Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Serious Eats' podcast Special Sauce enables food lovers everywhere to eavesdrop on an intimate conversation about food and life between host and Serious Eats founder Ed Levine and his well-known/famous friends and acquaintances both in and out of the food culture.

Food Arts

Update frequency: every 7 days
Average duration: 35 minutes
Episodes: 420
Years Active: 2015 - 2025

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Special Sauce: Kenji on Smashed Burgers; Susan Spungen on Sprezzatura [2/2]

On this week's Special Sauce, Susan Spungen, author of Open Kitchen: Inspired Food for Casual Gathering and other books, regales us with her experiences in Hollywood as a food stylist and culinary co…

00:39:24 | Thu 16 Jul 2020

Special Sauce: Kenji on Dried Herbs; Dan Barber on the Outlook for Small Farmers

On this week's Special Sauce we talk to Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill, about the huge changes being brought about in the food culture by the Covid-19 pandemic. The startling co…

00:34:09 | Thu 09 Jul 2020

Special Sauce: Kenji on Butter; Anne Saxelby and Sheila Flanagan on Being Optimistic [2/2]

On this week's Special Sauce we're once again talking about selling cheese during the pandemic with cheesemonger Anne Saxelby of Saxelby Cheesemongers and cheesemaker Sheila Flanagan of Nettle Meadow…

00:23:28 | Thu 02 Jul 2020

Special Sauce: “Ask Kenji” Is Back! And Anne Saxelby and Sheila Flanagan on Selling Cheese During the Pandemic [1/2]

This week on Special Sauce we are returning to the topic of the horrendous toll the pandemic has taken on the food culture. Today, we’re talking cheese. In the first of two far-ranging interviews, I …

00:33:08 | Thu 25 Jun 2020

Special Sauce: Alexander Smalls on How Food and Music Nurture Hope and Connection [2/2]

"A jukebox is the musical equivalent of a well-stocked pantry," says Alexander Smalls. Poetic riffs on the relationship between food and music are just par for the course with Smalls, who's both a Gr…

00:33:37 | Thu 18 Jun 2020

Special Sauce: After a Tony, a Grammy, and a Beard, Alexander Smalls on What’s Next [1/2]

The last Special Sauce I recorded in a studio before the coronavirus pandemic hit was with the multi-talented chef, opera singer, and restaurateur Alexander Smalls. He was just about to publish his n…

00:52:57 | Thu 11 Jun 2020

Special Sauce: Cookbook Author Susan Spungen on Craving Togetherness [1/2]

Special Sauce has obviously changed a lot with the advent of the pandemic. But before we changed the format a couple of months ago to adapt to the times, we'd already recorded a couple of great inter…

00:46:55 | Thu 28 May 2020

Special Sauce: NYT’s Pete Wells on the Future of Restaurant Criticism [2/2]

On this week's Special Sauce, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, who's been used to eating out six nights a week, tells us about cooking lunch and dinner for his two teenaged sons now that …

00:20:06 | Thu 21 May 2020

Special Sauce: NYT Restaurant Critic Pete Wells on the State of the Industry [1/2]

What does a restaurant critic do when there are no restaurants to review? The San Francisco Chronicle's Soleil Ho has shifted to primarily covering how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the resta…

00:27:13 | Thu 14 May 2020

Special Sauce: Why DC-Based Restaurant Owner Ezekiel Vázquez-Ger Is Feeling Optimistic

According to Ezekiel Vázquez-Ger, my guest on this week's Special Sauce, everything was going swimmingly at his new Washington, DC, restaurant, Seven Reasons. The place was packed almost from the min…

00:28:09 | Thu 07 May 2020

Small Businesses Need More Help Now, Says Ovenly Co-Founder Agatha Kulaga

In 2010, Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin founded Ovenly, which they originally envisioned as a bar-snack business, providing bars with better alternatives to beer nuts and potato chips. Over the cour…

00:30:37 | Thu 30 Apr 2020

Special Sauce: Will Xi'an Famous Foods Survive the Coronavirus Lockdown?

As part of our special Special Sauce series on the pandemic's effects on the various constituents of the food community, I reached out to Xi'an Famous Foods co-founder Jason Wang. Jason had told his …

00:33:36 | Thu 23 Apr 2020

Special Sauce: Tom Colicchio on How to Save Restaurants

As we all try to deal with the crisis confronting us, I thought we'd follow up on the Special Sauce episodes that focused on Kenji's stories with other voices from the food and beverage industry. In …

00:28:06 | Thu 16 Apr 2020

Special Sauce: Kenji on His Food Safety Article

It's obviously still not business as usual at Serious Eats (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), so we're going to continue to produce Special Sauce episodes that deal with the coronaviru…

00:16:38 | Thu 02 Apr 2020

Special Sauce: Kenji on Coronavirus and Its Impact on Restaurants

Editor's note: The Coronavirus story is unfolding at a breakneck pace. That means that something said that was true at the time may no longer be so. On this episode please note that Lola, the Tom Dou…

00:24:33 | Thu 26 Mar 2020

Special Sauce: Claudia Fleming on the Pitfalls of Your Passion [2/2]

On this week's Special Sauce, I continue my conversation with visionary pastry chef Claudia Fleming. But before we get to Claudia's captivating story, Kenji fields a question from Serious Eater Joan …

00:36:29 | Thu 05 Mar 2020

Special Sauce: Kenji on Vegetarian Chile Verde, Claudia Fleming on Lego Desserts [1/2]

There are forgotten giants in the food world, people who have profoundly influenced what we eat, but whose names we barely know. James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Claudia Fleming is one of those …

00:31:36 | Fri 28 Feb 2020

Special Sauce: Misha Collins on Pasta With Jam Sauce and Random Acts of Kindness [2/2]

In part two of my conversation with Supernatural star Misha Collins, we dive into his family's eating habits, which eventually lead to The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Ti…

00:45:01 | Fri 14 Feb 2020

Special Sauce: Supernatural Star Misha Collins [1/2]

One of the things I love about Special Sauce is how often I am surprised and moved by my guests. And this episode, in which I interview Supernatural star Misha Collins, who, with his wife Vicki, just…

00:32:50 | Thu 06 Feb 2020

Special Sauce: Maangchi on Being the Korean Julia Child [2/2]

This week's Special Sauce features part two of my conversation with the online cooking star Maangchi, but first we get to hear from Kenji, who answered a question from Serious Eater Kyle Johnson abou…

00:35:17 | Fri 31 Jan 2020

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