Episodes

  • Episode #102: Olivier Bur

    Episode #102: Olivier Bur
    Jan 31 2025
    Olivier Bur is the chef and owner of the restaurant Casarré in the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Casarré is unlike any other restaurant I’ve heard of in the Caribbean. It’s a fine dining restaurant, at least in the sense that it serves 7 to 10 courses and a pairing, even though it does it in a casual way. There are of course many other fine dining restaurants in the Caribbean too, but unlike everywhere, Casarré is defined by its limitations as much as it is abundance. They don’t use flour, milk or eggs and instead find alternatives within the natural environment. They don’t serve wine in the pairing, as it isn’t produced on the island, and instead make different distillations like Mamajuana and source Clairin, an unaged sugarcane rum from Haiti, which needs to be bottled in Europe for it to be legally sold in the DR. They cook on a rustic wood fire, as it is done in the countryside, shunning most modern cooking equipment. It’s a fascinating approach in a region that needs some disruption.

    Olivier was born and raised in Switzerland with his Swiss mother making typical Dominican foods for him every day. He still felt disconnected from Dominican food and life there, but as he became a professional cook, working in kitchens around Europe and Latin America, including Pujol and Noma Mexico, he gradually gravitated more and more to the island. After a few pop ups and research trips (which he continues to write about), he moved to Santo Domingo and began creating a network of collaborators. Not just suppliers and culinary friends, but artisan craftsmen of every sort. Casarré is a restaurant that tells the story of and immerses you in Dominican culture in a really profound way. And as you will hear in this interview, he has the right temperate and patience for it to work.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Episode #101: Bryan Ford

    Episode #101: Bryan Ford
    Jan 17 2025
    Bryan Ford is the author of the new book Pan Y Dulce: The Latin American Baking Book. Bryan is a baker and a very good one, and I think he’s looking at Latin American breads unlike anyone else. His first book, New World Sourdough, released right in the middle of the pandemic was a giant hit and it’s one of my most used baking books. It’s good practical advice at making better sourdough and as I mention in the conversation, his persona makes it less intimidating. At least for me. I find bread intimidating sometimes because it takes a while to make and I found it easy to mess up, especially when I first started making it. The new book, Pan Y Dulce, goes deep into the traditional breads of Latin America and I’m excited to use it. There are recipes for things like Peruvian pan chuta, pizza like fugazettas from Argentina, cassava breads, and other types of baked goods that don’t get much attention stateside. For a lot of these traditional breads that are rarely made with wild yeasts these days, he includes sourdough options. I’m especially excited to test this out as so many of these breads have so much potential made in this way.

    Ford was born in the Bronx to Honduran immigrants and raised in New Orleans. He was an accountant that liked baking and started to make a wholesale business out of it on the side. When he made a Honduran pan de coco, at his mother’s request, his blog Artisan Bryan suddenly exploded. He is the the host of Magnolia Network’s Baked in Tradition and The Artisan’s Kitchen, and you’ve probably seen him on some other shows on Netflix and elsewhere. Aside of the new book Pan Y Dulce, he also launched a Substack newsletter last year, also under the name Artisan Bryan. Despite his growing popularity, he’s not afraid to talk about things like slavery and colonialism, which I find refreshing. It seems like you are supposed to ignore history if you gain some mainstream traction. These things have had an obvious impact on breadmaking in Latin America, so of course he, as an Afro-Honduran acknowledges them, right in the first pages of the new book. He does it in a way that still celebrates the recipes, though some editors might be scared away by it. I personally appreciate the way he does it. It would be stranger to me if he didn’t mention these things. So, show your support and buy the book.

    READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.
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    1 hr and 38 mins
  • The 100th Episode Extravaganza

    The 100th Episode Extravaganza
    Jan 2 2025
    Food in the year 2125 with Giuliana Furci, Nephi Craig & Andrea Petrini.

    This is a very special 100th episode of this podcast. That’s not something I ever expected to say. I really had no understanding of what it takes to launch a podcast when I started. I just recorded conversations with friends and colleagues and posted them online. That’s still basically what it is, but I think I’ve become a bit better about how I go about it. I have Juli of course as a co-host to ask intelligent questions and grasp big concepts that I miss. I’m a little more comfortable interviewing people now, and I have a better understanding of who makes a good guest. Some thoughts about food, cooking and life are very different than they were four years ago, while others are the same.

