Dan Pashman: Hey! It's Dan here with another Reheat for you. This one's all about the science of how sound affects the taste of food. When you think about your senses in food, of course, you think about taste, smell, sight — even feel, like texture. But as you'll hear in this week's episode, when I talk with Oxford researcher Charles Spence and my old friend the food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt, sound plays a key role in cooking and eating. Remember, as always, if you have an episode you’d like us to reheat, send me a message at hello@sporkful.com. All right, on with the show.

[BAG CRINKLING AND EATING CHIPS]

Dan Pashman: Back in 2004, a researcher at Oxford named Charles Spence did a study that’s now pretty famous. He had people eat potato chips in front of a microphone, [EATING POTATO CHIPS] and while they ate, they were also wearing headphones that were connected to that microphone. That way as they ate the chips, they heard the sound of the crunch in their headphones.

[EATING POTATO CHIPS] 

Dan Pashman: Then he messed with what people heard. When he made the crunch sound louder, [EATING POTATO CHIPS LOUDER] people claimed the chips were crispier, fresher, better. Even though the chips were all identical — they were Pringles. Here’s Charles Spence:

Charles Spence: This thing that we think where we're sort of feeling crispness or freshness in our mouth — it's kind of the sense of touch. In fact, it's being influenced more than we realize by what we were hearing. I think we were the first to demonstrate in real time that we could, you know, make things crunchier or crisper, fresher simply by changing the sound and leaving the actual texture the same. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Eating involves all your senses, but sound is the one sense you don’t think about as much when you eat. Well, it turns out sound affects taste in a whole lot of ways. Today on The Sporkful, Professor Charles Spence explains how. He’ll even put me through an experiment, to show how changing the background music can change the way chocolate tastes.

Dan Pashman: And later in the show, our favorite food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt returns. He’ll tell us why you should listen to your food when you cook, and what you should listen for.

CLIP (KENJI LOPEZ-ALT): My first real restaurant job where I was working in a fancy kitchen, my first task was to cut chives. The chef came by, Barbara Lynch, and she was just walking by and she's like, "You're cutting those wrong." She didn't even look at me. She's like, "You're cutting those wrong," and made me throw them all out. And the way she could tell was because of the sound they make. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s coming up, stick around.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University in England and he studies the many, many factors that help determine taste. He’s looked at the color of the lights, the color of the plates, the shape of the plates, all to see how these things change our enjoyment of a meal.

Dan Pashman: My conversation focused on how sound affects taste. To demonstrate his work, he told me to come to the interview with some dark chocolate.

Charles Spence: Take that piece of chocolate that you're holding in your hands and you put it into your mouth and I want you to, you know, go very slowly start eating it ... 

Dan Pashman: Okay.

Charles Spence: And you're gonna have to keep it in there for a minute or so, so gobble it down too quickly. 

Dan Pashman: I've got the chocolate in my mouth. 

Charles Spence: Think about the taste sensation you're getting, or I should say flavor. And in particular, think about how sweet and how bitter the chocolate is. Once you've got that chocolate in your mouth and you've thought about — kind of put a rating on how sweet and how bitter that chocolate is ... 

Dan Pashman: It already tastes pretty bitter ...

Charles Spence: Mm-hmm. What I like to do is play the first of the two soundtracks …

[SOUNDTRACK ONE PLAYS]

Dan Pashman: Mmm. It almost makes it taste more bitter. 

Charles Spence: That's right. [LAUGHS] Keep chewing slowly ...

Dan Pashman: Okay.

Charles Spence: Thinking about the taste, the sweetness and the bitterness, and now I want you to play the next soundtrack and think about whether your experience changes.

[SOUNDTRACK TWO PLAYS]

Dan Pashman: Oh my god!

Charles Spence: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: It totally just got sweeter!

Charles Spence: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: That was crazy!

Charles Spence: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: That second, when the music first kicked in, it was almost as if, like, a little sugar crystal had landed on my tongue.

Charles Spence: That's it. That's sonic seasoning for you.

Dan Pashman: When I'm eating that same piece of chocolate and different music is playing and it's affecting the flavor, what's happening in my brain to make that happen?

