What do Dolly Parton and Jennifer Garner know about baking?
We’ll find out, if King Arthur Baking podcast hosts Jessica Battilana and David Tamarkin get their way. The two celebrities are on the hosts’ pie-in-the-sky guest wish list. Their podcast, “Things Bakers Know,” debuted earlier this year and starts its second season in September.
It’s a succulent, spicy blend of baking history, tips and tricks, seasoned with downright fun stories — read on for one about biscuits and basketball — and the occasional inflammatory statement. “We think of pizza as needing cheese,” Tamarkin says in Episode 2. “It doesn’t. There, I’ve said it.”
The Norwich baking company began airing the podcast on April 28, and it rose to No. 14 on Apple’s top shows chart a week later — after just two of the season’s five episodes had been released. The show has had nearly 156,000 episode downloads, and more than 24,000 people have subscribed on Apple and Spotify.
“The numbers told us this was worth continuing, and we were having a good time,” Battilana said.
In online reviews, listeners have called their work “blessedly apolitical” and “a delightful listen.” “Whoever had the idea to do this podcast deserves a double raise!” one wrote. Others want less host chatter and more time with guest experts and how-to advice.
“We really just want people to experience the joy of baking.” David Tamarkin
Battilana, King Arthur’s staff editor, and Tamarkin, senior director of editorial and baking education, focus on one baked good during each 35-minute episode. Chocolate chip cookies, pizza, birthday cake, sourdough and biscuits have been the fare so far. Guests have included Cheryl Day of the iconic, now-closed Back in the Day Bakery in Savannah, Ga.; Dan Richer, chef-owner of Razza Pizza Artigianale in Jersey City, N.J.; and King Arthur Baking School director Amber Eisler, who dished on sourdough.
Battilana and Tamarkin plan to call on more of their colleagues this fall. “People know the brand for the flour they see in the grocery store, but I don’t think they totally understand how deep the bench is,” Battilana said. “We have amazing experts in chocolate. We have amazing experts in laminated pastries. We have bagel makers.”
Potential guests Garner and Parton fall into the notable-people-who-bake category. Garner stars in her Webby People’s Voice Award-winning “Pretend Cooking Show” on Instagram, “where she is often baking pretty elaborate stuff,” said Battilana, who has emailed the actor and awaits a reply. “We know that she bakes with King Arthur flour.”
Parton and her sister coauthored the 2024 cookbook Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals — A Lifetime of Family, Friends, and Food, and Duncan Hines features a Dolly Parton line of cake, cookie, biscuit and brownie mixes.
“We just have to get our profile a little higher, and then I’m sure Dolly Parton will want to come on the show,” Battilana said.
King Arthur serves a loaded buffet of educational opportunities: on-site classes at baking schools in Vermont and Washington State, on-demand instruction online, recipes, videos, blog posts, and a hotline staffed seven days a week. The podcast presents another avenue to offer information and to “slip into people’s daily life,” Battilana said.
With audiences scattered across digital platforms, “we really have to be everywhere,” Tamarkin said.
Neither he nor Battilana had hosted a talk show before this. Their comfortable banter belies the fact that they’ve been working together for only three years — and that they record miles apart, from their respective homes in Manhattan and Falmouth, Maine.
They attribute their rapport to their shared experiences. Nearly the same age — Tamarkin is 47; Battilana, 46 — they both are gay, longtime food writers, recipe developers and cookbook authors. Tamarkin worked for culinary website Epicurious as lead editor and digital director. His Instagram pledge to cook every meal he ate one January led to his first cookbook, Cook90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals. Before Epicurious, he was food editor and restaurant critic for Time Out Chicago and a producer for CBS Radio and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
Battilana wrote Repertoire: All the Recipes You Need and coauthored nine other cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-nominated, No.1 New York Times bestseller The King Arthur Baking Company Big Book of Bread. She earned a Grand Diplôme from La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, France, and has worked as a cheesemonger, private chef and elementary school lunch lady.
Battilana has wanted to do a podcast since joining the company three years ago, but she also wanted a cohost. She set her sights on Tamarkin after the two of them watched a demonstration at work one day and offered a running commentary à la Statler and Waldorf, the elderly Muppets who heckle from their theater box seats. “And I was like, ‘David, I know that you have a lot on your plate already, but I think that you should cohost this,” Battilana said, “because we have a pretty easy rapport.'”
They aren’t trying to teach baking. King Arthur has videos for that. Instead, Battilana and Tamarkin use the podcast to entertain and offer nuggets of information that relay the science behind baking and help people improve their skills. When cutting biscuits, for example, press straight down. Twisting the cutter seals the biscuit’s edges and inhibits its rise.
In the same episode, producer Rossi Anastopoulo tells a story about her alma mater, the University of North Carolina, where biscuit chain Bojangles gives basketball fans two sausage biscuits for $1 when the Tar Heels score 100 points in a game. “So we might be beating a … terrible team by 40 points — total snooze fest,” Anastopoulo says. “And then, as soon as the score gets into the 90s, you just hear people going, ‘We want biscuits.'” When someone hits “the biscuit basket,” she says, “the crowd goes wild.”
Whisked together, the stories, tips and banter inspire people to bake, Tamarkin said: “We really just want people to experience the joy of baking.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Baking Dish | Tips, tricks and radical pizza comments flavor King Arthur Baking’s new podcast”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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