Our 15th Anniversary Sporktacular

Happy anniversary to us! This week The Sporkful is celebrating our 15th anniversary with a special episode sharing the story of the show’s creation, and tracing its evolution. Dan started The Sporkful in 2010 — the Stone Age of podcasting — recording episodes in his living room, or borrowed studios that he sometimes had permission to be in.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  Make holiday hosting effortless with Boars Head Sweet Slice Uncured Ham. It's the perfect centerpiece for gathering family and friends around the holiday table. Hand-packed into netting, Sweet Slice Uncured Ham has the look of a traditional holiday ham with rich flavor worth savoring. Slow roasted and delicately smoked, boneless Sweet Slice Uncured Ham delivers classic bone-in flavor made for the moments that bring everyone together. Find Sweet Slice Uncured Ham at your nearest Boars Head deli. And for holiday entertaining inspiration, recipes, and more, visit boarshead.com. My whole extended family and I went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this past spring. And I gotta say, I came away feeling like, number one, this is a great family destination. Number two, this is a great place to come all year round.

• 0:42Dan Pashman?

  The mini golf alone is probably worth, it's like the mini golf capital of the country. They have the most incredible elaborate mini golf courses. They also have more than 80 championship full-size golf courses, plus 60 miles of beautiful coastline, all-season sunshine. Of course, you can relax by the beach or the pool. There's also jet skiing, fishing charters, paddle boarding, and of course, food. Oh man, did we eat well in Myrtle Beach. From fresh local seafood to craft burgers and craft beers to kebabs on the boardwalk. With more than 2,000 restaurants to choose from, from legendary no-frill seafood shacks to chef-driven dining, Myrtle Beach has it all. Plus, live entertainment at the beach, there's always something epic going on. So, summer may be winding down, but in Myrtle Beach, you're gonna find the coastal vacation of your dreams all year long.

• 1:27Dan Pashman?

  Start planning your ultimate beach vacation at visitmyrtlebeach.com.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  You always liked debate. You know, like you were on the debate team in high school. So, you know, like talking about food in this like format where you can debate different issues, I think was really interesting for you.

• 1:46Dan Pashman?

  I actually did Model UN, not debate, just so you know. I was like a little too cool for debate.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Well, you liked to debate me, at least.

• 1:55Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. And this week's show is a very, very special one because The Sporkful is celebrating our 15th anniversary. Yes, it was way back in January 2010 in the stone ages of podcasting that I launched this show from my living room, often recording episodes in borrowed studios and off-hours, sometimes even with the permission of the rightful owners. People often ask me about those early days, like how I got into this, how the show developed into the podcast you hear today. So in honor of the show's birthday, I'm gonna tell you that story, complete with clips of some of my very favorite moments in Sporkful history.

• 2:38Dan Pashman?

  But before we get to those clips, let's just kick our feet up and reminisce a little bit. And to do that, I have a very special guest. It's every Sporkful listener's favorite regular, my wife, Janie. Hey, Janie.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 2:51Dan Pashman?

  So I mean, let's, let's talk a little bit about the story of the early days of The Sporkful. Like, I started The Sporkful out of desperation. As you know, I graduated from college in 1999. My dream was to host my own radio show. And I figured, all right, I'll start as a producer. I'll work my way up. But I had the bad luck of entering the industry just before two major recessions and right when the internet was turning traditional business of media upside down. So in 10 years, I was laid off from six radio jobs. Every time I thought I found a great opportunity, the show I was working on would get canceled. And actually, I have this clip. This is me on air on Air America Radio with Marc Maron.

• 3:32Dan Pashman?

  The show that I produced worked with him was called Morning's Edition. So let's listen to this.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Important stuff going on here in the studio. Dan Pashman has a stance that I'm not sure I agree with, yet he will defend it. We were discussing what we were gonna have for breakfast, but then it became a bigger problem about bread.

• 3:49Dan Pashman?

  Well, this is something I feel very strongly about, Marc, and I am a bit of a sandwich connoisseur. I'll be honest with you. I put a lot of study and research and thought into the creation and manufacture of sandwiches. Yes. And I'm quite confident that you already have an inferior sandwich before you're taking a bite. If you have hot things on the inside with cold bread on the outside, if you're gonna have hot eggs and cheese, or a burger, or a hot dog, or anything, whatever you're doing, you gotta heat the bread.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Back up, back up. This is crazy. You're talking crazy, cuz you're denying the power of fresh bread. If you have a fresh roll, alright, that's really nice and fresh and soft, like a bulky roll, as they call them in Boston, or a Kaiser roll, yeah, and you put the egg sandwich on that, toasting a Kaiser roll that's really fresh, just, it makes, it's wrong. I think you're wrong here.

• 4:32Dan Pashman?

  I understand what you're saying, and I will grant you that in a situation where you have a small amount of bread and a large amount of hot filling, but if you're talking about one scrambled egg and one slice of cheese in a big fat bulky roll, where your sandwich is like 80% bread, if that bread is not heated, then, then, that's not a good sandwich.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Bulky roll squishes up, like it gets all soft and it meets, it meets the egg and cheese. It meets it. Do you understand? If you have a little toasted crust, cuz you grill a bulky roll, there's no saying it doesn't just turn hard and brown. You know, I've been there, and it dries it out. It dries out the fresh roll.

• 5:00Dan Pashman?

  You could microwave it. It doesn't even have to be hot.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Oh, not microwave? No, no, no, no.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  You can't microwave anything.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  You call yourself a sandwich connoisseur, you use the word microwave?

• 5:08Dan Pashman?

  That was Marc Maron's co-host, Marc Riley, jumping in there. So that was 2004, 2005. Janie, what goes through your head when you hear that?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of forgot how early it was that you were focusing on, like, food minutia. I also think you're wrong. Toasting a roll. I mean, you don't want a cold, cold bread in your sandwich, but you assume it's room temperature. If you toast, like, a roll, it will get crunchy and hard and flaky, you know, flaky. I mean, do you still agree with yourself? 20 years later?

• 5:40Dan Pashman?

