Special Sauce with Ed Levine
370 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago - ★★★★ - 336 ratingsSerious Eats' podcast Special Sauce enables food lovers everywhere to eavesdrop on an intimate conversation about food and life between host and Serious Eats founder Ed Levine and his well-known/famous friends and acquaintances both in and out of the food culture.
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Episodes
Special Sauce: Jason Wang on Building a Xi'an Famous Foods Empire [2/2]
May 09, 2019 21:11 - 33 minutes - 23 MBIn part two of my conversation with Xi'an Famous Foods cofounder Jason Wang, he and I talked mostly about the struggles and challenges involved in first getting the business off the ground, and then expanding. The restaurant's original location, in a subterranean food court in Flushing, Queens, had a napkin problem. Money there was so tight, Wang said, "We had to cut back on things.... Back in the days, I'll be honest with you, we didn't give out napkins. We didn't have a napkin di...
Special Sauce: Jason Wang on the Origins of Xi’an Famous Foods [1/2]
May 02, 2019 21:41 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBOne of the many reasons I love doing Special Sauce is I get to interview people who shed light on various parts of the food culture I know very little about. People like Jason Wang. Wang and his father, David Shi, are the co-propietors of Xi'an Famous Foods, the fast-casual Chinese food concept that introduced New Yorkers to dishes like as lamb burgers, liang pi "cold skin" noodles, and the legendary lamb face salad that's unfortunately no longer on the menu. Wang emigrated with h...
Special Sauce: Kwame Onwuachi's Journey From Setbacks to Success Story [2/2]
April 25, 2019 22:17 - 27 minutes - 31 MBWhen we last left chef and memoirist Kwame Onwuachi, he had dived back into his catering business in New York City. Business was decent, but he’d begun to see holes in his game. "The food tasted good, but was it completely hot when it hit the table? I would roast the meat perfectly, but by the time I got to the table it'd be a little overcooked. The sauce that I thought would be really good, when I reduced it down, it was a little bitter. It was like these little things I didn't kno...
Kwame Onwuachi on Special Sauce: Notes From a Young Black Chef [1/2]
April 19, 2019 02:14 - 20 minutes - 23.7 MBThis week's Special Sauce guest, chef-restaurateur (Kith/Kin in Washington, DC) and memoirist (Notes From a Young Black Chef) Kwame Onwuachi, has led an interesting life, to say the least. How interesting? By the time he was 21, the now-29-year-old had already started a catering business and cooked on a ship cleaning up oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico- all after discarding a previous life that included membership in a gang and selling "nutcrackers," or homemade alcoholic punch, on ...
Special Sauce: Allison and Matt Robicelli on Moving to Baltimore [2/2]
April 11, 2019 19:56 - 36 minutes - 25.3 MBWhen we last left the irreverent Robicellis in the first part of their Special Sauce interview, they had decided to leave Brooklyn, their beloved hometown. I wondered why Allison and Matt decided on on Baltimore. "It feels like the New York I grew up in," Allison says. "It is an inherently broken city. Everything is broken and if you're a creative type like me, there's nothing more electric than that. Because everything is a possibility. Everything about your life has stakes. Everyt...
Special Sauce: Matt and Allison Robicelli on Cupcakes and the Bonds of Suffering [1/2]
April 04, 2019 18:58 - 36 minutes - 41.8 MBSometimes our Special Sauce guests are just so idiosyncratic, so entertaining, so thoughtful, and so zany, I find myself alternately laughing and near tears for an hour and a half straight. That's what happened when I had Matt and Allison Robicelli on the podcast. Allison is a longtime baker, cook, and James Beard- nominated food writer; Matt is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has cooked at City Bakery and Lutèce. Together, they opened the acclaimed bakery Robicelli...
