
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. But what began as a show dedicated to dissecting food minutiae eventually grew to incorporate more serious conversations, in-depth interviews, globe-spanning investigations — and even a couple of original musical compositions. In this anniversary spectacular Dan tells that story with the help of his wife Janie (an all-time favorite Sporkful guest) and a whole bunch of classic clips.
This episode contains explicit language.
The Sporkful production team includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Nora Ritchie, and Jared O'Connell. Publishing by Shantel Holder.
Interstitial music in this episode by Black Label Music:
- “Back At It” by Bira
- “Trippin’” by Erick Anderson
- “Loud” by Bira
- “De Splat” by Paul Fonfara
- "Hot Night" by Mark Mallman
- “Talk To Me Now” by Hayley Briasco and Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
- “Small Talk” by Hayley Briasco
- "When You're Away" by Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
Photo courtesy of Dan Pashman.
Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Get all your favorite podcasts, more than 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, and live sports coverage with the SiriusXM app.
View Transcript
Janie Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: I actually did Model UN, not debate, just so you know. I was like a little too cool for debate.
Janie Pashman: Well you like to debate me, at least.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
MUSIC
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. 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 at off hours, sometimes even with the permission of their rightful owners.
Dan Pashman: 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 going to tell you that story, complete with clips of some of my very favorite moments in Sporkful history. 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.
Janie Pashman: Hi.
Dan Pashman: So 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. You know, as you know, I graduated from college in 1999. My dream was to host my own radio show and I figured 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 the traditional business of media upside down. So in ten years, I was laid off from 6 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. The show that I produced, worked with him on, was called Morning Sedition. So let's listen to this.
Marc Maron: 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 going to have for breakfast, but then it became a bigger problem about bread.
Dan 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.
Marc Maron: Yes.
Dan Pashman: And I'm, I'm quite confident that you already have an inferior sandwich before you've taken 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 if you're gonna have hot inside.
Marc Maron: Back up, back up, this is crazy. You're talking crazy because you're denying the power of fresh bread. If you have a fresh roll, all right, that's really nice and fresh and soft like a bulkie roll as they call them in Boston or a kaiser roll, yeah, that, 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.
Dan 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 and a big fat bulkie roll where your sandwich is like 80 percent bread. If that bread is not heated, then you, it’s not a good sandwich.
Marc Maron: The bulkie 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, ‘cause you grill a bulkie roll, there's no saying it doesn't just turn hard and brown. Yeah. You know, I've been there and it dries it out. It dries out.
Dan Pashman: You can microwave it. It doesn't even have to be hot.
Mark Reilly: Oh, no. Microwave? No. No, no, no. You can't microwave anything. You call yourself a sandwich connoisseur, you use the word microwave?
Dan Pashman: That was Marc Maron's cohost, Mark Reilly, jumping in there. So that was 2004, 2005. Janie, what goes through your head when you hear that?
Janie Pashman: Yeah, I kind of forgot how early it was that you were focusing on, like, food minutiae. I also think you're wrong. [DAN LAUGHS] 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, you know, flaky. I mean, do you still agree with yourself? Twenty years later?
Dan Pashman: Maybe with a bulkie 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.
Janie Pashman: Right, but the bread is not cold.
Dan Pashman: I guess not.
Janie Pashman: Yeah, I mean, 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.
Dan Pashman: Yeah. But anyway. I'm with you on that. My opinions are evolving on this topic. But but…
Janie Pashman: The arrogance from 20 years ago.
Dan Pashman: It's slowly fading away. [LAUGHS] Anyway, that show with Maron was cancelled, the show I produced at NPR got cancelled, by the time I was 32 I had been laid off from 6 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 going to start a podcast. And you…
Janie Pashman: 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.
Dan 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.
Janie Pashman: Right. But you didn't know if you could make money.
Dan Pashman: Right, right. My goal when I started The Sporkful was I just want this to be a full-time job. That was as far into the future as I could see.
Janie Pashman: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: But so, 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 it became my career?
Janie Pashman: 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 than I had ever eaten at. I mean, you just, you really thought about food more than I did.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Still, to this day! But like, you know, when I thought about doing a food podcast, I thought back to things like debating hot and cold sandwich bread with Maron 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.
Dan Pashman: 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 minutiae 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. The show launched in January 2010, and here's how episode number one began.
Announcer: This is The Sporkful. [MUSIC]
Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, where sacred cows get grilled. I'm Dan Pashman, along with my friend Mark Garrison.
