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New York Times
5 days ago
- General
- New York Times
You Should Be Traveling with a VPN
CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called You Should Be Traveling With a VPN. Hey there, it's Christine Summer is rolling in and lots of people are probably making big summer travel plans and some of you might be going abroad. Today we're going to do a special mini episode about something that might help keep you and your information's safe while you're gallivanting about the world VPNs, which stand for virtual private network. If you're like me, you might be like, what does this mean? I don't understand this, but we're going to get into it in this episode because a VPN can be really helpful for keeping your information secure while you are web browsing. In just a second, Caira is going to chat with Max Eddy, a staff writer who covers privacy and security here at Wirecutter. He's been featured on another bonus episode of ours, about 23 and Me a few months back, and this week he's going to talk with Caira about what you need to know about a VPN, why it might be helpful and why you should probably have one if you're traveling overseas, we'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. I'm here with Max Eddy, who is a staff writer who's covered privacy and security for over a decade, and now he's here to chat with me about VPNs. Max, welcome to the show. MAX: It's great to be here. CAIRA: I'm so excited to have you on, especially because I don't know much about VPNs. So could you tell us what exactly is a VPN? Explain it to me like I'm five. MAX: Sure, sure. So a VPN is a service, so you're going to need to buy a subscription. It's usually monthly, but you can find shorter term or longer term. And once you've purchased a subscription, you're going to want to install the application on your phone or laptop. The application is actually going to handle all the setup for you, so that's how you're going to interact with it. You open the app and from there you'll be able to turn the VPN connection on and off and select different locations to route your traffic. When you turn the VPN on, it does a few things to your web traffic, so all of the web traffic from your phone, from your browser, from applications, talking to the internet in the background, email, all that stuff is routed through an encrypted connection to a server that's operated by the VPN company. And that connection between your machine and the server is encrypted in such a way that your internet service provider, anyone who's trying to observe your traffic, cannot see what you're doing. And that protects your privacy on that end, and by routing it out through this server, that means it's harder for anyone watching your activities out on the web to connect that back to you. So let's say they, the omnipotent spying they is looking at a website and they see a little blip on it, that's your traffic, and they try to track it back. They're just going to see it coming from the VPN server and not from your computer. So it allows you to both change where your data appears to be coming from by selecting a different server in different location, but importantly, it protects your device. It sort of makes it seem that your traffic is somewhere else. We're trying to prevent observers from being able to correlate that information together. CAIRA: So why would you use a VPN? MAX: So a VPN can help improve your online privacy in a couple of different ways. Advertisers will have a harder time tracking you and your ISP, your internet service provider can't see what you're doing and when you're traveling, it means you can sometimes use streaming services or websites as if you were still at home. CAIRA: Right, right. I like using it if I'm in Canada and you usually can't use HBO Max somewhere than if you have a VPN located in New York. You can still use HBO Max, right? MAX: Sometimes. CAIRA: Sometimes it doesn't work all the time. So then why don't people just use VPNs all the time? MAX: Well, because most of your traffic is already encrypted and you have to pay for a VPN, so you really would end up paying for another subscription on top of your internet service provider subscription. The other reason is that it does slow down your internet connection and VPN companies have gotten better about this, but it is always going to have an impact on it, especially if you're connecting to a VPN server that's further away. So if you're in New York and you're pretending to be in California, it's going to be much slower than if you were connected to a VPN server in New York. CAIRA: So to make it a little bit more grounded in the real world, what are some examples of people who might want to use a VPN at home or abroad? MAX: So at home, someone might want to use a VPN if they really don't want their ISP to see what they're doing. Your internet service provider can see everything that you're doing, and legally they can sell that data. And I think also people who are just very concerned about trying to reduce their exposure to advertising trackers to pretty much anyone out there who is trying to observe your movements online. I think that's from the privacy perspective. From a usability perspective, there are people who might be trying to access streaming or some kind of online service that's only available in a particular region. You can do that with a VPN sometimes. But really when we look at VPNs, we look at them as a privacy product. This is what you're using it for. CAIRA: And then if you are abroad, what is a normal person going to use a VPN for abroad? MAX: So I think the most normal thing to use it while you're abroad is just a little bit more peace of mind when you're traveling in an area where you might not know what the privacy laws are like you might not know anything about the region, you might not ever be coming back either. So it's a little bit more peace of mind. It can make things a little bit easier while you're traveling. And most importantly though, I think the more practical thing that people are going to use a VPN for abroad is to access services that are only available at home. So if I am out in another country and I want to watch show on my favorite streaming platform, I might want to use a VPN so that I can appear to be in the US and doing that. Again, that doesn't always work, but there's lots of other services like you might want to be connecting to your bank or even just using the regular internet as if you were at home. That can be localized to your own language if you try to access Google somewhere else, it's not going to be in English probably. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do that. CAIRA: When I was in college, I studied abroad in Shanghai and they required us to have VPNs on our phones and our laptops because the government centers so much stuff. MAX: Anyone who's in a position where they feel like they might be targeted by a repressive government, a minoritized person, a journalist, an activist, that makes sense for them to use VPNs, and your example of being in Shanghai is a really great example because that's a situation where there's not only censorship where you need to use a VPN to connect to sites that would be unavailable where you are, but also because there's known to be a lot of surveillance and if you're trying to avoid or really mitigate that to some extent, that's an important thing to use a VPN for. CAIRA: Totally. So when people might be considering getting a VPN, what should they look for? What do you look for? MAX: So the most important thing I look at with VPNs is their commitment to transparency because a VPN, if it wanted to, could monitor its servers and see all the traffic that all of its users are accessing, and that's not good. So one thing we also look for is recent third-party audits. When I look at VPNs, I want to see that they're making some kind of commitment to security and privacy and that they're following their own policies. Obviously audits are not perfect, but they're a good tool to evaluate that. And you want to have a strong privacy policy. The company should be able to explain to you what data they're collecting and why and what