Hungry for something good to listen to? From foodie chats to fascinating food stories, these podcasts are serving up plenty of flavour.  

Whether you’re cooking dinner, stuck in traffic or simply looking for something entertaining to listen to, a good food podcast can make the time fly. Podcasts take food beyond recipes by exploring the people, places, businesses and stories that make what we eat so fascinating.  

Table Manners: Pass the Gossip 

Hosted by singer-songwriter Jessie Ware and her mom Lennie, Table Manners combines relaxed celebrity conversation with a love of home cooking. Guests talk about their favourite meals and memories around food, making each episode feel like you’re eavesdropping on a very entertaining dinner party. They’ve chatted to everyone from Nigella Lawson to Dolly Parton; it’s as much about personality as it is about food.  

A Table in the Corner: Inside SA Food 

For a distinctly South African listen, start with A Table in the Corner. Hosted by food journalist Russel Wasserfall, the podcast sits down with the people shaping the country’s food and hospitality industry. It’s particularly good for anyone curious about what happens beyond the dining room, with a focus on sourcing ingredients and running restaurants to the realities of building a career in hospitality.  

South African Food Stories: Food, with a Story  

SA Food Stories is well worth adding to your queue. Hosted by Nicci Robertson, the podcast explores the country’s food culture through conversations with industry leaders and entrepreneurs. Nicci emphasizes the stories behind the businesses and personalities and covers passion, perseverance, creativity and the challenges involved in building South Africa’s food and hospitality industry. Recent episodes have featured Ina Paarman, making this a particularly appealing listen for anyone interested in the people behind South African brands.  

The Food Programme: Food for Thought  

For something more investigative, BBC’s The Food Programme explores ingredients, food trends, culinary traditions and the wider culture surrounding what we eat. It’s the kind of podcast that can turn an everyday ingredient into a fascinating story, taking listeners from farms and kitchens to restaurants and communities around the world. If you find any interest in the history and politics of food as much as the indulgence of eating, then this is one to have on your list. 

Dish: Dinner with the Stars 

Dish from Waitrose is an extraordinary choice featuring broadcaster Nick Grimshaw and Michelin-starred chef, Angela Hartnett. Together, they host a weekly meal with a celebrity guest, combining relaxed conversation with plenty of food talk. With Angela cooking a meal inspired by their guest and Nick keeping the conversation flowing, listeners catch a glimpse into real stories about careers, favourite foods, culinary disasters and success stories. Guests have ranged from Gordon Ramsay to more recently, Daisy Edgar-Jones for an all-round range of conversation.  

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From the South African braai to Japanese Yakiniku, Chef Jaycee Ferreira is a true master of flame. You can find him at the helm in the kitchen of a restaurant that brings two cultures together under one roof: East City Grill & Yakiniku (think South African steakhouse with Asian sensibility). 

Tableside Grill 

Yakiniku (“yaki” means to grill and “niku” is meat) is an interactive and meat-centric Japanese-style grill house. While South Africans often like to think that we know all there is to know about fire cooking, my recent visit to Yakiniku proved there is so much more to explore. So, in an issue that celebrates coming together, what better time to celebrate a restaurant that brings together two cultures over the art of fire cooking. The large black tables house a gas grill in the centre, complete with some suction to ensure no smoke fills your table. 

On The Menu  

Sourced from the Swartland in small batches, the free-range wagyu delivers on buttery tenderness due to its superior marbling. The grilling experience starts with your waiter filling the table with two trays of thinly sliced wagyu, butterflied prawns (if choosing the Experience Menu) and accompaniments. You’ll find bowls of top-tier rice, kimchi, pickled cucumber, a variety of seasonings (including matcha, yuzu and plum seasonings) and bespoke umami-loaded sauces. Then the fun starts: season and grill, dip in sauce and place onto your rice-loaded salad leaf. Finally, dig in and savour the depth of flavour! 

Beyond the Grill 

Don’t miss out on their bento boxes (three-layered containers with snacks and their great dessert options, which include flavours like Japanese whiskey, miso caramel and matcha, to name a few. The flavourful fire journey reignited my curiosity for experience-focused dining. It’s evident that the restaurant transforms the classic Japanese style of cooking into a refined experience that honours both heritage and craft. 

