This week's episode of The Sporkful is up! Listen through the player and subscribe in iTunes.
Here at The Sporkful, we revel in mealtime minutiae. No eating quandary is too small for rumination and mastication.
In this episode, we're grappling with Sporkful listeners' pressing food questions about everything from flatbread semantics to whoopie pie engineering to restaurant etiquette.
How do you get an indecisive group of friends to go to the restaurant you go to? Joshua in New Hampshire calls in with a great tip.
Then I get a call from my friend Micheline Maynard, a noted whoopie pie expert, who takes a purist's approach to her beloved tripartite treats.
"If it's not marshmallow filling -- preferably marshmallow fluff, you don't really have a whoopie pie," she says. "It's a classic, don't mess with it."
Micheline brooks neither frosting nor pudding in her whoopie pies. The only exception to her marshmallow filling rule: pumpkin cream cheese when paired with carrot cake. (That's my preferred whoopie pie variation, for the record.)
I argue that whoopie pies are akin to sandwiches and, thus, should be held to stringent sandwich engineering criteria. But Micheline takes a more laissez faire approach. She doesn't mind if her whoopie pie fillings squish out the back at first bite -- as long as the filling and both cakes are equally allocated.
"You can never have too much marshmallow fluff," she says. "I think marshmallow fluff is an active participant in any whoopie pie."
Plus, Andy in Scottsdale, Arizona, calls in to ask about the distinctions between pizza and flatbread.
But I think the real question is: Are pizza and flatbread two separate categories or is, in fact, a pizza a type of flatbread?" Listen in for the exciting conclusion of our doughy debate.
And we also take a call from George in Oakland, California. His friends say his salsa is too spicy. So should get make milder salsa or get spicier friends?
"Don't I have a moral obligation to increase their spice tolerance and get them to love the salsas?" George asks. Listen to the show for our conclusion.
Music in this show by BWN Music:
- "Funky Love Baby" by Steve Pierson
- "Bunyan's Bunion" by Cullen Fitzpatrick
- "Mother Tucker" by Steve Pierson
Photos: Flickr CC / Dennis Wilkinson and My_Amii
