We caught up with Cameron to ask him more about how the show came to be…

Tell us about the podcast! Where did the idea for the show come from?

Lick the Plate was born out of my realisation that everything I do socially has food and/or drink as an element. Cuisine is a true passion of mine and has been for such a long time. In the past I have narrated a podcast not of my own creation, and I’ve also co-hosted a podcast of which I was a co-creator. I always wanted to singularly host my own podcast but feared that I would never have the time to create something from scratch, given how busy my life can be as an actor.

When a business venture’s door closed prematurely, I suddenly had time. Although it was unfortunate for that to have happened, it was a blessing in disguise. You know the saying: “When one door closes, another one opens.” Once I had the free time, and once I convinced myself to take the leap, my creative juices overflowed and out came Lick the Plate!

Why podcasting? What is it about the medium that you enjoy so much?

There is a freedom and autonomy that the medium of podcasting welcomes. It is one of the few types of media in which you can truly and unapologetically be authentic to who you are as a creator. The more authentic and honest a podcast’s theme and voice is, the better. There are so many types of podcasts, with so many ways to execute, and I love how the genre is open to so many variations of expression and production value. Podcasting made me realise that I love to edit and produce! I most enjoy the technical elements of it. Being that my podcast is edited, I really get into the nitty-gritty of the audio production and am really focused on making sure that listener experience is top-notch.

Food podcasts are very popular, why do you think the topic lends itself to podcasting so well?

Food is community; food is fellowship; food is life! No matter where you come from, food is a crucial element to culture. It’s how we share stories. It’s one of the things we use to bookmark moments in life. Every person has a relationship with food, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent, so it is the perfect vehicle for driving conversation and for discovery.

Which podcasts do you take inspiration from?

Of the many podcasts I have in my library, I take inspiration most from The Guardian’s Comfort Eating with Grace Dent; Where’s Home Really? with Jimi Famurewa; Stirring It Up with Andi & Miquita Oliver; The West End Frame Show; and Busy Being Black. It’s so much about storytelling and each of those podcasts tell stories in such engaging, honest ways – with unique personality.

Who’s your dream guest for the podcast?

Hands down my dream guest is Stanley Tucci! I love everything he does and I feel like I would have a ball just chatting with him about food and life. His book Taste is one of my favourite books ever and our passion for both cuisine and travel align. Plus both of our voices on one podcast – melt in your mouth (or ear?) goodness!

What do you hope listeners take away from the show?

Oftentimes ‘cuisine’ can feel inaccessible; it can have connotations of being exclusionary. I hope that listeners embrace that food of all types – from street food to haute cuisine – is for everyone, regardless of race, class, education, socioeconomic background or culture. It’s all about food’s accessibility. I want them to embrace that we as human beings are very much connected through food, and realise how much we may actually have in common. Food is global and I want listeners to have a global listening experience. People should feel welcome to walk away from the podcast and eat or drink something new that they’ve never had before.

Anything else you would like readers to know?

Season 1 is going so well and I am looking forward to sharing more food stories with people. You can look out for Season 2 of Lick the Plate in the springtime! Make sure to subscribe on the podcast platform of choice and follow on social media to keep up-to-date with everything. – @licktheplatepodcast

Listen to Lick The Plate on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other popular podcast apps >>

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But The Great British Bake Off is part of the furniture now, and despite shuffling presenters and channels has retained its cosy charms, and its weekly knockout format makes it a perfect show to whip up a quality watchalong podcast for. Some are presented to the judges – that’s you, podcast fan – and quickly found to have collapsed in the oven, or gone all funny in the middle, or unaccountably have mixed some pretty inadvisable flavours together.

Not these ones though. These are the podcasting equivalents of the star bakers: the best Great British Bake Off podcasts.