  Maybe with a bulky roll, or like a Kaiser roll, as some people call it, yeah, if it's fresh and good, and you're putting something hot. I just, I still don't like when you have, like, extreme temperature contrast between sandwich bread and sandwich fillings.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Right, but the bread is not cold. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you took some bread out of the freezer, the fridge, or something, yeah, that's a problem. Or if the fillings don't match. Like, I've had a hamburger that had, like, a cold slice of tomato on it. That's problematic.

• 6:09Dan Pashman?

  Yeah. But anyway, I'm with you on that. And my opinions are evolving on this topic, but, but...

• 6:17Speaker 01

  The arrogance from 20 years ago.

• 6:19Dan Pashman?

  Slowly fading away.

• 6:22Dan Pashman?

  But anyway, so that show with Marion was canceled. The show I produced at NPR got canceled. By the time I was 32, I had been laid off from six radio jobs. At that point, we were married, our first kid, you know, we know is gonna be on the way soon. I was feeling desperate and I was like, I'm gonna start a podcast.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Right. I think we said we would give it a year. Or I don't remember what the timeline was, a year or two years. And then you always had this fallback that maybe you'd go to law school. Your dad's a lawyer, you come from a family of lawyers. So that was like, okay, if you really can't figure out a way to make this a career and make some money, then you'd have to go back to law school.

• 7:02Dan Pashman?

  Right. It felt like this was my last chance. I feel like because I worked in radio, I knew podcasting was the future before the general public. And I figured if I start my own podcast, at least nobody can cancel it but me.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Right. But you didn't know if you could make money.

• 7:16Dan Pashman?

  Right, right. My goal when I started this portfolio was I just want this to be a full-time job. That was as far into the future as I could see.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Dan Pashman?

  But so then I had to start figuring out, okay, so what's my podcast gonna be about? And you know, at that point, most of my radio work had been in news and talk radio. But I just like, I didn't think the world needed another guy with opinions on the news. But then I thought like, what about food? You know, like I had no professional culinary training. I hadn't worked in food media. But as you know, I did always love eating. And you know, like food was an area where I had a lot of idiosyncrasies. How aware were you of my idiosyncrasies about food and eating, like before I became my career?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Your whole family was, you know, always interested in food and eating. And I remember you telling me about your mom and her catalog of index cards of restaurants and chefs and what she wants to eat, you know? And when we started dating, like you wanted to take me around and show me, you know, different restaurants that you really liked, higher end restaurants that I had ever eaten at. I mean, you just, you were really thought about food and more than I did.

• 8:24Dan Pashman?

  Still to this day. But like, you know, when I thought about doing a food podcast, I started thinking back to things like debating hot and cold sandwich bread with merit on air and other times that I had just a lot of opinions about food. And I just started to realize like, maybe this is the role I was born to play. It all kind of came together. I conceived The Sporkful with a simple premise, which was that we are going to discuss and debate the most ridiculous food minutia in search of new and better ways to eat. So we should say that initial concept was very different from what the show has evolved into. But anyway, I had never hosted a show myself, so I asked my friend Mark Garrison, who I'd worked with at NPR, to join me.

• 9:05Dan Pashman?

  The show launched in January 2010, and here's how episode number one began.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  This is The Sporkful.

• 9:27Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful, where sacred cows get grilled. I'm Dan Pashman, along with my friend Mark Garrison.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Hello, Dan.

• 9:34Dan Pashman?

  We're about to challenge your assumptions about consumption and drop a sporkful of knowledge on you because we're obsessively compulsive about eating more awesomely. And because if history has taught us anything, it's that the hosts of food shows need a lot of catchphrases. Mark Garrison, how are you, sir?

• 9:47Speaker 04

  I'm doing good. I had some leftover pumpkin lasagna.

• 9:50Dan Pashman?

  First of all, I composed that theme music on GarageBand. Thank you very much.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I remember when you were composing the music, and I remember debating what the name of the show should be.

• 10:01Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Because I think for a while, you just thought it was Sporkful. And then I can't remember who it was that said it should be The Sporkful.

• 10:09Dan Pashman?

  I wanted something that sort of expressed both sort of like ingenuity and creativity in food, like sort of the idea of seeing things in a new way, but also something that was sort of fun and silly and very like, basic and accessible. So one working title that I had for that show was sliced bread, because that was the same kind of like a super basic innovation. And then I thought about the spork.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Right, oh, that's what it was.

• 10:30Dan Pashman?

  It was a friend who said, no, call it The Sporkful.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:33Dan Pashman?

  My friend, Robin Epstein. Shout out to Robin, who said, call it The Sporkful, which was a good call.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:38Dan Pashman?

  But how does it feel to listen back to that intro?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I remember that music and how excited you were. You had a ton of ideas, you know, because I remember thinking like, well, what happens if you run out of ideas? And you're like, that's not gonna happen.

• 10:52Dan Pashman?

  I was right about that 15 years later.

• 10:57Dan Pashman?

  So that was the intro of the very first episode. And yes, by the way, it's true. In the first few months of the show, our main catchphrase was not, it's not for foodies. It's for eaters. It was where sacred cows get grilled. But anyway, Mark and I launched the show and the first episode was all about grilled cheese. I am a lover of words like yourself. Okay. And the food we're discussing here is grilled cheese. Yes. If you don't grill it, it's not a grilled cheese. No. We're talking grill, not like a barbecue grill. Yeah, yeah. On in a pan or in a diner style grill. Skillet, yeah. If you put it in a toaster, bread and cheese melted in a toaster, that's not a bad food. No. But that is a toasted cheese sandwich. Yes. That is not a grilled cheese.

• 11:40Dan Pashman?

  So our first episode was grilled cheese. Our second episode was on ice cubes. Ideal surface area to volume ratio, how fast you want it to melt, depending on the situation. And just like in general, what makes good ice? I get good bagged ice. You get bigger ice cubes. Where do you get good bagged ice? Do you have some like, like? I know a guy. I know a guy. Is it ice that fell off a truck? No, because then it melted. You lied. Everything is a lie. No. Here's something funny. I don't remember this. Back then, and even today to a point like most food media was chefs, recipes, restaurants, and I wanted a food show for people who love to eat, but weren't that interested in those things. So in those early days, I had a strict rule that we would not interview chefs. Like I thought they were all pretentious. I was turned off by foodie culture.