Mark Garrison: Hello, Dan.
Dan 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’s taught us anything, it's that the hosts of food shows need a lot of catchphrases. Mark Garrison, how are you, sir?
Mark Garrison: I'm doing good. I had some leftover pumpkin lasagna before I came here… [FADE UNDER]
Dan Pashman: First of all, I composed that theme music on GarageBand. Thank you very much.
Janie Pashman: Yeah, I remember when you were composing the music. And I remember debating what the name of the show should be.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Janie Pashman: 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.”
Dan 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 the show was “Sliced Bread,” ‘cause that was the same kind of like super basic innovation. And then I thought about The Spork, and it was a friend who said, no, call it The Sporkful.
Janie Pashman: Right.
Dan Pashman: My friend Robin Epstein. Shout out to Robin who said, call it The Sporkful, which was a good call. But how does it feel to listen back to that intro?
Janie Pashman: 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 were like, that's not going to happen.
Dan Pashman: I was right about that 15 years later. 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…
Dan Pashman: I am a lover of words. Like yourself. And the food we’re discussing here is grilled cheese.
Mark Garrison: Yes.
Dan Pashman: If you don’t grill it, it’s not a grilled cheese.
Mark Garrison: No.
Dan Pashman: We’re not talking grill, not like a barbecue grill.
Mark Garrison: Yeah yeah.
Dan Pashman: In a pan or in a diner-style grill.
Mark Garrison: In a skillet, yeah.
Dan Pashman: If you put it in a toaster, bread and cheese melted in a toaster, that’s not a bad food.
Mark Garrison: No.
Dan Pashman: But that is a toasted cheese sandwich.
Mark Garrison: Yes, agreed.
Dan Pashman: That is not a grilled cheese.
So our first episode was on 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:
Dan Pashman: I get good bagged ice, you get bigger ice cubes…
Mark Garrison: Where do you get good bagged ice? Do you have some like locavore ice producer?
Dan Pashman: I know a guy, I know a guy.
Mark Garrison: Is it ice that fell off a truck? No, because then it melted. You lie! Everything is a lie.
Dan Pashman: No…
Dan Pashman: Here’s something funny, I don’t know if you 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 -- I thought they were all pretentious, and I was turned off by foodie culture. 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 at 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 s’mores.
Dan Pashman: So the topic at hand Nathaniel, is s’mores. Now you came to us with this idea for s’mores.
Nathaniel: Yeah I did.
Dan Pashman: What is it that you love about s’mores?
Nathaniel: Well I just like it all. I like the marshmallow, I like the… I like it all.
Dan Pashman: And you’ve been doing some research on things that you can add to s’mores to make them even better. Is that right?
Nathaniel: Yeah I have.
Dan Pashman: Well tell us some of what you’ve found.
Nathaniel: Well I did peanut butter, I did Nutella, and I did marshmallow fluff, if you’re in the office.
Dan Pashman: So, that, oh that’s a special office s’more.
Nathaniel: Yeah.
Janie Pashman: How old is Nathaniel now?
Dan Pashman: So Nathaniel is now 23.
Janie Pashman: Oh my god.
Dan Pashman: And he's 6 foot 4. [LAUGHS]
Janie Pashman: He was such a cute little kid.
Dan Pashman: I know. That's how long this show has been around and how old we are.
Janie Pashman: Wow.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] And then, so our first celebrity guest on The Sporkful 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 hamentaschen, and which I had brought in for him.
Marc Maron: Can I have a prune one?
Dan Pashman: I don’t have prune, I have apricot and I have...
Marc Maron: Do you have poppy?
Dan Pashman: Poppy seeds.
Marc Maron: Oh poppy’s the best.
Dan 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.
Marc Maron: I appreciate that.
Dan Pashman: And so she deemed these subpar.
Marc Maron: You mean she threw out the dough and this is from the dough that was bad?
Dan Pashman: That’s right. She put too much flour in the dough and it was irreparable.
Marc Maron: Oh. Well ‘cause it’s alright.
Dan Pashman: I think they’re pretty good. I mean they aren’t the best hamentaschen I’ve had in my life but I’m not gonna throw ‘em away. They taste pretty good to me, right?
Marc Maron: Did you say that to her?
Dan Pashman: Yes.
Marc Maron: You said these aren’t the best hamentaschen I’ve had in my life?
Dan Pashman: I left out that part but I did say they were good and I did eat several of them in front of her.
Marc: How are you guys getting along?
Dan Pashman: Great.
