Pod Insights The Sporkful Is Your Recipe Lying To You? About this episode If you look at any list of best-selling cookbooks, certain words come up over and over again: quick, easy, fast, effortless. But is it actually possible to deliver deliciousness in no time? Or are these recipes too good to be true?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:34 Dan Pashman? Over the course of your career, you've written about a wide range of topics.
1:38 Speaker 01 I have. I've written about weather modification in China, I've written about sports, I've written about politics, media, and also food.
1:47 Dan Pashman? And yet, after all your years and years of a distinguished writing career of covering such a wide range of topics and a wide range of impressive publications, there seems to be one piece that stands out above all the rest, at least in terms of capturing the most public interest.
2:03 Speaker 01 Nothing I've written has had as sort of a long-lasting effect as the piece I wrote for Slate about how long it takes to caramelize onions.
2:16 Dan 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. To get things rolling this week, we're gonna jump right into a story from Tom Skoka, you just heard at the top. Tom's been a journalist for decades. He got his start at Alt Weekly's in Baltimore and DC, then moved to New York, where he worked at scrappy, edgy websites like Gawker and The All. He's always been a bit of a rabble-rouser. He loves writing stories that call out big media when they get things wrong, usually in their coverage of politics or current events. But in the spring of 2012, a different kind of story caught his eye.
2:50 Speaker 01 I can remember it pretty clearly. I was in my living room, reading The New York Times, and there was a recipe for scones with caramelized onions.
3:00 Dan Pashman? It was like savory scones.
3:01 Speaker 01 Savory scones. Savory scones. And it said, "Put the onions in a pan and cook them for 10 or 15 minutes until they were golden brown and caramelized."
3:10 Dan Pashman? Now, I should mention, Tom's not just an accomplished journalist. He's also an experienced home cook. He has a wife and two kids, and at the time, his kids were little, and he made dinner for the family every night. So Tom sees this instruction to cook onions for 10 or 15 minutes until caramelized. And you feel that that is not how long it takes to caramelize onions?
3:29 Speaker 01 I know that is not how long it takes to caramelize onions.
3:34 Dan Pashman? Now, I should add, this wasn't the first time Tom had seen this. He'd come across recipes in cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines again and again, saying, "Cook an onion for 10 or 15 minutes, at which point it will be golden brown and caramelized." This one, in The New York Times, it was the last straw.
3:50 Speaker 01 I snapped. I went on Twitter, I was like, "Stop lying." Why do recipe writers lie? I think I was using all caps. I reserved all caps for when I was heated.
3:59 Dan Pashman? It felt good to get it off his chest, but Tom wasn't satisfied.
4:02 Speaker 01 I was like, "I'm still mad. I haven't discharged my frustration and anger yet." And, at the time, I had a blog on Slate, and so I just decided I gotta blog this.
4:14 Dan Pashman? Tom didn't know it at the time, but he was about to hit a nerve in the world of recipe writing and create a space for home cooks to vent about something that had been building up for a long time: that recipes might be deceiving us.
4:28 Dan Pashman? If you look at any list of bestselling cookbooks, there are certain words you see over and over again in the titles. Quick, easy, fast, effortless. These books are essentially promising the same thing as that savory scone recipe. Deliciousness in no time. But is it too good to be true? Today on the show, we ask, is your recipe lying to you?
4:52 Dan Pashman? After firing off an all caps tweet, Tom set out to write a more in-depth story. And like the consummate journalist he is, he approached the question objectively.
5:01 Speaker 01 I'm gonna wipe my mind clear of my previous assumptions and experience that tells me how long it takes to caramelize onions. And ask myself, okay, if I'm in a huge hurry and I really want to make these scones and I want to believe that they're telling me the truth, how fast can I do it?
5:15 Dan Pashman? Tom had seen online that sweet onions would caramelize faster. So he bought one of those, added half to a pan, and cranked up the heat to high.
