This Is TASTE

We’ve been talking a lot about food TikTok in the office, and we’ve written about TikTok, too, but we haven’t had a bona fide TikTok star on the show until now. Eitan Bernath has over two million followers on the platform, and we talk about what makes a great TikTok video, what he ate growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and how his first cookbook, Eitan Eats the World, expresses his love of many fo...

It was such a treat to have Sara Jenkins on the TASTE Podcast, and this conversation really delivers. Matt has followed Sara’s career for over a decade, dating back to her amazing restaurants Porchetta and Porsena in New York’s East Village. We talk about her childhood growing up in Beirut and Italy—and how, to this day, she returns to the Tuscan farmhouse her family bought in the 1970s for their...

On this episode of the TASTE Podcast, we talk to chef, writer, and activist Jenny Dorsey. Jenny has beat Bobby Flay on Beat Bobby Flay and shown the internet how to make Spam-filled wontons, but she’s also the founder of the nonprofit Studio ATAO, which creates educational tools for food publications and organizations to think inclusively and equitably about their work. We talked about how VR gogg...

We’ve made it to 100 episodes, and it feels like we’re just getting started. Thank you for listening—we have some amazing things in the works and can’t wait to share them with you. Our guest this episode is a legend in the food podcasting world. Dan Pashman is the creator and host of the long-running podcast The Sporkful. In this fun conversation, we learn about how Dan pivoted his career from pro...

For coffee fans and professionals, there is no more critical resource than the website and media company Sprudge, and we were really happy to have a lively conversation with Sprudge’s cofounder Jordan Michelman. While we do discuss the evolution of the so-called third-wave coffee bar around the globe, we also dive into Jordan’s career in journalism and discuss some of his memorable stories for TAS...

For many followers of the home cooking internet, Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story has been a steady hand holding the whisk for the past decade. She recently released the New York Times best seller The Weekday Vegetarians. As the name suggests, Jenny’s vision is of a world where plant-based eating becomes more of a Monday-through-Friday habit than a life-altering stricture. In this fun conv...

If you’re a fan of recipes that make clever use of a handful of ingredients and a few swift moves in the kitchen, then chances are, you’ve probably cooked an Ali Slagle recipe. Maybe it was her margherita pizza reimagined as beans on toast, or maybe it was her oat milk chocolate pudding. Ali’s new book, I Dream of Dinner, is full of these types of recipes that manage to be both wildly efficient an...

We’ve long been fans of Jenny G. Zhang’s incisive journalism and podcasting, and we couldn’t wait to have the current Gawker editor and writer on the show. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about food in the time of TikTok, Zhang’s memorable 2018 Eater story about Pizza Hut in China, and the regular food she covers in her Gawker column Regular Food Reviews. We also talk about the world of...

On today’s episode, we have a great conversation with Emily Weinstein, the Food and Cooking editor of the New York Times. We’ve been great admirers of the work at NYT Cooking, and we took the opportunity to cover many subjects in home cooking and food media. We talk about what makes a great story and some of the cooking trends Weinstein is most interested in covering. We also discuss Weinstein’s l...

Today on the TASTE Podcast, we’re talking to Nisha Melvani, the author of Practically Vegan. Nisha is the creator of the website and Instagram account Cooking for Peanuts, a source for colorful, practical, no-nonsense plant-based recipes. We talk about how much range cashews have as an ingredient for creamy dishes, and about why tempeh has such a bad reputation (and how to make it taste truly deli...

On today’s episode, we have a really fun conversation with the one and only J. Kenji López-Alt. As the author of The Food Lab, Kenji has been a guiding force in home cooking for over a decade. He’s back with a new book, The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, and we discuss creative ways to cook with one of the best tools around. We go all the way back to the heady days of early Serious Eats, a time when...

On today’s episode, we’re sitting down with longtime food writer and cookbook author Cathy Barrow. Cathy’s the author of Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry, Pie Squared, and When Pies Fly. Her most recent book, Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish, makes the case for bagels at home. As she points out, if you throw together the dough before bed and proof it in the refrigerator overnight, boi...

Today on the show we are speaking with one of the clearest and most singular voices in Italian cooking in New York City, Missy Robbins. In the episode, we turn back the clock to the heady days of Missy running two major NYC restaurants in the late aughts, as well as discuss her current hit Brooklyn restaurants Lilia and Misi. We also talk about her new cookbook, Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Ital...