    Even though it was just a few years ago, the world seems like a very different kind of place than it was in April of 2019. We were still in the midst of the pandemic and everyone was trying to think of what direction the world. What was going to happen to restaurants. To hunger. To food systems. To ecosystems. Everyone had taken a step back and was starting to have a new perspective on things. Very quickly, we all became caught up in the same problems. I think we are still sorting ourselves out from the pandemic, especially as it relates to food. We’re still trying to envision what the future looks like. It it’s really fucking messy right now.

    For this episode I wanted to try and think well into the future. Not just the next five, ten or twenty years, which I think are going to be rough, but 100 years away. Can we imagine what that is going to look like? What are we going to be eating? How are we going to be producing this food? How are we going to feed the extra 2 billion people on the planet when the earth’s population peaks in 60 years?

    I asked three people I have known for a very long time to appear on this episode. All three have been past guests. They are extremely different people from different backgrounds and I have deep respect for all of them and the work that they do. I would never have imagined I could get them in a room together. There’s Giuliana Furci from Chile, who founded the Fungi Foundation and literally has and is changing the legal framework around fungi in the world. There’s Nephi Craig, the chef of Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, whose vision for ancestral food systems extends far beyond kitchen skills. And lastly, Andrea Petrini, the Italian writer and founder of Gelinaz!, who is continually questioning the idea of art as it relates to cooking. Of course there was also with Juliana Duque, my co-host, who brings her own anthropological background to the conversation. They are all some of my favorite people. They are people that continually fight for what they believe in, but they always do it with love. It’s something to aspire to and it was an honor to converse with them here.

    READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • Episode #99: Alejandro Osses

    Episode #99: Alejandro Osses
    Nov 15 2024
    Alejandro Osses is a food photographer from Bogotá, Colombia who recently moved to Madrid, Spain. He recently published a book of his work documenting food in Colombia over the past decade, called De Cero a Cuatromil Ochocientos, with Colombian publisher Hammbre de Cultura. He's a great photographer, that focuses on the human element behind the food as much as he does about the art of cooking, and the book takes you all over Colombia, from the high altitude wetlands and urban areas to Afro-Caribbean communities on the Pacific coast to indigenous outposts in the Amazon.

    Osses is also involved in a lot of other projects, alongside his wife, a great food writer named Carmen Posada. Together they have helped create Futuro Coca, a conference about coca leaves; Mucho Colombia, a distribution model for heritage Colombian ingredients from rural and indigenous producers; and Migrant Food Systems, which he is developing in Spain.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Episode #98: Shane Mitchell

    Episode #98: Shane Mitchell
    Nov 1 2024
    Shane Mitchell is the author of the book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots, which is a history of food in the American South, often reflecting on her family’s three centuries of history on Edisto Island, South Carolina connects with it. While told through stories that center around 11 different crops, the book isn’t directly about food, but how we center it as a way to understand cycles of life. All of the stories in the book, except for one, were originally published in The Bitter Southerner, a brilliant magazine and website about the South. It has some of the most beautiful writing anywhere in it and despite having little to do with the south I read it regularly.

    Shane lives in upstate New York and is the Editor at Large for Saveur, which is now back in print and absolutely deserves your support. She also writes for The New York Times and is the author Far Afield: Rare Food Encounters from Around the World, a book about her travels around the world while profiling the stewards of the world's traditional foodways and it also features beautiful photos and recipes. She is a many times James Beard award winner and one of my favorite writers anywhere, so I was really excited to have this extended conversation with her.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Episode #97: Sabor Barranquilla

    Episode #97: Sabor Barranquilla
    Oct 11 2024
    Rather than a straight forward interview, this episode is a report from on the ground in Barranquilla, Colombia during the city’s annual gastronomy festival, Sabor Barranquilla. The 17th edition of the festival occurred at the end of August and we were there to capture the sounds of the city and speak with local cooks, event organizers and people in the street, while exploring the region’s diverse cuisine, from Lebanese restaurants to fried street snacks and corozó wine.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    32 mins
  • Episode #96: Gilberto Briceño