Marc Maron: Are you sure?
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] But because she was just throwing dough around and throwing them away, I made a hamentaschen out of raw dough that I brought in. Because I made one of these and ate it yesterday and it was amazing. Do you want to try with me an uncooked cookie?
Marc Maron: No.
Dan Pashman: I put it in the fridge last night.
Marc Maron: That doesn’t cook things.
Dan Pashman: Exactly! That’s the idea. Try it.
Marc Maron: That’s the wrong thing to put it in.
Dan Pashman: OMG it’s so good. Why does anyone ever cook cookies? Try that, what do you think
Marc Maron: That’s awful! Like I can taste, I’m probably gonna get sick from that.
Dan Pashman: You may.
Marc Maron: What kind of food show is this?
Janie Pashman: My hamentaschen have gotten better too. [DAN LAUGHS] I was baking them for way too long.
Dan Pashman: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we've been together now for 20-plus years, and I feel like your baking exploits much less frequently end in tears.
Janie Pashman: Yeah. There's been a lot of dough thrown in the garbage over the years.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] So when Maron came on I got a, I scored a feature for it, for his appearance in Apple Podcasts, which was, or you know, in iTunes, which was 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.
Janie Pashman: Right. There were like 20 podcasts and they’d pick three a week to feature.
Dan Pashman: I remember we also got an early bump from an appearance by Rachel Maddow, whose newscast I wrote in 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 retape half of it immediately afterwards when I realized the batteries in my recorder had been dead for most of the conversation. Uh, shout out to Rachel. Uh, I told her we could do this show about like, I was like, whatever topic you want, you name the topic, and she picked cocktails. And then things got especially rowdy when we talked about what to do with cocktail garnishes.
Rachel Maddow: I think I'm going to be able to short-circuit this entire discussion.
Dan Pashman: Okay.
Rachel Maddow: You're never supposed to eat the garnish.
Dan Pashman: Arrrr?
Rachel Maddow: 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.
Dan 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.
Rachel Maddow: But that means you've got to be fishing in there with your fingers.
Mark Garrison: A straw? A straw can do it.
Dan Pashman: Yeah, I think a straw or a stirrer, you know, you can poke it out. You can get it out of there.
Rachel Maddow: It's impossible to do it with elegance, though, isn't it? Admit it. Admit it, Dan.
Dan Pashman: Oh, well, I didn't know that elegance was one of the criteria, all right? If elegance was part of the issue here, that went out the window a long time ago, alright?
Rachel Maddow: I'm gonna tie my hands behind my back and just oat bag nosedive into this thing.
Janie Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Well, I won't stop you.
Janie Pashman: Like, if I'm buying a $16, $17 cocktail, I'm gonna eat everything that's in the cup.
Dan Pashman: You're chewing the ice, you take the glass home, you get it all.
Janie Pashman: Yeah.
Dan 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?
Robert Krulwich: For those who are a little, um, 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.
Dan Pashman: The middle, the part sliced in the middle.
Robert Krulwich: 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.
Mark Garrison: So you can be anywhere.
Robert Krulwich: No, I've never seen anybody eat the pointy part.
Mark Garrison: When you're saying choosing your point of entry. So you are fine with any, any point along the long edge.
Robert Krulwich: Any, any, like, it's like a piano. You can hit any note on the keyboard. It's stretched there before you.
Mark Garrison: 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, you…
Robert Krulwich: 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 addressing, with ardor, the meal. Yeah, of course.
Mark: I was waiting for the romantic, uh, part of it.
Robert Krulwich: You hit, you hit the sandwich, big time.
Mark: Why not choose the acute angle and then it's almost like an arrow, it's an arrow like pointing into your mouth and it goes in there perfectly and…
Robert Krulwich: That's the sandwich's way of spiking. That's the sandwich saying, no, not here. That's what that is. JANIE + DAN LAUGH
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: All right, now that we’ve covered the earliest days of The Sporkful, I’m going to give Janie a break. I’ll fly solo and play some more clips. And then Janie’s gonna join us again towards the end.
Dan Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: 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.
Dan 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 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.
Dan Pashman: Meanwhile I kept trying to book some big-name guests. Get some attention on this show! I desperately wanted to get Weird Al on the show. He seemed to me to be the perfect guest. 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 the show.
Dan Pashman: We analyzed every food-related song he’s ever written, from “Eat It” and “Fat,” from “My Bologna” and “Grapefruit Diet,” to this one:
SONG: La la la la lasagna. You want the some of lasagna. Magnifico or a maybe spaghetti.
