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

**Warning: My interview with rock star Sammy Hagar contains some bad words.

Jacques Pépin was a celebrity chef before anyone had ever heard of such a thing, and Sammy Hagar is a bona fide rock star -- he used to front Van Halen.

But Sammy says before he learned to rock, he learned to cook.

And Chef Jacques knows a thing or two about how to party:

"This spring I bought 70 cases of wine," he tells me in this week's episode. "We do drink a lot of wine."

Today on The Sporkful, Sammy and I talk about the art of making mozzarella and what he learned about food from his Sicilian immigrant grandparents.

When I handed him a ball of freshly pulled mozzarella in our interview, he didn't miss a beat:

"I just want to take some toasted French bread and some tomatoes and a little bit of basil and salt and pepper and olive oil -- and I'm good to go."

Then Jacques and I drink beer out of paper cups and talk about his arrival in America and his first encounter with an Oreo cookie.

"After half a century in America, I've absorbed so many different types of cuisine," he says. "I never really tried to be French and, by the same token, I never really tried not to be French."

Both Sammy and Jacques have new cookbooks out this fall -- Are We Having Any Fun Yet?: The Cooking & Partying Handbook and Jacques Pépin Heart & Soul in the Kitchen.

But the similarities between these two passionate Eaters go A LOT deeper. Listen in to the full episode -- I think you’ll find that neither of these guys is who you think they are.

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

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Photos: Anne Noyes Saini, Kevin Berne, courtesy of Sammy Hagar, courtesy of Jacques Pépin