The Sporkful

“Literally all pasta shapes are wonderful except bucatini. Bucatini can go get effed.” Francis Lam’s strongly-worded tweet inspired Dan to organize a live event in 2018, where he, Francis (host of The Splendid Table ), and Evan Kleiman (host of Good Food ) could debate the merits of various pasta shapes. It was called “The Bucatini Dialogues” — and yes, it was the night when Dan first announced hi...

The craft brewery used to be a place for self-proclaimed beer nerds to sample the hot new IPA. Now, young kids, toddlers, and even infants take up as much space as beer-drinking adults. So how did this happen? It’s a story of a fast-growing industry finally slowing down, and its core customer base growing up. Sporkful senior producer Andres O’Hara investigates how craft breweries became the go-to...

Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-British chef famous for getting people to eat more vegetables. But now, he's making the case for sugar. On the heels of his 2017 dessert cookbook, Sweet , he discusses the personality differences between bakers and cooks. Plus, why he never orders the specials in restaurants and what happens when a perfectionist like him attempts to cook with his kids. This episode o...

In 1973, Madhur Jaffrey penned An Invitation to Indian Cooking and introduced many Americans to Indian cuisine. More than 50 years later, Priya Krishna (author of Indian-ish and Priya’s Kitchen Adventures ) argues that Indian food is just as American as any other immigrant cuisine. But among many non-South Asians in the US, Indian food still carries the perception that it’s “foreign.” Why? And wha...

Should you eat fast food on vacation, or should every meal be at a special local place? Is soup bar food? Does ice belong in milk? Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings join Dan to answer your questions — and to settle some long-standing food disputes of their own. Brittany and Eric used to co-host the podcast For Colored Nerds , a show about Black culture. They’re also old friends, which means they argu...

The fat acceptance movement has spent decades fighting weight stigma and calling for equal rights for fat people in all areas of life. As the movement moved online, the idea of body positivity emerged. While fat acceptance was about societal change, body positivity was more about self help -- loving yourself at any size. With the rise of social media, body positivity influencers gained success and...

Comedian Nicole Byer hosts the cooking competition show Nailed It! on Netflix. It’s family-friendly, but that doesn’t stop her from deploying her raunchy humor with her co-host, the chocolatier Jacques Torres , when the cameras are off. Nicole talks with Dan about the parallels between a restaurant kitchen and comedy club, and why she makes her own favorite cake for her late mom’s birthday. And yo...

If someone asked you to name the country that dominates American yogurt aisles, you would undoubtedly say Greece. Thick Greek yogurt makes up more than half of all US yogurt sales. But shaking its fist from the shadows is another country that’s even more obsessed with yogurt: Bulgaria. They have a museum of yogurt . One key bacteria found in all yogurt in the world was discovered in Bulgaria. And...

Dan goes on an adventure around Los Angeles, starting at the airport. Where is he going? He doesn't know. He doesn't have a plan. The one thing he does know is that he's going to attempt to travel through time to eat a piece of coconut cake from Patys Restaurant , which he should have eaten three years ago. With an Atlas Obscura article as his guide, what could go wrong? This episode originally ai...

Thirty years into her career as a chef and cookbook author, Carla Lalli is releasing a book many people told her she shouldn’t write. It’s called Food Is A Feeling , and it’s a lot more personal than her others. It has plenty of great recipes, but at its core it’s a series of essays about her divorce, and how it changed her relationship with food. Carla talks with Dan about what she made the night...

You know that friend of yours who rails against the evils of high fructose corn syrup? The one who’s obsessed with where every single morsel of their food comes from? Writer  Michael Pollan  — author of The Omnivore's Dilemma , Food Rules , and Cooked — may have made your friend like that. But as we hear in this conversation, Michael  himself  isn’t like that at all. This week,...

Fernando Frías was a successful cafe and restaurant owner in Havana. But when Fidel Castro came to power, the government nationalized Fernando’s businesses and imprisoned him when he tried to leave the country. Eventually he got out, settling near Miami like so many other Cuban expats. Even though Fernando never went back to Cuba, he was always searching for pieces of his homeland in the Cuban-Ame...

