The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Kenji and Deb and Ed

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Thanks to our friends at Special Sauce for allowing us to share this episode. Deb, Kenji, and host Ed Levine talk about ye olde days of early food blogging and the backstory of The Recipe.

Hi, everybody. This is Audrey Mardovich, executive producer of Radiotopia. Before we get started, I just want to say thank you so much for listening to The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Here at Radiotopia, we have been longtime fans of Deb and Kenji's work. We own all of their cookbooks. We make all of their recipes. And so it has been really thrilling to watch the show grow from really a seed of an idea into a very real podcast that many of you seem to really enjoy a lot. And so thank you so much again. And if you're like me,

you can't get enough Kenji and Deb. And so while Kenji and Deb are taking a little quick summer break, we thought we'd share with you an episode of Special Sauce with Ed Levine, a favorite of ours. Just to give you a little bit of context for the episode, Smitten Kitchen and Serious Eats both launched around the same time in the mid-2000s and they were really pioneers of food blogging and I really believe that that changed how we prep and cook and eat and talk about food today.

And so Deb and Kenji and Ed are going to get into all of that and more in this very special episode. We really hope you enjoy. Today's guests on Special Sauces have changed the way we all cook in the last 15 years as much as any two recipe developers I know. Deb Perlman launched her terrific home cooking blog, Smitten Kitchen, in 2006, right Deb, or is it 2005? 2006.

Right around the time I started Serious Eats, Deb is the author of four best-selling cookbooks, including what's the name of the most recently published one? It's been Kitchen Keepers. And Kenji Lopez-Alt is the best-selling author of two cookbooks, Food Lab and The Wok. He's also the host of Kenji's cooking show on YouTube and the columnist for the New York Times. Because both Deb and Kenji didn't have enough to do, they were bored with all their endeavors,

including parenting two children each. They have launched a podcast called The Recipe. I have a small quibble with your recipe, Kenji. I like to hear quibbles. Why are you doing this to me personally? Why are you making me use six ounces of dry pasta? It is like, it is for me, it is like, and I have a scale. I have multiple scales. It's not that. I can tell you why.

But I personally, like I just have this thing, this kind of like twitchy thing where I need things to either match the package size or half the package size. I like a recipe with four tablespoons of butter or eight, eight ounces of pasta or 16. Here to tell us all about the podcast are two serious eaters whom I have known for more than 15 years, Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Kenji Lopez alt. We'll talk about the recipe on this edition of Special Sauce. I'm Ed Levine, founder of Serious Eats. Back in a moment. Welcome back to Special Sauce Kenji and Deb. Thanks for having us on. I think you've probably known us collectively for almost three decades or over three decades.

Right, actually. Yeah. Crazy. It's been a while. It's been a while. I just don't want to admit that I'm this old. That's the thing. Does our relationship make you look old? Does that make us look old? I'm totally responsible for making me look old.

So let's talk about the podcast. Let's talk about the recipe and how it came about. Because you two, if actually, if I remember, you don't go way back, right? No, not at all. Yeah, not in person. I've obviously followed Deb's work for many years, but we met for the first time a little over a year ago now when Deb came to Seattle as part of

her book tour. Her publisher asked me to host her at an event here in Town Hall, and that night just before we went on stage in front of the people was the first time we'd ever actually met in person, and really the first time I think we had exchanged more than, I don't know, maybe a message over social media or something like that. But really the first time we ever met was that night. I know it's crazy because I definitely knew your work and I followed it from the beginning and everybody knows who Kenji is, your household name, and your book was the biggest thing to ever happen in cookbook publishing. So all of your books, every single one of them, but it was the biggest, the one, the first one that made the earthquake

quite indentation in publishing. But yeah, no, that was the first time we met and it turned out we got along well. Yeah, you must have, because you've decided to do this podcast unless it's like a double suicide pact of podcasts. Like, what are we doing here? I think it was maybe like, it was October or November

that that event was. And then I think I emailed Deb maybe two weeks later saying, hey, like that was fun talking to you. Do you want to do a podcast? It was even longer ago. It was January, 2023. Yeah, it was the end of the book tour. I was in the West Coast.

