francisco Chronicle 's Soleil Ho has shifted to primarily covering how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the restaurant industry in the Bay Area, while also writing profiles of people like the Indonesian artist known as Nao, who publishes drawings of toast that, according to Soleil, "have garnered her a legion of followers who swoon at the accuracy of her char marks, the glorious shimmer of her half-melted butt...
May 14, 2020•27 min
According to Ezekiel Vázquez-Ger, my guest on this week's Special Sauce, everything was going swimmingly at his new Washington, DC, restaurant, Seven Reasons. The place was packed almost from the minute it opened its doors in April of 2019. A rave review followed in The Washington Post in October, and then, a month later, Esquire named it America's Best New Restaurant of the year. It even survived a fire that started at the bar next door. It was all good, until it wasn't. The coronavirus pandemi...
May 07, 2020•28 min
In 2010, Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin founded Ovenly , which they originally envisioned as a bar-snack business, providing bars with better alternatives to beer nuts and potato chips. Over the course of ten years, Ovenly transformed into a combination wholesale/retail bakery, with four retail locations and a healthy wholesale business selling to coffee bars and upscale grocers. By March of 2020 it had grown into a business with more than fifty employees and a new, about-to-open location at Ke...
Apr 30, 2020•31 min
As part of our special Special Sauce series on the pandemic's effects on the various constituents of the food community, I reached out to Xi'an Famous Foods co-founder Jason Wang. Jason had told his remarkable story previously on Special Sauce , so I was confident that his experiences as a Chinese-American, his knowledge of financial matters, and his experience as a restaurateur serving his justifiably famous hand-pulled noodles would give him a unique vantage point on the pandemic. As you'll he...
Apr 23, 2020•34 min
As we all try to deal with the crisis confronting us, I thought we'd follow up on the Special Sauce episodes that focused on Kenji's stories with other voices from the food and beverage industry. In the coming weeks you're going to hear the stories of farmers, bakers, cheesemakers, bartenders, servers, chefs, and anyone else in our food supply chain that should be heard from in these troubled times. This week, food activist, chef-restaurateur, and Top Chef co-host Tom Colicchio gives us the lowd...
Apr 16, 2020•28 min
It's obviously still not business as usual at Serious Eats (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), so we're going to continue to produce Special Sauce episodes that deal with the coronavirus pandemic. On this week's episode, we once again hear from Serious Eats's Chief Culinary Advisor Kenji López-Alt. Kenji has been pitching in mightily on so many coronavirus-fighting efforts, both on Serious Eats and off. On Serious Eats, he published an epic post on coronavirus and food safety that ...
Apr 02, 2020•17 min
Editor's note: The Coronavirus story is unfolding at a breakneck pace. That means that something said that was true at the time may no longer be so. On this episode please note that Lola, the Tom Douglas restaurant in the Hotel Andra in Seattle, is now closed, as is the hotel itself. Before the sh*t hit the proverbial fan, I had the next several episodes of Special Sauce all queued up. They were going to feature Susan Spungen, the founding food editor of Martha Stewart Living and author of Open ...
Mar 26, 2020•25 min
On this week's Special Sauce, I continue my conversation with visionary pastry chef Claudia Fleming. But before we get to Claudia's captivating story, Kenji fields a question from Serious Eater Joan Moore, who wants to know how long the blade on her Cuisinart food processor should last. After Kenji delivers his characteristically thoughtful answer, Claudia and I pick up where we left off last week, and talk about her harrowing and moving journey. We start off by examining why she and her late hu...
Mar 05, 2020•36 min
There are forgotten giants in the food world, people who have profoundly influenced what we eat, but whose names we barely know. James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Claudia Fleming is one of those people. She is the author, along with Melissa Clark of the New York Times , of The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern , which you'll find on the bookshelf of anyone who's serious about dessert. She is also my guest on the next two episodes of Special Sauce, and man does she have some storie...