5:22 Speaker 01 I'll just stand over here stirring it like crazy.
5:25 Dan Pashman? 10 minutes later, the onions were burnt. So he tried another method. This one was a tip from the recipe in the New York Times. Start the onions in a dry pan, stir until they darken, then add oil and salt, and saute until they caramelize.
5:38 Speaker 01 You gotta be on top of the stove and the stove has to be roaring. And it's, you know, a huge amount of effort.
5:43 Dan Pashman? After 10 minutes, the onions were still pale. At 15 minutes, they had darkened a little. 20 minutes, they were getting dark, but not caramelized.
5:51 Speaker 01 With all that effort, I think I got it down to like just under half an hour.
5:56 Dan Pashman? Now, the way I know to caramelize onions is you cook them at a low or medium-low heat for at least like 40 minutes. It's a slow process. But you can also leave them alone and go prep other ingredients. If you're cranking up the heat to get them done faster, then you're gonna be constantly washing the stove so the onions don't burn. So maybe it'll be done a little faster, but it would be a lot more stressful and you couldn't do anything else during that time except stir the onions.
6:21 Speaker 01 You're certainly not rolling out and measuring any like scone ingredients on the side while you're doing this.
6:27 Dan Pashman? And even then, it still took you 28 minutes, which was a lot longer than what the recipe said it would take.
6:31 Speaker 01 Right.
6:32 Dan Pashman? So Tom writes up his story. And in May 2012, it goes live on Slate with the headline, "Layers of Deceit: Why Do Recipe Writers Lie and Lie and Lie About How Long It Takes to Caramelize Onions?" Tom figured he'd get some emails and some tweets in response, and he'd move on to the next story. But that's not what happened.
6:51 Speaker 01 The reaction to the piece was a little overwhelming.
6:58 Speaker 01 People really, really had been looking for someone to either tell them or confirm to them that what recipes were saying to them about caramelizing onions was not true.
7:11 Dan Pashman? Tom's story had a remarkably long life. People would post it or tweet about it years after it was published. Then, in 2016, four years after it first went live online, Tom got a bit of justice. Sam Sifton, the founding editor of New York Times Cooking, had a weekly newsletter at the time with recipe recommendations. Sam included an improvised dish of pasta and shrimp with caramelized onions, then wrote, quote, "Try it, but note well the teachings of Tom Skoka. Caramelizing onions takes a lot of time." Victory, right? Somewhat, but attention on the internet can lead to unexpected consequences. A year after that, in 2017, Google was using snippets, a pre-AI version of that thing where, at the top of the search results, Google summarizes the info it finds on the
7:54 Dan Pashman? web, so you don't have to click through various links. And there was an issue.
7:58 Speaker 01 There was suddenly this discussion of how Google was pulling bad information into its snippets. And I was like, well, one piece of bad information that I know a lot about now is people saying that you can cook caramelized onions in a really short time. So I was like, okay, so if I Google, like, how long it takes to cook caramelized onions, is Google gonna find one of these articles out there where somebody is saying, oh, you can do this in 10 minutes? And so, you know, I typed it in, and what I got from Google was not somebody else's article, it was mine. And Google was telling everybody that my article said that you could caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes.
8:36 Dan Pashman? So it was like, it was sort of misinterpreting what you had written?
8:40 Speaker 01 Right. The Google bot was searching the text, finding the part where I was describing the false claim that it could be done in 10 or 15 minutes, and hooking that out and presenting it to the web searcher as the news that you could caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes.
8:57 Dan Pashman? So unwittingly, you were part of, of spreading the misinformation you were seeking to debunk?
9:02 Speaker 01 Exactly. I was pulled into the misinformation machinery. Without my knowledge, against my will. I mean, this is, this is the thing they always talk about in like fighting misinformation. Usually it's people in politics who are saying it, you know, warning you, don't repeat the false claim.
