Special Sauce with Ed Levine

If there is a smarter or better TV critic than T he New York Times 's James Poniewozik I have yet to come across him or her. So when I was dying to talk to someone about The Bear 's moving final season I rang up James and he graciously agreed to come on Special Sauce to talk about it. We had a blast talking about Carmy and Sydney and all the other finely etched characters on the show.  Learn about...

Here at Special Sauce we love pie in all its forms: we love shepherd's pie, apple pie, key lime pie, lemon meringue pie, and our absolute favorite, peach pie. And given that we're coming up on America's 250th birthday and Americans love pie we thought we'd reheat one of our favorite pie episodes to get in the spirit of things. Stacey Mei Yan Fong catalogued her love of pie when she published 50 Pi...

This week on Special Sauce serious eaters get to eavesdrop on part 2 of my hilarious and informative conversation with burger mavens Kenji and Hamburger America 's George Motz . Nobody knows more about cooking and eating burgers than these two burger mavens.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As one of the millions of long-suffering Knicks fans I am still basking in the afterglow of the team's historical and magical run. I decided I had to devote another episode of Special Sauce to the team's amazing playoff run to the NBA championship. And who better to join me on mic than the The New York Times'  terrific writer Matt Flegenheimer , who to my way of thinking has become the poet laurea...

With grilling season underway I felt the time was right to talk burgers with Kenji and Hamburger America 's George Motz . We talk burger history, burger cooking methods, and all things burger.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As one of the millions of long-suffering New York Knicks fans, I decided I had to devote an episode of Special Sauce to the the team's amazing playoff run. Joining me on the pod is the The New York Times 's Matt Flegenheimer , who wrote a great piece about NYC coming together to celebrate this magical run the team is on so far, and food writer Chris Crowley , a former Serious Eater who is now one...

This week on Special Sauce we talk to Mateo Kehler , the cheese visionary behind Jasper Hill Farm .  Mateo and his brother Andy, carpenters by trade, pooled together their life savings and bought a 200 acre dilapidated dairy farm in Greensboro, Vermont, in 1998. They were cheesemakers on a mission to save a disappearing way of life in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, where dairy farming had been in pr...

I have written thousands of words about the joys of eating hot dogs, so when Memorial Day rolls around, this serious eater's thoughts immediately turn to the humble frankfurter. A couple of years ago we had my friend and fellow food writer J.J. Goode on Special Sauce to talk about our love for the hot dog in all its forms, including the many regional styles we both have encountered along the way....

This week on the pod we are back with Part 2 of our deep dive into bageldom with bagel baker and celebrated chef Mark Strausman of Mark’s Off Madison in NYC. He and I taste-tested bagels from Wall Street darling PopUp Bagels, which was just valued at 300 million dollars, a classic traditional NY bagel concern Utopia Bagels, next-gen sourdough bagel bakery Apollo, and of course, Mark’s own bagels....

Like slice pizza and smash burgers bagels are having a moment. One concept Pop Up Bagels was just valued at $300 million in its most recent round of financing. Pop Up's rip and dip bagels are a viral sensation but have left some traditional bagel purists unimpressed. One of those purists is the great chef turned master bagel baker Mark Strausman, so we traveled to Mark's restaurant Mark's Off Madi...

Like many serious eaters I am a serious NBA fan. And although the playoffs this year have just gotten underway, they are already proving to be thrillingly entertaining for people like me who have no skin in the game -- other than an unabated lifelong passion for the New York Knicks and just about any and all underdogs. Ever since we had NBA champ and former Knick Channing Frye on the pod a couple...

The idea that food is medicine has been around for centuries. On this week's Special Sauce The New York Times 's Kim Severson and the Aspen Institute 's Corby Kummer talk about how doctors, the government, and even insurance companies have been engaged in a half-century long process to treat various medical conditions with food cooked healthily that the government and health insurers pay for. Chic...

Last November ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, terrorizing both restaurant customers and workers in immigrant communities all over the Windy City. We heard firsthand accounts of ICE's violent misdeeds by Chicago Tribune reporter Zareen Syed and restaurateur Marcos Carbajal of the esteemed Carnitas Uruapan. I checked in with Zareen and Marcos this week to get an update on the situati...

Tom Valenti, one of my favorite chefs of all time (who also happened to be a swell, generously spirited human being), died suddenly last week. Tom was a friend of mine, so I gathered writer Andrew Friedman (who co-wrote Tom's cookbooks) and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que founder John Stage to celebrate the life and times of the best chef you might never have heard of.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...

As someone who has spent the greater part of a half-century searching for and obsessing about where to find the best of any kind of foodstuff, I was immediately drawn to Ella Quittner 's book Obsessed with the Best . Quittner and I delved into the pleasures and pitfalls any writer encounters when he or she tackles this most subjective undertaking.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-...

Smitten Kitchen 's Deb Perelman explains why she and many other recipe developers and food writers regard AI as an existential threat on this week's episode of Special Sauce.  This is serious business, serious eaters. Listen up! Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

According The New York Times , Noma chef and co-owner René Redzepi physically and verbally abused more than thirty of his kitchen staff between 2010 and 2017. To find out what that means, I sat down with longtime restaurant critic Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times , and best selling author and youtuber, Kenji Lopez-Alt . Kenji worked in many serious restaurant kitchens in Boston for a number o...

This week we're reheating one of our favorite recent episodes on the ongoing struggle between ICE and the immigrant-driven food cultures of major American cities. LA Taco 's editor-in-chief  Javier Cabral explains how and why his website became one of the leading voices of ICE resistance in the "City of Angels'.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On part 2 of our revealing and refreshingly honest conversation with three of the best food critics in America, Hannah Goldfield of The New Yorker , Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times , and Elazar Sontag of The Washington Post , all three are not feeling particularly sanguine about the future of restaurant criticism in general. And it's not just social media to blame.  Learn about your ad choic...

Are restaurant critics dinosaurs in the age of social media? We discuss that and more in part one of our critic's roundtable with The New Yorker's Hannah Goldfield , The Washington Post's Elazar Sontag , and The Los Angeles Times' Bill Addison .  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week Pete Wells and I talk about our mutual worst food enemy, our addiction to sugar. Pete explains how the hidden added sugars in many packaged and processed foods just compound our dietary problems. We also talk about how the mixed messages we get from the government add to our dietary woes.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this first of two episodes featuring The New York Times 's Pete Wells , the former Times restaurant critic explains how he learned to eat differently after a trip to his doctor scared the crap out of him. Yes he eats many more whole grains and avoids added sugar any way he can. But as you'll hear his health and diet journey revealed just as many unexpected truths about how to eat right.  Learn...

For millions of serious eaters the Super Bowl has turned into a food event almost on a par with Thanksgiving. With the Super Bowl coming up we thought it would be fun and edifying to reheat last year's Super Bowl episode featuring Kenji Lopez-Alt giving serious eaters sage advice about making pizza and wings at home. I've had Kenji's wings and his pan pizza, and they are both seriously delicious a...

On this episode of Special Sauce the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Sharyn Jackson reports on the devastating effect of the ICE operation on the Twin Cities' restaurant and food community. ICE's terrifying tactics in Minneapolis have been met with many creative forms of resistance. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this episode of Special Sauce we go deep into the story of the not famous enough Jewish roll known as a bialy (which is far superior to its kind of distant cousin, the bagel) with the celebrated chef, Mark Strausman, who is merely one of the great bialy bakers of our time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices