The Sporkful

Tiffanie Barriere is an award-winning bartender and cocktail educator who goes by the title “ The Drinking Coach .” As the holidays approach, Tiffanie joins us to share some cocktail inspiration, talking with Dan about drinks for every season. She’s also created a cocktail perfect for this season — find it on Dan’s Instagram and in our newsletter ! Tiffanie reflects on going from bartending at App...

How did the U.S. military create a pizza that soldiers could eat on the battlefield? Our friends at the podcast Proof from America’s Test Kitchen follow the five-year journey to create the world's most shelf-stable pizza. In the process, they learn about ration bars made with ultrasonic technology, and how to keep cheese the right color in extreme conditions. The Sporkful production team includes...

Sohla El-Waylly — chef, recipe developer, YouTube star — just released her first cookbook, Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook . She sees the book as an antidote to the pitfalls of culinary school (which she calls “a scam”), and she wrote it to help home cooks learn in their own kitchens. Sohla tells Dan why she always knew that she wanted to cook for a living, how she fell in love...

Major announcement! Dan’s first cookbook, Anything’s Pastable , is available for preorder wherever books are sold starting today! This collection of non-traditional pasta sauces is not your nonna’s cookbook. It has kimchi carbonara, cacio e pepe with chili crisp, roasted artichoke with preserved lemon, and a dish called spaghetti all’assassina, or assassin’s spaghetti, which is pan fried until the...

Back in 2018, we talked with chef and recipe developer Yewande Komolafe about her experience as an undocumented immigrant. She grew up in Nigeria, but after immigrating legally to the U.S. a clerical error led to her losing her immigration status. For years she felt she had to hide parts of herself, for fear of being outed as undocumented. And because of her status, she couldn’t go back to Nigeria...

We are back with the Salad Spinner! This is our rapid fire roundtable discussion of the latest food news, from significant to silly, surprising to strange. And in the Spinner this week are Amanda Mull , a staff writer at The Atlantic , and Doug Mack , who writes the newsletter Snack Stack . They discuss the genius of Bass Pro Shops , the truth behind Van Halen’s brown M&Ms story , and the weirdnes...

Curtis Chin was practically raised at Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, his family’s restaurant in Detroit. It was a restaurant that served everybody, from the mayor (who was a regular) to sex workers to business executives. Within the walls of the restaurant, the Chin family saw the rise of Detroit as a multicultural, industrial city, and its decline in the wake of white flight and the crack epidemic. C...

School is back in session. And for kids, lunch period is the closest you get to being on your own at school. So what do kids actually talk about at lunch? Dan goes to one elementary school to find out. Then we hear from parents dealing with the high-stakes daily routine that is packing a lunch. Food writer J. Kenji López-Alt joins Dan to talk about his tips and tricks for using a bento box to pack...

Husband-and-wife comedians and podcast hosts Natasha Leggero and Moshe Kasher often perform standup together. In their Netflix special they offer couples relationship advice, and the occasional roast. This week on The Sporkful, Natasha and Moshe help Dan and his wife Janie resolve their long-simmering marital conflicts involving hand soap and hosting dinner parties. Can Dan and Janie figure out ho...

Back in 2017, a far-right politician in France angered his supporters and caused a small scandal. The faux pas? Enjoying a plate of couscous. Couscous is one of the most popular dishes in France, and it’s also a symbol of North African immigration. So how does the food of a former colony become “French” — and how much credit should France get for its culinary influence on former colonies? Reporter...

On today’s show, we’re featuring two new cookbooks that we’re excited about, and the stories of the authors behind them. James Park’s new cookbook Chili Crisp: 50+ Recipes To Satisfy Your Spicy, Crunchy, Garlicky Cravings is a testament to how he’s never really followed the rules — and why that’s his secret weapon. Then we talk with Adeena Sussman, whose new book is Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals Fr...

Breeders at Washington State University spent 20 years developing a completely new variety of apple: Cosmic Crisp. What exactly does it take to create a new kind of apple? And how do they come up with a name for it? We team up with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist podcast to learn about this apple innovation — and to heap a deserving amount of scorn on the ubiquitous, flavorless Red Delicious. Th...