9:16 Dan Pashman? All right, I'm gonna run a test right now, Tom. I'm typing it into Google. How long does it take to caramelize onions? Oh, all right, progress. Caramelizing onions can take at least 45 minutes and often over an hour, depending on the stove and the quantity of onions. The natural sugars in the onions need time to caramelize over low heat. Who are they linking to for that first bit of information? A caramelized onions recipe from Love and Lemons. So they're not, they're not gonna give you that, Tom.
9:44 Speaker 01 There was a time, there was a time when I was cited in Wikipedia in the caramelizing onions article, but I think someone objected to my lack of credentials and that got pulled.
9:54 Dan Pashman? All right, I'm looking up caramelizing onions Wikipedia. Onions require 30 to 45 minutes of cooking to caramelize. That's citing footnote number six and seven. Footnote number six, Tom Skoka.
10:08 Speaker 01 I'm back. Amazing.
10:10 Dan Pashman? There you go. That's a little internet justice for you, Tom.
10:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, someone will probably hear this and take me off again.
10:17 Dan Pashman? Today, more than a decade after Tom's original piece was published, he thinks there's an important lesson in all this.
10:22 Speaker 01 I had caramelized so many onions that I knew how long it took to caramelize onions. And so when I read a recipe that said it took 10 minutes, I said, this recipe's lying to me. I will adjust accordingly. But lots and lots of people would end up with a pan of slightly softened white onions and think they had done it wrong. You know, what I heard from people was that they just thought they were bad cooks, that there was some quality of being a cook that would make your onions turn brown in 10 minutes, and they just didn't have it. They believed the recipe. That was what really sort of shook me when I started hearing from people telling me that, that somebody is gonna look at a pan of lightly
11:05 Speaker 01 cooked onions and think it's their fault.
11:08 Dan Pashman? But do you think that people who are underestimating how long it takes to caramelize onions and the recipes that they write, are they doing it on purpose? Like, are they, are they writing it knowing that it's not true?
11:19 Speaker 01 I do not know how you can write a recipe telling somebody to spend 10 minutes caramelizing onions if you are someone who cooks and writes recipes and not know that you're, that you're lying.
11:31 Speaker 01 I think that it was somehow, you know, an acceptable fib, that it was just sort of like, if everybody's saying it takes 10 minutes, then everybody's cook times are gonna sort of reflect everyone else's cook times. There's like an industry standard. It just happens that the industry standard is false.
11:50 Dan Pashman? Nowadays, when you look for recipes for caramelized onions in The Times, you'll get ones with 40-minute cook times, not 10 or 15. We asked Sam Sifton if this story affected the way they write recipes in The Times, and he said that, no, they didn't make any changes because of the story. But nevertheless, he loved Tom's piece when it came out, and he references it as often as he can. I believe him, because a few weeks ago in his newsletter, Sam wrote, quote, "Yes, it takes a long time to caramelize the onions, longer than most folks care to admit." And despite this progress at The Times, you can still find recipes on many top websites for 15-minute caramelized onions. The myth does persist. And Tom thinks this myth is just the tip of the iceberg, that there are plenty of other acceptable fibs in recipes.
12:32 Dan Pashman? I decided I wanted to try to find out if he's right. If I'm gonna go forth from here, Tom, and talk to some recipe writers and recipe developers, should I like shine a spotlight in their face and say, "Tom Skokas says you're a liar"?
12:47 Speaker 01 That might be a little bit too confrontational.
12:52 Speaker 01 I hope you wanna like patch me in and have me call him a liar, you know?
12:59 Dan Pashman? I have one particular person in mind to talk to, a recipe developer who's been in the business for decades. But will he open up and give me some real answers? We'll find out after the break. Stick around.