Baking Bad

Comedians Ross Drummond, Harry Monaghan and North American correspondent Claire Downs chew over the events of each episode, in an enjoyably home-brewed podcast which has a lot of fun with the transatlantic appeal of Bake Off – the show is, Americans are reminded, screened on every IMAX screen on the country each week. It’s got a magnificent take on the Bake Off theme tune for its opening sting too. Listen now >>

Worth the Calories

Matthew and Cathryn Vose run the rule over the contestants and their efforts, as you’d expect, but the cherry on the extra dollop of cream on top of this cake is their enthusiastic dissection of exactly how doable any of the individual entries are for the home baker. It’s that linking of the show and the slightly frazzled would-be cream horn maker which gives Worth the Calories its charm. Plus, there are bonus recipes in the show notes each time. Listen now >>

The Bake Down

There are only a select few people around who know what it’s like to enter the tent and feel its suffocating atmosphere play merry hell with their creme pat. The Bake Down brings in expert witnesses in Bake Off alumni Jane Beedle (series 7), Howard Middleton (series 4) and Dan Beasley-Harling (series 9) to join host Sarah Taylor to talk review the action each week, and recall what it was really like baking under the steely gaze of Paul, Mary and Prue. Listen now >>

Sticky Bun Boys

This is a watchalong pod which has wandered between Bake Off and The Traitors, but is back on Bake Off for the new series. David Atherton and Michael Chakraverty are particularly keen on the innuendo – they tend to title their episodes after new entries in the canon, like “dry beaver” – and as well as going over the twists and turns of each episode, they speak to former contestants for an inside scoop. Plus: they love a bonus dating disaster story. Listen now >>

The post These are the BEST podcasts about Great British Bake Off appeared first on POD BIBLE.

Far be it from us to start gushing about high street supermarkets, and obviously other high street supermarkets are available, but everything Waitrose does comes with the implicit promise that it’s going to be a little bit nicer than the equivalent own-brand product you’d have got elsewhere. It’s a little present to yourself.

Its podcast, Dish, has that feel. The idea is that it’s a dinner party with a different famous type each time, and exactly the kind of unguarded, daft conversation which any decent dinner party usually degenerates into with the appropriate company and drinks. Hartnett, the Michelin-starred chef, wisely takes charge of the cooking to put together a different dish every time; Grimshaw does the glad-handing, sous-cheffing and sommeliering.

That isn’t to say that it’s over-polished or prim: hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett’s skill is in making each episode sound like you’re earwigging on their conversation with a famous friend having been sat next to them in a restaurant, or perhaps that you can hear their conversation floating through the kitchen window. Here’s where to start.

S1 E1: Nick and Angela

It’s an obvious place to start, but given that you’ll be spending a whole lot of time with Grimshaw and Hartnett from here on out it’s an essential grounding in their attitudes to food and where they’re coming from. This first dish is a pea and pancetta risotto, with a side of memories of Hartnett’s time being lambasted by Gordon Ramsey for making a hash of a terrine and sending butter flying everywhere from a stand mixer. “And as I’m cleaning down in my panic, I switched the freezer off,” Hartnett remembers. “So then I start melting the ice creams for lunch, everything.” It’s reassuring to know that even extremely good chefs have literal and metaphorical meltdowns when the pressure’s on. Plus: the insider knowledge of which famous people are famous enough to demand takeaway from Hartnett’s restaurant. Harrison Ford is a big yes, as are Cher and Claudia Winkleman. Sting’s touch and go.

S2 E1: Rylan Clark

Everyone’s favourite X Factor dud turned all-round presenting and chatting geezer is a national treasure in the making, and his visit to Hartnett and Grimshaw wanders typically quickly from the point and onto the many types of wildlife making themselves at home chez Clark. That includes a one-legged pheasant he found using his treadmill, and the snake which he found staring him down in the kitchen. Obviously he asked Instagram what to do.

“Half of them were saying, ‘It’s a grass snake, it’s more frightened of you.’ The other half were saying, ‘My dad’s a vet and it’s gonna kill you.’” Panicking, Rylan called his gardener to come and sort the snake out, which had gone missing again. “So I’m in a boiler suit I once wore on X Factor, tucked into a pair of UGG boots. And it was boiling as well, it was like 30, 40 degrees out. So he’s opened up the bi-folds. It was like Cilla Black’s ‘Moment of Truth.’”