• 12:25Dan Pashman?

  So the podcast was mostly me, Mark and old radio friends of mine arguing about the tiniest details of the eating experience. We did a two-part series on snack mixes. We debated the best strategy in an all you can eat buffet. We compared apples and oranges. Remember that? That was groundbreaking, proving for the first time in history that it is in fact possible. And we interviewed a friend's eight-year-old kid Nathaniel for an episode about smores. So the topic at hand Nathaniel is smores. Now you came to us with this idea for smores.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did.

• 12:54Dan Pashman?

  What is it that you love about smores?

• 12:56Speaker 05

  Well, I just like it all. I like the, the marshmallow. I like the, I like it all.

• 13:00Dan Pashman?

  And you've been doing some research on things that you can add to smores to make them even better. Is that right?

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have.

• 13:07Dan Pashman?

  Well, tell us, tell us some of what you found.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  Well, I did peanut butter. I did Nutella and I did marshmallow fluff if you're in the office.

• 13:17Dan Pashman?

  So that, that's a special office smore?

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Oh my god, how old is Nathaniel now?

• 13:22Dan Pashman?

  So Nathaniel is now 23.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 13:25Dan Pashman?

  And he's 6'4".

• 13:28Speaker 01

  He's such a cute little kid.

• 13:29Dan Pashman?

  I know, that's how long this show has been around and how old we are.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:35Dan Pashman?

  And then, so our first celebrity guest on this program was Marc Maron, who, as I said, I'd worked with him in my radio days. He came on to talk about coffee, but we started off chatting about Jewish cookies called hamantaschen, which I had brought in for him.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  Can I have a prune one?

• 13:47Dan Pashman?

  Yeah, I, uh, I don't have prune, I have apricot.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Do you have poppy?

• 13:50Dan Pashman?

  Poppy, so, there you go.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  Oh, poppy's your best.

• 13:52Dan Pashman?

  Now, I'll warn you before you eat this, that my wife was so disappointed with the dough that she made for these cookies, that she actually threw it out halfway through.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  I appreciate that.

• 14:01Dan Pashman?

  And so, she deemed these subpar.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  You mean she, she threw out the dough and this is from the dough that was bad?

• 14:07Dan Pashman?

  That's right. She, she put too much flour in the dough and it was irreparable.

• 14:11Speaker 06

  Oh, well, cause it's alright.

• 14:13Dan Pashman?

  I think they're pretty good. They're not the best hamantaschen I've had in my life, but I'm not gonna throw them away. They taste, they taste pretty good to me, right?

• 14:18Speaker 06

  Did you say that to her?

• 14:19Dan Pashman?

  Yes.

• 14:20Speaker 06

  You said these aren't the best hamantaschen I've had in my life?

• 14:23Dan Pashman?

  I, I left out that part, but I did, I did say that they were good and I did eat several of them in front of her.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  How are you guys getting along?

• 14:28Dan Pashman?

  Great.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  You sure?

• 14:32Dan Pashman?

  But because she was just throwing dough around and throwing it away, I made a hamantaschen out of raw dough that I brought in. Cause I made one of these and ate it yesterday and it was amazing. Will you wanna try with me an uncooked cookie?

• 14:43Speaker 06

  No.

• 14:45Dan Pashman?

  I put it in the fridge last night.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  That doesn't cook things.

• 14:50Dan Pashman?

  Exactly, that's the idea, try it.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  It's the wrong, it's the wrong thing to put it in.

• 14:53Dan Pashman?

  Oh my god, it's so good. Why, why does anyone ever cook cookies? Try that. What do you think?

• 14:58Speaker 06

  That's awful. Like, I can taste, like, I'm probably gonna get sick from that.

• 15:02Dan Pashman?

  You may.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  What kind of food show is this?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  My hamantaschen have gotten better too.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I, I was baking them for way too long.

• 15:16Dan Pashman?

  Yeah. Yeah, I feel like, uh, uh, we've been together now for 20 plus years. And I feel like your baking exploits much less frequently end in tears.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been a lot of dough thrown in the garbage over the years.

• 15:30Dan Pashman?

  So when Maren came on, I got a scored a feature for it for his appearance in Apple Podcasts, which was or you know, in iTunes, which is very exciting. Like, I don't know if you realize this, but nowadays, like PR executives in the podcast industry spend weeks lobbying Apple's podcast team for these promo slots. But back in 2010, you literally just emailed a guy named Steve.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Right. There were like 20 podcasts and they picked three a week to feature.

• 15:55Dan Pashman?

  I remember we also got an early bump from an appearance by Rachel Maddow, whose newscasts I had wrote at another job that I lost way before anyone knew who she was. But by the time she came on the sporkful, people did know her. I went to her office at MSNBC to interview her. She was gracious enough to not only tape a show with us, but to re-tape half of it immediately afterwards. And I realized the batteries in my recorder had been dead for most of the conversation.

• 16:18Dan Pashman?

  Shout out to Rachel. I told her we could do the show about like, I was like, whatever topic you want. You name the topic and she picked cocktails. And then things got especially rowdy. We talked about what to do with cocktail garnishes.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  I think I'm going to be able to short circuit this entire discussion.

• 16:31Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  You're never supposed to eat the garnish.

• 16:33Dan Pashman?

  All right.

• 16:34Speaker 07

  The garnish is not a snack. The garnish is there to modify the liquor that is in the glass. It is not there to provide you a tasty treat to go along with your drink. The drink is the treat.

• 16:47Dan Pashman?

  I would say that if you're going to eat your olive or your cherry or whatever, then it should be between the one third of the way through the drink mark and the two thirds of the way through the drink mark.

• 16:56Speaker 07

  But that means you've got to be fishing in there with your finger.

• 16:58Dan Pashman?

  A straw, a straw can do it. Yeah, I think a straw or a stirrer, you know, you can poke it out. You can get it out of there.

• 17:04Speaker 07

  It's impossible to do it with elegance, though, isn't it? Admit it.

• 17:07Dan Pashman?

  Oh, I didn't know that elegance was one of the criteria, right? I mean, if elegance was part of the issue here, that went out the window a long time ago, right?