Special Sauce: Tommy Tomlinson on Asking for Help When You Need It [2/2]
March 28, 2019 20:15 - 45 minutes - 52.1 MBIn part two of my wonderful conversation with Tommy Tomlinson, author of the impossible-to-put-down book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, we talk about how he decided he was going to have to do more than just diet to successfully deal with his weight issues. Tomlinson describes asking his friends and family about what they thought about his eating habits. "I learned a lot from them about how they would watch what I was eating. And th...
Special Sauce: Tommy Tomlinson on Untangling Food, Love, and Loving Food [1/2]
March 21, 2019 20:11 - 33 minutes - 38.6 MBIt's pretty rare for a Special Sauce interview to speak so directly to me that it feels like I've been hit in the gut. But that's exactly what happened when I talked with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Tommy Tomlinson, whose book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America is a moving memoir about struggling with eating and weight issues. As someone who has grappled with a weight problem my whole life, I identified with every word Tomlinson wr...
Special Sauce: Osayi Endolyn on the Legacy of Southern Fried Chicken [2/2]
March 14, 2019 17:51 - 28 minutes - 32.2 MBThe superb young food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn is back again for this week's episode of Special Sauce. This time our far-reaching conversation includes a discussion of a brilliant piece on fried chicken Endolyn wrote for You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another, a fascinating anthology edited by former Lucky Peach editor Chris Ying and Noma's Rene Redzepi. First, we talked about the fundamental premise of the book. "It's obvio...
Special Sauce: Osayi Endolyn on Nigerian Food, Writing, and Identity [1/2]
March 07, 2019 20:57 - 31 minutes - 22 MBOn this week's episode of Special Sauce, Ed speaks to Osayi Endolyn, a Florida-based food writer whose work regularly appears in major food publications across the country, and whose column in Gravy, the journal published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, earned a James Beard Award in 2018. Ed and Endolyn's conversation starts off exactly where most Special Sauce conversations start off, namely with Endolyn talking about her family and the food they used to eat when she was growin...
Special Sauce: “Is Deep Dish Pizza a Casserole?” And Other Pressing Pizza Questions [2/2]
February 28, 2019 20:39 - 31 minutes - 36.3 MBWelcome back to part 2 of Ed Levine's Special Sauce conversation about pizza in the wake of the revelation by pizza historian Peter Regas about the true origins of New York City pizza. If you recall from last week, Regas has demonstrated that Lombardi's, which was long thought to have been the first pizzeria in New York, was in fact not the first. This week, Regas shares a little bit of what he's discovered about the origins of Chicago's iconic deep dish pizza. As is par for the co...
Special Sauce: Uncovering Pizza's US Origins [1/2]
February 19, 2019 17:09 - 41 minutes - 28.8 MBWe rarely deal with breaking news on Special Sauce, but when said news concerns pizza's US origins, exceptions must be made. As soon as I learned that Peter Regas, a Chicago-based statistician by day and pizza obsessive by night, had discovered that there were pizzerias operating in Brooklyn and Manhattan years before Gennaro Lombardi opened what has long been thought to be the country's first pizzeria in 1905, I knew we had to have him on the podcast for an extended interview. I ev...
Special Sauce: Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo on the Importance of Kindness (and Salt) [2/2]
February 14, 2019 22:47 - 35 minutes - 41.2 MBOn this week's Special Sauce, Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo talk a lot about a lot of things, including their cookbook, the aptly titled Kindness and Salt: The Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors. I asked them to dissect the unusual title, starting with "kindness." Doug explained, "It's a big part of what we do...We try to be kind in everything we do, in our relationships as a staff and also with our customers. So that would have to be a part of our book. That's our philo...
Special Sauce: Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo on the Neighborhood Restaurant [1/2]
February 07, 2019 23:15 - 29 minutes - 20.4 MBI am constantly on the lookout for good neighborhood restaurants. The kind of restaurants that treat me like a regular even if I'm not; where the host greets me warmly even when it's really crowded; where the food is consistently serious and reasonably priced; and, most of all, where I feel well taken care of at all times. So when I read Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors by Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo, who own Buttermilk Channel and F...
