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PODCAST

Sauced

What happens when two former chefs — now leading voices in the drinks world — turn the mic on their favorite topic: cooking with booze and drinking with food? That’s Sauced, a new weekly podcast from Tim McKirdy and Sother Teague. Each week, Tim and Sother unpack a single dish: its history, the techniques that make it sing, and the drinks that belong alongside it. From Beef Bourguignon to Crêpes Suzette, we"re exploring the classics — and the booze that gives them their identity. Tim is a drinks

arts food

All Episodes

01:38:16

Pulled Pork

Sauced ·

2026/10/01

The pork shoulder spent most of its life as a cheap, tough poverty cut. Then Pulled Pork went from Carolina pits to a London street-food trailer to menus across the city, and worldwide searches for it peaked in the spring of 2020. We trace how the humblest cut on the pig became a global craze, and what a pandemic had to do with it.We also get to the bottom of why the shoulder is sold as a butt, settle our non-negotiables for smoking one at home, and make the case for the sauce that really belongs on

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01:34:16

Shepherd's Pie

Sauced ·

2026/09/24

Online, the rule gets enforced like scripture: shepherds keep sheep, so Shepherd's Pie means lamb, and beef makes it a Cottage Pie. The oldest recipe usually cited for the dish asked for cold meat of any kind. For most of its life, nobody was checking what sat under the potatoes.We trace how a Monday-night leftover earned two names, meet the pharmacist who sold France on a crop it thought was pig feed, and ask why Americans eat so little lamb. The build settles which booze goes in the filling, where

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01:30:59

Hot Dogs

Sauced ·

2026/09/17

Americans eat about 20 billion hot dogs a year, roughly 70 per person, and close to 7 billion between Memorial Day and Labor Day alone. It is five centuries old and lives in our songs and our slang, yet it still loses top billing to the burger. From a $1.50 warehouse counter to $200 under gold leaf, no food is more American, or harder to pin down.We get into where it really came from and why the famous origin story is a myth, how to cook one so it snaps instead of splits, and the regional map that

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01:05:30

Chicken Caesar Salad

Sauced ·

2026/09/10

Everyone assumes the Caesar is Roman, or at least Italian. Instead, it was invented in Tijuana on the Fourth of July, 1924, by an Italian immigrant who worked a border crossing from San Diego because Prohibition had left his side the only place you could still sell a drink. It began as tableside theater, improvised from what a holiday rush left in the kitchen.We get into whether the anchovy everyone argues about earns a place in ours, where we land on breast or thigh, and how a dish that began as

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01:10:56

Shrimp and Grits

Sauced ·

2026/09/03

For most of its life, Shrimp and Grits was a morning meal, the thing shrimpers ate at dawn while the season was running. Its old names say so plainly: "breakfast shrimp," and the earlier "shrimp and hominy." Then a Chapel Hill chef did the daring thing and moved it onto the dinner menu, and a 1985 New York Times write-up sent a humble plate national.We get into how it climbed from the docks to the white tablecloth, why grits and not shrimp are the real non-negotiable, where we land on booze in a

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01:11:07

Bonus Episode: Mashed Potatoes

Sauced ·

2026/08/29

This is a bonus episode that first went out to our premium subscribers in January. We're dropping it in the public feed today so you can hear what bonus episodes are like. They typically feature deep dives into a single technique, ingredient, or side dish, or historical deep dive.Mashed potatoes might be one of the simplest dishes to make, but getting them right? That's another story. We're breaking down where things go wrong (gluey textures, waterlogged spuds, the "point of no return") and how the

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01:31:02

Beef Wellington

Sauced ·

2026/08/27

The hardest part of a Beef Wellington isn't the beef. It is getting a crisp pastry shell and a rare, rested center out of one hot oven, both finishing at the same moment, and one wrong move ruins the whole thing. We take the build apart so it finally stops being intimidating.We trace how a French classic wearing a British hero's name became the most obsessed-over showstopper on the internet, right up to the chef who turned it into a meme. Then we get into the one cut of beef that works, the pile of

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01:15:08

Chicken Piccata

Sauced ·

2026/08/20

Chicken Piccata puts the bird in its title, but the capers run the show. Pull out that hand-harvested flower bud, too precious to come in a normal-sized jar, and two professional chefs will tell you the dish stops being itself. So how did an ingredient you can barely fish out with a spoon, one that people swear once cost more than gold, become the thing a weeknight classic lives or dies on?This week we get into what a caper actually is and why it comes in six market sizes almost no one has heard of,

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01:13:49

Osso Buco

Sauced ·

2026/08/13

The same thing that ruins osso buco is the thing that makes it. The tough silverskin wrapped around a veal shank starts shrinking at about 140 degrees and cups the meat into a hockey puck. Cook it low, hold it long, and that same collagen melts into the gelatin that turns a cut the butcher couldn't give away into a special-occasion plate.This week we get into the two moves that keep the shank from cupping, why veal sends the whole dish white instead of red, and the trick that makes the texture

