Special Sauce With Ed Levine

On this episode of Special Sauce Kenji Lopez Alt and Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman come to our rescue with some helpful hints about what to do with Thanksgiving leftovers.

On this episode of Special Sauce Kenji and Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman give us some tips on how to cook up a Thanksgiving feast in a small space without stressing out.

This week on Special Sauce we hear more about the joy of vegetables and the importance of family with “Tenderheart” author Hetty McKinnon.

On this week's Special Sauce I talk to food writer Hetty Liu McKinnon.With her five vegetarian cookbooks, her popular Substack newsletter, and her ingenious vegetarian recipes for the New York Times, food writer Hetty has been called the vegetable whisperer, and rightfully so.

Last week, we got an inside look at the father son relationship at the heart of the YouTube series, Hunger Pangs. This time we pick up our conversation with Kevin Pak, the Editorial director of Digital at America's Test Kitchen and his dad, Jeffrey, and learn about how they transformed their success online into a new book, A Very Chinese Cookbook: 100 Recipes from China & Not China (But Still Really Chinese).

On this episode of Special Sauce I talk to food writer Kevin Pang and his dad Jeffrey about how they bridged their substantial generation gap through their shared love of food and cooking.

On this episode of Special Sauce the great "pie-stress" Chrissy Kinsman is back with pie tips for amateur baking.

On this episode of Special Sauce the great pie baker Chrissy Kinsman of Pie Chicks on Martha's Vineyard tells us about the trials and tribulations of trying to make a living selling pies year round on a sparsely populated island.

On this episode of Special Sauce we revisit my nifty 2016 conversation with the legendary baker and cookbook author Dorie Greenspan, which became one of our most popular episodes of all time. Fast-forward to the fall of 2023, when many a serious eater's thoughts normally turn to baking. When I listened to Dorie's old episode I was struck by how relevant our nearly ten year-old conversation still was in 2023. So we thought it would be fun to re-post the old episode now. And rest assured that the indefatigable Ms. Greenspan has not been idle in the interim. She has published three more cookbooks since then, including the cookie book she refers to in the episode, the James Beard Award-winning Dorie's Cookies. She also writes a free, delightful newsletter xoxo Dorie. So here is Dorie Greenspan redux. It's definitely worth repeating.

On this episode of Special Sauce Ann Kim talks about the evolution of her relationship with her Korean parents. You won't believe what happened when Ann invited her parents to her about to open first restaurant Pizzeria Lola.

On this episode of Special Sauce I talk to the James Beard award winning chef Ann Kim. Ann opened her first restaurant, Pizzeria Lola, in Minneapolis in 2010 without ever having cooked professionally. In fact, she was a working actor before she realized that it was cooking that made her happy.

On this episode of Special we dig still deeper into America's regional hot dog styles with food writer JJ Goode, who just wrote an entertaining and informative guide to American regional hot dog styles for the NYT.

On this episode of Special Sauce we go deep into dogs, hot dogs that is, with JJ Goode, who wrote a guide to regional hot dogs styles for the NY Times. We also checked in with a few hot dog devotees and got their hot take on one of the world's most popular foods.

On this episode of Special Sauce Kenji is back with some tips for grilling vegetables.

On this episode of Special Sauce Kenji is back with some surefire (pun intended) tips for grilling chicken and fish.

On this episode of Special Sauce, we talk about the joys of grilling pizza with Kenji. J. Kenji Lopez Alt is a New York Times cooking columnist and the host of Kenji's Cooking Show on YouTube. He’s also the best selling author of The Wok, The Food Lab, and the children's book Every Night is Pizza Night.

This week on Special Sauce we talk to pastry chef extraordinaire Natasha Pickowicz. Natasha is as the title of her new book More Than Cake implies, much more than a baker. Natasha is an original thinker, a fine writer, and a thoughtful soul. Her path to making delicious pastries is anything but typical.

This week on Special Sauce Part 2 of my conversation with chef Hamissi Mamba, who runs the amazing East African spot Baobab Fare in Detroit with his wife Nadia Nijimbere. With the restaurant, their African market called Soko, and their street food pop-up Waka, Mamba and Nadia are building a cultural bridge between Detroit and their native Burundi. They fled their home country as refugees, determined to build new lives in the US with their children - and the traditional dishes they grew up with became the foundation.

This week I'm talking with Hamissi Mamba about the long road to success from his native Burundi to the vibrant food scene in Detroit.

On the second Special Sauce episode Kenji and I did live from the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY last March we talked about his latest book ‘The Wok’, Kenji and I successfully cooked eggs and tomatoes in a wok onstage and I didn’t get fired as his sous-chef for inadequately chopping the scallions.  Kenji also answered questions from the audience ranging from the best oil to cook with in a wok to how to involve young children in cooking. He also told us what happened when he made a  creme brulee for an architecture class project at MIT. I'm not sure it went well. Kenji and I had so much fun we thought people would enjoy listening again. Kenji of course has been very busy since we taped this episode last year. He was a judge on the Roku Channel's sushi competition show Morimoto's Sushi Master. And Kenji's Cooking Show on Youtube continues to entertain and inform millions of subscribers.