I kind of made my way at the West Coast. And it was Seattle, then Vancouver. And I was done with the tour. A little over a year ago. Before the last day of the month I think I had an email from you or maybe within a week or two later I had an email from you and the truth is that over the years I'd always thought it would be fun to do a podcast but I never wanted to do it solo. I always wanted to do it with another person and I didn't really know who it was because I've always worked independently and so I don't have like a natural other,

but there we were on stage and it turned out when we started talking about cooking, we could not shut up or I cannot shut up. So, and you tolerated it. So here we are. They had one of those, you know, those giant hooks that they pull you off from the sideways. Jocelyn's gonna have to get one for this.

By the way, she already has one for me. But I, it was a really great event. The energy was really good. Seattle, people really come out in Seattle. The food energy in the city is fantastic. I had done two nights there and the previous evening I had been at third place books and there was almost an equal size crowd there of people who had just showed up at a bookstore. It was so cool. I don't even think I can do that in New York, to be honest. New Yorkers are not as impressed. On my first book tour for the Food Lab,

when I came to Seattle, Seattle was by far sort of the friendliest, most supportive city. It was actually one of the reasons why I was like, oh this is actually a pretty nice place. I heard like, because I'd always heard like Seattle is like cold and the people are cold and standoffish, but I was like, Oh, this is actually a pretty nice place. I heard like, cause I'd always heard like Seattle is like cold and the people are cold and standoffish, but I was like, no, people are actually really friendly here. Seattle I've always found has a really good food crowd. They come out and they're very supportive and people are really nice. It's always a fun audience to talk to here.

I remember I wrote a cookbook with Tom Douglas, a Seattle chef. And so I would spend weeks at a time staying at his house. And I thought the food energy of the city was great. So tell us about what the development process was when you're when you're doing a podcast. We knew from the beginning, we wanted to talk about cooking and we started thinking about doing episodes on different food cooking topics. At first, you know, recipes that he has, Kenji has recipes that I do, but you know, it's

going to evolve into just even single ingredients and single dishes that we're really into. Yeah, like we're going to do an episode on iceberg. And so we'll be doing like, I'll be making a couple of Deb's salads. I think Deb has like a pickled iceberg recipe. We're gonna be doing like stir-fried iceberg. Some episodes are single recipe specific and others are sort of more ingredient based. But honestly, I don't think there was a huge development process because we kind of, we kind of came up with the idea pretty fast. I feel like from the beginning was like, like, hey, let's do a podcast about recipes. Like, you know, you, Deb, you approach recipes differently from the way I approach recipes. And so there's a kind of natural compliment there because we both, you know, what I find interesting is that we both have

the same goals, right? We both have our writing recipes for home cooks and we want home cooks to feel good and feel like they can accomplish something and then actually go in and accomplish it. But we come at it from, from very different points of attack, you know? And so I think it's interesting just to hear those conversations and hear how we end,

how we both wanted to make a great mac and cheese recipe for a weeknight for home cooks, but how we ended up with such different results. You know, the idea is to always be useful to home cooks so that they can follow along what the recipe development process is. And from that sort of glean what things they may and may not want to do in their own kitchens.