Charles Spence: All of these tastes and flavors, bitter and sweet, chocolatey or not — those are all kind of milling around somewhere in your head and your brain can't kind of deal with so much inflammation. By playing that kind of high-pitched music draws your attention to the sweet taste, much like I could say to you, I could say, "This chocolate's gonna taste really sweet," or as the wine expert might say, "You know, can't you smell the asparagus on that wine?", and as soon as they say it, it sort of appears magically in the tasting experience. It was there all along, you just didn't quite latch on it. And I think these are kind of the more subtle version of the same idea. It's important that you're cooking has both bitter and sweet notes in it to begin with, cause I can't sound and digital seasoning to kind of make tastes out of nowhere, but what I can do when you got kind of complex tasting experience, like a coffee with a little bit of sweetness, like a dark chocolate, then I can draw your attention to an element in what's going on in your experience and do it through sound and it'll bring out about a 10 percent increase in perceived sweetness simply through the sounds that you hear.

Dan Pashman: Do you view these as tricks? Like do you feel like you're tricking people into an eating experience that isn't there? Or is it — you know, is this somehow manipulative?

Charles Spence: [LAUGHS] Those aren't ... Those aren't necessarily the words I would want to use. I think of it more in terms of enhancing the experience and nudges towards sort of healthier eating. So I think these — I mean, the whole idea of taste and flavor is a construction of our mind. It is all kind of an illusion that we think we taste food in our mouth, when in fact most of the interesting stuff is happening in our nose. So tastes and flavors are full-stop kind of, you know, an illusion. And if I think about things like there are certain smells that you will describe as sweet, things like caramel and vanilla, maybe strawberry — smells do not actually have a taste, but I can use those sweet smells to almost trick your brain into tasting sweetness that isn't there. So it is kind of an illusion. It is kind of a trick. Does that mean it's manipulation? Maybe it depends on whose hands these kinds of results are, but I think the potential and the hope is you can help people. Cause if you actually reduce the unhealthy ingredients in many food and beverage products, consumers don't like it. They complain. They say, "Give me back the product as I remember it, as it used to be. Don't mess with it." So maybe the hope is you could actually gradually slowly somewhat reduce some of the unhealthy ingredients in foods and drinks and use some of these psychological techniques in order to bring back the lost taste and flavor through other means and hopefully deliver an experience to the consumers that's the same as always but done through a better understanding of the mind and hands a little bit less of the less healthy ingredients.

Dan Pashman: And can you list a few of the changes that have been made to familiar products in the world of food and drink that came about because of your research, in particular, on how sound affects eating and drinking?

Charles Spence: We've done research after our original work on the crunchiness of the crisps. We then got thinking why is — most potato chips come in kind noisy rattly bags. We used to think that was maybe something about, you know, the preservation of the product needed that kind of packaging. It turns out, it doesn't. It was just some clever marketeer or sort of packaging designer back in the 1920s, 1930s, who figured out noisy food would go well with a very noisy pack. So we started doing experiments where fed undergraduates to get a new cohort with new packets of potato chips, and this time they didn't hear the sound of a crunch of the potato chip but instead they heard the sound of the rattle of the crisp packet and we found that the noisier the rattle of the crisp, or potato chip packet, as I should say for you, the crunchier the crisp began. And the effects of a noisy packing aren't quite as big as very noisy crisps or potato chips, but they are still there.

Dan Pashman: Let's talk a little bit about background music and the music that you could be listening to when you are eating. I mean, restaurants ... Many restaurants have music and I think that most of the time they're thinking about the music as a way to set a certain decor or atmosphere or vibe. They don't think of it as a way to actually quite literally compliment the food. What have you learned about the way background music affects the actual eating experience?

Charles Spence: So there are a couple of things there, I think. On the one hand, we're sort of seeing this kind of increase in the level of noise and music being played in many restaurants and bars. And there's research out there now to show that at such loud noise or music levels, you can actually suppress your ability to taste things like sweetness and saltiness in food. If you get it right and the sound levels and the music levels are not so deafening, there you can see happening is that if I give you some food to eat, maybe it's Italian food, maybe it's French food, then if I play music that's kind of ethnically kind of appropriate, so imagine somebody playing the kind of organ on the banks of the river Seine in Paris and you get that kind of music, and I'm serving you some French food, some escargots or something, it shouldn't affect the taste, but it will affect the authenticity the experience.

Dan Pashman: In general, when the music is very loud, we taste less.

Charles Spence: Correct.

Dan Pashman: It kind of makes me think of, like, when you're driving, if you're listening to music that's very loud and then you sort of turn off the highway and you have to find your way, like you need to navigate, and you'll turn the music down.

Charles Spence: That's right.

Dan Pashman: And it's like the loud music shouldn't stop you from being able to see where you're going or finding street signs, but you're like, "Oh, I have to concentrate on my driving. I'm gonna turn the music down." But there is something about the way loud noise can distract from your other senses.

Charles Spence: That's right.

Dan Pashman: Do you have a family, professor?

