This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)

Chef Yotam Ottolenghi is credited with getting many people to eat healthier. The recipes in his Guardian column and influential cookbooks are famously vegetable-centric.

But this week on The Sporkful, he makes the case for eating at least some sugar:

"The idea of consuming less sugar is probably the right thing but a good way to go about it is not to avoid sugar at any cost," he tells Dan.

"If you ask me, the best way to eat less sugar is to bake a cake and to eat a slice and avoid lots of snacks and things that have sugar in them that you haven’t put in yourself," he explains.

Those are wise words to live by, as we head into the holiday season.

(Incidentally Yotam's latest cookbook is devoted entirely to desserts.)

In this week's episode, Yotam also pulls back the curtain on his famous test kitchen and reveals what it's really like to eat all day long, for a living:

"At 11:00am when you taste your first thing…everything tastes wonderful. And at 4:00pm after you’ve eaten 12 things, everything tastes horrible," he says. "So at 4:00pm if something tastes moderately good, it means it’s amazing. And at 11:00am, if you’re not jumping up and down, then it means it’s pretty rubbish."

And he tells us how his own young children have changed his perfectionist approach to cooking and baking.

"Sometimes I want to tear my hair out [when I cook with my kids] because I like to be in control," he admits. "But I also find it really quite refreshing because...you’re forced to let go."

Listen in to the full episode to hear Yotam's take on one of Dan's culinary creations, and Yotam tells us why he never orders the specials when he goes out to eat.

This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)

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Interstitial music in this episode from Black Label Music:

- "Still In Love With You" by Stephen Clinton

- "Oakland" by Justin Asher

- "Simple Song" by Chris Bierden

- "New Old" by JT Bates

Photos: Peden + Munk and courtesy of Yotam Ottolenghi