In this episode, we’re sitting down with Mark Canha, the biggest food personality in Major League Baseball. Mark is an itinerant diner who documents his eating and cooking on Instagram as @bigleaguefoodie. We asked him about his pregame eating rituals, as well as some of the restaurants in New York that he’s most excited to check out as a new player for the New York Mets. We also talked about some...

For the past year and a half, Daniela Galarza has written one of our favorite things on the internet: a four-day-a-week cooking column for the Washington Post food section, Eat Voraciously. In this episode, we hear about Daniela’s journey from pastry cook and private chef to holding down editorial jobs at LA Weekly, Eater, and the Post. We also talk about some of the great work she’s done as a wri...

Today on the show, we’re catching up with Gary Shteyngart, a New York Times best-selling novelist and food writer who has written memorable books including The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story, and his most recent work, the rollicking pandemic satire Our Country Friends. In this episode, we talk about some of Shteyngart’s world travels, both as a hired gun and for fun, as we...

On today’s episode of the podcast, we’re talking to Fany Gerson, the pastry chef mastermind behind La Newyorkina, Dough, and, most recently, Fan-Fan Doughnuts in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. In addition to making some of New York’s most legendary doughnuts, Fany has written extensively about the paletas, ice creams, and other sweets of Mexico, where she grew up. We talked about the secret ingredient that m...

Today on the show, we’re talking to Hrishikesh Hirway, the musician behind The One AM Radio, the podcaster behind The West Wing Weekly and Song Exploder, and the host of Netflix’s adaptation of Song Exploder. In addition to collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and interviewing musicians like Michael Stipe and Alicia Keys, Hrishikesh is also the cohost, with Samin Nosrat, of Home Cooking, which has quickly...

Today on the show, we have a colorful conversation with Cara Nicoletti, a fourth-generation butcher, writer, and cofounder of the vegetable-centric sausage company Seemore Meats & Veggies. We’ve fallen hard for these sausages, which are made with 35 percent vegetables, and we wanted to have Cara on the podcast to talk about how she went from working at the legendary Meat Hook butcher shop in Brook...

On today’s episode, Anna sits down with longtime chef and sustainable seafood advocate Bart van Olphen. The Dutch chef has written many cookbooks for an international audience (including several on the topic of tinned fish), and he’s the founder of Sea Tales, a company that sells sustainable canned tuna, anchovies, and sardines. They talked about why tinned fish is having a moment, how to shop res...

One morning this fall, Matt found himself in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, seated in the front yard of Edy’s Grocer, the remarkable deli and specialty food shop run by the amazing young entrepreneur Edy Massih, who joins him on the show today. Massih formerly worked as a caterer, and during the pandemic, he took over a storefront and began selling all sorts of delicious foods—all with a modern and excitin...

Matt met author and television writer Jean Kyoung Frazier through Instagram during last year’s NBA playoffs. She is a Los Angeles Clippers fan, he’s a Brooklyn Nets fan, and they had a lot to talk about. But what most inspired the exchange, and eventually this episode, is Jean’s novel Pizza Girl, which is based partially in a suburban Los Angeles pizzeria. We speak with Jean about how she writes a...

If you’ve caught some of the exciting new writing coming from the relaunch of Gawker, you may have read some food writing by Tammie Teclemariam, who’s been taking down moka pots, making the case for buying a whole ham, and lauding the Black Russian as a far superior alternative to the espresso martini craze. Tammie’s also written for TASTE about the virtues of fried chicken livers, how Caraflex is...

Samah Dada is the brainpower behind Dada Eats, a recipe blog that has blossomed into a plant-based lifestyle brand. We got to know Samah a few years back at a TASTE Podcast taping at Books Are Magic, and we have been following her career as she’s grown from Today Show production assistant to author of Dada Eats: Love to Cook It. In this interview, we talk about her recipes for chocolate chip cooki...

Our guest today needs little introduction—but if you didn’t grow up watching cooking on television over the past 20 years, here’s the deal. Jamie Oliver pioneered a form of food television that brought cameras into the home in a way not previously seen. When the Naked Chef debuted on BBC Two in the UK and the Food Network in the United States in 1999, home cooking on TV was a stand-and-stir affair...