Dan Pashman is the three-time James Beard Award and two-time Webby Award-winning creator and host of The Sporkful. He launched the podcast in 2010 after getting laid off from six radio jobs in eight years. At that point he knew he had to either find a way to make a living making a podcast, or go to law school.
In 2021 Dan released cascatelli, a new pasta shape that he invented. The shape went viral, and was eventually named one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions of the Year. (It's now in stores across the country and available online, along with two other shapes he collaborated with the pastamaker Sfoglini to produce.) Dan told the story of his three-year quest to create cascatelli in a series on The Sporkful called Mission: ImPASTAble, which the New York Times named one of 10 Best Podcasts of 2021.
In March 2024 Dan released his first cookbook, Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes For Saucy People, a collection of nontraditional pasta sauces with a foreword by J. Kenji López-Alt that became a national bestseller. Library Journal says, "If Willy Wonka and Alton Brown collaborated on a pasta cookbook, the end result might be something like this -- revolutionary in all the right ways."
Dan is also the creator and host of Cooking Channel's You're Eating It Wrong and a contributor to NPR and Milk Street Radio. He has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Guy's Grocery Games, NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, WTF with Marc Maron, Radiolab, Planet Money, Beat Bobby Flay, Freakonomics Radio, and more. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and others. Prior to launching The Sporkful Dan was a producer and reporter at NPR, SiriusXM, and Air America Radio. He lives outside New York City with his wife and two daughters.
To invite Dan to speak at your event, email hello [at] sporkful [dot] com.
