Food52 hosts break down recipes and food-business origin stories, from sourdough to Salty Pimp cones.
Burnt Toast treats food as a doorway into memory, technique, culture, and the occasional giant pumpkin. Episodes move from hands-on baking and bread-making to White House dinners, ice cream nostalgia, and the people who turn recipes into stories.
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Burnt Toast is produced by Food52 and mixes two formats: solo or single-guest recipe walkthroughs, and two-host interview conversations. Recipe episodes, some packaged under the Play Me a Recipe banner, have a baker such as Anthony Falco talk listeners through a dish step by step, down to gram measurements, hydration percentages, and oven temperatures. Interview episodes are hosted by Food52 staff — managing editor Kenzie Wilbur and co-founder Meryl Stubbs have co-hosted conversations with guests like Big Gay Ice Cream founders Doug Quint and Brian Petroff. A separate recurring segment, Genius Recipe Tapes, is hosted by Kristen McGlory and features cookbook authors and food bloggers, such as Tara O'Brady, breaking down the technical development of a signature recipe, including failed test batches and ingredient substitutions. Typical topics include bread and dough technique, cookie chemistry, the branding and business history of small food companies, and how home cooks turn a blog or column into a published cookbook. Guests tend to be working bakers, chefs, food writers, or entrepreneurs discussing one specific dish or business rather than general food-culture commentary. The tone is conversational and instructional rather than debate-driven or news-oriented. Listeners after precise technique get gram-level recipe detail; listeners after backstory get founder narratives about accidental branding, viral moments, and career pivots. The show serves home bakers and cooks looking for reproducible technique as well as listeners curious about how small food businesses and cookbook careers get built. Episodes run as continuous dialogue or narrated demonstrations rather than heavily produced narrative segments.
Made for: Home bakers and cooks wanting gram-precise recipe technique, plus listeners curious about the founding stories behind small food businesses and cookbooks.
What sets it apart: Pairs real-time, measurement-precise recipe walkthroughs with founder-origin interviews, and folds in crossover episodes from Food52's other podcasts like Play Me a Recipe and Genius Recipe Tapes.
Food intersects with our lives in more ways than we think. Food52's Burnt Toast podcast chases those stories to give listeners the perfect pieces of snackable dinner-party fodder—all inside of a commute's time.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Burnt Toast pairs hands-on cooking guidance with lively conversations about the memories, science, and power carried through food.
Burnt Toast treats cooking as both something done with the hands and something worth thinking through. Practical episodes guide listeners through onion and olive bread or malted milk chocolate rugelach, pausing over starter activity, wet dough, filling texture, and the border…
A White House dinner goes cold; your onion-and-olive bread comes out hot.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A cozy bake-along for malted milk chocolate rugelach, with practical assembly detail and a nostalgic cookie-pastry finish.
Malted milk chocolate rugelach gets a warm apartment-kitchen bake-along, with Jesse Sefchik moving from dough and filling to chilling, egg wash, coarse sugar, and the first too-warm bite.
A relaxed cook-along that makes onion and olive bread feel tactile, forgiving, and quietly nostalgic.
Anthony Falco keeps this onion and olive bread close to the counter: flour on the scale, starter broken into water by hand, olive oil measured and waiting for the dough to come together.
A warm, practical cookie conversation where texture, memory, and simple technique do the work.
Burnt Toast turns one chocolate chip cookie into a compact lesson in why simple baking can be so satisfying. Kristen McGlory brings on Tara O'Brady to talk through her basic great chocolate chip cookies, a recipe admired for cold butter and eggs, no stand mixer, and a texture…
A sharp food-history story where terrible White House dinners reveal Eleanor Roosevelt's power, politics, and possible private payback.
Burnt Toast treats the Roosevelt White House dinner table as a deliciously miserable little scandal. Guests arrived thrilled to meet FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, then wrote home about gray meat, limp salads, and the Washington rule that you ate before a White House invitation.
A funny, fond ice cream chat with Big Gay Ice Cream on truck treats, salty cones, naming lore, and strange toppings.
Burnt Toast starts with the kind of ice cream-truck roll call that can send a person straight back to fifth grade, then lets Doug Quint and Brian Petroff of Big Gay Ice Cream run with it.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Lillian Cunningham travels to five national parks to trace the human fights behind each landscape.
Academic Mukulika Banerjee and journalist Pragya Tiwari interview one expert each episode on India.
Jesse Sefchik guides listeners through making malted milk chocolate arugula cookies, from dough preparation to baking, highlighting the nostalgic flavor of malted milk powder and tips for achieving perfect spiraled holiday treats.
Anthony Falco, a pizza maker based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, guides listeners through his onion and olive bread recipe on Food52's Play Me a Recipe.
Molly Gilbert, blogger and author of Sheet Pan Sweets, guides listeners through an apple fritter cake using four cups of chopped apples and a half-sheet pan.
Food blogger and cookbook author Tara O'Brady joins host Kristen McGlory to discuss the origin of her widely celebrated basic great chocolate chip cookie, which took approximately 700 test batches to perfect.
Leonardo Urena, a Mexican immigrant working at a California vineyard, has broken state records three times growing giant pumpkins that weigh over 1,400 pounds.
Eleanor Roosevelt served the worst food in White House history, but the reasons behind those infamous meals reveal a complex story of marriage, power, and women's independence.
Doug Quint and Brian Petroff of Big Gay Ice Cream join Food52's Kenzie Wilbur and Meryl Stubbs to eat melted Good Humor products and discuss the origins of their cult New York ice cream business.