    Episode #96: Gilberto Briceño
    Sep 27 2024
    Gilberto Briceño is the owner of RLT Cuisine, or Road Less Traveled Cuisine, in Playa Potrero, a small beach town in Guancaste, Costa Rica. RLT Cuisine is not a restaurant, but it’s also not not a restaurant. There is a restaurant element to it. Inside his food lab in a commercial building, nowhere near the beach, he has 4 seats inside of the main kitchen. Whenever someone wants to come in, he creates a 9-course meal out of local ingredients for them. But that is just a small fraction of what RLT Cuisine is. It's outdoor pop-up dinners in wild settings, a private chef service, product development, cooking classes and storytelling.

    Gilberto spent years staging at some of the best restaurants in the world, learning both the wrong way and the right ways to run a kitchen. He saw the toll that high level kitchens could take on a cook, but that it didn’t have to be that way. Not only is his concept for RLT Cuisine adaptable, going with the flow and making whatever idea work within its boundaries and the limits of the business, but it is kind. There are staff meals provided by a local cook and the idea that everyone working there has equal value.

    Social media is also an important part of what Gilberto does. His Tiktok videos are great and should be a reference for any small culinary business. They are less of an advertisement about the business and more of just a way for people to stumble onto the way he thinks, which in turn helps his business. It’s also a way to deepen knowledge of cuisine in the area. This is a part of Costa Rica that’s near a Blue Zone, one of just a handful of places on earth where people live the longest because of the local diet, but the widespread development along the coast over the last 10 years is wiping it away even as they market the very concept of blue zones. I have been spending a lot of time in Costa Rica over the past decade and it’s a really special place with a complicated history that I can’t really equate to anywhere else. It has the greatest network of accessible small farms in the region, while also having industrial farms that have some of the world’s highest rates of pesticide use. There are incredible local restaurants called sodas, while there are also more terrible, overpriced, ill-conceived tourist restaurants that don’t use local ingredients than anywhere I can think of. Anyway, Gilberto and his pura vida vibes is someone that can help shift the momentum.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Episode #95: María Álvarez

    Episode #95: María Álvarez
    Sep 13 2024
    María Álvarez is the co-founder, along with Isaac Martínez, of the publisher Novo, the very first publishing house dedicated to gastronomy in Mexico. Maria and Isaac started Novo in 2023 because they saw a lack in the types of books being published about Mexican cuisine, both in Mexico and abroad. The wanted to be a publisher that is more collaborative with other disciplines, more like a milpa. Rather than just a monoculture of corn, they wanted a multicropped garden of designers, photographers and other professionals to help support the vision of the author. In this interview she explains how she moved from the world of art publishing into culinary publishing and is helping shape a community around these niche books about food in Mexico, as well as through their podcast series, Radio Milpa.
    Novo now has published two books. The first is Cocina de Oaxaca, by Alejandro Ruiz, published last year. Ruiz is the chef of Casa Oaxaca, who is one of the godfathers of modern Oaxacan cooking and has helped teach in a generation of cooks at his restaurant Casa Oaxaca. They also just released Estado de Hongos, a book about mushrooms in central Mexico by the Mexican Japanese forager by Nanae Watabe. She supplies mushrooms to lots of the best restaurants in the DF and is at the intersection of all things mushrooms in Mexico and the book reflects that. This October, they will be publishing La República Democrática del Cerdo, by Pedro Reyes, who you might know from the Taco Chronicles on Netflix. You can order them online or find them in bookstores in Mexico, as well as buy some of the books on Amazon in the U.S. or at incredible culinary bookstores like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York and Now Serving in Los Angeles.

    This world of publishing culinary books in Latin America is really beginning to open up and I couldn’t be happier. I think a healthy publishing environment is one where a lot of different voices and aesthetics are being developed and not just that of a few large international publishers. In the interview we discuss how important the very language being used in a culinary book can be.

    Read more at New Worlder.
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    1 hr and 12 mins