So Deb, why don't you tell us about your development process? My recipe development process is, I feel like it's a little unusual. What's not unusual about it is it usually starts with a craving. I wanna make this thing, I want it for dinner, I haven't had it in a while, I don't have a good recipe for it. From there, it could be a week of, like it could be an hour or two of playing around, obviously to get to a published ready, published

recipe, it'll take longer. It can sometimes be years of me plugging away at one document with different versions of the recipe that I've tried with my notes of what I liked and what I didn't like. But it usually starts with hunger or craving or just a feeling that I don't have a go-to recipe for something or I don't have a go-to recipe that matches the way I desire to make it. Either it's not simple enough or it's not good enough. So for you, it's like almost like a practical approach for you, right? I do best at this job when I keep it practical and relevant. I get to do that more because I don't you know I don't really have

people I report to so the center of the job can be what I feel like cooking that day. Obviously the reality of the job is that it's a lot more than there are things that they didn't tell you that you now report to me? I should. You would hate it. I am so bad at deadlines. And also when I don't want to make something anymore, I don't make it anymore. I just write a lot of notes, save the document, and then if it takes me six months or four years to crave it again, I will find the document, pull up the notes, and hope and pray that I wrote coherent notes that I can pick up where I left off. So I'm in the middle of like, at any given time, 500 recipes. Really? Wow, that's so ancient.

Yeah, not actively. Is there a recipe graveyard for you, Deb? Like, is there a place where your recipes just go to die that they never see the light of day after you get, you know, 75% of the way there and you just give up? I would say that, yeah, that definitely exists. And if I were to like flip my Google Docs to like the oldest ones, I could see which ones I'm never going to come back to. Or they might still be like saved Microsoft, like Word Docs back when I used to use that before Google docs. So those are really archaic. I had to pull one up last weekend when I was making a birthday cake for my father-in-law. It was his 75th birthday and I last made it for his 65th birthday. So I had to find my notes.

That's really funny. They were not coherent. Yeah. So I had to kind of go back to the drawing board. So Kenji, before I ask you about your development process, I just want Deb to know that Kenji survived reporting to me. You were the last person that I reported to full time

and ever since leaving Serious Seats, I've vowed never to have another boss again. So it could be I had such a traumatic experience that I never want to do it again, or it could just be that I wanted to end on a high note. So... We'll see how it goes today. We'll make a final assessment. No boss could ever live up to Ed.

So... I mean, that's fair. So Kenji, tell us about your recipe development process. It really depends on the recipe. I sort of think about my recipes in different categories. So there are recipes that I think of as just like, hey, this is a cool idea. I don't actually have to test too much

because it's based on other things I've done. It's like, I don't need to test how to make pasta every time I make pasta. I can change the ingredients around and come up with a new dish that I enjoy. And that's a simple recipe where I might refine it a couple of times, make sure that the measurements work, do a little bit of foolproofing and then I can publish it.

Whereas sometimes I'll do recipes that I consider more of like a much deeper dive, you know, and these tend to be the recipes that are sort of my version of a known existing dish, like my mac and cheese or my meatloaf or whatever it is. Like a dish that people are familiar with that I need to bring something new to the table. And for me, when I bring something new to the table, it's usually not in the form of like just, you know, adding another ingredient or doing, you know, or radically altering the technique.

It's more, what I try to bring to the table is more, why do we do things the way we do them? So I'm going to test everything on here to sort of figure out why we do each step and which steps are sort of important and which ones aren't. I've talked to you and Deb about this before, but I think of recipes as turn-by-turn directions to get from one place to another.

And for me, a lot of times, what I'm trying to do is provide more of a map that you can look at so you can plan your own route, and with a suggested route for how to get from one place to another. But I really want to try and provide a lot of context in the kitchen for why you're doing certain things so that, you know, because I feel, at least for people like me, that kind of context gives you more control and a little bit more confidence in the kitchen. Although I fully understand that there are people who don't,

right? Like there are people who are, who just want to follow the recipe and that's what gives them confidence, the confidence in knowing that if I follow these steps, I will get to the end without getting lost, right? And I think those are that if I follow these steps, I will get to the end without getting lost. And I think those are two very different, but both, I think, equally useful and valid approaches depending on what mood you're in or depending on who your audience is. That's actually where I usually come in. While I, in my own cooking, see it as a path from point A to point B, I really love and respect the recipe format as just something you can follow and almost turn your brain off.

