Home Cooking · Samin Nosrat & Hrishikesh Hirway

Here's What Else You Knead to Know Today (with W. Kamau Bell and Stella Parks)

April 7, 2020·53 min·4 clips

Stella Parks explains how to bake with whole wheat flour when white flour is unavailable.

1. Home Cooking is a four-part quarantine miniseries hosted by Samin Nosrat and Rishi Dhingra, with this second episode featuring James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Stella Parks and comedian W. Kamau Bell. 2. Samin Nosrat co-created the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat cookbook and television show; Rishi Dhingra is the creator of Song Exploder; Stella Parks is the author of BraveTart, Iconic American Desserts, and a contributor to Serious Eats. 3. The episode addresses the specific cooking constraints of quarantine—limited grocery access, substitute ingredients, no refrigeration for some, and tight budgets—through listener questions. 4. Samin opens by describing her pandemic cooking regression into a 'red sauce joint mood': pepperoni pizza, pork meatballs in a lazy tomato sauce made from a hand-crushed can of tomatoes, Gouda rinds, and the ends of onions normally thrown away. 5. She references Marcella Hazan's famous four-ingredient tomato sauce—tomatoes, onion, butter, salt—as the inspiration for her own simplified version. 6. Listener Marta's question about cooking on $45 for 14 days prompts Samin to calculate $3.21 per day and recommend tortilla española—eight eggs, potatoes, caramelized onions—as six filling portions for roughly $4. 7. Rishi recommends Good and Cheap by Leanne Brown, a cookbook designed for SNAP-budget cooking and available as a free PDF at leannebrown.com in both English and Spanish; editor Margaret Miller credited the creamy zucchini fettuccine as a standout recipe. 8. Seattle bus driver Max asks for no-refrigerator, no-microwave lunch ideas for a 30-minute break on essential-route service, and Samin recommends farro salad, chickpea salad, and cabbage slaws that 'actually improve' sitting dressed for hours. 9. The soba noodle salad and focaccia sandwich with salami and pickled peppers are added options, and Rishi recommends crumbling a jalapeño kettle chip over any salad for crunch and umami. 10. A voicemail from listener Nicole describes proofing focaccia dough in her clothes dryer after her house was too cold; Samin and Rishi celebrate this as an example of quarantine cooking creativity. 11. Stella Parks joins to address the most common baking obstacle: white flour unavailability, which she frames as primarily an expectation-management problem—adapt the recipe to the flour you have, not the flour to the recipe. 12. Stella recommends her 100% whole wheat sandwich loaf on Serious Eats for beginners, and endorses no-knead bread (specifically Kenji's recipe on Serious Eats) as a flour-independent approach that lets time do the work of a stand mixer. 13. A listener in Rome asks about substituting Italian 00 flour for American all-purpose flour in brownies and chocolate chip cookies; Samin explains that 00 flour has lower protein content, making it unsuitable for crusty bread but acceptable for cookies, where slight spreading is tolerable. 14. Listener Ian from Los Angeles—with a new baby and a wife craving white cake—has only whole wheat flour, wild sockeye salmon, and Werther's Originals; Stella's verdict is that white cake is structurally impossible without white flour, and both hosts apologize to Ian's wife Emily. 15. Stella reveals her BraveTart carrot cake works with 100% whole wheat flour and can be made with shredded, squeezed apples in place of carrots—solving simultaneously Ian's question and listener Rose's problem of 19 apples she can't finish. 16. Samin confesses she had spent four months independently developing the same 'anything cake' concept using whole wheat flour and rotating fruits, only to learn Stella had already published it. 17. Rishi draws a parallel: while scoring a video game, he realized he had independently written a main theme from Skyrim. 18. The episode's final segment with Samin covers using stale bread as an ingredient, including panzanella, bread pudding, French toast, panade, ribollita, and a breadcrumb cake from the Camino restaurant cookbook. 19. Home cooks dealing with pandemic-era pantry limitations, baking beginners navigating flour substitutions, and anyone cooking on a tight budget will find this episode directly applicable. 20. Listeners expecting polished audio production or a traditional interview format may find the conversational, multi-guest phone-call structure slightly loose.

As heard by us

A warm quarantine kitchen call-in for home bakers, pantry improvisers, and anyone tempted by no-knead bread.

Home Cooking's second quarantine episode has the loose, generous feel of a kitchen call-in show made for people suddenly spending a lot more time with their flour, pantry staples, and cravings.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want baking advice that feels like friends talking over the counter.

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