• 17:14Speaker 07

  I'm gonna tie my hands behind my back and just oat bag nosedive into this thing.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I don't remember listening to this because I like stick a fork in my cup to get the cherry at the bottom of my drink.

• 17:27Dan Pashman?

  Well, I won't stop.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Like, if I'm buying a 16, $17 cocktail, I'm gonna eat everything that's in the cup.

• 17:34Dan Pashman?

  You're chewing the ice. You take the glass home. You get it all.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:40Dan Pashman?

  And then in an episode that contains one of my all time favorite food arguments in Sporkful History, former Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich joined us to debate an age old question. When you have a sandwich on basic supermarket sliced bread, and you cut it in half diagonally, one half is a triangle, right? So, when you have that half, do you take the first bite of that triangle from the hypotenuse, or from one of the acute angles?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  For those who are little, who have trouble with geometry, what he means by the hypotenuse is he means the obvious place to eat the sandwich, the big wide part where you can see everything.

• 18:17Dan Pashman?

  The middle, the part sliced in the middle.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  The middle. Yeah, that's what it is. And so, of course you eat there, because A, you can look at it, B, you can choose your point of entry, C, it's, it's, that's how you do it. That's how you do it.

• 18:31Dan Pashman?

  So you can be anywhere.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  No, I've never seen anybody eat the pointy one.

• 18:36Dan Pashman?

  When you're saying choosing your point of entry, so you are fine with any, any point along the long edge?

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Like, it's like a piano. You can hit any note on the keyboard, it's stretched there before you.

• 18:45Dan Pashman?

  I don't quite understand why you would choose a bite that would put your cheeks in jeopardy of, of being smeared with something. And also too, you-

• 18:53Speaker 03

  It's like a kiss. If you want to kiss somebody, would you pucker, pucker, pucker, and stretch your lips as far, so you got as close to a duck as you could, and then take a little peck? No. You would bury yourself in the lips of the other. A sandwich is a form of comfort and a dressing with ardor the meal.

• 19:12Dan Pashman?

  Okay, I was waiting for the romantic.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you, you, you hit, you hit the sandwich big time.

• 19:18Dan Pashman?

  Why not choose the acute angle? And then it's, it's almost like an arrow, it's an arrow, like, pointing into your mouth, and it goes in there perfectly, and-

• 19:27Speaker 03

  That's the sandwich's way of spiking, that's the sandwich saying, "No, not here." That's what that-

• 19:37Dan Pashman?

  All right, now that we've covered the earliest days of The Sporkful, I'm gonna give Janie a break, and I'm gonna fly solo for a bit and play some more clips. Then Janie's gonna join us again towards the end. In that first year or two, everything was great. There was just one problem. The Sporkful wasn't making any money. It was a passion project, something I did at night and on weekends. At six in the morning while my daughter Becky watched cartoons. During the week, I worked various freelance jobs. Sometime in 2011, about a year and a half in, I got an email from a book editor who asked, "Have you ever thought of turning your podcast into a book?" I had, but I had no idea how to do that. She helped me get a literary agent, and I went through the process of pitching a book. Around this time, my co-host Mark Garrison got a full-time job offer that made it hard for him to keep doing The Sporkful on the side, so he moved on.

• 20:21Dan Pashman?

  The book deal brought in enough money to take The Sporkful from a passion project to a part-time job. So, still not quite reaching my goal of it being a job job, but, you know, heading in the right direction. Anyway, I started writing the book. In 2013, I also started hosting a web video series for a cooking channel called You're Eating It Wrong, in which I shared some of my strong opinions about eating, such as folding a slice of pizza inside out. Meanwhile, I kept trying to book some big-name guests, get some attention on this show. I desperately wanted Weird Al on the show. He seemed to me to be the perfect guest. I mean, first of all, I was and am a huge fan. I grew up with Weird Al. But also, he's silly in much the same way The Sporkful is, and he's written so many songs about food. After two years of me nagging his manager, I got Weird Al on.

• 21:04Dan Pashman?

  We analyzed every food-related song he's ever written, from Eat It and Fat, from My Balona and Grapefruit Diet, to this one.

• 21:23Dan Pashman?

  I think that you may have unwittingly agreed with my opinion about lasagna when you wrote that song, because a lot of lyrics are sort of like, "You should eat my lasagna, or if you don't like that, try these other foods." I think that lasagna is a severely overrated food.

• 21:39Dan Pashman?

  Uh, I, I think that it's a ton of work to make it. Separating those strips is a giant pain in the butt.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  For the longest time, my, my road manager, uh, had a thing and the, and the writer saying that no lasagna backstage.

• 21:51Dan Pashman?

  Really?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Because I don't, I, I didn't know this, but apparently lasagna is very cheap to make, apparently. So a lot of, a lot of promoters like, I'll give them lasagna. And then you wind up eating lasagna five times a week. So, you know, I, I like lasagna, but that was, that was off the writer for a long time.

• 22:04Dan Pashman?

  Okay, but so, uh, you don't quite share my disdain for it?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  For lasagna, I, I like it okay. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's overrated, but I, I think it's rated just fine.

• 22:17Dan Pashman?

  I see, I, I kinda feel like, okay, someone's gonna make you lasagna and their time wouldn't be better spent doing something else for the world.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Like paint my house.

• 22:24Dan Pashman?

  Right, exactly, and, and give me what I think is the, basically the same thing, which is baked ziti.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Okay, there you go.

• 22:29Dan Pashman?

  Same thing, except it doesn't require the fine detail of the layering of the ingredients, which is so time consuming and tedious.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Right, so, so make me some baked ziti and give me a back rub.

• 22:39Dan Pashman?

  In 2014, I got my big break and the Sporkful was picked up by New York Public Radio, WNYC. Podcasts were starting to get more attention. It was becoming more obvious that this was the future of audio. WNYC offered me a salary and a producer, which would allow me to work on the Sporkful full-time and have the help I needed to make more ambitious episodes. Four years in, I officially had my dream career. My first producer was Kristin Meinzler, who's gone on to become a successful podcast host and author in her own right. Soon after arriving at WNYC, again, four years after the Sporkful launched, I interviewed a chef for the first time, Tyler Cord. I only agreed to have him on because he had written an entire book of recipes for broccoli and he was famous for his broccoli sub.