they're doing to protect you and a transparency report if possible. That's a accounting of how many requests from law enforcement the company has received and how they responded to them. CAIRA: Oh. MAX: You want to see that as low as possible. And we also want to see companies that aren't leaning into fear, uncertainty and doubt in their marketing. Like I said earlier, VPNs are tricky because they do what they say they're going to do, but whether or not they make sense for you is going to depend on your particular situation and companies that try to convince you that you need this to survive. We don't think that's fair. CAIRA: Okay. So if it's really blasting, either you're being surveilled all the time, you definitely need this VPN because it's going to protect you, maybe don't trust that? MAX: Yeah. CAIRA: Okay. So that does sound like a lot of criteria. Did any of these VPNs that you tested actually cover all of that? MAX: Absolutely. And one of the things we do look at too is affordability and Mullvad VPN is a great choice for affordability. It's only $5 a month, a little over $5 a month, and they don't require you to reveal much personal information when you sign up. It's an interesting system, a little bit hard to get used to, but it's really convenient and it's a great way to protect your privacy. The only issue that we've ever had with Mullvad is that it only has servers in 50 countries. That should be fine for most people, but if you need to be in a specific country with your VPN server and it's not there, then that could be an issue. CAIRA: So do you have a recommendation just for people who only want a VPN when they're traveling abroad? MAX: Yeah, IVPN is cheap, easy to use. It does have some limitations, but it's great for traveling because they have very low cost, short-term subscriptions. So you can get a week subscription for just $2. So short trip, short VPN subscription. CAIRA: That's lovely. And do you have to put in a lot of information to sign up for IVPN? MAX: No, you don't. They have a pretty similar system. CAIRA: Oh, so it's quick, easy and cheap? MAX: Yeah. CAIRA: Amazing. Can you walk me through how I might go about picking a VPN? If I'm planning on traveling abroad, what does that decision tree look like? MAX: So first off, you're going to want to go and take a look at our guide at Wirecutter because we have not just our top picks, but a number of other ones that we think are good and situations where you might want to use them. First and foremost, people need to look at the cost. The average price of a VPN is about $10 a month. If it's more expensive than that, it needs to be offering you something extra in order to justify that cost. And like I said, you want to look at what assurances they're making you about their transparency, their security. You want to take a look at their privacy policy. They should be able to explain to you why they're safe to use. If you need to be in a particular region, you want to look on their website and see what servers they offer. Most VPNs will cover most major locations. That's pretty common. In terms of value. You want to make sure that you're getting it two to five devices depending on how much you're paying. So the low cost IVPN, week long subscription I mentioned that limits you to just two devices at the same time. Usually you can get up to five devices at the same time. So if you wanted to say, have one VPN account for two laptops, two phones, and then another device that'll have you all covered. CAIRA: Like a family plan? MAX: Yeah, exactly. You can actually get significantly more depending on how much you're willing to pay. Ideally, you should be able to select a server location manually, but especially if you're traveling, you're probably going to want to be routing your traffic to a specific location. So you want to look for a service that will let you do that. CAIRA: Can you briefly explain how you actually tested VPNs? MAX: Most of the time when I do VPN testing, I'm testing from where I live. And that's very limiting, right? Because your experience of using a VPN is going to be very dependent upon your internet connection, how far you are away from a VPN server and all these other variables. It gets really, really messy, really fast. So for this last round of VPN testing, I got some volunteers from the Wirecutter staff who tested VPNs on their homes at various locations across the country in various situations. So we had people in really rural areas, we had people in big cities, we had people in mid-sized cities and across the country, and we saw some strong trends. But it really underlined that where you are, your personal situation is going to have the biggest impact on whether or not that VPN is going to perform well for you. And it will be wildly different depending on where you are. So the reason we did this was to underline the advice that we give to people, which is, it's cheaper to buy a VPN at a year-long or longer subscription. It's much, much cheaper to do that, and they want you to do that, but you don't know how it's going to work in your home. So it's better to get the shortest possible subscription or use the free version of it if that's possible. Try it out at your home, see how it works, and if it even makes sense for the thing you're trying to accomplish. And if it does, then you can go ahead and sign up for that longer subscription. CAIRA: So let's say that you've traveled, you're back home. What do you do when you're done with a VPN? Does it just stay on your phone forever? MAX: If you no longer need a VPN, you should turn it off, uninstall it, and cancel your subscription. Because when you're connected to a VPN, it's always going to have an impact on your internet speeds. And that's because it's usually adding more distance to that. It's really easy to forget that it's on. So take a look in the application, see if you're still connected, disconnect, and then look in settings, make sure it's not automatically connecting. If you don't want it to be doing that, get rid of it. Live a great life. CAIRA: Do you think there's anything else that the curious novice might want to know about VPNs? MAX: There are some free VPNs out there that we actually do trust. Proton VPN does not limit your data for its free subscribers, but it does limit your locations. TunnelBear has a free subscription option that does limit your data, but not locations. So depending on what you're trying to do, one of those might be really good. Tor I should really mention it, is a much more robust privacy option that is free, but it is absolutely going to slow down your connection a lot more. Most people don't need to use VPNs all the time. It is a valuable tool that can solve a problem, but it only makes sense if it's one problem you're trying to solve. So if you don't want your ISP to see what you're doing, or you need to be in a specific location and a VPN is a really useful tool, but to make a really strong impact on your personal security, you should be using a password manager and enabling 2FA wherever you can. CAIRA: What is 2FA? MAX: Two-factor authentication. It makes it much harder for an attacker to take over your account even if they already have your password. CAIRA: So in a perfect world, you should have a password manager, a two-factor authentication, and a VPN when you're traveling abroad? MAX: I don't even think that's a perfect world. I think that's just the world we should live in. CAIRA: I like that answer. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Max, for coming and talking to me about VPNs. MAX: Thank you so much. CHRISTINE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage on VPNs or if you want to check out the specific VPNs we recommended today, go to our website or check out our show notes. Thanks so much for listening. See you. CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddie Massiello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Elishiba Itoop and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief. I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. CAIRA: Thanks for listening.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Wirecutter Show Episode 41: Grill, Baby, Grill!