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16:21 Dan Pashman? It's the best way to support the show. Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. This week, we're focusing on recipe writing gone wrong. But if you want to hear more about the stories behind great recipe writing, tune in next week, where we talk about one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, which uses a totally different recipe style from just about everyone else. I'm talking about the joy of cooking. Megan Scott and John Becker updated and published the ninth edition of the book. John's great-grandmother, Irma Rombaugh, wrote the original joy of cooking in 1931. And as Megan and John were revising the recipes, they saw just how much food had changed, like in the recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
17:00 Speaker 04 In 1943, Irma wrote something like, oh, a special type of chocolate has been invented that makes, you know, making these cookies so much easier. And she was talking about chocolate chips because before that time, chocolate chips were not a thing. So you would take chocolate and chop it up and add it to your batter. And then they, you know, chocolate chips were invented, making it much easier to make chocolate chip cookies.
17:24 Dan Pashman? Right. She's like, extra, extra.
17:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:27 Dan Pashman? Check out the latest in kitchen technology. That episode comes out next week. Of course, if you want to make sure you don't miss that one or any of our episodes, open up your podcasting app, whatever app you're using to listen right now, go to The Sporkful Show page and click Follow or Subscribe or Plus or Heart or Like or whatever the button is in your app. Then we can hang out all the time. You can do it right now while you're listening. Thanks. Okay, let's get back to the show.
17:51 Dan Pashman? I wanted to find out, are recipe writers intentionally deceiving us with instructions that make recipes seem like they'll be quicker and easier than they are? And if so, why? I should say, last year, I published my own cookbook, but I worked with a team of pro recipe writers for the book. I'm not a trained chef. I was more the stand-in for the home cook. I wanted to talk to someone who's a real expert, who's read and written a lot of recipes. Christopher Kimball. He created America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country Magazine, and since 2016, he's been running his new company, Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. Chris has a well-earned reputation for his painstaking approach to testing recipes. This is not a guy who cuts corners. But as he looks out at the ever-growing world of cookbooks and online recipes, does he see
18:34 Dan Pashman? the same deceptions that Tom Skokas sees? Is there an open secret in the recipe world that's being kept from the rest of us?
18:40 Speaker 05 Dan, you are a conspiracy theorist. You're a culinary conspiracy theorist.
18:46 Dan Pashman? Were you in that smoke-filled room, Chris?
18:47 Speaker 05 I know. We had this meeting back in 1973, and you weren't there. You missed that one.
18:53 Dan Pashman? I pressed my case to Chris. We know people love quick and easy. Doesn't that put pressure on recipe writers to make their recipes seem quicker and easier than they are?
19:02 Speaker 05 Did you have a really bad experience early in your career with a recipe that really pissed you off? You've really got it out for recipe writers. I can tell you. I mean, you're now letting go. You got your teeth deeply into this one.
19:15 Dan Pashman? I was getting nowhere. I decided to try a different approach. What is your take on cooking times in recipes?
19:22 Speaker 05 Where do I begin? Cooking times in recipes are utterly, totally worthless.
19:30 Dan Pashman? Aha! Is this a crack in the wall of silence? Not really. Chris insists there's no conspiracy, but he does have a theory on why cook times aren't always accurate.
19:41 Speaker 05 I think people have an idea in their head from prior work, how long it takes to do standard tasks, right?
19:48 Dan Pashman? By people, Chris means recipe developers.
19:51 Speaker 05 They're just like putting these numbers down. And I cook a recipe, even from our own cook sometimes, and I'm going like, these times make no sense to me. And the reason is, on the stove top, it depends on the type of pot you're using. It depends what kind of heat you're using. And in the oven itself, every oven heats differently because most ovens are not accurately calibrated.
20:16 Dan Pashman? So there are too many variables in a home kitchen for a recipe writer to figure out a precise cooking time for everyone. Also, some issues can be a result of a poor choice of words. Chris agrees you can't truly caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes. The sugars just don't break down that fast. But in that time, you can soften them, and they can be very delicious. And for some recipes, that works. Just don't call it caramelization. The more I talked to Chris, the more I saw evidence of this gap between recipe developers and home cooks. A home cook, especially a less experienced one, sees a recipe as a precise set of instructions they have to follow to a T. But Chris has a different view.