Feb 28, 2020•32 min
In part two of my conversation with Supernatural star Misha Collins, we dive into his family's eating habits, which eventually lead to The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time , which he wrote with his wife, Vicki. Their children Maison and West had adopted the chicken nuggets-centric diet typical of many children in America until West, seemingly at random, put some Jerusalem artichokes into the shopping cart. From that moment on their food lives changed forever. All of...
Feb 14, 2020•45 min
One of the things I love about Special Sauce is how often I am surprised and moved by my guests. And this episode, in which I interview Supernatural star Misha Collins, who, with his wife Vicki, just published The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Mealtime , is a perfect example. Collins had a peripatetic childhood- "I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15," he tells me—and often found himself living in parks and teepees. Yet his "idiosyncratic and eccentric" mother ...
Feb 06, 2020•33 min
This week's Special Sauce features part two of my conversation with the online cooking star Maangchi, but first we get to hear from Kenji, who answered a question from Serious Eater Kyle Johnson about whether or not you can freeze the base for his white chili with chicken . Kenji being Kenji, he doesn't just limit himself to yes or no, but he offers a few pears of food-freezing wisdom, like "Flat things freeze faster and they defrost faster." Maangchi and I mostly discussed her new book Maangchi...
Jan 31, 2020•35 min
Maangchi. Maangchi. Maangchi! Need I say more? On this week's Special Sauce I had a chance to sit down with YouTube cooking sensation Maangchi , who, in addition to being an inspiration to all of us here at Serious Eats, is our associate producer Grace's hero. And I discovered she's an impossibly engaging woman, as charming and disarmingly forthright as anyone we've had on. And her path to success was definitely unorthodox: Maangchi went from living in a room in the back of her father's seafood ...
Jan 23, 2020•42 min
On this week's far-ranging Special Sauce we cover a lot of territory- and I mean a lot- of territory. We've got Sean Brock on the highs and lows of an extended stay in rehab, and the joys of parenthood; Kenji on being a Juicy Lucy skeptic; and Stella on making an olive cake so delicious and so easy it can be in your mouth in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Billions . Before we get to Sean Brock's ongoing battle with recovery, Serious Eater Mike Suade wants to know if Kenji will jo...
Jan 16, 2020•40 min
On the first new Special Sauce episode of 2020, we go deep and wide on a whole range of topics. First the insanely talented chef Sean Brock, whose new book, S outh : Essential Recipes and New Explorations , has just been published, takes us on part of his extraordinary journey as a chef. Brock talks about picking vegetables in his grandmother's kitchen and getting his first job in a restaurant kitchen as a teenager, which he describes as feeling like walking on to a pirate ship. He then delves i...
Jan 09, 2020•38 min
This year, my wife and I managed to get through Thanksgiving without any major mishaps or blow-ups. That domestic and culinary tranquility was thanks (at least in part) to the answers Kenji and Stella gave on our special episode of “Ask Special Sauce.” This week, “Ask Special Sauce” returns with even more reassuring answers to an impressive array of holiday cooking questions posed by serious eaters all over the US and Canada. We got straightforward inquiries, like how to navigate holiday baking ...
Dec 19, 2019•37 min
In part two of my conversation with the extraordinary bakers Amy Scherber of Amy's Bread and Melissa Weller of High Street on Hudson, we take a deep dive into what makes a proper (and I would say perfect) bagel, keeping wholesale bread fresh and high-quality, as well as the balancing act required to make entrepreneurship, marriage, and parenthood work. Both bakers have overcome extraordinary hurdles in the process of building their baking empires. Melissa recounts making bread in an outdoor wood...
Dec 13, 2019•57 min
This week's Special Sauce episode unintentionally turned into a carb fest. Although I knew I was having on a couple of the finest bakers in the land- Amy Scherber, the founder of Amy's Bread , and Melissa Weller, a baker and partner at High Street on Hudson - I had not anticipated that the other segments of the show would have a similarly starchy focus. But let's start with the bread-bakers: Scherber founded Amy's Bread way back in 1992, and it was one of the first artisanal bread-baking busines...
Dec 05, 2019•32 min