Like if I do step one, two, three, four, and five, well, if it's Ken cheese, mac and cheese, if I do step one and then like one and a half, I have a perfect bowl of macaroni and cheese. And I just, I really love somebody else being in charge sometimes. Like, it's like, I will have dinner if I do these things. And I like that in a world where, I don't know, I get tired of adulting and making like so many decisions every day. Sometimes I'm like, just hand me a recipe and dinner will appear. And other times, I really want to break it down and get it my way. but when I don't, I really want a recipe that just,

I can just tell me what to do. What you both share is an obsessive quality to your work. Kenji, you may start from a less practical place, but you always wanna end up at a practical place. What's practical for like 44 year old me with two kids is different from what was practical for 29 year old me living in a studio in New York. And Kenji, I know you use social media maybe more than Deb

when you're developing a well-known recipe. Like you might say, you know, like, look, I'm thinking about chicken kia. Like what can anybody tell me about? So one thing I do, especially if I'm thinking about chicken Kiev. Like, what can anybody tell me about? So one thing I do, especially if I'm tackling a sort of classic recipe, I mean, I don't think I've done a chicken Kiev recipe, but if I was doing something like chicken Kiev,

what I do want to do is make sure that I understand what that recipe means from a cultural perspective. And so to that end, I really do want to sort of speak to as many people as possible about what the dish means to them, because the last thing you want to do is come up with your own version of a recipe and realize that what you think this dish has completely misses the mark or just doesn't resonate with people

or maybe ignores an important historical or cultural context that you just weren't aware of. So yeah, for sure, whenever I'm starting a new recipe, the first thing I want to do is research the cultural and historical context of the recipe and make sure I understand that really well, because you can always get a recipe that's gonna taste good,

but you run the risk of creating a dish that doesn't hit the mark for people in the best case, and in the worst case, could be culturally insensitive, could offend people because you just missed it. So I do always want to start with that, and I find social media actually to be a very good way to get a wide range of those opinions and thoughts. We'll get into more of the recipes featured on Kenji and Deb's podcast right after this quick break. So for the first episode, you did a recipe swap on mac and cheese, right? What did you learn Kenji when you made Deb's mac and cheese?

What did I learn when I made Deb's mac and cheese? I learned that she likes measurements and that she likes to make... So mac and cheese, I never thought of as like a single serving dish, but Deb is a single serving recipe, which I found to be very interesting. I'd actually never seen a recipe for mac and cheese quite like Deb's because it doesn't have what I consider to be the classic mac and cheese cheeses. There's no cheddar, there's no American,

it's Parmesan. So her recipe is almost like a, a hybrid between a, you know, a bechamel based stovetop mac and cheese and something like a cacio e pepe because it has lots of cracked black pepper and it has Parmesan. So instead of using like giant mounds of a milder cheese, she uses small amounts of a very, very sharp cheese, which I think is a different approach because I don't know, I can't remember whose recipe I was reading a while back, but when I was doing the recipe for my book,

maybe it was a David Leets recipe, but in it, you know, he talks about how the ratio of cheese to macaroni is really important, and that he does like a one-to-one ratio with a pound of cheese and a pound of macaroni. And that's what I ended up using in my recipe as well, which is more than what most people do.

Whereas Deb takes the completely opposite approach and uses much less than what other people do, but instead sort of jacks it up with a more intense cheese. Although in talking to Deb since then, she says she often adds white cheddar to her macaroni and cheese as well. And I think I even mentioned in the heads that you can go half and half

from like a slightly more classic flavor. But something like stove top mac and cheese is something that I don't remember what year I did that recipe, but it's many, many years into the Smitten kitchen that I kind of got around to doing something like that. And a lot of it was just that I feel like there's a million recipes out there.

