“Highlights include the impossibly charming Raymond Blanc, who despite being such an iconic stalwart is so forward thinking in his approach to how we consume food.”
We love a weekly podcast fix, and it seems we’re not alone. According to Ofcom, 7.1 million people listen to podcasts each week in Britain, with more than half of them jumping on the podcast bandwagon in the last two years. With Christmas on the horizon there’s much feasting to be done, so we’ve compiled our three favourite food-based pods, the perfect accompaniments for the many mid-afternoon digestion sessions between Christmas and New Year.
Table Manners with Jessie Ware
This wonderfully chaotic podcast scores high on authenticity. Jessie Ware and her mum Lenne cook for a different celebrity each week, but despite their star power, guests are often admonished for arriving late or making high maintenance menu requests. The dishes don’t always go to plan and in the most recent season, Jessie’s new baby makes a few mid-nap cameos to the delight of that episode’s guest. Highlights include the impossibly charming Raymond Blanc, who despite being such an iconic stalwart is so forward thinking in his approach to how we consume food, and Antoni Porowski who, despite being lavished with compliments for his physical beauty for the first 10 minutes, seems as sweet and humble in person as he is depicted on Netflix’s Queer Eye.
Out to Lunch with Jay Rayner
I’ve gathered (from the comments on Twitter) that Jay Rayner and his ‘acid tongue’ are a bit like Marmite – people seem to love or hate them. I’ve always been of the former, and whenever he’s on the Masterchef Professionals judging panel, I sit up straighter knowing I’m about to get an authoritative opinion on whether the jus is in fact a jus or just a glorified red wine sauce. He was a great guest on Table Manners so when I heard about Out to Lunch it didn’t take much for me to subscribe. It’s a simple premise, each episode he takes a celebrity to a restaurant of his choosing and lets the wine and conversation flow. Sometimes this free-flowing approach is at risk of getting bit waffly (Table Manners is yet to fully master it) but in Jay’s masterful hands the chatter on food, feelings and the things good food can make us feel lends itself to pleasantly easy listening. As a devoted Stanley Tucci-phile, I particularly enjoyed the episode where they lunched on pasta at Locanda Locatelli, where as a trembling account executive, I carried out a photo shoot during my first few weeks at William Murray!
BBC’s The Food Programme
Deviating from the celebrity interviewing / cooking for a fellow celebrity theme, we have BBC’s The Food Programme. The weekly podcast takes an inquisitive deep dive into the food we eat and is a positive enabler for those wanting to be more informed about all aspects of the food chain. Recent episodes used the tomato to examine the potential impact of Brexit on food, and explored how and why we experience the sensation of sourness, a must for anyone who lost all feeling in their tongue in childhood attempts to conquer Extreme Sour Warheads – turns out, it was due to an ungodly coating of malic acid! At around half an hour, every episode is nicely digestible brain food for your commute.