• 23:22Dan Pashman?

  That all just seemed so weird and ridiculous that I made an exception to the no chefs rule. I think we're all familiar with the typical perception of broccoli. It's boring. Yeah. It's difficult to make it palatable, but yet we sort of feel obligated. It's like, you know, it's good for you, you kinda just have to do it. You're lucky there's a table between us, my friend. Fighting words. Well, go on, make the case. But no, but I mean, that's a true, it's all, broccoli is such a weird symbol for, for exactly that. I mean, it's the one that, that it seems politicians always use to describe things that kids are forced to eat that they don't want to eat. Uh, I guess I don't have a very established defense for that. Because it's just so stupid, you know, like it's so delicious.

• 24:06Dan Pashman?

  When you get home late at night, you love a ham, cheese and broccoli sandwich. Now, most people would have just stopped at ham and cheese. What does the broccoli add to a late night ham and cheese sandwich? I mean, there's no texture in a ham and cheese sandwich. And don't get me wrong, I love a ham and cheese sandwich. But adding the bright crunch of salty steamed broccoli is one of the great things in the world. And if you've never tried it, you would be wise to do so. Chatting with Tyler, I learned that chefs aren't always as pretentious as I thought. And they tend to be very obsessive about the smallest details of the eating experience. Just like me, my no chefs rule started to soften. Later that year, Ann Sannity took over as producer. Would produce the show for five years, helping to oversee tremendous growth in the quality and listenership of our show.

• 24:51Dan Pashman?

  Ann Simon and Schuster published my book, Eat More Better: How to Make Every Bite More Delicious. A year later, in the fall of 2015, I got really into the question of whether hot dogs are sandwiches. Now, you gotta understand, back then, this was a very hot topic, not the kind of tired meme it is today. Now, I can't claim to have been the first to cover the hot dog sandwich question, but I was definitely an early adopter. We did a sold out live show at the Bell House in Brooklyn where John Hodgman and I debated the issue. I, of course, argued that hot dogs are sandwiches. He argued that they are not. On the media's Brooke Gladstone was the moderator. Most dictionaries say that for a food to be a sandwich, it must have two pieces of bread, but a hot dog bun is but a single piece.

• 25:36Dan Pashman?

  A hot dog bun counts as a sandwich bread. It is a hinged bun, like the same bread on which you would make a meatball sub. Okay? You can sever the hinge of a meatball sub or a hot dog bun, and you do not fundamentally alter the structure. At its core, a hot dog is a piece of meat between two pieces of bread. No. Yes. Yes, it is. In what way is it not? I was so with you. I didn't realize it at the time, but in retrospect, that event marked the apotheosis of the first iteration of The Sporkful, where the show was all about discussing and debating food minutia. After that, the show continued to get better, but it wasn't really evolving. A couple hundred episodes in, I was starting to think there might be more to food than debating

• 26:20Dan Pashman?

  the ideal surface area to volume ratio of french fries. As we entered 2016, I was resolved to go in new directions, to make the show more thoughtful, to do more in-depth storytelling, and to connect with listeners more deeply. That phase would include globe-spanning investigations, covering one of the biggest food media stories of the last five years, and of course, pasta. We'll get to all that when we come back. Stick around.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Time to cook up some advertisements.

• 26:57Dan Pashman?

  When you're cooking, ingredients matter, right? You use higher-quality ingredients, you usually get better results. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably the kind of person who puts some thought and effort into your ingredients. But ingredients don't just matter with food, they also matter with laundry detergent. Of course, the cleaning job needs to get done, the odors and stains have to be tackled, and I want to feel good about the detergent and the ingredients in it. Because remember, whatever's in your laundry detergent is essentially in your clothes, and then you're putting those clothes on, you want good stuff in there. And All Free Clear uses only essential ingredients. It's 100% free from dyes, perfumes, parabens, and irritating residues. Check out the label and see for yourself, it lists all the ingredients and what they do. We've been using it in my house, we're very happy with it. And let me tell you, family of four, two teenagers, we do a lot of laundry,

• 27:42Dan Pashman?

  so we have put All Free Clear to the test. It's a powerful clean that you can feel good about. All Free Clear is the number-one detergent brand recommended by dermatologists for sensitive skin. When it comes to laundry detergent, the choice is clear: All Free Clear. Pick up a bottle for your next laundry day. You put a lot of love into the things you send during the holidays. It's baked with love, carefully packed with love, or shipped with love right from home. Because what you're sending isn't just what's inside the box, it's the time, thought, and care you put into it. And this holiday season, the United States Postal Service is delivering your love to more addresses in America than anyone else. So send it with love. Send it with USPS. The United States Postal Service. Learn more at USPS.com/holiday.

• 28:26Dan Pashman?

  I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad Thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/recipes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 28:56Dan Pashman?

  For a long time, I did not understand the point of vests. Like, why not just have a jacket? That covers your arms, too. But something clicked for me. I think I got gifted a vest, and now I am obsessed with vests. And it just adds that little bit of toastiness. And I got this new Quince packable puffer vest. I love that you can just squish it up and shove it in the bottom of your bag. That way, you have it with you all day. If it gets a little chilly, break out the vest. I also got a Quince down quilted vest. It is so soft and cozy. They make them for men and women. And as with everything you get at Quince, they focus on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. These are all timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. Give the gift of quality this

• 29:41Dan Pashman?

  holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was The Sporkful. It's the best way to support the show.

• 30:03Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and I have a very big, exciting announcement. Now, if you follow me on Instagram, you know that back in November, I teamed up with my friends at Culinary Backstreets to take a group of folks to Italy, retracing the research trip I took for my cookbook. We feasted on spaghetti alla assassina in two places in Bari to compare and contrast. We saw the sun shining off the limestone buildings of Lecce, and we took a cooking class with Silvestro Silvestri and drank local wine while enjoying the fruits of our labor. It was incredible. In fact, it was such a success that we're doing it again this November. That is the big announcement. We just opened up spots. It's a small group, so space is limited. Bottom line, come eat pasta with me in Italy. For all the details, go to culinarybackstreets.com/sporkful.

• 30:53Dan Pashman?

