The Recipe with Kenji and Deb

If you've ever spent an afternoon making the same dish three times because the first two weren't quite right, Deb Perelman and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt are your people. Deb runs Smitten Kitchen, one of the most beloved food blogs on the internet, and Kenji wrote The Food Lab and The Wok -- books that turned home cooking into a science without sucking the joy out of it. Together on The Recipe, they talk through what actually goes into building a great recipe from scratch. They'll spend an entire episode on stovetop mac and cheese, debating cheese blends, starch ratios, and whether you really need to make a roux. Another episode tackles Eggs Benedict and whether the hollandaise is worth the stress. The format is conversational and genuinely funny. These two disagree often enough to keep things interesting -- Kenji tends toward the scientific, Deb toward the intuitive -- and the tension between those approaches is what makes the show click. Episodes release every other week through Radiotopia from PRX, and each one runs about 45 minutes. The show launched in early 2024 and has covered everything from meatloaf to brownies to burgers, with occasional listener Q&A episodes thrown in. They've taken breaks for book-writing projects, so the episode count is modest, but quality over quantity is clearly the priority here. It's the rare cooking podcast that actually makes you better in the kitchen, not just entertained while you're away from it.