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sourdough

Secrets of Sourdough: TRANSCRIPT

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Secrets of Sourdough, first released on December 19, 2017. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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Secrets of Sourdough

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Today, you can find a huge variety of breads on supermarket shelves, only a few of which are called "sourdough." For most of human history, though, any bread that wasn't flat was sourdough—that is, it was leavened with a wild community of microbes. And yet we know surprisingly little about the microbes responsible for raising sourdough bread, not to mention making it more nutritious and delicious than bread made with commercial yeast. For starters, where do the fungi and bacteria in a sourdough starter come from? Are they in the water or the flour? Do they come from the baker's hands? Or perhaps they're just floating around in the foggy air, as the bakers of San Francisco firmly believe? This episode, Cynthia and Nicky go to Belgium with two researchers, fifteen bakers, and quite a few microbes for a three-day science experiment designed to answer this question once and for all. Listen in for our exclusive scoop on the secrets of sourdough.

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TRANSCRIPT Nutrition Advice Decoded

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Nutrition Advice Decoded: What Foods Are Actually Good For Us, What Should We Avoid, and Why Is It All SO Confusing?, first released on March 25, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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TRANSCRIPT First Class Fare

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode First Class Fare, first released on May 25, 2021. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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TRANSCRIPT The Brightest Bulb

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, The Brightest Bulb, first released on December 22, 2020. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Student 1: Add barley, onions and shallot… Oh my god, I can’t pronounce that. Shallots. And cook until soft.

COOKING SOUNDS

Student 2: Wait, what meat is this?

Student 1: Lamb.

Student 2: Medium rare lamb? Mmm. LAUGHS

SEARING

Student 2: How do you know what it’s done though?

Student 1: I don’t know when it’s done.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Back in the days when we could hang out in groups indoors, we spent an afternoon cooking lamb stew with a bunch of teenagers in the kitchen lab of North Carolina State University.

NICOLA TWILLEY: We were there at the invitation of our old friend Rob Dunn, who many of you will remember fondly from our sourdough episode. These days, he’s got a whole new question he’s trying to answer.
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The Brightest Bulb

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Imagine, for a moment, a world without garlic: garlic-free garlic bread, tzatziki sans Allium sativum, a chili crisp defanged. If this sounds like the makings of a horror story to you, you’re not alone. Garlic consumption in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1980, and people around the world have been enjoying the stuff for thousands of years. But alliums smell like sulfur, and sulfur is something humans are born *not* liking—so why did we start adding garlic, onions, and their kin to our food? This episode, we join microbiologist Rob Dunn and food safety specialist Ben Chapman to follow along as they conduct the world's first experiment designed to figure out whether alliums started out as a food safety additive designed to keep our lamb stew safe for longer, and only later turned into a flavor we crave. Plus, why did the British government send garlic to the trenches in WWI? What do fetal sniffing, Egyptian fertility tests, Korean mythology, and the world’s first-recorded labor strike have to do with the stinking rose? Listen in now for all this and more!

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TRANSCRIPT Pizza Pizza!

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Pizza Pizza!, first released on May 19. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.


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