CAIRA: What is the difference between a barbecue and a cookout? SAM: Well, that's a whole episode. CAIRA: Oh. SAM: I think at a barbecue, you're actually going to barbecue. You're going to cook meat for a long time and serve it to a large number of people. At a cookout, Chad's going to just do the hot dogs. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CAIRA: This episode is called Grill, Baby, Grill ROSIE: Hey, Caira. Hey, Christine. CAIRA: Hi. CHRISTINE: Hello. ROSIE: Another Wednesday, another Wirecutter Show. CHRISTINE: Again, this has become a regular thing for us. ROSIE: Today we're going to talk about grills and grilling. CHRISTINE: 'Tis the season. ROSIE: 'Tis the season. Are you grilling people? CAIRA: I want to be. ROSIE: Aspirational griller? CHRISTINE: Aspirational. I do not currently have an outdoor space that I can grill at, but when I am somewhere where I can grill, I do grill. And on the site, we do have recommendations for gas grills, for charcoal grills, and I have got to tell you all that it is kind of wild testing grills in New York City, I think we're going to get into that in this episode, but it is a massive task to figure out places that you can actually grill. We can't do it at our offices. There's no outdoor space to do it. Our landlord will not let us do it there, and so we've had to get very creative over the years. ROSIE: The kitchen team had to put together something wild. CHRISTINE: Yeah, they really did. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. CAIRA: I loved what they ended up doing and I want to do it again. First up today, we're talking with Lesley Stockton, who's a senior staff writer on the kitchen team to talk to us about all of the unexpected things that she uses to cook and keep her grill clean. And then later we're going to have Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor at NYT and co-founder of New York Times Cooking, talk to us about some of the recipes he's excited to cook on his grill this summer, and, of course, his famous hosting tips for a blowout barbeque. CHRISTINE: I am really looking forward to that. ROSIE: Sam is the best. CHRISTINE: Okay, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back we'll talk with Lesley Stockton about tips and tools for becoming a better grill cook. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Lesley Stockton, who is a senior kitchen writer at the kitchen team at Wirecutter, and she's worked as a professional chef for over 20 years. And one of her very first jobs was working as a sous chef at a restaurant that cooked over a wood burning grill, and she had to do the maintenance for all of that, which is so impressive. CHRISTINE: Lesley. I love that. Welcome back to the show. LESLEY: I love being here. CHRISTINE: Lesley, you've been testing grills and grill tools for Wirecutter for many years, and most recently you finished this really huge grill test where we rented an entire brownstone in Brooklyn to test a bunch of grills. Tell us a little bit about that. LESLEY: Okay, so first of all, I did start this coverage eight years ago in my backyard. So this time around, since I don't have that backyard anymore, because living in New York can be perilous, we rented a backyard in Clinton Hill. And you're covered in grease, you're sweating, you're swapping out propane tanks, there's meat. It's so much. CHRISTINE: And just to paint a picture, because I went to this house and checked it out, you had over a dozen grills in this backyard, right? LESLEY: Grills and griddles. CHRISTINE: Right. So you had gas grills, you had griddles. Were you doing any LESLEY: Charcoal? LESLEY: There was one charcoal grill in the backyard, which is our top pick, the Weber 22 inch kettle. I was using that because I was testing griddle inserts for Weber grills, which is just kind of like a flat piece of metal that you can cook pancakes on, and bacon, and shrimp, and things like that. CHRISTINE: And bacon, bacon and eggs, french toast. You can use it as a plancha. Of course. Wonderful. CAIRA: That's what the deli guys used at the bodegas, right? CHRISTINE: Yeah! And also just for listeners who might not be aware, I mean it is a really big deal to be able to test grills in a backyard. Like you mentioned earlier, the first time we did this was in your backyard in Brooklyn, took weeks, and this time it took weeks also. So we spent two weeks testing grills in this backyard, which is a huge, huge task. ROSIE: So when you're doing grilling testing, big picture. I know we're going to zoom into some of the specifics about tools and about setups, but big picture grill testing, what are some of the criteria you are using to judge grills? LESLEY: So for propane grills, what you're looking for is a cast aluminum firebox because that reflects heat the best, and aluminum is not corrosive the way steel is, so it won't succumb to the elements. You also want a grill that doesn't flare up a lot. Every grill is going to flare up a little bit, but you just don't want a bunch of flare-ups. You want it to heat relatively evenly. Now with every single gas grill, the very front of the grates, like the part that's closest to you, is always going to be the coldest. That's just what it is. We can't do anything about it. But how cold is it up there and how hot is in the back corners? Do the grates give you a good sear? Does it get hot enough to give you a good sear in good color or does it get too hot where everything just comes out with a layer of carbon? It has a lot to do with user-friendliness. So Weber has been our pick and we're not shills for Weber, but the thing is about Weber is that it heats evenly. It has the fewest amount of flare-ups and I think it's the most user-friendly grill for your average home cook. CAIRA: So why would people be upset about that? I feel like Weber- LESLEY: Because all our picks are Weber. CAIRA: But that's because I feel like I don't know anything about a grill, but I tried to use a Weber grill last week and it felt like I was using a stove, like a gas-burning stove. LESLEY: Yeah, and you still get a really good end result. You get great sear marks, you get great flavor, you get good searing. I've tested so many dang grills, trust me on this one. CAIRA: I like that. So Lesley, what I really want to know is what is the easiest, simplest way to really level up your current grilling experience? LESLEY: The best way to do that is to spend some time really focusing on cleaning and oiling your grates in the beginning. Let me expand on that. So, there are a couple of different schools of thought on this, but as someone who did work over a grill, what I do is, I turn on the grill, I let it get hot, and then I come back, and I scrape the grates with a wire brush. Now I know this is controversial because people are like, 'but you can get a wire stuck in your soft palate.' There are more steps to this. You scrape those grates clean, you get all the food debris from the last cook off, by the time the grill is hot, they have turned to carbon, so they're really easy to get off. Now next, you go over it with a damp rag and when you look at that rag, it's going to be sooty that would've been on your food, right? Use tongs. Don't wipe a hot grill with a damp rag- CHRISTINE: And your hands. LESLEY: And your hands. CHRISTINE: It's not going to feel good. LESLEY: Use tongs. And then, last step, with a paper towel with some vegetable oil on it, oil those grates, now it is ready to cook CHRISTINE: And that's what you should be doing every time before you grill. Right? LESLEY: Yes. CHRISTINE: Because I know some people will leave their grill on for a little while after they're done grilling to burn off any food. Great as a rodent deterrent. CAIRA: Oh, okay, good. ROSIE: Well that's always good. CHRISTINE: What about cleaning the rest of your grill? I was actually at a friend's house a couple summers ago and they hadn't cleaned their grill in a couple years. They have a propane grill. And they had a grease fire and they had to put it out with a fire extinguisher. LESLEY: Yeah. Mm-hmm, that happens. Uh-huh. CHRISTINE: How important is it to clean your grill and deeper clean and how often? LESLEY: Yeah, so let's say you're going to grill, and you turn it on to heat it up and you come back and you see some smoke coming out of the firebox. And what I mean by coming out of the firebox, is smoke