Special Sauce

As one of the millions of long-suffering New York Knicks fans, I decided I had to devote an episode of Special Sauce to the the team’s amazing playoff run. Joining me on the pod is the The New York Times‘s Matt Flegenheimer, who wrote a great piece about NYC coming together to celebrate this magical...

This week on Special Sauce we talk to Mateo Kehler, the cheese visionary behind Jasper Hill Farm.  Mateo and his brother Andy, carpenters by trade, pooled together their life savings and bought a 200 acre dilapidated dairy farm in Greensboro, Vermont, in 1998. They were cheesemakers on a mission to save a disappearing way of...

I have written thousands of words about the joys of eating hot dogs, so when Memorial Day rolls around, this serious eater’s thoughts immediately turn to the humble frankfurter. A couple of years ago we had my friend and fellow food writer J.J. Goode on Special Sauce to talk about our love for the hot...

This week on the pod we are back with Part 2 of our deep dive into bageldom with bagel baker and celebrated chef Mark Strausman of Mark’s Off Madison in NYC. He and I taste-tested bagels from Wall Street darling PopUp Bagels, which was just valued at 300 million dollars, a classic traditional NY bagel...

Like slice pizza and smash burgers bagels are having a moment. One concept Pop Up Bagels was just valued at $300 million in its most recent round of financing. Pop Up’s rip and dip bagels are a viral sensation but have left some traditional bagel purists unimpressed. One of those purists is the great chef...

Like many serious eaters I am a serious NBA fan. And although the playoffs this year have just gotten underway, they are already proving to be thrillingly entertaining for people like me who have no skin in the game — other than an unabated lifelong passion for the New York Knicks and just about any...

The idea that food is medicine has been around for centuries. On this week’s Special Sauce The New York Times‘s Kim Severson and the Aspen Institute‘s Corby Kummer talk about how doctors, the government, and even insurance companies have been engaged in a half-century long process to treat various medical conditions with food cooked healthily...

Last November ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, terrorizing both restaurant customers and workers in immigrant communities all over the Windy City.We heard firsthand accounts of ICE’s violent misdeeds by Chicago Tribune reporter Zareen Syed and restaurateur Marcos Carbajal of the esteemed Carnitas Uruapan. I checked in with Zareen and Marcos this week to...

Tom Valenti, one of my favorite chefs of all time (who also happened to be a swell, generously spirited human being), died suddenly last week. Tom was a friend of mine, so I gathered writer Andrew Friedman (who co-wrote Tom’s cookbooks) and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que founder John Stage to celebrate the life and times of the...

As someone who has spent the greater part of a half-century searching for and obsessing about where to find the best of any kind of foodstuff, I was immediately drawn to Ella Quittner‘s book Obsessed with the Best. Quittner and I delved into the pleasures and pitfalls any writer encounters when he or she tackles...