Come for the Inspo, Stay for the Company

Compulsive recipe checkers, raise your hands. For scores of home cooks (myself included), an ingredient list goes in one eye and out the other, leaving us to pause mid-whisk to see if we’ve missed a step.

With Play Me a Recipe, that problem dissolves. Bringing you off the page and into the zone, this podcast has beloved cooks guide you through their favorite recipes, explaining when to add the spices and where to stop for stiff peaks.

Before you start any episode, it helps to scan the recipe, conveniently living in each episode’s show notes (this saved me from omitting sugar from my Plantains Foster!). And, while mise en place is arguably important in any recipe, it’s crucial here to be able to dash in flour to a roux as soon as your guide instructs you.

You won’t always be in perfect sync with your host—you can pause any time, and rewinding is also mercifully easy (on Apple Podcasts and other, smaller platforms) thanks to the podcast “chapters,” which you can tap to skip to any step of the recipe.

But this pod isn’t purely utilitarian. As you move through a recipe, your host shares anecdotes about the joy of a train-station egg sandwich; how potato salad became a Black cultural staple; or how similar soufflé is to queso— all over a score of sunny jazz that wraps you in a blanket of comfort as you cook. I’ve even started listening to the show outside the kitchen, just to enter a space of ease.

Come for the inspo and stay for the company. You can play me a recipe any time.

Is there a recipe you'd like to hear us make? Tell us all about it at [email protected]!