Special Sauce: Chef Anita Lo on Cooking for Yourself [2/2]
January 31, 2019 17:01 - 18 minutes - 12.9 MBOn this week's Special Sauce, Chef Anita Lo talks about her new cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. To Anita, cooking for yourself is a journey of self-discovery. "I think cooking can be self re-affirming," she says. "I mean if food is culture and you're cooking what you like to eat, it's about you. It's about who you are...Food is identity." She also says cooking for yourself is therapeutic and thought-provoking. "I've had a lot of people say to me that this book...
Special Sauce: Chef Anita Lo on Cooking for Michelle Obama [1/2]
January 25, 2019 01:58 - 26 minutes - 18 MBThis week on Special Sauce with the terrific chef and fine writer Anita Lo. Anita had Annisa, a great restaurant in Greenwich Village, for 16 years before closing it in 2017. She was part of the first wave of women chef-restaurateurs in New York. Anita was also the first woman who cooked a State dinner for the Obamas at the White House. Finally, she is the author of the recently published elegant and pithy cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One This week's episode focu...
Special Sauce: The White Moustache’s Homa Dashtaki on Staying Small and Flourishing [2/2]
January 18, 2019 15:45 - 29 minutes - 20.5 MBOn this week’s Special Sauce I continue my delightful conversation with The White Moustache founder Homa Dashtaki. I asked her how she makes her sinfully rich yogurt. Homa said, "There's nothing I'm doing different than the way I would teach you how to do it at home. And you can make White Moustache yogurt at home, and it's a very magical process, but it's so, so simple. It's just a matter of boiling the milk, letting the milk cool to a certain temperature, and then very mildly let...
Special Sauce: The White Moustache’s Homa Dashtaki Makes the Best Yogurt in the US [1/2]
January 10, 2019 22:43 - 34 minutes - 23.7 MBI have a confession: Until Daniel Gritzer told me about The White Moustache a couple of months ago, I 'd never heard of it, much less its founder, Homa Dashtaki. Now, after interviewing Homa and trying her yogurt, I can tell you that Daniel was right when he said it would change my life. First of all, the yogurt is so tasty, so thick and creamy, that I can't think of a reason not to eat some every day (which I've done ever since first trying it). Secondly, Homa is a force of nature,...
Special Sauce: René Redzepi on Apprenticeships, El Bulli, and Being a Better Leader [2/2]
January 03, 2019 21:13 - 20 minutes - 14.2 MBIn this week's Special Sauce interview with René Redzepi, he describes his journey from being a 15-year-old novice cook to culinary visionary, which started when he was an apprentice at Pierre André, a Michelin-starred, classic French restaurant in Copenhagen. "I spent four years with [chef-owner Philippe Houdet], and it was an incredible time," Redzepi says. "I mean, I basically went from being a child to being an adult like overnight. Just like that you're working 85 hour weeks an...
Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on What They Hate About the Holidays
December 18, 2018 18:47 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MBStella Parks and Daniel Gritzer are back for the second part of our Ask Special Sauce holiday edition, and we tackle some of the most pressing issues many of us face when cooking during the holidays. For example, take the sticky subject of royal icing, which, according to Stella, is great for making a bunch of holiday-appropriate treats far in advance."You can make a bunch of frosted snowflakes, and they'll keep for weeks, without any kind of loss of quality, because there's nothin...
Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on Combustible Artichokes and Making a Better Cookie
December 13, 2018 22:44 - 36 minutes - 41.7 MBI had such a good time answering your Thanksgiving questions with Kenji and Stella on our recent installment of Call Special Sauce, we thought we'd do the same thing in a two-episode series leading up to the end-of-year holidays. This week and next, Daniel Gritzer joins Stella to answer your holiday cooking and baking questions, and I can tell you that I learned a lot. You'll want to listen to the episode or read the transcript to hear Stella's and Daniel's complete answers, but her...
