“Cooking is a way of listening to the radio,” musician Brian Eno once wrote in his diary. Podcasts, of course, are another way to soundtrack your meal-making (or road trips, office commutes and reluctant gym visits). In the last year, there’s been an explosion of new food shows. Just weeks ago, Heston Blumenthal launched Pod and Chips, billed as the “first-ever multi-sensory podcast”. While The Fat Duck chef isn’t making, say, lolly-flavoured smoke come out of your headphones, he does convey personal details (like how he’s fluent in “food French”: “I can go into a bank and ask for some caramelised onions”) and brain-twisting facts (a dish will seem significantly saltier if you change its name: crab ice-cream, for instance, delivers a stronger sodium hit than when it’s called frozen crab bisque, apparently).
With 125,000 new podcasts joining the iTunes store in the last year alone (which is insane, considering it took 12 years for the platform to gain 400,000 podcasts from the day it first made podcasts available), there’s been a corresponding spike in appetite-related shows.
Comedian/actor Ben Schwartz keeps refilling his glass as host of The Wine Down by Wine Dialogues (key learning from the show: which drop goes best with waffles), City Larder co-owner Robbie Bell covers Melbourne’s food scene with incredibly laidback conversations on Cooking The Books, Alicia Kennedy’s Meatless asks industry insiders about whether or not they consume animals (and why), while The Oxford Food Symposium’s Ox Tales gets deep on “the ancient Mesopotamian art of liver divination”. Yes, there truly is something for everyone.
Niche shows are great for specific tastes – but for something that might also appeal to everyone in the car (or kitchen) this summer, try these new-ish podcasts.
Proof
America’s Test Kitchen launched this podcast last month, with a memorable episode about how celery-crazy people were back in the Victorian era: celery tonics were said to cure nerves and “sluggish” livers, while having a special table vase for the vegetable was an upper-class power move. Also bizarre: the now-dowdy green was more of a luxury item than caviar back then.
But is that as strange as Jelly Belly’s ability to produce gross-out flavours, such as a convincing jelly bean called Stinky Socks? The lolly is part of Beanboozled: where appealing flavours (such as Birthday Cake and Buttered Popcorn) are mixed in a packet with deliberately awful creations, such as Rotten Eggs and Skunk Spray.
Sara Joyner’s quest to find out how these lollies can resemble smelly footwear so accurately includes the revelation that the company places dirty socks in Ziploc bags and allows the smell to “ferment” for product inspiration. What’s crazier, though, is learning that the technology used to analyse life on Mars is involved in such flavour development.
Simple Pleasures with Yotam Ottolenghi
The premise might seem like awkward product placement: the chef chats to someone as he (conveniently) cooks them recipes from his new Simple cookbook. Except Ottolenghi is so likeable. Who doesn’t want to hear him chat with guests such as composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and his attorney wife Vanessa Nadal, over braised eggs with leeks and za’atar, Welsh bread and lemon cake? (Miranda’s story about his dad saving a 1954 bottle of port for a momentous occasion – only for his mum to mistakenly use it as cooking sherry three years later – has the most amazing coda.)
Another great guest is musician Jessie Ware: they’re both former journalists who worked for Jewish newspapers, so maybe that’s why they’re such good hosts.
Ware has her own food podcast, Table Manners, which she runs with her mother. The episode where they interview London mayor Sadiq Khan as he breaks his Ramadan fast is wonderful and at times comical – the pet cat sabotages their plans by attacking the very dates they're planning to serve the mayor.
Eat My Globe
This is deep food-nerd territory. If you want to know how many nutcrackers were on the Titanic before it sank, Simon Majumdar is your man. (The answer is: 300.)
Eat My Globe shows how fish and chips has Jewish origins, delves into the history of Spam and reveals how sushi went from a slow-food Japanese delicacy to a convenience snack found everywhere.
The Dave Chang Podcast
Of the many people the Momofuku founder has talked to (from Milk Bar co-founder Christina Tosi to ex-Noma chef Dan Giusti), his most memorable interview is his NSFW chat with artist David Choe. The fact he was wearing a $38,000 coat when he first met Chang speaks to how polarising he can be. When Anthony Bourdain asked the Korean-American artist to take him to an eatery that meant a lot to him, Choe famously opted for Sizzler.
Lee Tran Lam is the host of The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry podcast. She’s currently subscribed to 446 shows.
