The Pittsburgh Dish
Do you really know the food scene of Pittsburgh?! The Pittsburgh Dish introduces you to the people, places, and recipes that make our regional cuisine so special. By sharing personal stories, weekly recommendations, and community recipes, we aim to inspire you to connect with local taste makers and experience the unique flavors that shape our city.
The Pittsburgh Dish
081 A Peek Inside Pittsburgh’s Food TV
We pull back the curtain on how Pittsburgh’s local food television gets made, from planning and pacing a five-minute kitchen segment to building community around long-form public media cooking shows. Maria DeBone and Chris Fennimore share the inside scoop. Plus local TV food personality Chef Alekka offers an easy holiday crumble.
• Planning, staging, and timing a live kitchen segment
• Tips and hacks viewers value on short TV spots
• The origin and evolution of QED Cooks and its community format
• Realities of live-to-tape and behind-the-scenes crew work
• A beginner-friendly winter fruit crumble with oats
• Where to watch Alekka, Doug, and Chris across local TV
If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description.
Welcome to The Pittsburgh Dish. I'm your host, Doug Heilman. Well, November has been a busy time with TV for me, but what does it take behind the scenes to produce great local food television? And how did one of our local stations get its start in food TV over three decades ago? This week we peel back the curtain just a bit. Plus, my TV chef friend Alekka Sweeney is back again to give us an easy dessert suggestion for the holiday season. All that ahead, stay tuned. We are so lucky to have food and cooking spots being produced locally, highlighting home cooks to restaurant chefs and all types of makers in between. And I have been doubly fortunate to work with some of the great folks behind this local food television. From my personal experience, a five-minute segment starts many days ahead. There's a recipe concept, grocery shopping, thinking through the camera action, what am I gonna say? Are there tips and techniques to share? And then there's the preparing, the chopping, or even making a duplicate dish so that we can taste it at the end of the segment. I've had my regular spot on Pittsburgh Today Live for over three years now, and 36 segments later, I'm still learning. Some of the things I have picked up is having a cart, thank you, Chef Janet of Chef Life Hacks, a set of glass bowls so that we always see what the ingredients are and what we're mixing or folding in. I'm always thinking about the action for myself and also for anybody that's with me. What can I have them stir or chop? And of course, any talking points. I want to make sure that I'm giving the audience, the viewers, something that they can take away. There's a new tip in there, there's a new hack that maybe they haven't tried before. All of that for usually five minutes of live TV. And oh, that recipe better be posted somewhere that the viewers can get to it, because otherwise you're gonna get a lot of comments and DMs in your social media, and they're gonna ask for the recipe anyway. But enough from me. Let's hear from someone that's putting on this kind of show every day. Pittsburgh Today Live's Maria DeBone.
Maria:Testing one, two, three.
Doug:Would you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Maria:Yes. Uh, my name is Maria DeBone, and I'm the associate producer for Pittsburgh Today Live.
Doug:Maria, you and I have been working together for a while now at Pittsburgh Today Live here at the KDKA studio, also known as CBS Pittsburgh.
Maria:Yes.
Doug:I've done a few kitchen segments for you.
Maria:A few, a lot, Doug.
Doug:I was wondering from your perspective, what makes a good kitchen segment for live TV?
Maria:So you would think it's like very, you know, I guess easy to go into it. You're like, oh, you're just like making something on TV. But a recipe takes how long in a long time. And we have four.
Doug:What do you usually give me? You say four, four and a half minutes.
Maria:I say four, four and a half.
Doug:I probably take six.
Maria:If we're lucky, I can give you five or a little bit more than that. But it's about, you know, making sure you have you get all you want in to that short amount of time. And the time goes by so fast.
Doug:So fast.
Maria:So if somebody can consolidate the most important tips and hacks into that time frame, that's golden.
Doug:And is that what you think the viewers are really looking for? Is those tips and hacks?
Maria:Yes. Because anybody, I mean, a lot of people can follow a recipe, but knowing, you know, how to make your time, you know, go quicker or learning how to do something that you never thought of before. Having those tips and hacks that you can just go to, very helpful.
Doug:Today we made a sheet pan dinner and we made a pan sauce which helped clean the pan.
Maria:And I never knew that before. So because I just made dinner last night, and like for me, I'm like, I'm like scrubbing the pan, but you're like, oh, you could put it all over your food.
Doug:And then it's more flavor.
Maria:Yes. Yeah. That's so cool.
Doug:Here in your studio or on your show, how many kitchen cooking segments do you have in the average week?
Maria:Probably four to five.
Doug:Yeah. And you do a five-day a week show. So you have somebody in that kitchen almost every day. Yes. What are some of the variety of folks? I mean, I always call myself like the home cook, and I know I'm a food podcaster. What other types of folks come to the studio and do a segment for you?