  Okay, back to our 15th anniversary spectacular. And one quick note in honor of this occasion. For our Friday reheats, this month, we are pulling especially old episodes out of the darkest recesses of the deep freezer. This past Friday, we dropped the very first Sporkful episode ever, along with that episode on Sandwich Science with Robert Krulwich that you heard a bit earlier. There's more to come, so keep on checking out our Friday reheats. One last note, parents be warned, there's a couple F-bombs coming up. We'll pick up the story of the Sporkful in early 2016. As we said, I entered the year resolved to take the show in new directions, cover more substantive topics, get into more in-depth storytelling. Around this time, our show added a second catchphrase. We obsess about food to learn more about people.

• 31:36Dan Pashman?

  We launched Other People's Food, our first series on race and food. It included a tense conversation with chef Rick Bayless about criticisms he's faced for being a white chef who cooks Mexican food. We collaborated with NPR's Planet Money podcast on a show about a truffle dealer, and with Radiolab on a show about a woman who developed a mysterious allergy to meat. In 2017, I left WNYC, took the show to the podcast production company Stitcher, which was later acquired by Sirius XM, where we've been producing the show happily ever since. Soon after coming to Stitcher, we ran episodes called The Searching For series. These have become some of listeners' all-time favorites. There's one about the Cambodian Donut King of Los Angeles, and an epic story about a sandwich in Syria. These were the kind of long-form stories that I wanted to tell, that got to the heart of complex issues.

• 32:21Dan Pashman?

  We also started doing more thoughtful, in-depth interviews with people like Guy Fieri, Padma Lakshmi, Roy Wood Jr., Kumail Nanjiani, Jim Gaffigan, Samin Nosrat, Bill Nye, and Nigella Lawson, among many others. We won a James Beard Award and a Webby Award for our work. Of course, we continued to have a lot of fun, like when we attempted to travel through time in search of a piece of coconut cake. And bucking the most tired of food media traditions, we swore off Thanksgiving shows, releasing our last Thanksgiving special ever, featuring legendary food writer Mimi Sheridan. Rhining and all doesn't sound memory-making to me. It's so- Wet and what kind of vessel do you put a huge turkey into brine it? A five gallon bucket from Home Depot? Oh my god.

• 33:08Dan Pashman?

  In 2019, producer Gofan and Putubuele joined the team. Gofan was always creative. He had a ton of good ideas. He was especially great with music. He would place songs in places of the show that I wouldn't think to put them. He would pick songs that I wouldn't have picked that ended up sounding great. In fact, he spearheaded an entire episode on songs about jelly, which included the sportful's first ever original musical composition. One of our engineers at the time, John Delore, sang lead vocals.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Oh, jelly puts the joy in my joy fullest refrain. Fruit and pectin is like medicine. I spread it on my pain. That smooth consistency is the sweetest panacea. Can it be the jelly is the key to keeping sane?

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Why do I love it just like Romeo loves Juliet?

• 33:56Dan Pashman?

  And as fun and silly as that jelly episode was, at the same time, we were doing very serious episodes. That's the sort of things that I really love about doing the show even after all these years is that I love the idea that the show's gonna come out on Monday and you, the listeners, are not gonna have any idea of what to expect. That keeps it fun and fresh for me and the team. And case in point, around the same time of that jelly episode, our coverage of race and food hit a new high watermark with our episode, When White People Say Plantation, a collaboration with Osaii Endalyn that was nominated for a James Beard Award and won a Webby Award. In that episode, I had some difficult conversations with white people about what the word plantation conjures for them.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Plantable food, lots of food is what I envision when I hear plantation.

• 34:40Dan Pashman?

  And where do you think that image, that idea of plentiful food at a plantation comes from?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 34:48Dan Pashman?

  I don't, I think it just comes from our culture, from, you know, such a young age of, you know, pictures we see in storybooks, just media.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Over the years and reading books and imagining it in your head. The cozy scenes that you see in cookbooks. Yeah, I think of Gone with the Wind, Plantations and stuff like that. That's my impression. Scarlet and all that kind of stuff.

• 35:14Dan Pashman?

  Gofan and Anne Sannie have since moved on. And now Emma Morgenstern and Andres O'Hara are the producers who make the show. Early in their tenure amid allegations of racism at Bon Appetit, we released our episode about the reckoning there. One of the people we talked to for that one was Sola Elweli. She was working at BA at the time and shared the story of what happened on a company Zoom after a photo surfaced of the white editor in chief in brown face.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  He just kind of said, sorry. I'm sorry, this was dumb, a dumb costume. I didn't realize how this might affect people. And it was like a couple of sentences. And then he wanted, and then there was like a pause and no one spoke. And he was like, okay, so let's wrap this meeting up. And then I was like, absolutely not. You should resign. Like, I think it's crazy that you think that you can do anything now but resign. And then that got the conversation started.

• 36:04Dan Pashman?

  That editor, Adam Rappaport, did resign. That episode became the most downloaded Sporkful of all time and earned us our second James Beard Award.

• 36:21Dan Pashman?

  At the same time that we were making those episodes and so many others every week, we were working on something else behind the scenes, something top secret for three years. And I'm gonna bring Janie back to talk about it with me. Hi, Janie.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 36:34Dan Pashman?

  In March of 2021, our Mission Impossible series launched with this statement recorded live on stage. And I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. Spaghetti sucks. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:50Dan Pashman?

  I said it.

• 36:52Dan Pashman?

  It's round on the outside. That means it is a low surface area in relation to the volume. That means that sauce doesn't adhere to it well. It means less of it contacts your teeth when you first bite it. It's like, you know, there's all this romanticism around spaghetti, but spaghetti and meatballs isn't even an Italian thing. All right, like the lady and the tramp did a great disservice to American culinary history by romanticizing spaghetti. What we really should have taken from that movie is that it's a pasta shape that's only fit for dogs.

• 37:23Dan Pashman?

  Oh, it's gonna get real tonight, don't you worry.

• 37:27Dan Pashman?

  And at that same event, I made my intentions clear. And that is why I am excited to tell you here tonight, for the first time, that we are embarking on one of the most ambitious... You know, I'm gonna retract that. We are embarking on the most ambitious project in Sporkful history. We are gonna set out to invent a new pasta shape.