Special Sauce: René Redzepi on Opening Noma at 25 [1/2]
December 07, 2018 01:17 - 29 minutes - 20.2 MBIt was a thrill to sit across the table from René Redzepi to record this episode of Special Sauce. The pioneering chef-restaurateur is the force behind Copenhagen's Noma, which has been declared the best restaurant in the world no fewer than four times. As you might easily imagine, our conversation was far-reaching and revealing. Redzepi and I started off by talking about his new book The Noma Guide to Fermentation, co-authored by Noma's fermentation lab director David Zilber. Ferm...
Special Sauce: Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook on What Makes Israeli Cuisine Unique [2/2]
November 29, 2018 22:47 - 32 minutes - 37.8 MBIn part two of my enlightening and heartfelt conversation with Chef Michael Solomonov and his partner Steven Cook, authors of Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious we took a deep dive into- what else?- the soul of Israeli food. First of all, I became really envious when they told me about the kind of research they did for the book, which involved going to over 80 restaurants in eight days. That's my kind of trip! And, apparently, when you eat at that many restaurants, you end u...
[Rerun] Ask Special Sauce: Kenji and Stella Troubleshoot Your Thanksgiving (2017)
November 21, 2018 17:00 - 38 minutes - 44.6 MBWhen I was mulling over what we could do on Special Sauce for Thanksgiving, I immediately thought about stress reduction. Making the big dinner can be stressful for any number of reasons, and while we design all our Thanksgiving offerings with an eye to making the holiday as hassle-free as possible, I decided to continue with that theme in this special edition of Ask Special Sauce. I invited Kenji and Stella on to answer as many questions from our community as we could, since they k...
Call Special Sauce, Thanksgiving Edition: Kenji and Stella on Good Gravy and Loving White Meat
November 16, 2018 18:52 - 1 hour - 73 MBFor the last couple of Thanksgivings, we've done call-in episodes of Special Sauce with Stella and Kenji to answer the holiday-cooking questions stumping the Serious Eats community. We love producing these episodes, and our audience seems to love listening to (or reading) them, so we've decided to make it a Serious Eats holiday tradition. This year, we were treated to a mini treatise from Kenji on gravy, which, I'm not ashamed to admit, has vexed me so much over the years that I've...
Special Sauce: Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook on True Partnership [1/2]
November 08, 2018 22:36 - 33 minutes - 38.7 MBWhen we booked multiple James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Solomonov and his business partner Steven Cook on Special Sauce to talk about their new book [Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious](a%20href=%20) and their restaurants ([Zahav, Dizengoff, Federal Doughnuts, among others), I thought they'd talk a lot about a typical chef-restaurateur partnership and contemporary Israeli food. I couldn't have been more wrong. What I heard instead was an incredibly moving story of a ...
Special Sauce: Sam Sifton on Food in the Internet Age [2/2]
November 01, 2018 21:48 - 26 minutes - 30.7 MBIn part two of my repartee-filled interview with New York Times food editor Sam Sifton, we delved into the intersection of food and technology. When I asked Sam how he thinks the internet has impacted the food media landscape, he said "I think it has changed food for the better and for the worse. You know, there's something kind of delicious as a critic, at least in the first years of being able to go to the internet, to get the photographic notes that you would've taken if you were...
Special Sauce: Sam Sifton on Food as the Universal Language [1/2]
October 26, 2018 00:32 - 38 minutes - 44 MBSometimes my Special Sauce conversations function as a reunion, and this week's episode represents one of those times. Almost 20 years ago, my guest, Sam Sifton, was my editor at the New York Times food section, and, as such, the person who encouraged me to take deep dives into iconic foods like burgers and pizza. Those deep dives have in fact become the hallmark of Serious Eats, sometimes taking the form of recipes and cooking-technique articles, and Sam is now in charge of just ab...