He lived to tell the tale, clearly, and to wolf down the beer and burger Hartnett prepared for him.

S3 E7: Aisling Bea

The slightly luvvie-ish chat about how Aisling bumped into Grimshaw while he was getting a facial in Los Angeles – “gym-ed out, with his face absolutely pummelled and worked on” – soon turns into a deep dive into Bea’s extremely extensive knowledge of potatoes as they tuck into tuna niçoise and its natural counterpart, a nice whisky. If you’ve ever wondered exactly how to become a potato farmer, Bea has some sound but kind of gross advice: “How you do it is you just cut an old potato in half, let it dry out, and then – this sounds disgusting – its eyes will become its legs and then the eyes are to grow into a bit of soil, and then another potato comes out of the potato.”

Listen to Dish now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

To learn more about Angela and Nick, their love of podcasts, and the show read our interview in Issue 29 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

The post Where to start with… Dish appeared first on POD BIBLE.

And yet, food podcasting is massive. There’s a banquet table stuffed with food podcasts waiting for you out there. Table Manners kicked down the kitchen door; Off Menu burst through it, and surfed the wave of food podcasts which followed to become one of the biggest podcasts in the UK.

It’s food’s universality and specificity which makes it such a handy and bottomless topic to build a podcast around. You probably eat three times a day, maybe have some snacks. So, hopefully, do most other people.

But the infinite number of ways of eating, and what’s eaten, and why, make it one of the easiest ways to talk about big, complicated things like identity, class, childhood, family, and different cultures around the country and around the world. Bon appetit.

Off Menu

Well, obviously. Ed Gamble and James Acaster’s dream restaurant has welcomed the likes of Bob Mortimer, Louis Theroux and Claudia ‘I’ve never drunk water in my life’ Winkleman over the last three years, as well as half the stand-ups who Gamble and Acaster have bumped into on the circuit. Guests build a dream menu – poppadoms or bread, then starter, main, dessert, side and drink, not in that order – and bicker about it for an hour. A juggernaut. Listen >>

Table Manners

Again: well, obviously. It’s less about the celeb interviews, and more about the homely vibe which Lennie and Jessie Ware evoke from their kitchen, with each chat at the dinner table soundtracked click-clacking of cutlery on plates and scraping chairs. The interviews aren’t bad though. Paul McCartney’s been chatting pretty much non-stop for 60 years now, and thanks to Table Manners we’ve only just found out that he does eye yoga. Listen >>

Lecker

The name means ‘delicious’ in German, and there’s an appropriately international bent to Lecker. The stories and interviews come in different forms – sometimes it’s an essay-style consideration of the lockdown sourdough boom, other times an in-the-field bit of reportage on the World Bonnag Championships on the Isle of Man, and occasionally interviews with chefs and writers about the food culture they know best. Listen >>

Home Cooking

Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat is more than just a gigantic cookbook and endearingly goofy Netflix travelogue doc. It’s a kindly, beckoning hand through hundreds of different cooking techniques and essential recipes. Nosrat kept that vibe when she teamed up with Song Exploder’s Hrishikesh Hirway for this pandemic lockdown project which gives callers ideas of what to make. Apologies if those vibes are simply too cursed for you to contemplate absorbing, but this is a great place to pick up an upbeat jolt of kitchen inspiration. Listen >>

Dinner For One

New Yorker Sutanya Dacres had the archetypal fairytale romance with a French dude, fell in love, got married and moved to Paris. Unfortunately it ended in separation. This lo-fi podcast from her tiny Parisian kitchen is about both food and how she’s moved through heartbreak while getting her head around living in a foreign country. It’s a soothing, meditative listen, and Dacres is a great companion. Listen >>

Have you enjoyed the podcasts on this list? Check out the newest version of this list ‘6 more of the best foodie podcasts‘!

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