Stories

Chef Mads Refslund and forager Tama Matsuoka Wong fight the global problem of food waste by promoting "trash cooking."

Tucker Shaw from Cook's Science serves up a glamorous history lesson on the origins of fettuccine Alfredo in the U.S. and shares the process for perfecting the dish at home.

How do you cook with – and perfect dishes including – an ingredient that is not legal everywhere? Managing producer Sally Swift talks with Dan Souza, executive editor of Cook’s Science, about cooking with cannabis.

Cookbook author Samin Nosrat taught cooking for years. In fact, Michael Pollan credits her for teaching him how to cook. Her teaching revolves around a ridiculously simple idea, that to be a great cook, all you need to know is how to control four things: salt, fat, acid, and heat. Understand those and you will always be able to make delicious food, no recipes required.

In his career as a writer, editor and critic Tom Scocca has sharpened his sword on lazy media and skewered hypocritical politicians. But what he says might be his most important journalistic work came when he took it to recipe writers. Seemingly every last one of them has been lying to us about onions – in particular, caramelized onions. Host Francis Lam talked with Scocca about his fight against the onion cooking conspiracy.

Paula Wolfert is a one of the world’s most influential food explorers and cookbook writers. She’s most famous for breaking open the world of Mediterranean flavors in America. The way she did it defined a whole style of food writing – intense, immersive research, making no compromises in her recipes, and cooking things exactly as she saw them. But there’s a cruel irony in her story. The woman who’s done so much to document cuisines for posterity is battling dementia. We talk with Emily Kaiser Thelin, Paula’s editor at Food & Wine magazine, about her new biography on Paula.