Words: Liezl Vermeulen 
Photographs: Supplied  

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Forget the fluff and fanfare that often comes with fine dining. The partnership that produces these premium plates makes it accessible. Step into COY with Liezl Vermeulen, a dining destination where you’ll find echoes of African flavours. 

At first glance, COY looks like a small restaurant, with Table Mountain towering behind it and huge yachts swaying at its feet. The elegant black wooden frame stands at the Cape Town harbour’s edge at the V&A Waterfront. Inside, co-head chefs Geoffrey Abrahams and Teenola Govender-Abrahams (affectionately known as G&T) have curated a taste of the African continent, dishing up premium plates that draw inspiration from the shorelines of our continent. 

Two Head Chefs  

Teenola tends to answer the questions first – quickly and confidently. Next to her sits her co-head chef (and husband of six months), Geoffrey, who pauses and gives each question the same amount of consideration before answering with carefully chosen words. 

This isn’t surprising. When your job is to dish up premium plates in one of Africa’s most visited destinations, the margin for error is small. Their countless days of research, months of curating and planning, and years of industry experience make them keenly connected to their work and confident in their choices. At COY, everything is deeply considered, meticulously tested and planned to a G&T.

Two Stories  

Hailing from KZN, Teenola grew up with a Durban-Indian mom who loved to feed people. 

“My mom’s a wonderful and instinctual cook,” she says, smiling, while expressing her frustration that there are no written recipes to capture her mother’s cooking. Her mom is adamant that once she’s retired, she’scoming to Cape Town to cook staff lunches at COY. She wants to teach everyone about their culture and how they cook, making it evident that sharing is what underpins her cooking. For Teenola, Monday and Tuesday meant fasting from meat, while Sundays brought big family breakfasts with spicy beans and pork sausages. 

Growing up in Cape Town, Geoffrey was part of a busy, creative household where extramurals were king. For his mom, cooking was born out of necessity rather than an affinity for it. (Her creative outlet and career wasmusic rather than cooking.) Now, as an adult, he says he appreciates his mom’s cooking so much more, understands it so much more. “The one thing I’ll never, ever, ever be able to recreate” he says, and Teenola is already nodding in agreement with him, “is her Christmas lunch. No one can touch it, and we don’t try.”  

For him, his heritage is more vague, not because it isn’t as distinct and colourful, but because previous generations have been less forthcoming with stories. What he does have are fond memories of big Saturday morning breakfasts and the important Sunday lunches after church that marked the weekly family catch-up.  

Today, G&T have blended the two different traditions into their household and their approach to fine dining.   

Read more about G&T’s approach to fine dining when you subscribe to My Kitchen Magazine today! 

Words: Liezl Vermeulen 
Photography: Zhann Solomons  

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 Starting from different places, Zola and Onezwa have arrived on the same stage, each standing tall in her own spotlight. Neither feels like they’ve arrived yet. They’re both teachers and students on their journeys of food discovery and self-discovery.

In 2022, Zola and Onezwa’s paths crossed for the first time — on MasterChef SA as a judge and contestant respectively. Their interaction was limited, as judges and contestants were mostly separated. Since then, Onezwahas forged her own path, garnering immense online success, while Zola has steadily kept her fan following growing and well fed. This year, the two met again, now on a more level playing field: bookshelves nationwide.  

 

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For Onezwa, A Food Love Story marks a deeply personal debut cookbook rooted in culture, heritage and family legacy. For Zola, Simply More Zola is her fourth cookbook, the latest chapter in a career that has inspired South African home cooks for more than a decade. 

 Despite their different journeys, both are passionate about preserving food traditions, both believe travel expands the way we cook and eat, and both see food as a powerful vehicle for storytelling and connection. 

From discussions about umleqwa, dombolo and global food influences to the realities of navigating public scrutiny and social media fame, Zola and Onezwa reflect on what it means to honour the past while embracing the future. 

They spoke to My Kitchen about curiosity, criticism, legacy and the lasting power of food, showcasing that they’re each telling their (food) story in remarkably different ways. 

Read Onezwa & Zola’s full article when you subscribe to My Kitchen Magazine today! 

Words: Liezl Vermeulen
Photographs: Zhann Solomons  

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Free-range chicken producer Noorsveld Chickens caught our eye with their extra-large, yellow-hued chicken – and a price point that caused a double-take. Liezl Vermeulen finds out if there’s something to crow about.