• 37:56Dan Pashman?

  That awkward groan that you just expressed is not an unfamiliar reaction to me, I must say.

• 38:05Dan Pashman?

  I went to my boss, Chris Bannon. I said, "Chris, we're gonna invent a new pasta shape." He said, "Dan, nobody cares about pasta shapes." Do you think that's true? No.

• 38:23Dan Pashman?

  I don't think that's true.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Was that "yes, me"?

• 38:29Dan Pashman?

  I don't think so. You know, the initial inspiration for the Cask of Telly quest was that I wanted to tell a big epic story on the podcast, a story that could unfold over multiple episodes with cliffhangers, you know, like some of the hit podcasts of that era, like Serial and Startup. And I figured trying to invent a new food would be hard, it would have lots of ups and downs, which would create drama, and even if the whole thing crashed and burned, it would make for a great story. So Janie, I'm sure you recall that you were not super enthusiastic?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 39:01Dan Pashman?

  All right, let's listen to a clip.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  I can't even think of a shape that doesn't already exist.

• 39:08Dan Pashman?

  So what are your thoughts on my idea of trying to create a new one?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I think you're like a really smart person and maybe utilize that energy to think of something else other than a pasta shape.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  A new flavor? Ice cream?

• 39:29Dan Pashman?

  Now, despite your skepticism, I really believed that the world needed a new pasta shape. That said, I sort of, I will admit now that I underestimated how hard it would be, you know? Remember Pasta Industry Insider, Chris Maldari? He didn't think I was on the right track.

• 39:48Dan Pashman?

  And as the project wore on, Janie, you'll listen to this clip, you remember, you know, your patience started to wear thin.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  This is like, this is like the eighth time that the Pasta Project has been a huge disaster.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So I'm kind of over it.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And the amount of effort and work you put into it, like, could have, like, I don't know, created three new podcasts or something.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  So it's not just the amount of work that it is, that it's like, you know, there's like no days off, you know, there's a pandemic, the kids are home half the time, and the emotional roller coaster of like, you know, you being like, okay, I think this is gonna be good. And then, you know, 24 hours later, like, this is a disaster, everything sucks. Like, I just, I don't know, I don't really have any more emotional, I don't have excess emotions to console you over the Pasta Project right now. Sorry, not sorry.

• 40:53Dan Pashman?

  What are your thoughts listening back to that clip?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I remember exactly, I remember pouring cereal in the bowl, I remember like that exact moment, and we were all like stressed.

• 41:03Dan Pashman?

  And as people can hear from this next clip, I was pushed to the brink too. Ah, I'm not sleeping enough.

• 41:12Dan Pashman?

  I think I'm gonna cry. I am so, I'm literally going out of my mind.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Well, I think like now looking back on it, you know, obviously, we now know that it was a big success, but I really do appreciate that you have all these clips. And like, I think it showed people how hard it is and how much you have to struggle to like, create something new. And, you know, you heard some feedback, like, we heard people say that listening to Mission Impossible helped them feel like, I want to invent something, you know, like, it's hard and you have to really keep at it and be persistent. And so I think you showed people that part too.

• 41:54Dan Pashman?

  As you know, Janie, and as folks listening probably know, in the end, the new pasta-shaped cascatelli was born. I especially designed it to maximize forkability, sauceability, and tooth sinkability like no pasta shape before it. I teamed up with the pasta company's Folini in upstate New York to produce the original version, and then I went to their factory to watch the first batch roll off the presses. This is it.

• 42:17Dan Pashman?

  This is it. It's coming off the conveyor belt. This is the moment.

• 42:23Dan Pashman?

  I think I want to FaceTime with my family.

• 42:26Dan Pashman?

  I need Janie and the kids to see this. So the flower goes up to here. And then, and then the pasta comes out here. And here's the pasta shape.

• 42:45Dan Pashman?

  You're cheering up a little?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  It, it does make me a little, you know, make me emotional now. You know, thinking back on,

• 42:54Speaker 01

  you know, like that moment that was like so exciting that like, you know? And I think like for the kids and like for all of us that like it actually happened.

• 43:03Dan Pashman?

  I remember loading a bunch of boxes into the trunk of my car and it drive, it was like three hours to drive home. When I came home with all the boxes of pasta, I was so excited.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:12Dan Pashman?

  But it's still crazy, even in that moment, like as excited as I was that it existed. It hadn't launched. I still had no idea what was gonna happen.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Right. We still didn't know anyone would buy it, but we knew that it existed.

• 43:23Dan Pashman?

  Right, right. Exactly. As we know now, Cascotelli went viral, ending up as one of Time Magazine's best inventions of the year. And our podcast series, Mission Impossible, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Podcasts of 2021. I mean, it's still crazy to me to walk into a supermarket and see it on the shelves, bearing the sporkful name, the name of this podcast that I launched in my living room all those years ago.

• 43:47Dan Pashman?

  In recent years, we've continued to use food to get into a wide range of topics, from Barbie's evolving relationship to cooking and eating, to the science of lab-grown meat. And we won our third James Beard Award for our episode about couscous in France, a collaboration with the freelance reporter Samia Bazil. We also went on a year-long quest to uncover the story behind a bottle of whiskey that was found in a dead man's house in New Jersey. I wrote the lyrics for a song for that episode that would be the second original musical composition in sporkful history. Producer Emma's dad wrote the music and recorded the song, which, because the whole story took place in New Jersey, was intended to be in the style of Bruce Springsteen.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Well, you know, back in high school, Bobby was the star of the team.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Now he's ten drinks in, trying to figure out what it all means.

• 44:39Dan Pashman?