is coming out from underneath the flame ports. That's when I get, I don't know what is it is a spackle knife or a paint scraper, like one of those big spatulas that people used to fill holes with walls with spackle? Spackle knife. CHRISTINE: Like a metal version of that. LESLEY: Yeah, a metal version of that. And, make note, after this grill cools down, I'm going to remove the grates, take the flame port protectors off, and I'm going to get in there with this metal spackle knife, and I'm going to just scrape all the grease and crud out from the bottom of the firebox, direct it toward the grease trap, and change out that grease trap, wash it, whatever. So I would say once in the middle of grilling season, and then definitely at the end. CHRISTINE: Because you don't want that grease just sitting there all winter, right? LESLEY: Yeah, getting rancid and rodents. CAIRA: How can you tell if there isn't a live rat just crawling around in your grill? LESLEY: Droppings. CAIRA: How do you know the difference between charred bits of food and droppings? LESLEY: I mean... Look, if you're that paranoid, just get in there with some simple green and a scrub. And let it burn off for a solid 20 to 30 minutes. CAIRA: Okay. ROSIE: So back to the grill brush. That is a hot topic. You mentioned the metal bristles can get into food, it can get stuck in your body. Is that what you actually recommend to clean the grill? LESLEY: We do. We also have a recommendation for, oh gosh, it's called the grill rescue brush, and it's kind of cool. It's like a plastic red handle, and it's made with this fire retardant fabric that firefighters use or something, and you get it wet and while the grill is hot, it just kind of steam cleans the grates. CHRISTINE: So you don't need the bristles. It acts like the bristles because it's got some kind of texture on it. LESLEY: And the wipe of the damp rag afterwards. It works pretty well. Does it give you a really good scrape, like a wire brush? No. ROSIE: Two follow up questions. Why are you not worried about the metal bristles? LESLEY: I am not worried about the metal bristles because I'm going over it with that damp rag that picks up soot and everything else off of the top of those grates, and then I'm going over it again with an oiled paper towel, and so that's two wipes. When you hear about those horror stories of like, 'my five-year-old got a wire bristle stuck in their soft palate,' they didn't wipe it afterwards and that's always my first question. Why did they wipe down the grates? They didn't wipe down the grates, because if they did, this would not be a story. ROSIE: Got it. And then my second question is, I admittedly know exactly nothing about grilling, but I have heard that some people opt to use like an onion. Is that a thing? Is that a myth? LESLEY: No, it's not a myth. I honestly just use a balled up foil ball. The onion has... One, it's a waste of an onion. CHRISTINE: Yeah, grill that onion, eat that onion. LESLEY: Exactly. Two, it's going to deposit sugar, so you're not really cleaning it. Does that make any sense? ROSIE: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense to me. LESLEY: Yeah, it just doesn't sit right with me. CHRISTINE: I want to talk a little bit about tools. And I know that there's a pretty wide span of quality for grill tools. I think most people probably have a grill kit that maybe they got it as a gift, or it came with their grill. It's got a set of tongs and a spatula. Is this what you would recommend for people, or are there other things or unexpected tools that you think people should really know about? LESLEY: I find those kits, well aesthetically pleasing are not great. They're heavy. The tongs are always difficult to use. CHRISTINE: Yeah, they never squeeze right, I don't know if you notice they don't spring back very well. LESLEY: They spring back to two and a half inches and it- ROSIE: It makes me feel like a child holding the tongs because they're so massive. CHRISTINE: They're so big. ROSIE: And you can't quite, you have to use two hands. LESLEY: Because they're man tongs. CHRISTINE: I think, yeah, they're supposed to be man tongs. For sure. LESLEY: Man tongs. And I always find those spatulas to be awkward to use. Again, they're absurdly long. What I like to use, if we're talking about tongs, WinCo, restaurant tongs 12 inch- CHRISTINE: Just those metal, they're cheap, they're just the metal kind, right? LESLEY: The metal kind. We're not even talking about any silicone grips. The metal tongs you get at the restaurant supply store or on Amazon, and they're very inexpensive, and they last a long time, and they're dishwasher safe. I recommend WinCo tongs in many sizes. If we're talking spatulas, there's a very large fish spatula made by Mercer, and it's called Hell's handle, so if you want something manly, there it is. CAIRA: What's a fish spatula? What's the difference? LESLEY: A fish spatula is it's long and it flares out towards it tapers towards the handle and it flares out as it goes out. It's angled at the end and it's slotted, so it's just kind of the perfect spatula for almost anything, any type of flipping. I say almost, because it's not great for a griddle, but it's great in the kitchen. It's great on the grill. I love a fish spatula. CHRISTINE: It's come up before. I think Marilyn, our kitchen senior editor also loves a fish spatula. Are there any other, beyond tongs and the spatula, what else would you recommend for a grill? LESLEY: Get yourself a basting brush. I know we recommend a silicon brush and the one we recommend I think is the only one I will tolerate. I think it's OXO. It's easy to clean. Again, you can throw it in the dishwasher. CHRISTINE: What about, my mom has a grill basket she swears by it. Do you like those? LESLEY: Oh, grill baskets. I was such a hater for a very long time, but I'm into it now. ROSIE: What is a grill basket? LESLEY: So a grill basket is a steel perforated square basket with handles, and you just put it on your grill and you can grill cut up vegetables, anything that's small, like shrimp, anything that you don't want to put on a skewer you can do in a grill basket. I don't know about y'all, but I think skewers are kind of a pain in the butt. CAIRA: What? CHRISTINE: 1000%. LESLEY: Thank you. ROSIE: I don't want to waste the time to shove something on a skewer CHRISTINE: And soak the skewers if you're using the wood ones. LESLEY: But also things don't cook at the same rate and so people put eggplant and squash, and what are other popular things to put on a vegetable skewer? CHRISTINE: Peppers. CAIRA: Bell peppers. ROSIE: Onions, yeah. LESLEY: And then, every single time that eggplant is spongy and undercooked. Look, I'm not subtweeting anyone here. That is just how it goes. CHRISTINE: And so you would recommend putting all the things you would put on a skewer into a grill basket instead? LESLEY: Yes. If you must skewer, if you must, put all the same thing on one skewer. CHRISTINE: All the chicken. LESLEY: Yeah. CHRISTINE: All the pineapple. ROSIE: Keep it homogenous. LESLEY: And then people can just get what they want off the skewer, and keep it pushing. ROSIE: Lesley, so much good information here about how to really level up your backyard grill. What I'm taking away most of all is clean it. Deep clean at the end of the season, and then really clean for maintenance, that process you mentioned, whereby you're scrubbing it down with the metal bristles, you're taking a wet cloth to it and then you're taking a lightly oiled paper towel to it, and that's going to really help level up the performance of your grill if you're using it on any kind of regular basis. LESLEY: You should not have any or very few problems with food sticking to your grates if you do that process. ROSIE: The other takeaway I think is, you can go for those prepackaged grill kits if you want your tools, or you can make your own and maybe get a fish spatula, maybe get a grill basket. Play around. LESLEY: I honestly think you'll save some money too. ROSIE: And save some money. …Why do people grill? LESLEY: Let me tell you why we grilled when I was a kid, and why I continued to grill as adult is because, I grew up in Houston, and it's hot. You're fighting for your life cooling down your house in July, August, September. Your AC unit is working overtime, and so when you can turn on the heat source