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01:27:54

Lobster Rolls

Sauced ·

2026/08/06

Lobster used to be fertilizer. Coastal tribes buried it in the fields, colonists let it wash up in piles two feet deep, and prisoners complained they were being fed bugs. In 1634, William Wood wrote that a heap of lobster shells by your door marked you as too poor to eat anything else.This week we follow that same animal to a fifty-dollar tray of cold lobster salad on a buttered, griddled bun, and figure out how the cockroach of the sea got its glow-up. We take opposite corners on the only debate

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01:06:33

Chicken Teriyaki

Sauced ·

2026/07/30

You might think teriyaki is a sauce, but it's a cooking technique. Teri means the shine, yaki means grilled, and the name describes what happens when you lacquer meat over fire, a move the Japanese have been making since the 1600s. The bottle didn't arrive until 1961.This week we trace it from an 1813 shrimp dish to the supermarket aisle, and make the case that the real version, four ingredients reduced in a pan, beats anything you can buy. We get into why almost everyone still reaches for the jar,

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01:22:18

Ratatouille

Sauced ·

2026/07/23

The most famous ratatouille in the world isn't a ratatouille. The dish that makes the critic weep in the Pixar film is a confit byaldi, thin sliced and fanned in a pan, designed by Thomas Keller off a recipe Michel Guérard published in 1976. What Provence actually makes is a stew, and this week we make the case that the stew is the better dish.We trace the word back to the Occitan, where it meant a coarse stew of odds and ends and wasn't a compliment, through to the 1930s when the version we

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01:29:52

Baja Fish Tacos

Sauced ·

2026/07/16

The Baja fish taco didn't come from a San Diego beach. It was born in the late 1950s at a black market in Ensenada, and the first ones were grilled shark. This week we trace it from that fish stall across the border to the college kid who turned it into a SoCal staple, then build the deep-fried version everyone pictures.Along the way we make the case that the corn tortilla matters as much as the fish, get into the 3,500-year-old process that makes a real one, and argue out the non-negotiables that

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01:07:36

Bolognese

Sauced ·

2026/07/09

Real Bolognese is a meat sauce that happens to contain a little tomato, not the tomato sauce with meat that most of us grew up on. That's only where the misconceptions start. It's never served on spaghetti. And Bologna guards the real thing so closely that the city registered the official recipe, right down to the exact width of the pasta, with the Chamber of Commerce.We trace it from a cardinal's cook in the 1700s, whose ragù had no tomato in it at all, through Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 version to

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01:46:08

Burgers

Sauced ·

2026/07/02

At least six towns claim they invented the hamburger — and the one the Library of Congress actually crowned still won't serve it on a bun or with ketchup. Which raises the real fight we spend the episode having: what even makes a burger a burger?Just in time for the Fourth of July, we trace it from the Hamburg steak to the smash era, then go round after round on the things that actually matter — the bun, the cheese, the sauce, and the doneness most people get wrong. There's the counterintuitive salt

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01:22:42

Paella

Sauced ·

2026/06/25

Paella isn't the rice — it's the pan. Or at least, that's where the name comes from. And in Valencia, where the dish was born, there's even a body that certifies which versions have earned the name and declares the rest "crimes against rice." Yet the seafood paella the whole world orders? The purists barely count it.We get into the authenticity war, the official ten-ingredient list, why a whole category gets written off as "rice with stuff," the one ingredient that starts fights, and how a field

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01:12:07

Steak au Poivre

Sauced ·

2026/06/18

Five Paris chefs claimed to have invented Steak au Poivre in the early 20th-century. Four of them wrote letters of complaint to the same 1950 culinary magazine. The fifth had the best story.We dig into the origin fight, Julia Child's surprising position on the flambé, the chemistry behind why pre-ground pepper is inferior, and a red wine pairing that mirrors the pepper on a molecular level.For the glass, Americans in Paris — an Armagnac sipper built off the Vieux Carré, finished with a fresh crack

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01:12:53

Beer Can Chicken

Sauced ·

2026/06/11

Beer can chicken is the dish that defies its own science. The most credible American barbecue scientists tested it and concluded the beer in the can does almost nothing the cook thinks. Backyard chefs from Memorial Day to Labor Day have kept doing it anyway — and so will we.Today, we dig into the contested origins — including a 1993 Houston Chronicle article that puts the technique in former President George H.W. Bush's kitchen — the science that quietly buried it, the geometry that actually makes

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58:56

Clams Casino

Sauced ·

2026/06/04

Clams Casino has a paperwork problem. A Rhode Island maître d' named Julius Keller claimed to invent the dish at the Narragansett Pier Casino in 1917 — but a January 1900 menu from the Central Park Casino in New York City, held in the New York Public Library, predates him by 17 years. And neither one was a gambling house.We dig into both origin claims, the Portuguese-American "stuffies" tradition in Rhode Island that may pre-date both, and how to take a working man's ingredient and dress it up — a

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58:13

Tiramisu

Sauced ·

2026/05/28

Tiramisu's origin is contested. One claim puts it in a Treviso restaurant in 1972. Another places it in Friuli, more than a decade earlier. But zabaglione — the dish's direct ancestor — has always been defined by sweet Marsala. The booze was the family inheritance dropped at Tiramisu's birth, and added back by everyone since.This week: the 1972 Le Beccherie story, the rival Friuli claim that pre-dates it, why the original was kept deliberately sober, egg-safety concerns, and where we actually land

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