And I don't necessarily, I don't have anything to add. Like, I always say like, why crank up ye olde blog apparatus if you don't have something to say? Like it's a lot of work to develop and shoot and write. Like I think if you're comparing, for us to start with these recipes, my recipe is very bare bones kind of classic. It's like a light bechamel and a sharp cheese.

It's not like a great innovator in the kitchen. It's just something that kind of took off on the site. And it's great. Kenji does some real innovation with it. He, I read the recipe and thought, something that kind of took off on the site. Kenji does some real innovation with it. I read the recipe and thought, oh, I don't really like it when pasta isn't cooked in water. It doesn't really taste.

I had all of these expectations that it was going to come out too soft or gummy or whatever. And it was fantastic. My kids love it. They ask for it. Every time the video comes up, they want me to make it again. And I actually think that it's time for them to make it themselves. So can you really use what he knew about science

and his endless patience for testing to really innovate the way we make macaroni and cheese. And it's really cool. Yeah. The funny thing though is that that recipe after developing it, I always do a check, you know, to make sure that nobody else has, if I'm going to say something, you know, if I'm writing a recipe, I want to make

sure I acknowledge previous existing versions of that recipe or things that might be similar because I don't want to ever be accused of stealing things. And that recipe was one where when I was done with it, I looked up the process. I can't remember how I searched for it, but I found there was a very, very similar recipe on the, I think it was like the Carnation Evaporated Milk website, or maybe it was the, it was some, it was some like brand had a very, very similar recipe to it. And I was like, oh, darn it.

Which I mentioned in the article, but there are times when you like do, do what you think is innovating and then find out, oh yeah, of course this has been done before. Can't you, that's happened to me a few times where I'm like, I'm doing something new and then I always do that check. And then I find out there's some version of it somewhere. And it's so weird to find the language to back credit something that didn't influence you in your recipe development. So I usually write a note similar to what you do in that

recipe. I'm like, so I hadn't seen this at the time, but this is a really cool thing. And, you know, give it a look and maybe it's something you want. But it's a weird thing to be giving back credit when you thought you had your own unique and wonderful ideas, which you did. And you do. You did. It doesn't take it away from you. So, Kenji, will you be making Deb's Mac and Cheese in the future without tinkering with it?

I think I have to because my kids enjoyed it. Yeah. Mine's very riffable. Like you can, I mean, it's really a basis for any kind of cheesy bechamel sauce. What's the word for a cheese? Is it a Mornay sauce? Is the cheesy? Mornay sauce.

Mornay sauce. Cheesy bechamel. So it's just like a good foundation. You could add peas to it. You could add some spring asparagus to it. You could add, you know, you could really play around with it. You can double the sauce and add other things. So it's more of a foundational recipe.

And Deb, will you be making Kenji's recipe? I already have. I made it one or two more times, in part because I had half a can of evaporated milk to use up, and in part because my kids liked it. Yeah. Actually, mostly the latter.

They liked it. It. Actually, mostly the latter. They liked it. It's a great recipe. My recipe did have that issue that it calls for six ounces of pasta, which is like three quarters of a box, right? You know, you explained that that's at work. You had considered it, but there wasn't a way to make the recipe work. So you picked the most. But the nice thing is you could easily double it.

So Ed, to explain this, Deb has an issue with recipes that call for odd measurements. And my recipe calls for six ounces of cheese, six ounces of evaporated milk, and six ounces of pasta. And six ounces of pasta is a weird amount because it doesn't divide a box of pasta evenly. And so we put an audio clip of that up onto Instagram and TikTok,

and people generally agreed with Deb that having a recipe that calls for six ounces of pasta is broken somewhere along the process. In my defense, the reason I did it is because evaporated milk comes in six ounce and 12 ounce cans. Although I think through shrinkflation, they now come in like 5.5 and 10.5 ounce cans. But I'm not changing the recipe again.