20:54 Speaker 05 A recipe is sort of a vague suggestion about how to do something if you had the proper ingredients, at the proper temperature, the proper cookware. You've read the recipe and you have enough time.
21:08 Dan Pashman? All right, so maybe it's not a conspiracy as much as it is an issue that arises when experienced recipe developers in professional-grade kitchens write recipes for home cooks with all kinds of setups and all levels of experience. But still, there are some open secrets in the recipe-writing world. When I started working on my cookbook, I was shocked to learn that in recipe writing, it's standard not to include prep time in the total cook time. So when a recipe says that it'll take 35 minutes, that usually doesn't include peeling and chopping.
21:35 Speaker 05 The ingredient list is post-prep. You've done all your prep, and then you go to step one. So I don't think you should include prep time.
21:43 Dan Pashman? Really? I just feel like the average home cook opens a recipe. They see an amount of time, and in their head, they think, this is the amount of time that I have to cook dinner from start to finish. From the moment I'm looking at this piece of paper to the time the food's on the table, I have one hour. And if the recipe says 45 minutes, they say, OK, great, I have time for this. And then they don't realize that there's actually a half an hour of additional work that isn't factored into that 45.
22:06 Speaker 05 Everybody who knows how to cook knows that it takes people who have less experience forever. To do the prep. So I don't think you can actually include prep time because that's so all over the place. It might take somebody 45 minutes to prep, other priests in four minutes.
22:23 Dan Pashman? On this issue, Chris and I will have to agree to disagree. I do get what he's saying, but I think that recipe writers should do their best to estimate how long it'll take the average home cook to make a recipe from start to finish, including prep. To consciously choose to leave out a big part of the process makes recipes seem a lot faster and easier than they actually are. In my cookbook, I decided to include prep time in my recipes. And I'm not alone. Now the New York Times includes prep time in its recipes. But there's still many cookbooks that don't. And many of them are these bestselling cookbooks that promise faster, easier recipes. Forget 30-minute meals. Now it's 15-minute meals. How many home-cooked meals can you realistically make in 15 minutes?
23:02 Speaker 05 Look, I think people who buy those books know it's ridiculous. I mean, it's sort of like, it's an inside joke on both the author and the buyer of the book. Like, both know it's kind of not really gonna happen, but...
23:15 Dan Pashman? Well, I'm not sure. I think less experienced home cooks really do rely on that time estimate. And it's Tuesday night, they gotta get dinner on the table, and the recipe says 45 minutes, and they have 46 minutes till dinner needs to be ready. And then the recipe ends up taking them an hour and 15 minutes, and they get super stressed.
23:32 Speaker 05 You know, caveat emptor, buyer beware. Look, if you buy a book that promises fabulous recipes in 15 minutes, and most of the recipes aren't very good, okay, well, now buyer, you know, beware. You've been, you've learned your lesson. Look, this is really weird. I'm coming across as being, like, defending the right of people to produce crappy recipes for the market. And you're the guy going, there's a smoke-filled room, and these people, they didn't actually get together, but they all are on the same page. And when they go to these food conferences, they silently nod to each other with a knowing smile.
24:10 Dan Pashman? It's just a wink and a nod.
24:11 Speaker 05 It's a wink and a nod, and it's like, we're not fixing oil prices, but yes, we are.
24:16 Dan Pashman? We're gonna caramelize those onions in eight minutes, aren't we? Yeah, that's right.
24:27 Speaker 06 As any individual, recipe developer, chef, you don't want your time estimates to sit as outliers with the whole group.
24:35 Dan Pashman? This is Liz Dunn, a journalist who writes about food, business, and culture. Before that, she co-wrote cookbooks with chefs and adapted recipes for The Wall Street Journal. And she has her own theory on why writers feel pressure to make recipes look easier than they are. Because as a writer, your recipe is essentially in competition with other recipes for similar dishes. A competition to get cooked.