Free-range chicken has become a status symbol in South Africa. If there’s an industrial chicken in your shopping basket in 2026, it likely isn’t because you haven’t seen a heart-wrenching video of intense factory farming in action. Rather, the current economic climate and the threat of rising inflation can force free-range poultry out of reach, no matter how virtuous your intentions.

In April 2026, Noorsveld Chickens was selling a whole bird for R78/kg in a Western Cape Spar. This was R21 less than a free-range competitor and R1 cheaper than the house-brand chicken on the same shelf (R79 for non-free-range). It seems like Noorsveld is carving out a new section in shops: attainable free-range.

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Fowl Play

“You won’t believe how chickens play,” says Gerrit Dos Santos, owner of Noorsveld Chickens. “They’re like little children, tackling each other and running around.” Berné Botha, the general manager, chimes in that retail clients have occasionally raised concerns about seeing a scratch mark on the chicken’s skin because they don’t understand that free-range chickens play and fight.

Gerrit inherited his farm from his grandmother. Located in the tiny town of Jansenville (an hour outside Robert Sobukwe, previously Graaff-Reinet) in the Karoo Heartland, it had only a few sheep and goats – nothing to make it economically viable. After the bank denied him his ostrich-farm dreams, he bought 300 chickens in 1991 and set out on his new journey. He started by selling chickens to a few homes in town. “The ones with a lot of kids ordered up to 10 chickens a month.”

He tried doing his own little shop so that people could come to him instead of the other way around, but it brought its own set of problems that took him away from his farm too much.

Today, his booming bird business has more than 200 permanent employees (making it the biggest permanent employer in the town), and three of his children have joined the team, which doesn’t come as a surprise once you witness his zeal for chicken farming. Now the farm supplies free-range chicken to most of the major retailers in the Eastern Cape, and in the past two years, they’ve branched out to stock several retailers and restaurants in the Western Cape.

Going Slow to Grow

“People are production driven. We wouldn’t have made it against them; everything was working against us,” explains Gerrit, adding that their location – being far away from the market and producers of feed – was not ideal. “We had to look at an exclusive market and I liked the way free-range farmers were doing things.”

He dives into the nitty-gritty because free-range farming is about much more than simply letting chickens go outside.

“For the time the chickens are there, you try to make them as happy as possible. The happier they are, the better they do.”

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Gerrit makes it clear that his role as a free-range farmer isn’t to badmouth anyone. He does, however, want to put what they do into perspective, and in doing so, industrial chicken farming practices do come up.

Low-level lighting during the day keeps the industrial chicken’s movement to a minimum. This is important because a chicken that is growing abnormally fast (due to antibiotics and animal protein in its diet) would likely die of a heart attack if it lived longer than the 30-33 days, that is the industry standard, simply because its body cannot keep up with the growth. He pauses and makes it clear that free-range farming still isn’t at the speed it would happen without human interference or in the wild. If they were to work at that rate, the price would more than double and production wouldn’t keep up with demand.

Fundamentals of Free Range

Berne mentions that many small farmers may say their animals are free-roaming and call them free-range, but until a farm is independently audited by a third party and gets certified, there is just no guarantee for the consumer.

Because free-range is about much more than simply having access to the outdoors. “There are several things a farmer needs to have in place to make it free-range,” explains Gerrit.

Firstly, the chickens need free-range certified feed. Noorsveld uses Profile Feeds’ food, a mix using exclusively yellow corn and soya, with the addition of some vitamins.

“It’s that yellow corn that gives our chicken the unique yellow colour.”

Importantly, this supplier is also audited by a third party to ensure the feed meets the criteria. This means the chickens don’t receive any antibiotics, making them a healthier choice for human consumption.

The feed contains no animal protein (in industrial farming, this could be a powder made from animal by-products).

Secondly, stocking density (the number of chickens per square meter) can only be 15.

By comparison, industrial chicken farming can have up to 22 chickens. While seven additional chickens may not sound like much, it’s important to remember the volume at which they work. If Noorsveld has 20 000 chickens, an industrial chicken farm can have over 29 000 on the same size of land.

Thirdly, their outside roaming space needs to be twice as big as their indoor space. Plus, they should always have access to the indoor space for shelter.

“That’s the ultimate proof of a free-range chicken,” says Berné, “one that doesn’t go out when it has the chance to do so.” He adds that chickens are temperamental, getting hot and cold quite easily. “We have foggers to cool them down in summer and heaters to warm them up in winter.