Charles Spence: Yes. Yes ...

Dan Pashman: Do you have kids?

Charles Spence: No.

Dan Pashman: No kids. You're married?

Charles Spence: Married, yes. That's correct.

Dan Pashman: And when you are making food for your wife or when you're hosting people at home, do you ever do some unofficial experiments?

Charles Spence: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Do you ever ...

Charles Spence: You bet. You bet. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Mess with the music or the ...

Charles Spence: I hate to miss an opportunity [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] to get some data and see the ways in which people respond. And we're kind of lucky, my and I, we have a chef who works in the lab who lives with us, a French-trained chef, so we'll have kind of monthly dinner parties for everyone in the lab. And the chef may cook and everyone else may bring something, and that, like, the perfect opportunity to start playing with the music and see what it does to your taste buds buying these remote control color changing light bulbs to see what that does to the flavor of the wine.

Dan Pashman: Does your wife ever get annoyed? Is she ever like, "Charles, stop playing with the lights for once and come and eat!"

[LAUGHING]

Charles Spence: So yeah, we do have some battles, it has to be said, about some [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] — so I'd say, where we do research on the shape and the color of the plate, and I say, you know, "Angular black plates are really good for some foods. They can help to bring out the taste just the way that music does," and she's having none of that.

[LAUGHING]

Charles Spence: She wants the flowery kind of French ones, so my black plates are all in the office here, so she doesn't throw them out.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] All right. Well, Professor Charles Spence in Oxford, thank you so much for your time.

Charles Spence: My pleasure.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Professor Charles Spence of Oxford University. If you weren’t able to do that chocolate experiment along with me, we’ll post those two pieces of music at Sporkful.com so you can try out the experiment on your own time. You can do it with beer or coffee.

Dan Pashman: Also, shout out to Nicola Twilley, she’s the co-host of a great food podcast called Gastropod. She wrote a piece about Charles Spence in The New Yorker that has more on him and his work, so we’ll link to it at Sporkful.com.

Dan Pashman: Coming up, from the sound of eating to the sound of cooking. I’ll head into the kitchen with Serious Eats food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt, and he’ll explain exactly why they tell you to sell the sizzle, not the steak. Stick around.

MUSIC

 

+++BREAK+++

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I'm Dan Pashman. Now October is National Pasta Month and I plan to celebrate in style with Anything's Pastable events all over the country and across the border up north. October 8th, I'll be in Brooklyn doing a special one night only dinner with Edy's Grocer. I'm doing a virtual cooking class with Milk Street, you can join that from anywhere. We're gonna cook up the keema bolognese that Asha Loupy and I worked on, plus the kimchi carbonara. And the great thing about that is you sign up for the class, you can watch it whenever it's convenient for you. I'll be doing a pasta masterclass in Las Vegas in October and then also Toronto. Finally, yes, I know we have so many listeners in Toronto. It's really a travesty that I haven't been up there, but our first ever event in Canada — cooking, eating, talking. Chef Anthony Rose and I will be in conversation at the Prosserman JCC in Toronto. I want to see you there. And then it all wraps up in Canandaigua New York, where I'll be doing a cooking class and also a talk. Lots of fun stuff happening, so please go to Sporkful.com/events for details and tickets. Again, Sporkful.com/events. Happy National Pasta Month! All right, let's get back to the reheat. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: A while back we had Nat Bletter on the show. He runs a chocolate company in Hawaii called Madre Chocolate, and he said you can tell how good a chocolate bar is by the sound it makes when you break it. That's cause it’s an indication of how well-tempered the chocolate is. Tempering has to do with the structure of the chocolate crystals. Basically, a well-tempered chocolate bar will be very solid. It'll melt in your mouth slowly. A poorly tempered bar will crumble and mush and melt quickly. Here’s Nat demonstrating the difference in sounds, starting with the good one …

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): [LAUGHS] So you can see it's got a nice shine and I'm gonna break it right now. 

[BREAKING CHOCOLATE] 

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): That had a good thud to it.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): There was bass in that.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): Yeah, exactly.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): And no microphone tricks being added here at WNYC.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): Nothing up our sleeve.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): So next one.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): So in contrast, you see this one went through a lot.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): That looks like it was in your pocket ... in your back pocket and you sat on it and the entire flight from Hawaii.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): [LAUGHS] On an oven, right?

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Right. [LAUGHS]

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): So it's a very warped bar. And instead of that nice shine, it's all white and molted and kind of funky.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Let's listen to this now.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER):  Here we go.

