The Sporkful

A year ago we spoke with a young woman we’re calling Raina, who felt she was on the verge of developing an eating disorder. For context and perspective, we spoke with comedian Margaret Cho, who's struggled with eating disorders much of her life. This week, we get an update on how Raina is doing one year later.

This episode originally aired on January 9, 2017, and was produced by Dan Pashman, Anne Saini, and Shoshana Gold, with editi...

The Copenhagen restaurant Noma has consistently topped lists of best restaurants in the world. People fly in from all over the globe to pay $500 per person for the hyperlocal tasting menus dreamed up by chef/owner Rene Redzepi. But a couple months ago, Redzepi announced the restaurant will close next year because it had become unsustainable, “financially and emotionally.” The announcement came as many high end chefs have spoken out...

When Alexandra Yingst plopped down at a bar in Reykjavik after a 10-hour drive through a blizzard, she saw something unexpected: a Big Mac, in seemingly perfect condition, under a glass dome. It turns out that Big Mac tells us a lot about Iceland’s economy and national identity. Our friends at the Atlas Obscura podcast explore the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places — and this week they’re bringing us two of their best...

"Flirting over food is really the best way to flirt," says actor Alan Alda, and he would know. He met his wife, Arlene, at a dinner party in college. A rum cake fell off the top of a refrigerator, and Arlene and Alan were the only ones to grab a fork and eat it off the floor. More than sixty years later, they’re still married. Their secret? Good communication. Alan and Arlene advise Dan on how to communicate with his own family abo...

When the French chef Jean-Robert de Cavel died in December, hundreds of chefs wore their white coats to his memorial service in downtown Cincinnati. It was a testament to how many people Jean-Robert had inspired in the thirty years he lived in the city. So how did this fancy French chef end up in Cincinnati — and why did he stay? We hear about Jean-Robert’s unlikely love affair with his adopted city, and we talk with food writer Ke...

We’re entering the third wave of meat alternatives. First, there was the Gardenburger — a hockey puck-like object that made it less annoying to be a vegetarian at a barbecue. Next came the meat substitutes that really tried to replicate the look, feel, and experience of meat, like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Now lab-grown meat, once the stuff of science fiction, is on the horizon, edging towards feasibility. After billions of...

The number one question Dan has gotten since inventing cascatelli is: Are you going to invent another pasta shape? The answer is probably not — the sequel is never as good as the original. Instead, he gets a better idea: find some old, obscure shapes that he loves, make a tweak or two, and team up with Sfoglini to produce them. But first he has to figure out which shapes, and how to get his hands on them. That requires a lot of tas...

This week, a federal regulator called gas stoves a “hidden hazard,” saying a ban on them was in the realm of possibility. President Biden and the Consumer Product Safety Commission quickly walked back that statement, but not before it ignited a firestorm among Republican politicians. So why the big kerfuffle over gas stoves? In 2021, we investigated the debate over gas vs. electric stoves, including the ad campaigns that have fuele...

From the show about a thirst trap chef at a Chicago Italian beef joint, to a movie about a luxury restaurant planning to kill its customers, 2022 was the year of ambitious, experimental, and downright weird food TV and movies. This week, comedian and TV writer Ashley Ray (who hosts the podcast “TV I Say”) breaks down some of the most talked about food shows and movies of the past year, including The Bear, Julia, Atlanta, and The Me...

What foods do Sporkful listeners resolve to eat more of in the new year, and why? And what’s Dan’s New Year’s food resolution for 2023? All is revealed in our annual year-end spectacular. Plus we replay one of the Sporkful crew’s favorite episodes of the year, which we all loved for our guest’s combination of extreme hilarity and thoughtful storytelling... Jason Mantzoukas sees every meal as a threat. As an actor and comedian, he p...

When Rick Martínez was growing up in Texas, he and his mom would drive across the Mexican border to go to mercados and buy dried chiles. One winter break, they spent two weeks recreating Rick’s grandma’s recipe for tamales, using a whole hog’s head. Even with this deep connection to food at a young age, it took Rick until he was 40 to quit his corporate job in favor of cooking professionally. Rick’s first cookbook, Mi Cocina, follo...

Growing up in Sacramento, Illyanna Maisonet felt distant from her Puerto Rican roots. Eventually, through food, she found her connection to the Puerto Rican diaspora, and to the island’s rich culinary history and diversity, which she says are often overlooked by Puerto Ricans themselves. Illyanna talks with Dan about trying to coax recipes out of her grandmother, how her new cookbook Diasporican became a family affair, and being la...

Beloved dessert person Claire Saffitz joins Dan for a holiday baking-themed extravaganza and tackles some of the most pressing baking questions of the moment… What’s the best way to roll out pie dough into a uniform shape? How can I recreate a relative’s secret cookie recipe? And what’s the difference between a muffin and a cupcake? Plus, Claire tells us how she and her chef husband divvy up kitchen responsibilities at home, and of...

Firefighters face plenty of high-pressure situations — including cooking a lunch for their crewmates that’s hot, filling, and on time. The pressure is even greater for A.J. Fusco, a firefighter in Harrison, New York, who moonlights as a chef in New York City. His firehouse lunches sometimes include ingredients the other firefighters aren’t used to. And when he makes mistakes, his crewmates make sure he doesn’t forget. On today’s sh...

A bottle of whiskey with no online footprint. A bar that’s long been closed. An address that doesn’t exist. Six years ago, Akhil and Nisha Dayal found a whiskey bottle at an estate sale whose backstory they couldn’t trace. Can The Sporkful uncover the origins of this mysterious whiskey?

Correction: We defined "single malt" and "blend" incorrectly in an earlier version of this episode. The audio has now been updated to reflect the co...

It’s not just her three graduate degrees that set Dr. Wendy Osefo apart on The Real Housewives of Potomac. It’s also that she loves to cook. She says her castmates see her as “the only person on this entire show who feeds her guests real food.” That deep care around food comes from her mother, who would bring gourmet meals to the cafeteria in Wendy’s elementary school and cook up Nigerian delicacies regularly. But, Wendy says, her ...

Nigella Lawson is a domestic goddess of the highest order. She strikes the perfect balance between aspiration — a beautiful garden, perfect lighting — and accessibility — sheet pan dinners and a disdain for pretentiousness. Nigella reveals how her own cooking show persona comes from her discomfort in social situations, and shares the two condiments she always keeps in her purse. She also rebuffs the one piece of criticism that she ...

Today, we talk with two chefs who are putting their own stamp on Southern food, each refusing to be pigeonholed in the process. Vishwesh Bhatt was born and raised in Gujarat, India. He moved to Oxford, Mississippi, for graduate school and quickly embraced the region in his cooking, and his identity. Tanya Holland has family roots in Virginia and Louisiana, but she's not originally from there. Still, she took the Southern food tradi...

As civil war erupted in Yemen, Mokhtar Alkhanshali found himself imprisoned, with $5,000 stuffed in his underwear and his coffee samples confiscated. To get those samples to the biggest specialty coffee expo in North America, he’d have to survive more than one near-death experience. Would his coffee be worth the risk?

This is the second half of our two-part episode about Mokhtar Alkhanshali. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 from la...