“I don’t even have that at home!”

Then, they need to sleep eight hours a night and, during the day, they need continuous access to natural light outside for at least six hours a day.

Gerrit chuckles. “Chickens are scared of the dark. The amount of sound those little chicks make. and the moment you switch the lights on, they all go quiet at once. It’s like flipping off the radio switch.”

Finally, a chicken needs freedom to express natural behaviour. That means going out to forage and play – it’s chickens simply being chickens.

It’s clear Gerrit isn’t just meeting regulations. He feels it’s the right thing to do, and he knows it delivers a better product.

Rule of the Roost

The conversation illustrates that the microbiology behind chicken farming is the biggest threat and the hardest work.

“Chickens sleep and eat in the same place they poop.” Naturally, this means there’s a lot of bacteria that require expert management to keep birds healthy.

Dry conditions prevent breeding of bacteria, and the team reckons the arid Karoo counts greatly in their favour. “This climate of extremes makes for naturally healthier chickens.”

Other steps to keep the livestock healthy include keeping only one age group on a farm, as chickens of different ages could carry different bacteria. And this isn’t a different plot of land across the road; it’s at least 10 kilometres further, as bacteria are airborne. This means the same farm worker can’t even move between two groups without risking infection.

In addition, once the chickens are moved off the farm, the area is disinfected and left empty for a period of 17 days. This downtime means any bacteria will die, as it needs Berné, the one who’s on the road, driving to their stockists and managing any complaints, says people have asked what to do or add to get their chickens this big. “The only reason they can deliver a 2kg-plus bird is because they are healthy.” Because the chickens aren’t fed antibiotics, they aren’t growing at a speed the body and intestines cannot keep up with. They can be comfortably left to live a bit longer.

More Cluck for Your Buck

“A lot of guys take advantage of free-range. Through good farming practices, we try to produce chicken in the most affordable way,” says Gerrit.

Noorsveld chickens are hand-trimmed of excess fat, plus time is taken to hand-pluck feathers (something machines just can’t do with precision).

This means they process at a slower speed, working on 15 chickens per minute instead of 120 like their industrial competitors.

Then there are other small details consumers might miss because it isn’t stated on the packaging label – there’s just too much to mention on one sticker – like the fact that their thighs don’t include the backbone. The backbone can amount to 20-30% of the weight, which is why their price per kilo might be slightly higher, but the consumer is guaranteed more meat. Not to mention there is the fact that a mature bird has better flavour and better bone-to-meat ratio, giving you more meat.

Flying Ahead

“Our current goal is to come in at a price between industrial chicken and free-range chicken.

I want people to be able to try free-range chicken, to be able to eat it at an affordable rate.

That person might not be able to pay R40 per kilo more, but they could manage to pay R10-R15 a kilo more,” explains Berné.

But it’s not just a game of the price is right. Berné and Gerrit take regular road trips together, leaving behind the blue noors succulents in the arid Karoo for small towns and city skylines to talk directly to their stockists and get honest feedback. “Guys don’t tell you about all the small stuff they’re unhappy about, but when you see each other face to face then they give you honest feedback”, says Gerrit. “We’ve always managed to change for the better when we listen to feedback, because we take the punch and we take it seriously.”

Before they think of expanding further into the country, Noorsveld Chickens wants to ensure they have things under control in the Western Cape, where they’ve just started working in the past two years. They aren’t in a rush; they want to make sure their standard is maintained. They want to improve before considering expansion.

“You’re always trying to be better, to keep on improving.”

When asked how they like to eat chicken, Gerrit and Berne say they keep it simple. Gerrit’s favourite is wings, and he says salt, pepper and lemon are all you need. Berné says you just need to focus on getting it cooked while keeping the inside juicy and the skin crisp.

“If you get that right, it really doesn’t matter what you put on it – it will be delicious.” Their keep-it-simple-and-affordable approach rings true, whether on the farm or at the table.

Words: Liezl Vermeulen
Photographs: Supplied
Text Courtesy of: My Kitchen magazine

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 Zandile Finxa, the award-winning consumer scientist and chef nurturing South Africa’s renewed appreciation for sorghum, chats to Christi Nortier about their grandmother’s cooking, the ‘Sorghum Agenda’ and new ways to play with this ancient ingredient.  