Special Sauce: Kenji and Daniel Talk About Smashing Stuff
October 04, 2018 18:57 - 30 minutes - 34.9 MBOn this episode of Special Sauce, I asked Daniel Gritzer, our managing culinary director, to come on and talk about the work he's been doing recently, and about where he thinks the site is headed from a culinary point of view (I hope to have Daniel and other members of the culinary team on the podcast more regularly in the future). And just to spice it up a little, I had Kenji López-Alt, on, too. We spent a fair amount of time talking about a magical and ancient cooking implement: ...
Where’s Kenji?!? (Here. He’s Here.) [1/1]
September 20, 2018 20:05 - 36 minutes - 25.5 MBI decided to kick off the new season of Special Sauce by checking in with Kenji. It won't surprise the Serious Eats tribe that he's been a little busy lately. You probably know about Wursthall, the restaurant he opened with two other partners in his adopted hometown of San Mateo, California. But you may not know that he's also working on his very first children's book and the sequel to his best-selling book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, all while juggling the d...
Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie, Part 3: Pie Hard With A Vengeance [3/3]
August 30, 2018 20:24 - 41 minutes - 46.9 MBIn part three of my pizza nerd-cast with Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, we go seriously deep into New York pizza, specifically the state of the NYC slice in 2018. Scott observed that some of the best pizza in town is being made by a new generation of pizza makers, ones that have no connection with older pizzerias. As he puts it, "They're not someone who learned their recipe from somebody else. They're people who are taking it upon themselves to figure out how to do it and do it right...
Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie, Part 2: Pie Harder [2/3]
August 23, 2018 21:44 - 30 minutes - 34.6 MBThe self-described pizza nerds Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener are back with me on this week's Special Sauce to continue our deep dive into our favorite food. Scott took great umbrage at the widely disseminated origin story of the Margherita pizza, in which a pizzaiolo created a pizza with the colors of the Italian flag–red (tomato sauce), white (mozzarella), and green (basil)–to impress Queen Margherita of Italy. "Well, number one, tomato and cheese were both on pizza at least 45 year...
Special (Pizza) Sauce: Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener Talk Pie [1/3]
August 16, 2018 21:33 - 44 minutes - 50.9 MBFor the next three weeks on Special Sauce I will be geeking out about pizza with Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, two of the smartest, most passionate, and most knowledgeable pizza nerds on the planet. Adam Kuban is the founding editor of the seminal food blog Slice.com, which Serious Eats acquired right before we launched in December of 2006, and as part of the deal, Adam became our first managing editor. Adam currently runs Margot's Pizza, a mostly monthly pizza popup in Brooklyn. Sc...
Sam Kass on How What You See Shapes What You Eat [2/2]
August 09, 2018 21:23 - 21 minutes - 24.2 MBIn part two of my interview with former Obama personal chef and Obama White House food activist Sam Kass, I got schooled big-time about the role visuals play in how you eat at home. "The first lesson that I learned, that I think is maybe most helpful for people, is you eat what you see. How you set your home up can have a transformational impact on what you actually consume. Basically, the things you're trying to eat more of, you should put out in plain sight, and the things you're ...
Sam Kass on Cooking for the Obamas [1/2]
August 03, 2018 01:30 - 34 minutes - 39.4 MBAll right, I admit it: I've always fantasized about having one of the Obamas as a guest on Special Sauce. And while I haven't given up hope entirely, I realize that Sam Kass, my guest on Special Sauce this week, might be as close as I get to that particular dream. Sam is an author and food policy activist, and I first heard about him when he was tapped by Michelle Obama in 2013 to be the executive director of her Let's Move campaign, which focused on changing attitudes about food a...
Rick Bragg on Why Cooks Are the High Priests of Good Living [2/2]
July 25, 2018 16:00 - 34 minutes - 39.6 MBOn this week's episode of Special Sauce, the Pulitzer Prize–winning but ridiculously down-to-earth Rick Bragg digs deep into his mom, the subject of his latest book, The Best Cook in the World. For one thing, Bragg's mother was not in the least interested in trendsetting: "Well, the first time she ever heard the term 'farm-to-table,' the puzzled look on her face—like, 'Well, how else are they gonna do it?...' They had it back in her day, too. They called it a flatbed truck." Brag...
