820: Cooking Questions with Lisa Donovan and We The Pizza with Muhammad Abdul-Hadi
2/6/202650 min
This week, food columnist for The New York Times Magazine, Lisa Donovan, joins us to talk about what she's been cooking up recently and help answer our listeners' kitchen conundrums, from making the best tomato paste despite out-of-season tomatoes to using unsweetened chocolate in baking recipes. Lisa is the author of the memoir Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, and she leaves us with a recipe for a lovely Tarte Tatin to add to our repertoire. Then, we head over to Philadelphia, where we meet the founder and owner of Down North Pizza, Muhammad Abdul-Hadi. Muhammad tells us about his mission-driven restaurant dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated people rebuild their lives. Muhammad's new cookbook is We The Pizza: Slangin’ Pies, and Savin’ Lives and he leaves us with his signature pizza sauce recipe, Norf Sauce.
Broadcast dates for this episode:
- February 7, 2025 (originally aired)
- February 6, 2026 (rebroadcast)
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Speaker 10:09
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Speaker 20:15
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Francis Lam· Host0:30
[upbeat music] Hey, it's Francis. This week, we're reliving the past with an episode from last year about the best pizza in North Philly, and we're taking your calls with our friend Lisa Donovan. Have a listen. [upbeat music] I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. [upbeat music] Sometimes food means more than just the food. In North Philadelphia, there's a pizzeria that is maybe the most innovative, and I might say, the most important pizza shop I've ever come across. It's called Down North Pizza, and its founder, Mohammed Abdulhadi, says the point of the place is to sling pies and save lives. He means it literally. In his community, two-thirds of people who come home from prison end up back in prison, largely because they come home to situations with no money, no resources, and