When we reach out to shake hands with Zandile Finxa, you can’t help but notice the delicate tattoo of a sorghum stalk gracing the top of their hand and thumb. It immediately brings their beloved indigenous grain into the conversation – which is exactly what they want. 

This consumer scientist turned chef, recipe and product developer, writer and activist has used many means to highlight and push this grain to the front of the national conversation about sustainable, ethical future foods – from social media series to fine-dining events. It is versatile in the kitchen, gluten-free, nutritious, drought-resistant and improves soil health. So why aren’t more of us eating it? That’s where Zandile’s 

 The World In a Grain of Sorghum   

Zandile’s story can be told through sorghum – or rather, is it the other way around? As a kid, a holiday highlight was sitting on the stoep guzzling a sorghum drink with their cousins so they could resume playing. At family gatherings, funerals and weddings, sorghum was transformed into ting (fermented porridge) and mqombothi (traditional beer) to be shared with anyone who came to support the family. It was also their grandmother’s tool to “make a lot happen with very little”. 

A retired domestic worker, Zandile’s grandmother Matshepo Ntja had a “small pocket” and the ability to stretch food to the extremes at home in Sebokeng. “I think back on the meals and I’m amazed, because we had nothing in the house,” Zandile shares, shaking their head with a chuckle. “Vaal is a maize-forward place, but my grandmother made me love sorghum. When she was diagnosed with diabetes, she moved away from maize and back to sorghum, back to her roots. She would make it for me when I was sad, so I associate it with comfort. It was one of my first meals as a child, and it was her last meal before she passed.” 

At university, Zandile kept a small jar of ting in their dormitory room as a comfort when they missed their grandmother. They sat with the memory of their last argument: their grandmother livid that they changed from chemical engineering to food science. “I realised that she was disappointed with my choice because she’d worked her whole life so | didn’t have to cook for a living, like she had to do. She didn’t even let me cook as a kid. I had to explain to her that it won’t be like that – I’m still a scientist. She came round eventually and even bought me my first toolkit,” they share. 

After the first term’s exams ended, they headed home with excitement to show off new cooking techniques and cook up a storm for their gran. But Zandile returned home to grief: their grandmother had passed. They were too late. “She never got to experience my food. I became insistent on honouring food that made me think of her,” they share. “In that way, she can exist even beyond me.” 

Going Against the Grain  

Zandile turned thought into action immediately. At university, they tussled with a curriculum that only embraced indigenous African ingredients during Africa Month or Heritage Day and lecturers who had limited knowledge of them. Zandile used every project to pus! hese ingredients to th fore, especially sorghum. 

They developed a line of sorghum cookies as a solution for gluten intolerance, something they experienced themselves, but was at first told it was “too niche”. “How can food be ‘niche’ if it’s something 60% of people in South Africa grew up with?” they questioned. “Neophobia is the fear of anything new. 

This applies to food in that you can be biased towards the food you grew up with and see only that as credible. I wanted to change perceptions, but knowing this I needed to make it welcoming too.” 

The cookies went through a taste test each week and slowly but surely, perception began to change – people were enjoying them. Zandile took to X (formerly Twitter), posting polls to gauge public awareness and interest in sorghum. They started sharing more about the grain – that it’s drought-and heat-resistant, naturally gluten-free, contains protein and is filled with minerals and vitamins. “I took everyone on the journey with me. People started to see it as more than Maltabella. It created a community and challenged me to think beyond the projects,” they reflect. People asked more questions, which led to more and more research. Meanwhile, the sorghum cookies won an award for most creative and innovative recipe development. 

Since then, Zandile has developed recipes for meals they’ve hosted expressly to introduce people to indigenous ingredients, chief amongst them sorghum, in a way that’s accessible yet exciting. This experience fed into their academic research papers and continues to do so. 

A silver lining of their Covid-19 lockdown experience was the opportunity to post about sorghum and indigenous ingredients every day – food that made them, and surely others, happy during a terrifying time. The followers, awards, collabs and media attention for the Sorghum Agenda flooded in. People spotted Zandile in the street and shouted “Sorghum Agenda!” as they passed by. They had the term trademarked so that like the growers of sorghum, they should also benefit long-term from this project and that it will forever stay connected to their grandmother. It is no longer just an agenda – it is a national movement.

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