outside, and then keep your kitchen cool, that's everything. ROSIE: So that's the practical reason. What's the romantic reason? LESLEY: Cooking over fire, I don't know. Cosplaying struggle? ROSIE: Yeah. Is it tapping into, is it tapping into the hunter gatherer? LESLEY: I think so. I just think it's like a different way of cooking. It's like, we don't braise everything, we don't fry everything, we don't bake everything. It's like sometimes you want to switch it up. CAIRA: So there seems to be this eternal debate around the grilling community about gas versus charcoal. After years of your experience, Lesley, what is your take? Are you team gas or team charcoal? LESLEY: Let me tell you something. These charcoal folks have no leg to stand on, because I cooked over mesquite wood for years in this restaurant, and that is a whole other thing. If you want flavor, start with wood. I find that, mostly men, are resistant to propane grills because to them that's kind of like the outdoor cooking version of getting a minivan, and it's not sexy, it's way too practical. But another thing I noticed is that, when men finally do get the minivan, they love the minivan. CHRISTINE: I'll attest to this, we rented a minivan this summer and my husband totally loved it. CAIRA: So, it's not sexy, but it works. LESLEY: It works and it just frees you up. I love charcoal grilling. I do. But do I just want to rely on a charcoal grill to fire it up in the middle of the week because it's too hot to cook in my kitchen, and yada yada yada? No, I don't want to start that chimney starter full of coals just so I can cook myself some dinner really quick. That's why the propane grill is awesome. CHRISTINE: Lesley, it is always a pleasure to have you on the show. We want to have you back soon. We are going to take a quick break, and when we're back we're going to talk with Sam Sifton, who is the founder of New York Times Cooking, and he's going to talk about how to dial in your grilling, what summer recipes you might want to do, and the burning question that I think all of us want to know. How much booze should you serve at your summer barbecue? CAIRA: Yeah, he had a hot take about Thanksgiving, so. CHRISTINE: Oh my gosh. CAIRA: We'll get into it. CHRISTINE: All right, we'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. We're here in the studio with New York Times' assistant managing editor, co-founder of NYT cooking, and grill-enthusiast Sam Sifton. CHRISTINE: Sam, welcome back to the show. SAM: Thanks. Thanks for having me. CHRISTINE: It's so great to have you. So you're basically an honorary Wirecutter staffer at this point. You have tested grills with us. I think the first time we tested grills almost eight years ago, you joined us in the backyard of our writer Lesley Stockton's backyard, and you helped us test a bunch of grills. So I got to know, are you team charcoal or Team Gas Grill? SAM: I'm Team Grill. CHRISTINE: You're just Team Grill. Basically what she said. SAM: I just want to be clear about something. I have a lot of grills. CHRISTINE: Oh really? ROSIE: What is a lot of grills? CAIRA: How many? SAM: Listen, I have a gas grill because I think a gas grill is an incredibly useful tool. It's my outdoor kitchen all summer long and I love it. I love it. I love it. I have a charcoal grill because sometimes you want that kind of heat, you want that kind of char, that kind of flavor. I have other grills that I don't want to get into. It just marks me as a lunatic. But I am not on team charcoal or team propane. I'm on Team Grill. CHRISTINE: Okay. ROSIE: I'm not a griller. Who is the person? Who is this person who grills? Is this like- SAM: The grill guy? ROSIE: Yeah. Is it primordial? What is it about grill? Is it meat and fire? Why are we doing it? SAM: This is my culture. ROSIE: Tell me, talk to me. Who are you? SAM: I mean look, there's big dad energy to it, for sure. There is something about being outside. For me, in particular, I like cooking outside. I like the inventiveness that comes along with it. The sort of experimentation that leads to big reveals, and I just enjoy it. I guess it is. It's big dad energy, man. ROSIE: Big dad energy. So not team gas, not team charcoal. Your team grill. What does that mean for you? I mean not everyone obviously is going to be able to have multiple grills, so if someone's trying to get into it, what are you guiding them toward? SAM: I think that the easiest way in as a gas grill, because it's essentially, it's just an outdoor stove. You're not going to get a great steak out of it, but there are a lot of things that you can do on a gas grill that'll give you the fundamentals that you can transfer to live fire. As for live fire, if you're charcoal curious, head to your local park where there's often grills there, you can cook on them and learn, 'is this for me? Do I like this? Do I want to do more with this?' If you are moved to purchase a charcoal grill first, and obviously Wirecutter recommends you get the Weber Kettle Grill, which we knew going into the testing was going to win it's a superior product. CHRISTINE: It's obvious. Yes. SAM: Yeah. It's just a superior product. Get the one we recommend, the big one. Don't get the little one that looks like a football helmet. That's not going to help you in any regard. CAIRA: Sam, I know that you've written about this in your newsletter, but I want to talk a little bit about understanding the zones on a grill. As somebody who also isn't really a griller, that seems pretty intimidating to me. Just knowing where to put things, and when to take it off. What exactly does it mean to have zones in your grill? SAM: Yeah, people freak out. I don't get it, man. Do you freak out when you have zones with an air conditioner? Nobody's like, this room is cool, this room is cooler, this room is cold, okay? Those are zones. Ooh, I'm freaked out. So let's start with a charcoal grill. That's where the zone issue becomes most complicated. When you're lighting the fire at the very beginning of the process, when you dump that charcoal out, if you put it right in the middle, and then kind of push it out and everything's equal at the bottom of the grill, you have no zones. It's all uniform. However, if you pour them off, I'm right-handed so I usually pour them off to the left side, and it's sort of mounded on the left side and there's nothing on the right side, now you have a hot zone, which is right above where the top of the mound is, a kind of medium zone where it's slightly farther away, and a cooler zone off to the right where there are no coals at all. And I could put a chicken in that so-called cool zone, put the top on the Weber and let convection heat do its work and I got a nice smoked roasted chicken in about an hour. Zones! CHRISTINE: There we go. The zones. The zones. CAIRA: Don't be scared. CHRISTINE: Well, if somebody just feels kind of intimidated and they haven't had a lot of wins on the grill, what do you suggest they do? Obviously practice makes perfect, but do you have any strategies for just becoming better at grilling in general? SAM: Yeah, grill. CHRISTINE: Yeah, practice. Practice. SAM: Honestly, the more you do it, the more you're going to figure it out. Commit to the grill. You bought a grill, you spent the money on the Wirecutter pick for the best grill. Now you have it. Now you got to use it. And are you going to have some losses? Yes you are. I remember once cooking for a dinner party on a grill that was not my own, and I thought that the burner on the left was off, and that's where I had the chickens and I was kind of smoking them, and I came back and that burner was actually on, and my chickens were incinerated. I threw them in the trash and grilled some more vegetables and we had a big vegetarian feast, and nobody missed the chicken because I never told them that they were getting chicken in the first place. CAIRA: Well, I got some advice, just as a novice, if I find myself fidgeting around too much with stuff on the grill, then I'm probably doing something wrong. What do you think? SAM: Yeah, definitely. Why are you touching that? Stop touching that. Yeah, let's say I have a boneless skinless, or no, I'll give it skin. Let's say we have a boneless, eh, why am I taking the bone out? We have a chicken thigh. Okay? I've salted it. There's a little oil on there. I don't want it to stick to the