Author Rick Bragg on His Mom, the Best Cook in the World [1/2]
July 17, 2018 18:05 - 27 minutes - 31.5 MBWe don't often get a chance to have a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist on Special Sauce–Jonathan Gold was the first–so I jumped at the chance to have Rick Bragg, one of my favorite writers of all time, on the podcast. Of course, Rick isn't known as a food or a cookbook writer, but his new book The Best Cook in the World: Tales From My Momma's Table, is both an incredibly evocative portrait of his mother and a collection of his mother's recipes. Parts of the book read like poetry...
Rodney Scott on Bourdain and Letting the Barbecue Speak for Itself [2/2]
July 12, 2018 20:01 - 22 minutes - 25.7 MBIn part two of my terrific conversation with James Beard Award-winning pitmaster Rodney Scott, we discuss the fact that barbecue, like jazz, was developed by African-Americans, and yet most well-known pitmasters are white. "I respect any human being, man or woman, that takes the approach to be a pitmaster...Black, white, tall, short, it don't matter," Rodney said. "I see dedicated people who stuck to what they believed in. Kept trying at it, kept going, and they finally got someth...
Rodney Scott Was Born and Raised to Be a Pitmaster [1/2]
July 06, 2018 01:41 - 24 minutes - 27.9 MBBarbecue pitmasters are amongst our nation's greatest storytellers—they learn that all-important skill tending to their 'cue all night. But Rodney Scott, South Carolina pitmaster and James Beard Award winner, might just have the best story of all to tell, as you'll hear on this week's Special Sauce. When Scott was growing up, his family started making barbecue one day a week at their general store in the tiny town of Hemingway, South Carolina, two hours' drive from Charleston. As ...
David Lebovitz on Blogging, Cookbooks, and Moving to Paris [2/2]
June 28, 2018 17:21 - 33 minutes - 37.9 MBOn this week's Special Sauce, seminal food blogger, pastry chef, and author David Lebovitz and I took a trip back into the past. And we had a blast. David worked in the Chez Panisse kitchen for 13 years before he realized it was time to leave. "I left because I was getting older, and when your body hits a certain age," David explained. "It's hard to stand up for eight and a half hours. It's like, I need to listen to my body, I need to go to the bathroom when I have to go to the bat...
David Lebovitz on Renovating His Home in Paris [1/2]
June 21, 2018 20:41 - 35 minutes - 41.1 MBMy guest on this week's Special Sauce is the extraordinary blogger, author, and pastry chef David Lebovitz, whose latest book is L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home. David and I started off our conversation with the early days of blogging, and I asked him about whether he had ever intended to make money from his path-breaking blog. It is a question he frequently fielded at blogging conferences, where attendees would ask how they, too, could make a profit, to...
Matt Goulding on Why Italian Food Can Evolve [2/2]
June 14, 2018 20:06 - 32 minutes - 37.3 MBListening to Roads and Kingdom co-founder Matt Goulding talk about the food culture in Italy on this week's Special Sauce was a real treat for me. Matt spent months eating his way through the country for his extraordinary new book, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture, and he explains that what he found in his travels was a vibrant and evolving food culture, not one that is frozen in time. Or, as he so eloquently says, "I wanted to toss off this idea of this ...
Chef Ed Lee on Cultural Appropriation Versus Collaboration [2/2]
June 07, 2018 20:50 - 40 minutes - 46.4 MBIn part 2 of my conversation with the remarkable chef and writer Edward Lee, we take a deep dive into his terrific new memoir-with-recipes Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine. Lee writes in the book, "Much of what we think of as traditional American cuisine is being challenged. We're witnessing a reshaping of the food landscape, and it is thrilling to some, obscene to others, but that is when it becomes interesting. When the tension ...