But that's why I called for six ounces of pasta, because I wanted people to remember, oh, it's just like equal parts of everything. You've actually experimented with all kinds of ways to make pasta, like in just a little bit of water, not water, right? Back in my serious eats days when I had to write a Food Lab article every week, yeah, I ended up testing a lot of ways to cook pasta. I mean, pasta, it's like, it's very difficult to completely mess it up, right? Unless you like really vastly over-cooked, but even some people, some people even really like terribly overcooked

pasta and it's fine. But yeah, the amount of water you cook pasta in, it doesn't make too much of it. It certainly doesn't make the difference that people say it does. Right? You know, people, what chefs used to tell me was that you want to use a really big pot of pot of water for your pasta because when you drop the pasta into it, it comes back to a boil faster with a larger pot than with a smaller pot. This is actually not true. It's the opposite. You have a pot of boiling water, right? All the water is at 100 degrees Celsius. So you have a large volume of water at 100 degrees Celsius. You have a small volume of water at 100 degrees Celsius.

And you're maintaining that boil with a flame. When you drop your pasta in, the only thing you have to do to get that whole pot of water back up to 100 degrees is to add enough energy to heat that pasta itself up to 100 degrees, so that your entire pasta and water system is, again, at 100 degrees. So the amount of energy that you have to add to a large pot or a small pot that are both starting with boiling water, once you add the pasta, it's going

to be the exact same amount of energy you need to add, no matter what, because it's just the amount of energy you need to add to raise the temperature of that pasta. And you're adding the same amount of pasta in both cases. A large pot of water is constantly, well, both pots of water are constantly losing energy to the atmosphere, right? There's water evaporating, there's heat dissipating from it. So both of them are losing energy to the atmosphere. However, a larger pot is actually losing more energy to the atmosphere than a smaller pot because it has a bigger surface area.

So you're evaporating more, you're getting more heat coming off the sides of the pot. And so the amount of heat that you need to be constantly pumping back into that pot in order to maintain a boil is actually higher when you have a larger pot versus a smaller pot. And so when that temperature drops down once you add the pasta,

the pasta water will drop down a little bit more in the smaller pot, but it'll return to a boil faster because it's losing heat at a slower rate than the large one is. So the smaller one, I don't know if this is, I explained that in a way that makes sense, but the smaller one loses heat in a much slower than the large pot does. And so assuming all else is equal, a small pot is actually going to return to a boil faster than a large pot does. And so assuming all else is equal, a small pot is actually going to return to a boil faster than a large pot will.

You don't just put the lid on the pot for one minute to get it to come back to a boil in like five seconds. Oh, you can do that too, sure, sure. Yeah, but you can do that in either case. The only cases where it really matters is if you're using fresh pasta and your pasta water is gonna get really starchy and when it's too small a volume of water,

maybe your pasta is gonna stick together. Although not really, it's like I've never seen pasta really stick together if you stir it no matter how small a volume of water you use, but it doesn't matter whether you use a big volume or a small volume at the end. I want it to come back to a boil so I can walk away. Otherwise I'll come back at the timer

and then realize that it had never come back to a boil because I wasn't paying attention. I've been listening to the two of you and it seems clear that one of the criteria you use for what you're gonna do an episode of the recipe on is something you can make for your kids. Well, that's the criteria for a lot of my cooking these days. We're thinking more comfort foods,

things that there's a lot of opinions to be had on it. I know we're looking for things that are either instantly appealing or instantly interesting that we both have a lot of opinions on. Yeah, I think you need an impartial serious eater, someone like me for instance, to taste both versions and render a judgment. Have you thought about that? Have either of you thought about it? But you're imagining that it's a throw down

between Kenji and I. No, no, it's not a throw down. Maybe Kenji imagines it too. There's no competition. Both of our recipes represent the outcome of our processes. Like with different goals, what we were willing to go through to get the perfect recipe.