grate and I put it down on the medium zone, and I'm not going to touch it. I need enough fat to render that it's going to release from the grate. If you go in there too soon and pick it up, it's sticking to the grate, it's ripping and I'm losing this delicious skin that I want to render out and have be a crisp exterior. So don't touch too much. CAIRA: But what if it's charring too much in the medium? SAM: Then move it! For sure. CAIRA: Okay. SAM: You know what I mean? Touch for a reason. CAIRA: Okay. SAM: Don't touch for no reason, don't touch for nervous. Get a fidget spinner if that's what you need, but... CHRISTINE: Get a drink, help somebody else in the kitchen. SAM: Yeah, be careful on the drinks. ROSIE: We're we're going to get you the drink in just a second. Before that, what are some of the recipes that you think in terms of input versus outsized payoff? What are you thinking? SAM: I mentioned chicken thighs before. I think chicken thighs are a really, really good protein for the grill. There's a lot of fat on them, they don't dry out the way chicken breasts often do. For the big boy proteins, your hams, your pulled porks and stuff, your briskets, your beef ribs. You should feel pretty confident before you tackle those. CHRISTINE: These are advanced. SAM: Yeah. That's not for freshmen. CHRISTINE: Okay. Yeah. Is fish for freshmen? SAM: Oh, that's a great question. So, one of the extras that I have applied to my gas grill, and this is really easily done, is I have a piece of steel that can go over the grill and create this kind of... Create. It is a flat metal surface on which I can cook. The plancha is the perfect thing to cook fish on, because it's not going to stick to the grates, you can get plenty of oil on there or grease or fat or whatever you want for your flavor. You're going to get some taste of smoke. Because you could do this on a charcoal grill as well. That's the best way to cook fish the first few times until you kind of got it figured out. Like a whole fish say. But man, it's great with scallops, with shrimp, nothing's falling through the grates. ROSIE: Sam, what's your recommendation for someone who is trying to cook non-meat options, and maybe wants to impress a little bit? SAM: All the vegetables are available to you this summer, and they all do really well on the grill. Even tomatoes do well on the grill, but if you want fast track to success, get corn on there, let it get a little caramelized, put some cool toppings on it, you'll do great. Another great thing on the grill, I find, is tofu. If you press it for a while and get as much liquid as you can out of it, planks up pretty nicely and can kind of do well on the grill, especially if you don't move it too quickly, let it develop a sear, and then flip it over and then get it into a sauce. It just sucks up the sauce deliciously, you don't need meat to grill. CHRISTINE: That's right. SAM: But it helps. CAIRA: Sam, what are some recipes that you're excited to try this summer on the grill? SAM: Well, I am going to attack some of the kind of larger format proteins, a pork butt on the grill, slowly smoke roasted for hours and hours. If you take the Times recipe for the bossam that used to be served at Momofuku here in New York and do that in a charcoal grill or in a gas grill with a smoker tube attached. It's already outrageously good, and now it's like three x outrageously good. So I'll do that a bunch. I'll probably smoke a lot of bluefish. I fish a lot, so we pick up these little snapper bluefish, but darker and some would say oilier. I think that oil lends itself particularly well to smoking. On the gas grill, I use a smoke tube, this perforated tube filled with wood pellets. I love doing that. On the charcoal grill. I'm getting a moderate amount of smoke just from the charcoal briquettes, but when I'm being an advanced guy, I'm not using charcoal. I'm cooking over wood, so my Weber is now filled with wood, and I'm letting that cook down into coals, and you get some really good smoke flavor from that. CAIRA: How long does that take? SAM: Are you asking for a friend? Are you asking for my wife? ROSIE: We're hosting a barbecue this summer, let's say, we're going to bring out the grill or the grills. What are your best tips for hosting? SAM: I know I'm going to be serving some long roasted meat. We're going to have these ribs are coming or whatever, and so I want a lot of other things there that people can munch on while we're waiting for those ribs to come off. They don't need to be hot, but in contrast to what we do at Thanksgiving, where we kind of keep them hungry until the last minute, I really, really like to have some quickly cooked hot dogs, or brats, or sausages of some kind, that I can just get out there. Everybody can eat a couple hot dogs and still grind some ribs when they're ready. CHRISTINE: In November, when you joined us to talk about Thanksgiving, you shared your guidance about how much alcohol to have on hand at a Thanksgiving dinner, and I believe it was something like two bottles of wine per guest plus some spirits. I'm wondering what your guidance is for grilling? SAM: I want to dial that wave. The reason why I ask for so much alcohol at Thanksgiving is because you might need it. At a barbecue, I don't think you do seeing spirits at a barbecue before dark- CHRISTINE: It's trouble. SAM: There's trouble. There's trouble. So I think just you want a bunch of cold beer, and some seltzers or hard seltzers, or soda pop or whatever it is that you're interested in. I have to say my go-to beer at barbecues lately has been N.A. Beer from a company called Athletic. CHRISTINE: Oh yeah, SAM: Athletic, makes a really killer N.A. ROSIE: Sam Sifton, thank you so much. SAM: Thank you for having me as always. Thanks. ROSIE: Thanks. CHRISTINE: All right, you guys. Sam- ROSIE: Another All-Star episode. CHRISTINE: Another All-Star episode. CAIRA: So good. CHRISTINE: Lesley, Sam, I learned so much about grilling today. CAIRA: Me too. ROSIE: For something I've had almost next to zero interest in, I am intrigued. CHRISTINE: Are you intrigued enough to go down to Home Depot this weekend and get yourself a grill? ROSIE: Hard no, but I will say perhaps one time this summer I will ask to grill at someone's house if they'll let me. CAIRA: That's a big step forward. ROSIE: And well, one of my takeaways is what Sam talked about in terms of moving the food, don't move the food. CAIRA: Yeah. Mine is also kind of related to that. I think the reason that I was so fidgety over the grill previously, is because I didn't understand the zoning properly. I would just turn on all the burners, so the grill would just be way too hot. But now I know that you can turn on one side and then you have a hot medium and then cool, and then your food won't burn, and you won't be frantically moving it around. CHRISTINE: That's right. You've got options on that grill. CAIRA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: I think my little party trick for the summer when I'm at my mom's house where she has a grill, or at a friend's house with a grill is I'm going to go out and clean the grill. As long as it's not rude to the person that's grilling. Yeah, I'm going to scrub it down with the brush. I'm going to take the tongs and I'm going to wipe it down with the wet cloth, and then I'm going to oil that baby afterwards. And if I ever am in a situation again where I have a grill, personally, I'm going to make sure and keep it clean because I think that's something people oftentimes overlook. ROSIE: I love it. If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage of grills, if you want to see footage of the team at the Grill House or if you want to check out the products we recommended today, check out our Instagram, check out our website. And of course, you can peruse any and all of the brilliant Sam Sifton's Grill recipes at NYT Cooking. That's it for us. Thanks so much for listening. Peace. CAIRA: Bye. ROSIE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keele, engineering support from Maddy Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Alicia by Etube, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening. ROSIE: Another grill tool in your proverbial basket. Huh? Christine, what do you think of that? CHRISTINE: Wait, sorry, what? I'm losing the thread. I'm sorry. Wait, what? ROSIE: It was a joke.