Edward Lee on Finding Home in a Bowl of Collard Greens [1/2]
May 31, 2018 20:19 - 34 minutes - 23.9 MBHaving chef and memoirist Edward Lee on Special Sauce was the happiest of accidents. Sitting on top of a pile of books on Special Sauce associate producer Marissa Chen's desk was Lee's evocative and moving memoir, Buttermilk Graffiti. I read a chapter, was knocked out by it, and emailed his publicist asking if Lee–chef/owner at three restaurants in Louisville, Kentucky, and culinary director at another in Washington, DC, and Maryland–was going to be in NYC any time soon. By some ...
Special Sauce: Artist and Author Maira Kalman on Savoring Moments of Cake [2/2]
May 25, 2018 12:02 - 35 minutes - 24.1 MBIn part 2 of the Special Sauce interview with artist and author Maira Kalman, we were joined by Barbara Scott-Goodman, who co-authored Cake, and, of course, we talked cake. What else would we talk about? The first question I asked was how the book came to be. Scott-Goodman said that she had always wanted to write a book about cake, but not one that dipped into the realm of baking bibles or took itself too seriously. She wanted a book "about moments of cake." And so she approached K...
Writer and Illustrator Maira Kalman on Room Service and Moments of Joy [1/2]
May 17, 2018 21:15 - 34 minutes - 23.4 MBI don't know how many serious eaters have heard of the brilliant, food-loving, and thought-provoking artist and writer Maira Kalman, but I've been a huge fan of hers for a long time now. So when I heard that she had recently co-written (with Barbara Scott-Goodman) and illustrated a cookbook, Cake, I knew I had to have her on Special Sauce. Kalman worked with her late husband, Tibor, at the influential M & Co. design firm, where she worked on projects such as magazine covers and alb...
Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman on the Perils of Publishing [2/2]
May 10, 2018 19:27 - 36 minutes - 41.9 MBIn part two of my terrific interview with Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman, we move from the creation of her blog into book writing (her second book Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites was just published in October 2017), and how social media has (or hasn't) changed what she does. The first thing I learned was that writing books was never part of Deb's grand master plan: "From 2003, I had been hearing from agents and editors. No, I did not think I needed t...
Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman on Not Pretending to Be Perfect [1/2]
May 02, 2018 20:07 - 35 minutes - 41.2 MBA week after sitting down with Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes, I got to reminisce with another seminal food blogger: Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen. Deb started Smitten Kitchen in 2006, the same year that Serious Eats launched. Twelve years later, Smitten Kitchen has millions of readers who come to the site for both her fine recipes and her realistic portrayal of her insanely busy city life, testing recipes and posting on her blog with two young children underfoot. Somehow she's ...
Elise Bauer on Turning a Food Blog Into a Business [2/2]
April 27, 2018 00:47 - 34 minutes - 39.7 MBAt the end of part 1 of my Special Sauce interview with Elise Bauer, she had just described starting Simply Recipes in 2004 after coming home to live with her parents in Sacramento to recover from a serious case of chronic fatigue syndrome, and in this week's episode we pick up where we left off. At the outset, Elise says she was making enough money to splurge on movie tickets, but then things started to change. "The more content I added...the more we got picked up in search and the...
Simply Recipes’ Elise Bauer on Alcatraz Swims and Blogging as Medicine [1/2]
April 19, 2018 21:49 - 28 minutes - 33 MBMy guest on this week's Special Sauce is Simply Recipes founder Elise Bauer, who was a veteran of Silicon Valley start-ups long before she started her blog. "In the late '90's I worked with a start-up and helped raise $35 million on Wall Street for what was similar to what is now Skype. But it was also in the late '90's when, what do they say, what's that great saying of venture capitalists, 'In a strong wind, even turkeys fly.'" It failed and Bauer took its demise to heart. "The ...