Negin Farsad loves to negotiate. And when it comes to negotiating, nothing is off-limits — even religious law. "I feel like Allah would be like, 'Get the pork chop but don't kill anybody,'" the Iranian-American Muslim comedian and host of  Fake the Nation says. This week, Negin uses her lamb kebab to school us on campaign finance reform. (Can you tell she's a former policy advisor?) This epis...

In New Jersey, the tomato is king. Almost a century ago, a scientist at Rutgers University developed a variety that became the tomato that lined grocery store shelves for decades. Now, Rutgers scientists are at it again — they’ve invented a new grape tomato called Scarlet Sunrise . Will it become the next hot item in the produce aisle? How do you even invent a new tomato? And why are new varieties...

When Dan had to plan his mom’s big 80th birthday dinner, he knew just where to take the whole family: Myrtle Beach, SC. The group of ten celebrated at Hook and Barrel , a sustainable seafood and wine restaurant owned by restaurateur Heidi Vukov, who’s a legend in Myrtle Beach. She started out as a single mom who opened a small bakery, and 31 years later became the city’s first James Beard semifina...

Can “functional” candy be delicious? Why are people ordering from a fake food delivery app? And should tomatoes be banned from sandwiches? We cover all of these questions and more in this week’s Salad Spinner, our rapid-fire roundtable discussion of the hottest food news of the moment. Joining us in the Spinner this week are Tanya Sichynsky , a New York Times editor and author of the forthcoming V...

Chef Marcus Samuelsson was taught in culinary school that French cuisine is the gold standard of cooking. One day, he realized, “somebody lied." Samuelsson, a black Swede and the youngest chef to ever receive a three-star review from The New York Times (at age 23), has forged a new culinary ethos that permeates his restaurants in Harlem, Montreal, and London. His flagship restaurant, Red Rooster H...

Like palm trees, the Everglades, Disney World, and “Florida Man,” the orange is a classic symbol of the Sunshine State. But maybe not for much longer. Production has declined more than 95% in less than 25 years, setting off alarm bells across the industry. So what happened? It’s a produce murder mystery—and reporter Alex Sammon and our friends at Decoder Ring are on the case. The suspects include...

At the 1964 New York World's Fair, Belgian waffles were introduced to America. They became a sensation. But a half-century later, the woman who sold those waffles says her family's legacy has been co-opted. She joins Dan to share her memories of that World's Fair, and to explain why her mother still blames her father for everything that went wrong. Plus, we introduce her to an innovative, young wa...

The Rao family in Maryland knew that something was different about their younger daughter, Ayoni, almost as soon as she was born. But it took them until she was five to get a diagnosis of Prader-Willi Syndrome , a rare genetic condition that causes extreme, insatiable hunger. Food needs to be locked away from many of these patients, or they might eat until their stomachs actually rupture. Dan visi...

The musical Sweeney Todd is about a barber who goes on a killing spree and disposes of his victims by baking them into meat pies. In an off-Broadway production, they serve you an actual meat pie before the show begins. Dr. Pamela Dalton , a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center , helps us understand how food flavors and smells can affect our brains while we’re watching this kind of immer...

Mandy Naglich is an award-winning home brewer who also writes and teaches about beer. Now she wants to become a Master Cicerone — basically the beer equivalent of a master sommelier. There’s only a handful in the world, and the majority are men. If Mandy wants to join this rarefied group, she’ll need to pass a grueling two-day exam that includes identifying beers by taste and smell, pairing beers...

Why do our brains go crazy for the melted cheese on Philly's iconic cheesesteak? What is it about scrapple’s crispy fried goodness? How does surface-area-to-volume ratio make the roast pork sandwich more delicious? This week, we take a road trip to the City of Brotherly Love to feast on some classic Philadelphia fare. We also learn about the science of appetite with a researcher at the Monell Chem...

Is there anything better than hearing the sound of an ice cream truck approaching? Today we’re bringing you two stories of ice cream trucks, past and present. First, Sporkful managing producer Emma Morgenstern tells the tale of her great-uncles, who owned a fleet of trucks starting in the 1940s — complete with sibling rivalries, California dreaming, and the exact right speed to drive a truck to ma...

Carla Hall is known for her quirky, energetic personality on TV. But in some ways she’s very different today from the woman who first appeared as a contestant on Top Chef almost two decades ago. "I didn't want to show up as my Blackness if it wasn't going to be accepted," the former co-host of The Chew says of her first foray into food media. When Carla started her career, she turned her back on t...