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Health
- New York Times
The Wirecutter Show Episode 38: 'Detox' Your Kitchen
CHRISTINE: That all just sounds too complicated for a cooking spoon. KATIE: 100%. You know. Like let's not do more math than we need to, use wood! CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called: 'Detox' Your Kitchen CHRISTINE: Hey Rosie. ROSIE: Hey. Hey. CHRISTINE: It's just us today. Caira is out. We miss her very much. But today we are going to talk about something that often comes up in questions from Wirecutter readers. We get a lot of questions from people who are wondering about the products in their home and the sort of health implications of those products, and it kind of runs the gamut. We get questions about all types of products, but a lot of times we get questions about the kitchen. People have a lot of concerns about what they have in their kitchen. They're trying to maybe reduce their exposure to certain types of materials. Maybe it's plastic, maybe it's nonstick coatings. And we thought this would be a great opportunity to dig into that a little bit. Because we actually have a lot of information on the site and we have some experts who can speak really clearly to this issue. So Rosie, I thought it'd be interesting to bring two of our Wirecutter colleagues on the show to discuss how to approach detoxing your kitchen. And I'm saying detoxing with huge air quotes. ROSIE: I can see those quotes, yeah. Why air quotes? CHRISTINE: Because your kitchen is not a toxic waste dump. And we really want to emphasize that the risks that you face in your kitchen are, it's not like a toxic river or something like that. ROSIE: Right. But by the same token, it's the place where you are keeping the things you use for eating, drinking- CHRISTINE: Right. ROSIE: . . .cooking food. CHRISTINE: It's a place that you can control a lot of what goes into your body. ROSIE: Right. CHRISTINE: And the truth is there are places in your kitchen where you may want to reduce your exposure to certain types of materials. And so we're going to have Katie Okamoto, she's our sustainability editor, and Marilyn Ong, who is our senior kitchen editor. They are both a wealth of knowledge about this topic. And Katie's really going to speak to what people need to know about the science and the sort of health risks of certain materials. And Marilyn is going to be able to speak really clearly to what Wirecutter kitchen experts have tested. The sort of swaps that you can make. We're going to run through sort of a list of different types of products that you may want to swap out. ROSIE: Love it. So after the break, our first kind of round table conversation, we're going to talk about where to focus our energy in "detoxing" your kitchen. We will be back after a quick break. CHRISTINE: Welcome back. Katie, Marilyn, welcome. You've both been on the show before. Katie, you edit all of our coverage around environmental issues for the site. KATIE: Yes CHRISTINE: And Marilyn, you head our kitchen team, and so you know a ton about the kitchen equipment that we recommend, and great swaps that people might want to make in their kitchen. MARILYN: Yep. ROSIE: Very excited to have you both back. Katie, we did an episode with you last fall about microplastics. After that episode aired, my friends who are regular listeners of the show reached out to say that they win on a mini spree trying to reduce their plastic in their kitchen as much as they could manage. And replacing it with silicone and glass. I bring that up because it occurred to me when prepping for this episode that we should be clear at the top here what we mean when we talk about reducing toxins in the kitchen. So can you talk about it a little bit? KATIE: Sure. And I think that your friend really is demonstrating that we all have a different relationship to risk. And so when we talk about reducing toxins in the kitchen, we're talking about reducing the risk of exposure to an array of substances, chemicals, particles in some cases, metals that may potentially have health impacts. These are complex issues and areas of ongoing research. And we're still establishing in some cases what those exposures might mean for our health over a long period of time. Many times these exposures are cumulative. But there's a lot that we can't control. And many of the exposures that we're discussing today really require addressing at the root through system-wide change or regulation. But there are some things that we can control as individuals. CHRISTINE: Okay, so let's talk about what we can control. A term I've heard both of you use is "exposure budget". . .where you can basically choose what to focus on eliminating based on how important it is to you. And everyone's budget may look a little different. For instance, one person might really want to eliminate all plastic in the kitchen, whereas another person who has little kids or a disability might really need to use plastic in certain cases, because they can't risk breaking glass. MARILYN: Yeah, I mean It's kind of this idea that if you try to be all or nothing about it'll just stress you out, right? So you have to be kind of measured about what risk you are comfortable with and what you're not. And what convenience or time-saving factors, different products bring into your life that are worth spending a little bit of that exposure budget. KATIE: I think that's true of how we make recommendations and make choices when we shop. In general, we're always weighing the kind of costs and benefits. And yeah at Wirecutter we're always thinking about the tradeoffs really between price, usability, aesthetics, whether it works, durability, repairability, sustainability. And now we're also talking about potentially these other exposures that can come from using products over time. So yeah, just to say this budget concept is sort of true of all the choices that we make as consumers, nobody has the right answer. It's always a highly individual one. ROSIE: This conversation, like all of our conversations on this show, but I think also at Wirecutter in general is like this has to be rooted in lived experience and that's not monolithic. The advice that you're giving and the guidance needs to be applicable. It needs to be real. MARILYN: Yeah. the exposure budget idea can kind of help you focus on what you are doing, what you are controlling and feel good about that. And not worry about all the things that you can control. CHRISTINE: Exactly. Katie, I'm wondering, how much do you think eliminating things like plastic or nonstick finishes, how much does that really matter in the grand scheme of things? KATIE: Unfortunately we can't say for sure how much of a difference it will make. I will say there are some things that there is more robust evidence to support at least the exposures. Even if we don't know 100% how that will manifest in a health impact. Since we're talking about supporting long-term health, big picture, I do want to back up and say a lot of the experts that I've spoken to, when I've been reporting on plastics in particular, have said that, "Don't forget that there are evidence-based ways to support your health and your family's health and wellness over the long-term through certain behaviors. Things like getting enough sleep, balancing nutrition, going to get your annual physical." So just want to say that. If you walk away with anything after you listen to this episode, I think one hope I have is that you can really simplify your "kitchen detox" by prioritizing things that will last and repairing and maintaining what you have. That's because a lot of the items that might expose you to microplastics might expose you to forever chemicals. These are things that are less durable and less repairable. I think one thing that we're starting to see in plastic research in particular is that we're now able to measure microplastics and nanoplastics. And so people are starting to measure them everywhere they possibly can. And so we're learning a lot more, but it can also feel like a cascade of new information. We're finding plastics here. We're finding plastics there. And I think the