Dan 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. Uh, I think that it's a ton of work to make it. Separating those strips is a giant pain in the butt.
Weird Al: For the longest time, my road manager had a thing in the rider saying that no lasagna backstage.
Dan Pashman: Really.
Weird Al: Because I don't, I didn't know this, but apparently lasagna is very cheap to make, apparently. So a lot of, a lot of promoters are like, I'll give him a lasagna and then you wind up eating lasagna five times a week. So, you know, I like lasagna, but that was off the rider for a long time.
Dan Pashman: Okay. But so, uh, you don't quite share my disdain for it,
Weird Al: For lasagna? I like it okay. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's overrated, but I think it's rated just fine.
Dan Pashman: See I kind of feel like, okay, someone's gonna make you lasagna. And their time wouldn't be better spent doing something else for the world.
Weird Al: Like paint my house.
Dan Pashman: Right, exactly, and give me what I think is basically the same thing, which is baked ziti.
Weird Al: Okay, there you go.
Dan Pashman: It's the same thing, except it doesn't require the fine detail of the layering of the ingredients, which is so time consuming and tedious.
Weird Al: Right, so make me some baked ziti and give me a back rub.
MUSICDan Pashman: In 2014 I got my big break, when 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.
Dan Pashman: My first producer was Kristen Meinzer, who’s gone on to become a successful podcast host and author in her own right.
Dan Pashman: Soon after arriving at WNYC, four years after The Sporkful launched, I interviewed a chef for the first time -- Tyler Kord. 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. That all just seemed so weird and ridiculous that I made an exception to the “no chefs” rule.
Dan Pashman: I think we’re all familiar with the typical perception of broccoli. It’s boring.
Tyler Kord: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: 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 kind of just have to do it.
Tyler Kord: You’re lucky there’s a table between us my friend. Those are fighting words.
Dan Pashman: Well go on, make the case.
Tyler Kord: But no that’s true… Broccoli is such a weird symbol for exactly that. I mean it’s the one that it seems politicians always use to describe things that kids are forced to eat that they don’t want to eat. 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.
Dan 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?
Tyler Kord: 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.
Dan Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: Later that year Anne Saini took over as producer and would produce the show for five years, helping to oversee tremendous growth in the quality and listenership of our show. And Simon & Schuster published my book, Eat More Better: How To Make Every Bite More Delicious.
Dan Pashman: 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 tired meme it is today. 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:
Brooke: 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.
Dan 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 could 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.
John Hodgman: No, what? No! [FADE UNDER]
Dan Pashman: 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 minutiae.
Dan Pashman: After that, the show continued to get better, it wasn’t really evolving. A couple hundred episodes in, I was starting to think there might be more to food than debating the ideal surface-area-to-volume ratio of French fries.
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Dan Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: That phase would include globe-spanning investigations, covering one of the biggest food media stories in the last five years, and, of course, pasta. We’ll get to all that when we come back. Stick around.
+++ BREAK +++
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Dan 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 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 all’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 Silvestori 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.
Dan Pashman: Okay, back to our 15th anniversary spectacular, and one quick note: In honor of this occasion, for our Friday Reheats this month, we’re 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!
Dan Pashman: One last note, parents be warned, there’s a couple f-bombs coming up.
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Dan Pashman: We’ll pick up the story of The Sporkful in early 2016. As we entered the year I was resolved to take the show in new directions, cover more substantive topics, and get into more in-depth storytelling. Around this time our show added a second catchphrase: “We obsess about food to learn more about people.”
Dan 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.
Dan Pashman: In 2017 I left WNYC and took the show to the podcast production company Stitcher, which was later acquired by SiriusXM, where we’ve been producing the show happily ever since. Soon after coming to Stitcher, we ran episodes we 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 longform stories that I wanted to tell, that got at the heart of complex issues.
Dan 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. We won a James Beard Award and a Webby Award for our work.
Dan Pashman: 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 Sheraton:
Mimi Sheraton: Brining and all doesn't sound memory-making to me. It's so wet. And what kind of vessel do you put a huge turkey in to brine it?
Dan Pashman: A five-gallon bucket from Home Depot?
