The Sporkful

This episode is chock full of strategies for making your way in one of the world's most barren food wastelands. We cover both the airport and airplane, short domestic flights and long haul international flights, snacks, entrees, and more. We'll tell you how to mix your cocktail, how to use your pretzels to improve your other food, how to get served first, and how to end up with enough beverages to get you to your destination.

This e...

From a moisturizer made of beef fat, to bartenders hating on Gen Z, to tariffs, a lot happened this year. (How do you get away with stealing 100,000 eggs and a truckload of Guy Fieri’s tequila?) We cover the biggest and strangest food stories of 2025 in our Salad Spinner Year in Review! Helen Rosner, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at The Atlantic, join us to discuss all these headlines and more -- an...

Patti LaBelle is not just a music icon, she’s also a food icon. She’s written best-selling cookbooks, hosted a food TV show, and even cooked for Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and Prince. She talks with Dan about touring the segregated South in the ‘60s, the viral video that made her sweet potato pie a Walmart sensation, and the one recipe in her cookbook that’s perfect for women going through menopause. Plus food writer Adrian Mi...

It’s been eight years since Samin Nosrat published her smash-hit cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat. She says her whole adult life was on a trajectory toward that book. But in the aftermath of its success, Samin ended up in a dark place, struggling to understand why achieving her goals didn’t fix her problems. This week she tells us about that time, and how it eventually led her to write her new book, Good Things — which includes a bunch...

TikTok is the wild west of the food media world. It’s less professionalized than Instagram and YouTube, and it holds the promise of virality from the very first time you post. So we wondered: What actually makes a food TikTok go viral? To find out, we consult Bettina Makalintal, a food journalist and culture critic (who also makes her own TikTok videos), and Professor Emily Contois, who studies food on Instagram. Then we get advice...

In America, the cooking fat you use — lard, butter, shortening, oil — has long been a signifier of health, virtue, and class. What is it about fat that gets us so riled up? Reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong looks at four battles over cooking fats in America over the last 150 years, starting with lard vs. Crisco, all the way to our current panic over seed oils. What do these battles tell us about food culture, and about America?

This ep...

This week we’re reheating two call-in episodes from 2015. First: Two Sporkful listeners call in to debate the best way to make enchiladas: flat (lasagna style) or rolled. Can Dan's advice restore peace and save Enchilada Party Night? Next up: Adam and Jonathan in L.A. call in to debate a dystopian future with only one cheese and to explain why cheddar is like Hugh Grant. Then Erica in Illinois ponders the metaphysics of grilled che...

How does a traumatic brain injury affect the way you cook and eat? Filmmaker Cheryl Green, who has a brain injury, satirizes her own experiences in the kitchen in a short video called “Cooking With Brain Injury.” This week Dan talks with Cheryl about what it means to live with an invisible disability, how it affects her cooking, and why asking for help can be a beautiful thing. Plus, Cheryl records herself making a meal.

Watch “Cook...

Amy Sedaris offers advice on dealing with family members who are drunk or confrontational at the holidays. Plus, Robert Krulwich (formerly of Radiolab) on the time a turkey fell in love with his wife.

This episode originally aired on November 21, 2014, and was produced by Dan Pashman, Kristen Meinzer, and Anne Saini. The Sporkful team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Kameel Stanley, Jared O'Connell, Morgan ...

Roy Wood Jr. has long used humor to discuss topical issues and get at deeper truths. As a correspondent for The Daily Show, and now as the host of Have I Got News For You on CNN, he brings his own unique sensibility to political comedy. In his new memoir, The Man Of Many Fathers, he goes deep on his complicated relationship with his father, and the role food played in crucial moments of his childhood. Roy tells Dan about elaborate ...

Today we’re bringing you a conversation Dan had on the new podcast In the Test Kitchen, from America’s Test Kitchen. Hosts Dan Souza and Lisa McManus welcomed Dan into their Boston studio to dive deep into the world of pasta design, exploring what makes a perfect noodle and how texture, sauce-holding power, and mouthfeel come together in the ultimate bite. Plus, the ITTK hosts get into gear testing, and they offer Dan a “Ror-snack”...

We all know the classic regional pizza styles: New York, Chicago, Detroit. But Colorado? If you haven’t heard of that one, you’re not alone. Paul Karolyi, a reporter and executive producer of City Cast Denver, spent six years trying to uncover the story of how Colorado style pizza was invented, and why more people don’t know about it. This week we hear the tale of his epic quest, and enlist pizza expert Scott Wiener to try to answe...

Wherever Phil Rosenthal goes, he wants to eat — which explains the name of his Netflix show, Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world with wide eyes, an empty stomach, and a bottomless supply of delight at the people and food he encounters. And before Somebody Feed Phil and his new podcast Naked Lunch, Phil created the hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which used food as a key source of tension between the characters. Over lunch ...

Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew towards the quirky and neurotic — and his characters’ quirks often come out through food. In the classic 1996 film Big Night, Tony plays an uncompromising Italian chef whose Jersey Shore restaurant is on the brink of failure. In the TV show Monk, he plays a detective with OCD who has many strong opinions about how he wants his food. In The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, he’s a math professor who, ...

This week we're talking about a number of key candy issues with special guests in time for Halloween. You'll hear from a Colorado-based Eater whose highly comprehensive candy treatise is on our blog and a candy blogger who has a Kit Kat eating technique that is bound to cause sustained widespread controversy or at the very least an significant uptick in chocolate-smeared fingers.

This episode originally aired on October 25, 2011, an...

Ask folks in the world of food and cookbooks, “Who writes the best recipes?” and you’ll hear one name more than any other: Dorie Greenspan. "Dorie does rock solid recipes," says Chandra Ram, who judges the prestigious IACP Cookbook Awards. So what's Dorie doing that makes her recipes better than others? This week, we travel to her home in Connecticut to find out. We watch her test a recipe, and get a look at her butter fridge. We a...

To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Water bottles have become a crucial accessory — a status symbol. How did that happen? This week we bring you an episode from our friends at the Slate podcast Decoder Ring. They investigate how bottled water transformed itself from a small, European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America. It took savvy marketing from brands like Gatorade and...

On The Great British Bake Off, Paul Hollywood is known for his tough but fair judgments, his piercing blue eyes, and his handshake, which he offers to a contestant only when they really impress him. But before he was ever a TV judge, he was a baker. When he first started doing TV appearances, it was nothing more than “icing on the cake” of his baking career. But all that changed when he got the call from Bake Off. Paul tells Dan ab...

When Nadiya Hussain competed on The Great British Bake Off in 2015, it seemed like all of Britain — from self-proclaimed #Nadiyators to the prime minister — was rooting for her. Since then, she’s hosted TV shows, written best-selling books, and become a household name in the UK. But the transformation we focus on in this conversation is the one that has taken place within her. She talks with Dan about growing up in a British Bangla...