We asked for your food fights and hot takes, and you delivered! We hear about a 20-year dispute over a garlic aversion (with unsavory origins), get to the bottom of the best way to eat a pint of ice cream, and challenge Dan’s long-standing feud with spaghetti. Joining Dan to dish out wisdom are two opinionated, food-obsessed women of letters: Jiayang Fan and Samantha Irby . Jiayang and Sam also co...

Foraged ingredients have become all the rage in high end restaurants, part of the move toward hyperlocal, farm-to-table ingredients. Of course, we humans have been foraging pretty much forever. And though it’s less common in America today, Jay Marion’s family never really stopped. Now he’s carrying on that family legacy in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where he searches the woods and fields for al...

While the villages to the east and west have charming Main Streets, the small town of Greenlawn, sandwiched in between, has pickles. Dan stops by the annual Pickle Festival before diving into the story of Samuel Ballton, the formerly enslaved man who became Greenlawn’s Pickle King. Dan meets some of Samuel’s descendants as they celebrate the recognition he’s started to receive, and hears how learn...

Today we tackle news in the world of food that’s at turns substantive, silly, and surprising in a new series we’re calling Salad Spinner! Take a spin with us as Dan chats with journalists Amanda Mull ( The Atlantic ) and Dennis Lee ( The Takeout ) about Instant Pot ’s parent company declaring bankruptcy, Burger King’s rollout of a cheese sandwich monstrosity in Thailand, and what it means that the...

A few years ago, Tommy Pico, a queer indigenous American poet, and lover of junk food, set out to learn how to cook. He wanted to get healthier, but also, he wanted a food culture to replace the one that was wiped out when the federal government forced his ancestors onto a reservation. Rather than turn to the past to connect with that culture, Tommy turned to friends to build a new one. His book F...

When the first Barbie Dreamhouse came out in 1962, it didn’t have a kitchen. Fast forward to today and there are a dozen chef Barbies. What does that say about Barbie, and about American food culture? We talk with Helene Siegel, author of The Barbie Party Cookbook (1991), about why Mattel resisted having Barbie cook for so long. Then Dan dines with food writer Helen Rosner at the pop-up Malibu Bar...

Once known for its glacial pace, ice news today is breaking. In the wake of Starbucks’ recent announcement that they’re changing their ice, we’re devoting an entire episode to the drink chiller in all its forms: pellet ice, giant ice cubes, bagged ice, and more. Ice cube reporter Camper English, author of The Ice Book , tells us about his breakthrough method for making crystal-clear ice, and which...

It’s time for our annual game show, 2 Chefs And A Lie! The game is simple. Dan talks with three “chefs.” Two are real, and one is an actor with a made-up resume. He’s gotten no info on these people in advance and cannot look online while playing. He can ask each participant just five questions, then he has to guess which chef is the impostor. The best part: You can play along! Dan has lost the gam...

This week in honor of July 4th, we’re exploring an important part of American history – the contributions of enslaved Black chefs, whose work influences American cuisine to this day. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson brought the enslaved chef James Hemings, brother of Sally Hemings, with him to France to train under the French culinary masters of the day. Hemings created a cuisine that was half French, ha...

How do you feed yourself on a hike that’s more than 2,200 miles long and takes six months to complete? Every summer, hundreds of people attempting to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, are faced with that question. This week senior producer Emma Morgenstern heads to Pine Grove General Store, the trail’s halfway point, and enters a world where most typical rules of eating see...

The stand-up comedian Zarna Garg spent 16 years as a stay-at-home mom. Now she sells out shows across the country and has her own special on Prime Video . In her stand-up and her social media videos, food is often a main character. But Zarna has mixed feelings when it comes to cooking. As a teenager, she wasn’t always sure where her next meal would come from. And as a parent, she came to resent th...

Remember that time you bought an apple in Canada or a piece of cheese in France and “forgot” to declare it when you crossed the border into the U.S.? That makes you a food smuggler. It can feel pretty innocent, but sometimes, food smuggling can have big consequences. On today’s show, we talk with a small-time haggis smuggler in Toronto, learn about the Mexican bologna racket, and meet a contraband...

Top Chef judge Gail Simmons never thought she’d have a career in food. Sure, her mom ran a cooking school in their home growing up. Yes, she worked in the kitchen on a kibbutz in Israel. And it’s true, she wrote restaurant reviews for her college paper. But was food really what she wanted to do? It turns out: yes. Once Gail snagged a job on that as-yet-unknown reality TV cooking competition, she n...