We swoon everything Food52 touches, from its impeccable aesthetic and crowd-sourced recipes to its kitchen hotline and online shop, Provisions. With wit and style, they empower the home chef with inspiration, expertise and encouragement under the tagline: “Helping people become better, smarter, happier cooks.” Dishes become demystified in their beautiful platform, at once democratic and design-driven. True to its name, Food52 has inspired a round-the-calendar, never-dumbed-down discourse on all things food. Home chefs cook every day, so why shouldn’t a kitchen resource produce at a similarly incessant clip? We are not alone in our adoration: the James Beard Foundation named Food52 the 2012 Publication of the Year.Dishes become demystified in their beautiful platform, at once democratic and design-driven. True to its name, Food52 has inspired a round-the-calendar, never-dumbed-down discourse on all things food. Home chefs cook every day, so why shouldn’t a kitchen resource produce at a similarly incessant clip? We are not alone in our adoration: the James Beard Foundation named Food52 the 2012 Publication of the Year.
And now this: Burnt Toast, a new biweekly podcast on Panoply (Slate Magazine’s podcast network) hosted by Food52 founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, focused on topics that don’t make it onto the website, topics more suited to the water cooler, “from what makes a great cookbook to what makes a dish weird and our ultimate pet-peeves in recipe writing, and everything in between.” Hesser and Stubbs guide the chatty format featuring “a rotating cast of smart, salty guests.”
Since its March 11 debut, Burnt Toast has released four episodes, the first being our least favorite. While we appreciate the inaugural treatment of weird foods as a cultural and personal construct, the conversation contained too many “likes” for our likening, a discursive habit ironed out by the second episode, “Cookbooks: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.” The literary conversation feels like the book club you’ve always dreamed of existing in some faraway place (Brooklyn), where people come together with their most favorite or most hated tomes in hand, ready and willing to bare their ideas in the name of better understanding why we read, why we write and, in this case, why we cook. Spirited and unscripted, the episode epitomizes all we love about the community Food52 has created, where being a foodie is more fun than pretentious. Episode 3 continues the momentum with a diary of guests’ first forays in food (we love the image of Hesser working in a pretzel bakery in Germany with a fiery boss who would express his anger by hitting employees with a baguette).
We are hungry for more Burnt Toast. Find the podcast on Panoply, iTunes or any podcast app. And then come find us to gleefully rehash the latest episode.