  I gotta say that song was a big improvement from the GarageBand theme song that I composed 15-plus years ago. All along, we've continued to take your calls and recently introduced our regular salad spinner episodes, rapid-fire roundtable discussions of the biggest and strangest food news of the day. We also launched Deep Dish, a special limited-run podcast hosted by our friends Sola and Ham Alweli. And then, last March, I released my first cookbook, Anything's Pasta-able: 81 inventive pasta recipes for saucy people. We shared the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the book in a special series

• 45:24Dan Pashman?

  here on the podcast, which I hope changed the way you think about cookbooks, right down to the agonizing decision about what kind of salt my recipes should use. I use diamond crystal salt at home, between those two. And I use Morton's salt at home. Oh. I just feel like diamond crystal, I don't get as even of a sprinkle when I use it. Morton feels right to me when I pick up a pinch of salt. I don't have any sprinkling issues. Like, you may just be sprinkling wrong, Rebecca. That's true. I don't know, maybe you can send a video of you sprinkling it out. As part of the book launch, I took the sporkful on the road for the biggest tour in the show's history, doing 16 live shows across America and in Canada and the UK. We've gone international.

• 46:07Dan Pashman?

  We released two podcast episodes with the highlights from these shows, including this exchange with writer Lindy West, who engaged me in a game of fuck, marry, kill.

• 46:15Speaker 07

  Pasta rice bread.

• 46:16Dan Pashman?

  Ooh. I mean, those are all really good. Are we assuming like a high-quality bread?

• 46:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, the best version of each.

• 46:28Dan Pashman?

  Oh.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  I was doing some soul-searching, and I actually-

• 46:35Dan Pashman?

  I think I would kill pasta. And then I was like, I shouldn't say it because I shouldn't. I'll get fired from this show. Cut her mic, that's it.

• 46:49Dan Pashman?

  I mean, I would kill rice.

• 46:54Dan Pashman?

  Well, I love, I love all three of these things. That's the point of this game is you're forced to make hard choices. 1-800-DAILY-MALE. I'm not disparaging, I'm not disparaging any of these. But like for me, I love rice, but I didn't grow up with it at every meal. And so, and then like as between pasta and bread, I guess I would marry bread because I think there's more variety to it. So like over the long haul, I'd be less likely to get tired of it.

• 47:26Dan Pashman?

  And I'd fuck the pasta.

• 47:32Dan Pashman?

  That's good.

• 47:37Dan Pashman?

  Well, Janie, here we are on the couch, sitting on a couch chatting just as we did 15 plus years ago when I hatched this idea for a podcast.

• 47:50Dan Pashman?

  I think it worked out okay.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bunch more wrinkles.

• 47:55Dan Pashman?

  Few more gray hairs, two more kids.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  It's like the alternate universe of you being a lawyer didn't happen. And I live out in the suburbs with a garage full of pasta.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  But you're still recording in the basement.

• 48:11Dan Pashman?

  And yeah, it's exciting to think that it actually worked, that my goal of this being a job worked out to the point that it can support our family. But then also just like, you know, as the years go on, especially when I was on book tour, you know, like I talked to one guy who was like, my daughter's 16, she grew up listening to the Sporkful in the backseat of the car. Or I had like a family come to a live show and they're like, they have these teenage kids and they're like, this book was the only thing that our whole family can agree to listen to in the car. Or a woman in Toronto came up to me and said that like, this book was the thing she listened to when she had cancer and she was going to chemo and she just wanted something that would cheer her up and put her in a good mood. That's pretty incredible to me.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I think it's amazing. You know, I think people still really find so much connection in the podcast and in you. And, you know, so much has changed in the world and, you know, having this little bit of an escape every week to just talk about food and to laugh a little bit. I think it's really impressive and great that you've created that outlet for people.

• 49:17Dan Pashman?

  You get a lot of the credit too. You are the all time favorite Sporful guest.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Can you make a poll about that?

• 49:24Dan Pashman?

  I don't think I need to.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Let's see if it's true.

• 49:25Dan Pashman?

  All right. I'll make an Instagram poll, but I have confidence. I think you're gonna win in a landslide.

• 49:37Dan Pashman?

  When I was on book tour last year, people kept asking me what my next big project would be. Truth is, I'm not sure. I do have some ideas, but nothing I'm ready to announce. The good news is that Emma, Andres and I have plenty of ideas for podcast episodes, so I'm sure we'll be busy. In just the next couple of months, we'll tell you why your recipe may be lying to you. I'll take a road trip across Mississippi to visit some of the state's famed roadside eateries. And we'll take a call from a married couple that can't agree on how to cook broccoli. Of course, this 15 year run wouldn't have been possible without all the incredibly talented folks who contributed to the success of the show. Our editors, engineers, including longtime engineer Jared O'Connell, freelance producers and reporters, execs, marketing and ad salespeople, and so many more, especially

• 50:20Dan Pashman?

  everyone at Stitcher and Sirius XM, where the show's been produced for the past eight years. It also wouldn't be possible without you. Thank you so much for listening, engaging, coming out to our shows, telling your friends about us. It really, really means a lot. Finally, special thanks to Janie, my daughters Becky and Emily, and all of my family for your support.

• 50:44Dan Pashman?

  Next week on The Sporkful, is your recipe lying to you? We talked to several people who say yes, including an industry insider and the person who wrote an expose on the true amount of time it takes to caramelize onions. But the question remains, why all the deception? We'll discuss. While you wait for that one, check out our Friday reheats. Last week, we pulled the very first episode of The Sporkful out of the deep freezer along with the sandwich episode with Robert Kralwich. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.

• 51:29Dan Pashman?

  And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer-

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 51:40Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer- Andres O'Hara. It was edited by-

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Nora Ritchie.

• 51:44Dan Pashman?

  Our engineer is- Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producers are Nora Ritchie and Colin Anderson. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  And I'm Karen on Long Island, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  We know life is busy. That's why saving money should be effortless. With Atlantic Union Bank's Roundup Savings, every time you use your debit card, your purchase rounds up to the nearest dollar and automatically goes into savings. So whether you're grabbing coffee, filling the tank, or picking up groceries, you're saving without even thinking about it. It's just one of the ways Atlantic Union Bank makes managing your money easy. Learn more at atlanticunionbank.com or stop by a branch today. Atlantic Union Bank, any way you bank.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. Start your morning with the $6 McRiddles Extra Value Meal, featuring your choice of a sausage, egg, and cheese McRiddles or bacon, egg, and cheese McRiddles, plus crispy hash browns and a small premium roast coffee. Sweet, savory, crispy, and caffeinated, it's everything your morning ordered, all for just $6. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing at participating McDonald's.