It's not that I don't know how to make a more decadent, involved or whatever, you know, macaroni and cheese. It wasn't what I was looking for. So yes, different goals, different outcomes, and they're both amazing. Ed, you didn't get the envelope of meatloaf that I sent you in the mail? I did, but it spoiled.

Oh. When we do our live show, we can have Ed on trying everything. All right, that would be great. That would be fun. We're gonna go on tour. Take it nationwide. So what would you like the takeaways to be

from an episode of The Recipe? I would like the takeaways for everybody listening to think, oh, what lovely people Kenji and Deb are, primarily. They're so smart and funny. I mean, for me, I want people to come away, first of all, like enjoying themselves. I want people to feel relaxed and comfortable and like feel like they've enjoyed themselves

and feel like they just had a little chat with some good friends. But really I feel, yeah, I want people to feel more empowered in the kitchen. Like I want people to feel more empowered in the kitchen. I want people to go away feeling more confident with their cooking or thinking, hey, I wanna get into the kitchen

and try some of this on my own. And I feel like I can do it now that I've heard what goes into actually developing these recipes. Because I think, especially these days, it's hard to find recipes that you trust, right? Because you don't know what went into a recipe, especially if you're following a recipe from someone on social media,

then you don't exactly know what went into getting that recipe to the point where it is. And of course it's mixed, right? Some people put a ton of work into it, and some people don't. The idea of hearing what actually goes into the recipe development process, the factors we thought about in doing this,

the amount of testing we did, we really try and put ourselves in the shoes of home cooks and anticipate what questions they're going to have or what problems they might run into. I'm hoping that that gives them the confidence to then go and follow Deb's recipe or go and follow my recipe and you know know that it'll get them where they want to go. I think isn't part Deb that you're also trying to demystify both the recipes and the recipe development process. Talk a little bit about that. Definitely. I mean, a lot of my recipes, by the time they're published, looked very simple. They're very, you know, it's chicken noodle soup.

It's, you know, and it's because I went through a lot trying to get it to the place where I could cut out steps, where I could take things out or merge processes so that you could have something that worked for you or became more of a framework of a recipe that you could build on, you know, if you're like, oh, but this doesn't have this ingredient that I love in it. But a lot of work went into that and I love the process. I love the development process.

I love the tinkering. I love the trying to figure out what's worth it, what can be cut. And it's fun to get to talk about that. I'm a headnote person though, so you don't... I think it should be obvious my process. And Kenji also likes to explain his work. And it's true when you're pulling a recipe

from an Instagram caption or a TikTok caption or whatever, you just don't, you don't know the whole story behind it. It's more stressful for me, even if it comes out good in the end, that's great. And I think both of you are storytellers the way the best recipe writers are, right? I mean, that's really important to both of you, right? Can't you?

What I learned writing from Serious Eats is that the most successful articles and the most successful writing is, yeah, is when you tell a story. And even if it's a story about how you developed a recipe, it doesn't have to be the sort of what people imagine as the stereotypical blogger story, which can be wonderful in the right hands.

Your Aunt Edna and her church basement dinner and whatever, the spaghetti incident. It doesn't have to be that kind of story. A story can be as simple as how you started from one point and arrived at the end. But in order to teach people things, you can't just give them information dryly. You have to build suspense and your stories have to have a beginning, middle, and an end, and a resolution,

and I put bookends on it, something at the beginning and something at the end that calls it back to make the piece feel rounded and complete. I always consider myself a writer before I consider myself a cook. I happen to write about cooking because of something I know. It seems like that's the case for you too, Deb, right? It is.

I was definitely a writer first, and I think a writer first, and it'll be a writer in the end, I think. But I love the subject of cooking, and I love the context of cooking. I don't want to know about a recipe without knowing the context of why it matters. And when I'm writing a head note,

yes, I do tell stories that are the context and maybe they seem relevant, but you can completely skip that. I don't mind, I'm not offended in any way. But I also try to anticipate the questions. Oh, why are you using this kind of salt? Or how come you're not salting it at this point? Or all of those things.