Mimi Sheraton: Oh my God.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: In 2019 producer Ngofeen Mputubwele joined the team. Ngofeen 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 Sporkful’s first ever original musical composition. One of our engineers at the time, John DeLore, sang lead vocals…
CLIP: JELLY SONG
Dan Pashman: And as fun and silly as that jelly episode was, at the same time we were doing very serious episodes. That’s one of the things that I really love about doing the show even after all these years. I love the idea that the show’s going to come out on Monday and you the listeners, are not going to 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 as that jelly episode, our coverage of race and food hit a new high water mark with our episode When White People Say Plantation, a collaboration with Osayi Endolyn 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.
Tom: Plentiful food. Lots of food is what I envision when I hear “plantation.”
Dan Pashman: And where do you think that image, that idea of plenty whole food at a plantation comes from?
Tom: I don't know.
Blair: I don't, I think it just comes from our culture. From such a young age, pictures we see in storybooks.
Mary Ann: Just media over the years and reading books and imagining it in your head.
Blair: The cozy scenes that you see in cookbooks.
Tom: Yeah, I think of Gone with the Wind, plantations, and stuff like that. That's my impression. Scarlet and all that kind of stuff.
Dan Pashman: Ngofeen and Anne Saini 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 Sohla El-Waylly. 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 brownface:
Sohla El-Waylly: 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 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.
Dan Pashman: That editor, Adam Rapoport, did resign. That episode became the most downloaded Sporkful of all time, and earned us our second James Beard Award.
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Dan 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 going to bring Janie back to talk about it with me. Hi Janie.
Janie Pashman: Hi.
Dan Pashman: In March of 2021, our “Mission: ImPASTAble” series launched, with this statement, recorded live on stage:
Dan Pashman: And I’m just gonna go ahead and say it. Spaghetti sucks.
[CROWD REACTS]
Dan Pashman: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Oh? I said it. 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 contact 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 Italian thing. All right, like The Lady and the Tramp did a great disservice to American culinary history by romanticizing spaghetti. You know, what we should have taken from that movie is that it's a pasta shape that's only fit for dogs. Hmm. Oh, it's gonna get real tonight. Don't you worry.
And at that same event, I made my intentions clear:
Dan Pashman: 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 going to retrack that. We are embarking on the most ambitious project in Sporkful history. We are going to set out to invent a new pasta shape. That… [LAUGHS] That awkward groan that you just expressed is not an unfamiliar reaction to me, I must say. 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?
Audience: Nooo.
Audience Member: Yeah.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: I don't think that's true.
Janie Pashman: Was that “yes” me?
Dan Pashman: I don't think so. You know, the initial inspiration for the cascatelli 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, 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.
Janie Pashman: Um, yeah.
Dan Pashman: Alright, let's listen to a clip.
Janie Pashman: I can't even think of a shape that doesn't already exist.
Dan Pashman: So what are your thoughts on my idea of trying to create a new one?
Janie Pashman: I think you're like a really smart person and maybe utilize that energy to think of something else other than a pasta shape. A new flavor? Ice cream? [DAN LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: Now, despite your skepticism, I really believed 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:
Chris Maldari: Giving you some profanity, it looks like a clusterfuck. [DAN LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: And as the project wore on, Janie, listen to this clip, you’ll remember your patience wore thin…
Janie Pashman: So this is like the eighth time that the pasta project has been a huge disaster. So I’m kinda over it. With the amount of effort and work you put into it, like you could have like, I don't know, created three new podcasts or something. So, it’s not just the amount of work that it is. That it's like, you know, there’s no days off. You know, there’s a pandemic, the kids are home half the time, and the emotional rollercoaster of, like, you know, you being like, “OK I think this is gonna be good,” and then 24 hours later, like, “This is a disaster. Everything sucks.” I just...I don't know. I don’t really have any more emotional....I don't have the excess emotions to console you over the pasta project, right now. Sorry, not sorry. [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: What are your thoughts listening back to that clip?
Janie Pashman: I mean, I remember exactly, I remember pouring cereal in the bowl. I remember like that exact moment. And we were all like stressed.
Dan Pashman: And as people can hear from this next clip, I was pushed to the brink too.
Dan Pashman: Ugh! I’m not sleeping enough. [LAUGHS] I think I’m gonna cry. I am....I am literally going out of my mind.
Janie Pashman: 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: ImPASTAble” 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.
Dan Pashman: As you know, Janie, and as folks listening probably know, in the end, the new pasta shape cascatelli was born. I especially designed it to maximize forkability, sauceability, and toothsinkability like no pasta shape before it. I teamed up with the pasta company Sfoglini 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.
Dan Pashman: This is it… [LAUGHS] This is it. It's coming off the conveyor belt. This is the moment. I think I want to FaceTime with my family. I need Janie and the kids to see this. So the flour goes up to here, and then and then the pasta comes out here and here's the pasta shape.