Maria:A lot of um restaurant owners, the chefs, they bring in. We're always trying to show off um new restaurants in town. Um sometimes we get like kind of like yourself, like food bloggers. Yes. Um they're you know making it big on TikTok. We bring them in and they show off something. Um but yeah, mainly like restaurant owners.
Doug:Yeah. I know that chef Bill Fuller from the Big Burrito Group comes along. I think you guys just did a whole buffet of what is it, the Gobblerito? Yes. That was a big day. I wish I was here that day too.
Maria:So something we really like to tell our kitchen segments that are coming on that we want you to make our space yours, make it as visual as possible.
Doug:I love that.
Maria:Yes. And it's it's not just about like showing like each step, it's about how can we get people to go to your restaurant, go to your blog, go to your TikTok page. If there is like a tons of different menu items on the table displayed, like edible or not right there for the hosts. If there's more to see, that's what the listeners, well, the viewers, look at and they're like, oh, I really want to try that. I'm gonna go there. Right. So it really makes a big difference when we have a guest that comes prepared with a lot to see versus there's not that much to show off.
Doug:One of your other colleagues has told me that they want action as well. Like they want uh not only me or whoever's coming into the kitchen to do things, but if we can engage the the hosts, the anchors, and get them to do a little something, that that's always good. And and I think the other thing is we always want to get them to taste something, right? Yeah.
Maria:I mean, that's the whole point. You gotta give the people a review of what you're what you're making, the end product to be. But yeah, as if we can get Heather and David doing something, I mean, they won't do it well, but that's the funny part.
Doug:This is Heather Abraham and David Highfield, the hosts of Pittsburgh Today Live.
Maria:And I love them, and they know that, but they're not a professional chef, chefs. So watching them try to ice a cupcake or you know, try even like mix in cheese to something is always very fold in the cheese, David.
Doug:Fold in the cheese.
Maria:Yes. And that's where you and other expert chefs come in and show how it's done.
Doug:Yes. It is always satisfying that you make it through your segment and they do get to taste. I think it breaks my heart when I've seen some segments. Hasn't happened to me yet, but you don't get to that because you're still sauteing your shrimp. I'm like, no, that shrimp is gonna take four minutes.
Maria:I know. And but it's always helpful too when I mean there's leftovers for the crew like myself. It's like my lunch for the day.
Doug:I love that too. I love that. Maria, how long have you been at this station now?
Maria:Um, oh gosh. About more than like a year and a half now.
Doug:You're part of a great team.
Maria:Oh, I love it.
Doug:Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Maria:Yeah, we love having you on every month.
Doug:Well, I love having you on The Pittsburgh Dish.
Maria:Oh, thank you for having me. Yeah.
Doug:Up next, how do you stumble into food television by way of a zucchini and then keep it going for over three decades? Here is a segment of our chat with Chris Fennimore of WQED from episode 36.
Chris:All of the guests on our show are people in our broadcast area. The first one I did was uh Z is for Zucchini. Uh, I had a garden filled with zucchini right up here at the at the Homewood Cemetery.
Doug:Oh, yeah.
Chris:And um I I didn't know what to do with all of these. So I went back to the office. I was also the director of programming there, and I said to my uh director of continuity, Nancy Polinski, I said, Nancy, would you please make a promo asking people to send their recipes for zucchini? I got all these recipes and I thought, uh, you know, this is something unique. I'm I'm also a program producer. Right.
Doug:So I really had something here.
Chris:I am and and I and I so I said to uh the person who was the station manager, I said, could I have a little time during the next pledge period? Because I would love to do a a demonstration of a couple of recipes, and I'll type up these recipes and offer them as a thank you gift like the tote bag or the coffee mug or whatever people use.
Doug:What year is this, Chris?
Chris:Uh 93. Yes, ninety-three. It was the summer of ninety-three. So uh Nancy and I set up two tables and I cooked the five or six recipes that that I picked out of the book. Ahead of time. Ahead of time. And then I had all the ingredients. Uh and so the ingredients were on the front table and the finished dishes were on the table behind me. And so I would say, so then you chop this up, and then you put the onion in there, and then and then you uh slice that and blah, blah, blah, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes, and it comes out like this, and then we would taste it. Well, the phones rang off the hook. They people wanted these. And we were reading, while I'm cooking, while I'm making believe I'm cooking, Nancy is reading the letters from everybody who sent in their recipes. So it was very heartwarming, and it was, I thought, particularly appropriate for public broadcasting. Right. Because this was our way of sharing for them to share with us and for us to share back with them. And that to me, that's what public broadcasting is all about. You're bringing the community into the station. Well, on the next show, because what happened was immediately the people in the pledge department said, When's the next watch? And I said, I have no idea. I didn't know this was gonna happen. We s we picked cookies as the topic. Oh, then we decided that I wasn't gonna make all the cookies. We were gonna have people come in and make their cookies. And that was the beginning of the format that we have now followed for the last 31 years. And that is that people send in their recipes. We get usually, you know, a couple of hundred recipes. Um we select four or five people to come on the show. I usually make one recipe. Nancy usually makes one recipe, and that is not so much a matter of our egos involved, and you know, we've got to be part of this, but it's a timing matter in terms of production. Yes. So I usually do the first or the last, and Nancy does the first or the last. And that way, if I need to do it all in five minutes instead of twelve, I can do it. And also if we're you know stuck for time, I can just stand there and talk. It works out. It works out that way. So that's why I've been doing some of my recipes uh on on that show. Anyway, that's how the the cooking thing got started. And the thing about the recipes that they send in is they never send in their worst recipe. Other than Aunt Margaret's uh you know, zucchini boats. Which they still make. What they're sending you are the recipes that they are famous for. You know, that that always comes out, and people go, how do you make that? Those are the recipes that they're sending us that we put into our books, and as I say, it's now been hundreds and hundreds of guests, maybe eight, nine hundred guests over these years. That's a lot of people. It's incredible.