These are decisions we've made along the way. And I think it's great to get into them because they were made and I was hoping you'd ask. And the second episode is about meatloaf. And I was surprised that you didn't go into whether you should use a combination of beef or pork. Did you think about that? Do you guys think about that when it comes to meatloaf or do you just assume that everyone's

going to use ground beef? I mean, we did, we did go into it a little bit because Deb's, Deb's recipe is an all turkey meatloaf. I think Deb actually specifically used what was called meatloaf mix from the, from the store. I think it was more one of those things where we didn't go into detail about it because there's just so much to talk about. We could have talked about meatloaf,

we could have done a six hour long multi-part series on meatloaf. If we wanted to, if we felt like people would want to listen to that. Just the music. But yeah, I guess we just didn't go into detail about every single little thing, but you can read about it in our writing. Yeah. If we're still doing this in two years, but you can read about it in our writing. Yeah, if we're still doing this in two years, we can do a Meatloaf 2 episode.

Yes, for sure. I've always found that two years is the right division between when you tackle one subject and then you tackle another. I would also say that while the classic combination is pork, beef, and veal, but if you can only get two out of three of those from meatloaf, two out of three ain't bad.

Right. And you, and you referred in the episode to meatloaf. So I love the way you folded that in. That was very slick. It was hardly slick. It was not slick. My theory on meat is always that the meat is what's around, like whatever meat is around you is the meat that you use.

So yes, because meatloaf, as we were discussing, it is largely American, we're mostly talking about pork and beef. But if you grew up in some place where lamb was the primary meat, which a lot of the world has, like you would be making lamb meatloaf would be your, or some version of it would be your center. So it's really like what you're getting. To me, it's turkey, that's the operation. I had fun with it.

So what subjects are you gonna be tackling in future episodes? Buttermilk pancakes is coming up next. Oh, right, and you and I shared a plate of pancakes. You get a shout out. Yes, you're featured in that episode. I think after that, we've got tomato soup. Tomato soup.

And then grilled cheese. And then we are going to talk about iceberg, which I hope I don't regret talking Kenji into because I really pushed for it. And I think it's fun, but I think people are going to be like iceberg, but that'll give us our jumping off point. I bought four heads of iceberg at the supermarket a couple of days ago so I can make a bunch of iceberg recipes. I did. Hopefully you don't have a fridge like mine does where it freezes in the back. We got some grilled grilled chicken coming up.

We're doing an asparagus episode. Once we get to the summer, you have so much summer produce. I think it'll be really fun. We can do zucchini. We can do corn and everything. I have a popcorn guy. I have a guy who studies popcorn. He's a university professor who studies popcorn.

He's a popcornologist. He's a popcornologist. He's a popcornologist. I don't know what his official title is, but he'll send me bags, he'll send me bags of like, they're like Ziploc bags that say like HB 4679, which is like the strain of popcorn Colonel they're sending. So he'll send me boxes that have like six different strains

of popcorn and be like, this is the one that like Orville Redenbacher uses. This is the one that Pop like that like Orville Redenbacher uses. This is the one that Pop Secret uses. And drugs sniffing dogs are like, what is this? There's a popcorn guy. Kenji, you just made Deb so happy. I am so happy. This is like my dream. Somebody just giving me different popcorn each week to try.

First, it's free. Then they start charging. to try. First it's free, then they start charging, but it's too late to eat it now. Well, Deb Perlman, Kenji Lopez, all thanks so much for sharing your special podcast sauce with us. Serious eaters, check out the recipe wherever you get your podcasts. You'll learn a lot and you'll laugh as well. So special sauce is produced by Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Perry Gregory of PRX Productions. You can check out our entire library of episodes at the specialsaucepodcast.com and by all means leave a comment. And if you, so much fun to hang out, you know, and I can't wait to hear how I'm represented in the pancake episode.

We're just gonna roast you. In the best light.