Special Sauce with Ed Levine

On this week’s episode, we talked with Washington Post food writer Tim Carman and his wife, spirits writer Carrie Allen, about their scary battle with the Coronavirus and the lasting impact it has had on them. Later in the episode, Kenji stops in to offer up a simple soup recipe to comfort them, and you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's Special Sauce, host Ed Levine talks to Brooklyn restaurateur (BK Jani) Sibte Hassan. Hassan contracted the Coronavirus in April, and his long road (including a 12 day stint in the hospital) to recovery and redemption takes him through both near-death moments and a surprising spiritual awakening. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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...

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 c...

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 conne...

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 justic...

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. Susa...

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 conse...

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...

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...

"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 gue...

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 s...

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 N...

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 appre...

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...

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...

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...

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 justi...

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 time...

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 S...

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 g...

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...

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 desser...

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 Jerus...

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 m...