24:56 Speaker 06 You're putting together a lasagna recipe. And everybody else's lasagna recipe says it's like an hour start to finish. You're not going to be the guy who's like, this is a two and a half hour lasagna. Because, you know, it just, it makes you look undesirable. So I think everybody is sort of going along with this sort of like group delusion. But nobody is doing anything intentionally harmful.
25:18 Dan Pashman? It may not be intentionally harmful, but Liz says it can be harmful nonetheless. To understand how, you first have to know a bit more about Liz's relationship to cooking.
25:27 Speaker 06 You know, I had been a home cook who, in my teens and twenties, who just loved to dive into complex, meaty recipes.
25:36 Dan Pashman? But in 2015, Liz's first child was born, and life suddenly got a lot busier.
25:41 Speaker 06 I have now his nap time as my only time to do the entire contents of my life. And so I thought, you know, okay, no problem, because there's such, there's an entire universe of quick and easy recipes, right? So I'm just going to sort of, I'm going to pivot to those and it'll be great. And I quickly realized that those recipes were neither quick or easy by the standards of a person who had, you know, a newborn and then a toddler.
26:09 Dan Pashman? Fast forward to today.
26:10 Speaker 06 I have a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a four-year-old. And I still find the recipes that I come across profoundly not quick or easy.
26:20 Dan Pashman? There's the inaccurate cook times, the omission of prep times, all the stuff we've talked about already. But there are other ways that recipes look easier than they are. Some recipes have hidden recipes inside of them, meaning that one of the ingredients is a separate recipe, found on a different page. Like a taco recipe, where one of the ingredients is pickled onions, recipe on page 60.
26:38 Speaker 06 There is no such thing as a 15-minute recipe. If you're really, if you are really taking into account all of the time that goes into executing a recipe, like from the moment I step into my kitchen and I read that recipe to the moment I've washed the last pan, I'm going to say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a 15-minute recipe, maybe ramen. Not something that has 14 ingredients and involves getting three different pans out. Like, that is, that is not a 15-minute recipe.
27:09 Dan Pashman? On top of all that, there's the basic reality that making meals on a regular basis is a lot of work. You need to plan the meal, buy the ingredients, wash the veggies, and make sure your kitchen is actually clean enough to cook in before you can even get to step one of the recipe. For the majority of US households, that work falls on women. A Pew study from 2019 found that 71% of mothers handle both the grocery shopping and the cooking for the family. Liz can see all these structural problems now, but in her early years of parenting, trying to cook dinner while doing a million other things, she blamed herself.
27:41 Speaker 06 There is nothing more discouraging that when you're ending your workday, you're at the end of a long workday, you come home, and when you cannot execute a recipe that has been billed to you as simple or easy because, either because you don't have enough time or because it's actually more complicated than it looks. I mean, that, that really is a major downer. That's a terrible, terrible way to end your day, is to fail at this thing that you're being told is so simple.
28:10 Speaker 06 I am a person, I should probably go to therapy about this instead of talking to you on this forkful. But, um, so I am a person who, because I, a lot of my identity in my teens and twenties was wrapped up in being like the food friend. You know, the one who had every cookbook, was a really competent cook, would invite people over for dinner. That was, that was really a big part of my identity in my friend group and in my family. And when I had kids, and not only had much less time, but also felt much more, um, sort of...
28:46 Speaker 06 Physically overstimulated. When you have little kids, you're touched all the time. You're just, it's a very tactile, physical experience, as is cooking. Cooking is all about a physicality, and it's about the smells, and it's about the using your hands and all of that. And that's something that I loved when I was working, when I was writing during the day. But when I had these little kids, it was just something I didn't need anymore. And so I became really resentful of needing to cook, but really conflicted because I felt like being a mother who didn't cook from scratch for her kids was a really jarring idea. I'd always assumed I'd be that mother who was making all the baby food from scratch
29:31 Speaker 06 and just doing, feeding my kids 100 foods before they were one. And I just couldn't pull it off. And that was really difficult for me.