Janie Pashman: Wow, there it is!
Emily: I want to eat it!
Dan Pashman: Are you tearing up a little?
Janie Pashman: It does make me a little, you know, make me emotional now. You know, thinking back on, 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.
Dan Pashman: I remember loading a bunch of boxes into the trunk of my car and it was like three hours to drive home. When I came home with all the boxes of pasta, I was so excited.
Janie Pashman: Yeah.
Dan 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 going to happen.
Janie Pashman: Right. We still didn't know anyone would buy it, but we knew that it existed.
Dan Pashman: Right, right. Exactly. As we know now, cascatelli went viral, ending up as one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year. And our podcast series, “Mission: ImPASTAble,” was named one of the New York Times Ten Best Podcasts of 2021. 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.
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Dan 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 Basille. 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.
CLIP: “PALISADE AVE.”
Dan Pashman: I gotta say, that song was a big improvement from the Garage Band theme song that I composed 15-plus years ago.
Dan Pashman: We’ve continued to take your calls, and introduced our regular Salad Spinner episodes, our rapid fire roundtable discussions of the biggest, and strangest, food news of the day. And we launched Deep Dish, a special limited run podcast, hosted by our friends Sohla and Ham El-Waylly.
Dan Pashman: Last March, I released my first cookbook, Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. We shared the behind the scenes story of the making of the book in a special series 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:
Dan Pashman: I use Diamond Crystal salt at home.
Rebeccah Marsters: Mm-hmm.
Dan Pashman: Between those two.
Rebeccah Marsters: And I use Morton salt at home.
Dan Pashman: Oh.
Rebeccah Marsters: [LAUGHS] 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.
Dan Pashman: I don't have any sprinkling issues like you.
Rebeccah Marsters: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: You may just be sprinkling wrong, Rebeccah, that's also something you should take into account.
Rebeccah Marsters: That's true. I don't know. Maybe you can send a video of you sprinkling and I’ll...
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: 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! 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”…
Lindy West: Pasta, rice, bread?
Dan Pashman: Ooh. I mean, those are all really good. Are we assuming like a high-quality bread?
Lindy West: Yeah, the best version of each.
Dan Pashman: Ohh.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Lindy West: I was doing some soul searching and I actually 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!
Dan Pashman: Cut her mic, that’s it!
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: I mean, I get… I would kill rice.
Lindy West: [GASPS]
Dan Pashman: Well, look, I love, I love all three of these things. That's the point of this game, is you're forced to make hard choices.
Lindy West: 1-800-DAILY-MAIL!
Dan Pashman: 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.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: And I’d fuck the pasta.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING AND APPLAUSE]
Lindy West: That’s good.
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Dan 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. I think it worked out okay.
Janie Pashman: Yeah. A bunch more wrinkles.
Dan Pashman: A few more gray hairs, two more kids.
Janie Pashman: It's like the alternate universe of you being a lawyer didn't happen. And we live out in the suburbs with a garage full of pasta. You’re still recording in the basement.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 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, “The Sporkful is the only thing that our whole family can agree to listen to in the car.” Or a woman in Toronto who came up to me and said that like, The Sporkful is 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.
Janie Pashman: 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.
Dan Pashman: You get a lot of the credit too. You are the all-time favorite Sporkful guest.
Janie Pashman: Can you make a poll about that?
Dan Pashman: I don't think I need to.
Janie Pashman: Let's see if it's true.
Dan Pashman: All right, I'll make an Instagram poll, but I have confidence. I think you're gonna win in a landslide. [LAUGHS]
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Dan Pashman: When I was on book tour last year, people kept asking me what my next big project would be. The 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.
Dan Pashman: Of course this 15-year run wouldn’t have been possible without all the incredibly talented folks who’ve contributed to the success of the show: our editors, engineers, including longtime engineer Jared O’Connell, freelance producers and reporters, execs, marketing and ad sales people, and so many more, especially everyone at Stitcher and SiriusXM where the show has been produced for the past eight years.
Dan Pashman: It also wouldn’t be possible without YOU. Thank you for listening, engaging, coming out to our shows, telling your friends about us. It really, really means a lot.
Dan Pashman: Finally special thanks to Janie, my daughters Becky and Emily, and all of my family for your support.
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Dan Pashman: Next week on The Sporkful… is your recipe lying to you? We talk 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.
Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting 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 Krulwich.