[BREAKING SECOND CHOCOLATE BAR]

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Yeah, it was a higher pitch.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): Yeah.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN):  A little tinny.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): Yeah.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Yeah. 

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): It can get a lot worse than that. It can just be, kind of, like a "whoosh" more than a crack, even when it's totally untempered.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): That sounds demoralizing.

CLIP (NAT BLETTER): [LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Now those chocolate bars that Nat broke were already made. So all sound did was help us figure out which one was good. But sometimes you can use sound to fix problems before it’s too late while you're cooking. 

Dan Pashman: To find out how, I met up with Serious Eats food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt. You’ve heard him here on the show several times, we love Kenji. Kenji brought me into the kitchen so we could hear — really hear the right and wrong way to cook some basic foods. We started with how to slice scallions.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: So if you're cutting your scallions wrong, you're moving your knife — first of all, you're probably using a dull knife and you're just kind of crushing them. You're going straight up and down. And that sounds kind of like ... 

[CUTTING SCALLIONS IMPROPERLY] 

Kenji Lopez-Alt: That's the sound of plant cells being crushed. 

[CONTINUING TO CUTTING SCALLIONS IMPROPERLY] 

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Particularly for alliums, like, garlic, onions, and scallions, they have chemical precursors in them that once you crush the cells, those precursors escape and then they react with each other to form lacrimators, which are the things that make you cry — and they're the things that make onions sort of extra pungent. So when you're slicing scallions and chives, if you crush them, you get a lot of that super pungency that makes you cry ... 

Dan Pashman: You mean, like more bitter, sharper ... 

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Much sharper, yeah. Yeah, exactly. All those flavors that you actually don't really want to maximize when you're cutting them. You'd much rather get sort of the more aromatic things that make them smell nice and taste nice. So crushing them is bad. What you really want to do is maximize the horizontal motion of the knife, whether it's pushing forward or pulling back when you're trying to slice things. That's gonna slice a lot more evenly and ideally, it'll make very very little sound at all. So now, here we go ... 

[CHOPPING SCALLIONS PROPERLY] 

Dan Pashman: So the correct sound is quieter?

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Quieter and smoother.

Dan Pashman: And smoother.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: You don't hear that sort, like, crushing ...

Dan Pashman: It's almost like a sizzle. It's almost like a "sssss" ... That's the bad sound.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah, like a ninja slicing someone's throat as opposed to a strong man crushing their head.

Dan Pashman: Wait, which one ... In this analogy, which is the good ...

[LAUGHING]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: The ninja is the good one! 

Dan Pashman: Okay!

Kenji Lopez-Alt: You want to slice your scallions like a ninja.

Dan Pashman: Okay, as opposed to ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: André the Giant.

Dan Pashman: Okay, all right .... Gotcha.

[LAUGHING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: So you're making homemade mayo right now. You have two ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah, I have two cups identical ...

Dan Pashman: The ingredients in these cups have separated.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: They're separated, yes. The oil floats on top.

Dan Pashman: I should describe, like, on the bottom, 25 percent — they're clear so we can see through. On the bottom 25 percent, you see the egg you cracked, you see some water, and there's lemon juice, and they're sort of cloudy ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Mustard, yeah.

Dan Pashman: Cloudy egg in the bottom. And the top three quarters of the liquid is just pure oil.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Exactly. Exactly.

Dan Pashman: And you're gonna turn this into mayonnaise. You need to emulsify these ingredients and bring them together into one.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: For those of us who didn't do so well in science class, what is an emulsion?

Kenji Lopez-Alt: An emulsion is a stable semi-homogenous mixture of two liquids that typically don't mix. So in cooking, it's almost always oil and water. You need an emulsifier, which is a chemical that basically has one arm that likes water and one arm that likes fats and it's sort of the bridge between the two things. I like to think of it sort of like if you're at a high school dance party and the boys and the girls, like, typically separate from each other. The emulsifier’s sort, like, the ... It's like the alcohol of the mayonnaise party ...

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: It gets them to mix nicely, you know? So the way it works in these hand blender cups, if you want to do it the right way, you place the blender all the way at the bottom of the cup, turn it on, and then the vortex will slowly draw oil into it and that helps emulsify properly. If you're gonna do it the wrong way, you just have the blender running and stick it into the cup and you'll see it's going to ... Well, it doesn't emulsify. It comes out more vignette than a mayonnaise.

Dan Pashman: So the key is to put the blender all the way down to the bottom ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Before you start it.

Dan Pashman: Of the liquid before you turn it on.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: Gotcha.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: And you'll hear it. You'll hear a difference.