Doug:And I I just want to point out most affiliates in the PBS world don't always have kitchens or anything like we've had. So it's such a treasure for our community on the programs you guys have brought over the years.
unknown:Yeah.
Chris:Um I'm not sure uh if and when we might do another giant show because they take a lot of uh a lot of time, a lot of planning. I've noticed. And yeah. Because you've been part of those a little bit. You've got to collect the recipes and um and then get the cooks that you're gonna have on and book time to shoot them. It's easier now because we don't do them live. Man. I can't imagine, Chris. Live was so crazy, you know.
Doug:It's part of the element though that is it's fun. Even when they are not live, they're still pretty true to form. Well, they're live to tape. They are live to tape, yeah.
Chris:We may edit something later on, and we can stop. When I put the food processor on backwards for you. Exactly. Oh, but and we couldn't stop in those days. We just said, oh well, we'll clean this up later. And uh keep going. Poor Mary uh Irwin Scott and um Joe Certo and and folks like you who would come in and help us on that side of the of the camera, uh cleaning up in the kitchen and setting things out. People don't realize everything that goes on. They see what goes on on the countertop. Yeah, but to the left, stage left of the countertop, there's all kinds of stuff going on. All the time.
Doug:Yeah, there's a lot to it. Yeah, so it takes a it takes a small army. Um they're fun to do, but there's a lot of work in them. Chris, thanks so much. You're welcome.
Chris:Hi, this is Chris Fennimore, the host of QED Cooks, and I'm here with you on The Pittsburgh Dish.
Doug:Well, happily, if you are following WQED's social media as well as my own, then you might know that we've been some busy bees in the QED kitchen, and one of those big shows is coming. Keep an eye out for it when warmer months return. Finally, we couldn't end the show without some food talk. So here's one more friend that I know from TV, Chef Alekka Sweeney. Chef Alekka just walked us through some holiday baking, and she's here again to talk about an easy recipe for the holidays and maybe for a beginner baker. So, Alekka, we're talking about winter desserts and baking. I know you have a lot of skill, but if someone doesn't feel that they have a lot of confidence in the kitchen and they want some dessert for the fall holiday season, what kind of dessert would you point them towards?
Alekka:I would point people towards like a really simple fruit crumble. Okay.
Doug:Like a baked crumble, like any kind of fruit you can use.
Alekka:Like a seasonal fruit and the topping, which is like butter, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, and if you want to, I like to put oats.
Doug:I like putting oats in mine as well.
Alekka:Yeah, I like the oats in there.
Doug:So we just need an oven-safe baking dish. Yes. You cut up some fruit. If it's apples or something, do they have to peel the apples?
Alekka:I don't. There's two schools. I don't peel my apples. Yeah. The only tip I would give to that is if you see the topping getting a little bit more brown, cover it with some aluminum foil.
Doug:Okay. To make sure that the fruit has baked so like a knife goes through and it's all tender and five.
Alekka:Well, one of the other tells, I guess, or signs that I could say to people when you know that it's done is when you can see like those little bubbles bubbles, like thick bubbles. Love that. And it's really and that they can be pretty impressive. You can jazz it up with some whipped cream or some creme fresh.
Doug:And you can serve it in the dish that you baked it in. Uh-huh. So it keeps everything easy.
Alekka:You can do individual ones of those too.
Doug:Like a like a ramekin.
Alekka:Like a ramekin.
Doug:Oh, I love individual desserts. I'll come.
Alekka:We could get that on a t-shirt. I love The Pittsburgh Dish and individual desserts. Desserts.
Doug:Well, I love that. I love that you're here. And thanks so much, Alekka.
Alekka:Thanks for having me, Doug.
Doug:You can watch Alekka on KDKA's Talk Pittsburgh. Find me on Pittsburgh Today Live. And be sure to catch Chris Fennimore on WQED most Saturday mornings for QED Cooks. If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description. And if you want to follow my own food adventures, you can find me on social media at DougCooking. That's our show for this week. Thanks again to all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.
