Radio’s food shows must sell the sizzle

Food can excite the senses -- sight, smell, touch and, of course, taste. But how can a radio show about food entice, when all it has to offer is sound?

“I could hold the dish up to the microphone and say, ‘Breathe deeply.’ But it won’t get me much,” said Merrill Shindler, host of “Feed Your Face” on KLSX-FM (97.1), which airs 6-7 p.m. Saturdays. “It’s really just imagination. On one level it’s radio theater in its traditional sense. You’re creating an ambience. It’s about communication. It’s about telling stories.”

With gourmet foodie culture going mainstream, helped in part by the soaring popularity of cooking programs on television, it perhaps makes sense that the format is continuing to perform on radio as well. Granted L.A.’s long-running radio shows don’t have the benefit of visuals, but they find plenty of other ways to engage listeners.

Like Shindler, Evan Kleiman, host of “Good Food” on KCRW-FM (89.9), Saturdays from 11 a.m. to noon, stressed the importance of language and evocative descriptions. “Think of all the great food literature out there,” she said. “A lot of us read cookbooks when we’re not going to be cooking a thing in them. It’s to be titillated and excited and intrigued.”

Jamie Gwen, whose namesake show airs Saturdays on KABC-AM (790) from 11 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., said, “I wish you could smell it and taste it. There’s an opportunity to tempt you on the radio with description and food words that give you a ‘taste.’ ”

On a recent Kleiman show, Saveur magazine Editor in Chief James Oseland discussed Asian-themed Thanksgiving recipes. He talked about marinating a turkey with black soy sauce, different from the usual kind in that “it has a sweeter, more molasses-y, deeper, richer taste.”

“It’s almost like the balsamic vinegar version of soy sauce,” Kleiman offered, and Oseland added that the marinade burnishes the skin and gives the turkey “a mahogany beauty.”

In spite of the loving language, Kleiman stressed that her show is about more than just food. “It’s about art, it’s about science, it’s about wacky people. Food seems to illustrate people’s character and their foibles.”

One memorable guest, for example, was celebrity chef and adventurer Anthony Bourdain, who talked about eating raw seal in Alaska. “He was able to just make it come alive, and be real and so sweet at the same time it was completely horrifying,” said Kleiman.

Other guests have included a NASA scientist who explained how to grow food on Mars and a USAID worker in Baghdad who described the prevalence of fast food and dearth of anything fresh. Kleiman also aired the story of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of music for Queen Elizabeth, who found an electrocuted swan and decided to cook it for dinner.

“The police raided his house because it’s illegal to kill swans in England,” Kleiman said. “The swan tasted slightly fishy, I now remember.”

Another key element of most of the radio programs is listener interaction, when the hosts take calls. To get the audience ready for Thanksgiving, Gwen said her program this Saturday will be an all-live call-in show. “I like to call it ‘Turkey 911,’ ” she said.

Melinda Lee, who hosts “Food News” on KNX-AM (1070), Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., will also be on the air Thanksgiving Day from 9 a.m. until noon, taking calls from home cooks needing last-minute advice.

To better compete with television cooking programs, almost all of the radio shows are bolstering their online presence. Lee has an entire series of videos on remodeling her kitchen, with advice about appliances, cabinets and counter tops, and most of the other shows’ sites offer such Web-friendly features as printable recipes.

But even when the shows tackling something as visual as real cooking, as with “The Splendid Table” on KPCC-FM (89.3), 3-4 p.m. Sundays, the descriptions and ambient sound can still fire the imagination.

On last week’s show with guest Joshua Bell, the virtuoso violinist, host Lynne Rossetto Kasper cooked tagliatelle with caramelized oranges and almonds, a vintage Italian recipe that would have been contemporary with Bell’s 1713 Stradivarius.

While adding ingredients to the pasta sauce, which included cinnamon, sugar and orange, she described the “bitter but aromatic quality” of the orange rind. You can hear the skillet clanking, and the sauce sizzling in the pan.

“You see how the bubbles are shiny now, and they’re getting bigger?” she asked Bell, explaining that the water had boiled off. Afterward, you hear the crunch-crunch-crunch as he twists the grinder to add black pepper. “Notice how this is getting golden? It’s getting caramelized,” she says, just before they mix it with pasta and begin eating.

“I’ve never had anything like that,” Bell said. “That is so good. That is an amazing dish.”

The mental picture of them in the kitchen becomes even more vivid when Kasper suggests, “I think maybe we can stop eating from the serving dish now. Maybe we can get bowls.”