Dan Pashman: And that incorporates the oil slowly.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: All right.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: This is proper mayonnaise. When you're making it, you can hear — it gets sort a thicker sound, a deeper noise.

[BLENDING MAYONNAISE THE RIGHT WAY]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: And you'll see when we make it the other way. I mean, you can do this blindfolded because you can tell from the sound whether it's actually working right or not. So now, I'm just gonna turn on the hand blender before I put it in the cup and just kind of jam it down there and see what happens. So blender running ...

[BLENDING MAYONNAISE IMPROPERLY]

Dan Pashman: This is the wrong way.

[BLENDING MAYONNAISE IMPROPERLY]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: And yeah, I mean ...

Dan Pashman: It sounds like a lot thinner and more liquidy.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah. You know, if you're doing it the right way, you'll hear, like, a definite ... like, a deepening of the sound. And it goes from being, like, a splashing noise to a — well, like, I think it's more, like, flip-flip-chip-chip noise ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Let me hear your impression of [KENJI LOPEZ-ALT LAUGHS] each sound. First, let me hear the bad sound.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: [IMITATES BLENDING MAYONNAISE IMPROPERLY]

Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS] Now, let me hear the good sound.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: [IMITATES BLENDING MAYONNAISE PROPERLY]

Dan Pashman: So more bass, more thumping. 

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yes.

Dan Pashman: It's thumping and bass.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: [LAUGHING] Yeah, yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Good mayonnaise should sort of sound like drum and bass music.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dan Pashman: Bad mayo is more like indie-rock.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah, or like maybe a bad high school or something.

Dan Pashman: Okay ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Or like a lot of plinking on a keyboard.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah, yeah.

MUSIC

Kenji Lopez-Alt: That sizzling sound that meat makes when it hits a hot grill or when it hits a hot pan, there's a reason that sound is appetizing to us, and it's because, like, it's an indication that they maillard action is going on and that eventually, the meat is going to brown. And that brownness is what makes meat taste good. You know, that's why a grilled steak tastes better than a boiled steak.

Dan Pashman: So we're preheating these two pans ...

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: You're gonna put some oil in.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: And one will be relatively low heat. So first, I'm gonna put the pork chop into the pan that is not hot enough.

[LAUGHING]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: No sound at all. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: There's no sound at all.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: And that means that your meat is more going to steam than sear.

Dan Pashman: Okay, let's hear the right sound.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Okay.

[PORK CHOP SIZZLING]

Dan Pashman: What's happening here? Can you give me an analogy to explain, like, why that sizzling is making this food more delicious?

Kenji Lopez-Alt: The sizzle is the sound of water evaporating. It's the sound of surface moisture being expelled from the meat, evaporating, forming little bubbles that pop, and also the sound of the meat vibrating up and down as these bubbles force their way out from underneath. And the reason you want to evaporate that surface moisture is so that you can then get the meat hot enough to brown it properly. When you're browning meat, what you're basically doing is you're breaking down proteins and carbohydrates into much smaller pieces and then reconfiguring them and building all new molecules out of them. I like to think of it as if you have — as Legos. Like if you have a nice big Lego castle, it's pretty uniform shape and size. It might be cool but it's pretty boring. There's not much variation. If you then take a hammer and break that — or a little sister — and break that Lego castle apart [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS], then you have all these bricks, which you can build spaceships and cars and pirate ships and all these different things out of.

Dan Pashman: It becomes a city.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: Exactly. Exactly.

Dan Pashman: A more complex creation.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: We want our steaks and pork chops to be Legos cities, not Lego castles. Yes.

Dan Pashman: Okay.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Oh man, Kenji.

Kenji Lopez-Alt: [LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: I could listen to that all day.

[LAUGHING]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: The other sound that is — generally, I associate with properly cooked meat in an apartment setting, is the sound of the smoke detector going off.

[LAUGHING]

Kenji Lopez-Alt: But yeah, that sizzling sound, meat on a fire, it's a pretty primal sound.

[PORK CHOPS SIZZLING]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Kenji Lopez-Alt from Serious Eats, his New York Times bestselling cookbook and food science opus is The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. It’s really great, check it out.

CREDITS

Dan Pashman: Okay, outtakes from — this is authentic — this is, like, Foley sound effects. This is, like, old school how they did it.  

[UNINTELLIGIBLE] 

Dan Pashman: Yeah, that's right. I'm consuming all these calories for Sporkful listeners to make the best — only the finest potato chip sound effects for our show. 

[DAN PASHMAN EATING POTATO CHIPS] 

Dan Pashman: Mmmm. Okay, I think we got it. 

MUSIC

CREDITS