29:45 Dan Pashman? Over the years, Liz has gotten better at balancing cooking with the rest of her life. She says one breakthrough has been to see past another lie, one that's taken hold with the rise of foodie culture, that to be a great home cook, you have to always be trying something new. You have to be able to cook 100 dishes from a dozen different cuisines. Instead, Liz has done what her parents and grandparents did, cook a handful of recipes over and over again, so they become fast and easy for her.
30:10 Speaker 06 It's actually an incredibly pleasing and gratifying feeling, cooking things repeatedly and honing them. I don't know, there's something very comforting to me about cooking and re-cooking a dish over and over again and having it be part of my repertoire. And I think that we're actively discouraged from cooking that way now because of the focus on novelty. Again, I think very much driven by the, I've called it the recipe industrial complex, which is very dramatic, that's trying to encourage us to get interested in new recipes, which have their time and place. I just don't think their time and place is 5:30 on a Tuesday night when, in my case,
30:51 Speaker 06 you've got like three kids who just ran through the door and they're hungry, and you realize that you should have actually started this project at 4 o'clock. And occasionally on a weekend, I will do something that's a little bit more complicated. But I really have given that up for weeknights. I've just decided it's like, not today, Satan.
31:16 Dan Pashman? That's Liz Dunn. You can check out the newsletter she writes with Jane Black. It's called Consumed. Find it at consumed.substack.com. You can also find all of my friend Chris Kimball's work at 177milkstreet.com and check out his podcast, Milk Street Radio. And if you want to read more of Tom Skokka's work, he runs the publication Indignity. Find it at indignity.net. Finally, we want to hear from you. Have you ever felt deceived by a recipe? Or are you a beginner home cook who just feels like recipes don't work for you? I want to hear about it. Send me an email or voice memo to [email protected] . Be sure to include your first name and location. Next week on the show, we look at recipe writing from a different perspective, and we explore the legacy of one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time,
31:59 Dan Pashman? The Joy of Cooking. We'll talk to the people who are revising the cookbook for the modern age. And if you're looking for more Sporkfuls to listen to, last week's show was our 15th anniversary, Sporktacular. I sit down with Sporkful's all-time favorite guest, my wife, Janie, and we reminisce about the early days of the show and how it's grown and changed. I also play some of my favorite moments from the show over the years, including conversations with Marc Maron and Rachel Maddow from the early days, and a lot more. One more quick note, if you haven't checked out our reheat episodes, now is a great time to dive in, because this month I am reheating some of our favorite early episodes, including episode number one, the first episode in our show's history from 15 years ago. Last week was our epic episode with Weird Al. It has been so fun to revisit these episodes. I hope you enjoy. Reheats go up every Friday.
32:42 Dan Pashman? 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. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful.
33:11 Dan Pashman? This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer
33:13 Speaker 02 Emma Morgenstern.
33:14 Dan Pashman? and senior producer Andres O'Hara. It was edited by
33:17 Speaker 02 Nora Ritchie.
33:18 Dan Pashman? Our engineer is
33:19 Speaker 01 Jared O'Connell.
33:20 Dan Pashman? 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.
33:28 Speaker 07 And this is Larkin from Ithaca, New York, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
33:45 Speaker 03 Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. Start your morning with the $6 Mcgriddle's Extra Value Meal, featuring your choice of a sausage, egg, and cheese Mcgriddles, or bacon, egg, and cheese Mcgriddles, 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. What do I gift my mom and nieces? Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Lico. Oh, Dad loves music. Sonos can bring his songs to life. What sound that hits just right. And my coffee-obsessed bestie? They love me brews coffee right for mornings extra bright.
34:30 Speaker 03 All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew? We knew, now you do too. Shop gifts no love at Walmart.
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