takeaway of that is trying to orient around durability in our purchasing and really thinking about it from that scale rather than trying to get so hyper specific about how can I replace this particular item? And then finding another particular item to replace. Right? MARILYN: Absolutely agree. And I think that giving yourself time to do this, you don't have to in one month max out your credit card and replace everything in your kitchen. And you'll learn too what you can live without and what you can't. ROSIE: OK, so we know that plastics and forever chemicals are linked to some health issues – but the science is ongoing for what that means in terms of our exposure. So, before you spiral – focus on what you can control. Everyone's budget might look a little different, but you can make choices about what products you want to use and what you might want to phase out. CHRISTINE: Okay, so let's get into some kitchen swaps people might want to consider. Let's start with items that have nonstick coatings — like nonstick skillets, the inserts to rice cookers and air fryers, and some other appliances. These nonstick coatings are made with forever chemicals. Katie, what do we need to know about forever chemicals? KATIE: So forever chemicals is sort of a nickname for a class of chemicals that has thousands of different kinds of chemicals. They're called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS. P-F-A-S. CHRISTINE: Oh boy, that's such a mouthful. KATIE: Yes. They have been in the news quite a lot. They're added to many different things that we use all the time. They make things slick, nonstick, waterproof, oil-proof. And they're something that will build up in the environment and in our bodies over time. Hence the name Forever Chemicals. We pretty much all have PFAS exposure. It's one of those highly ubiquitous chemicals. And some of those chemicals have been more widely studied than others. Like PFOA and PFOS, P-F-O-S. They're actually no longer used in nonstick cookware that's being made new because they were so concerning. They've been replaced by other types of PFAS, and some of those go by names like Gen X and PFBS. Those are used in nonstick cookware. But just to back up, the research is ongoing, but the links that science is starting to find are at certain levels are reproductive impacts, high blood pressure, developmental impacts. Increased risk of some cancers, immune system function and endocrine disruption. That sounds really scary and it is very concerning. Experts don't think that using a single product once is going to expose you to dangerous levels. This is really an instance of accumulation over time, particularly because these chemicals do build up. When it comes to PFAS used on cookware, so like those non-stick pans, it seems that undamaged and unscratched pans are safe to cook with, if they're used correctly, which means that they're used at moderate to low temperatures below 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Above that heat, they can release fumes that are actually toxic enough to kill birds. And so you can start to see that this is a pretty unstable compound at certain temperatures and people really should consider replacing those pans or getting alternatives that Marilyn will discuss if they start to scratch and flake. ROSIE: Katie, we got a reader question. This is someone who asked about non-stick coating. So they said, "Non-stick coating breaks down over time. So doesn't this mean we're ingesting the coating over time?" What do you think about that? KATIE: I think that that's not an illogical conclusion to come to. And I think that is really why if you're taking a precautionary approach here, it's just cutting out non-stick pans is a wise informed choice. But once again, using them at low temperatures and taking care to use utensils on them that aren't going to scratch the surface can really mitigate that exposure. CHRISTINE: So Marilyn, if someone is looking for alternatives to non-stick cookware or other types of appliances that have these finishes, non-stick is super convenient. I mean, it's great. I have it in my rice cooker. I know a lot of people love their skillets. What are some of the best options that your team has tested? And give us kind of the pros and cons of those. MARILYN: Yeah. And I will also start by saying if you have a non-stick pan, if it's new, if it's still working really well, as Katie said, just use it when you absolutely need to, right? It doesn't always have to be completely all or nothing. If you really need it for an egg in the morning and that's the only reason you pull it out, that's a good place to start. And I will also say that if you non-stick pan is not acting non-stick anymore, that means it's definitely time to let it go. CHRISTINE: So if your eggs are sticking- MARILYN: If your eggs are sticking, if it's not just rolling straight off of it when you're cleaning it, your nonstick coating has worn off and is probably deteriorating and that's not a good look, so time to let that one go. But yeah, we do have other great options. Cast iron pans are one of my favorites. I keep mine on my stove. I use it all the time. They are not expensive. Our top pick is $40, but Lodge makes another one that's $30 12 inch pan. You can do everything on it. You can roast chicken, you can bake in it. I know it can be intimidating to take care of a seasoning on a pan. But I also promise that once you kind of get started and are okay with imperfection, because that's just life. It'll build up over time as you cook and can work out really great. CHRISTINE: I love cast iron, but it is really heavy. Beyond the- MARILYN: It is. CHRISTINE: . . .maintenance part of it. It can be quite a lot to take it up and down off of the stove. MARILYN: Absolutely. Yeah. Like our top pick cast iron pan is six and a half pounds, and that's a lot of weight. CHRISTINE: Right. MARILYN: So another option that we recommend sometimes is carbon steel pans. They're a little bit lighter. Our top pick 10-inch carbon steel pan, which is a little bit smaller than 12 inch, but still can do a lot. That one is less than three pounds. So it's still not quite as light as an aluminum nonstick coated pan, but it's much more maneuverable than a cast iron pan. CHRISTINE: And does it have the same feature as a cast iron, where it becomes kind of seasoned- MARILYN: Yes. CHRISTINE: . . .and it becomes more nonstick over time? MARILYN: Our top pick is pre-seasoned. So you can get pre-seasoned cast iron, you can get pre-seasoned carbon steel. In both of those cases, I mean during testing, we're taking out of the box and frying an egg right off the bat and it's working great. CHRISTINE: I have an enameled cast iron omelet pan. The advantage to it is that you don't have to season it. And so it is finicky in other ways, it's also heavy. You have to preheat it for quite a while, but it does have a nonstick surface once you get it to a certain temperature. MARILYN: Yeah. There's science going on about things adhering to a pan at certain temperatures and then releasing when certain proteins have coagulated and all of that. So yes, that is all true. And that reminds me another thing that we should talk about is a lot of times people buy nonstick cookware sets, and so it's not just like a skillet that you're dealing with. You have a stock pot with nonstick lining, you have saucepans. And in most cases you don't really need a nonstick coating on a stock pot. If you're boiling water for pasta or making a soup, there's so much liquid in there, like the nonstick coating isn't doing much for you. And in those cases, you absolutely should just swap those out for stainless steel tri-ply cookware, which is layers of stainless steel around a layer of aluminum. Which is a really great heat conductor. And we also recommend, like you said, enameled cast iron. And so when you see those beautiful Le Creuset, Dutch Ovens and pots on social media, that's what that is. It's enameled cast iron. And yes, that enamel can also be really great at releasing foods and not be terribly sticky. CHRISTINE: Right. MARILYN: Tri-ply stainless steel on the other hand can get a little sticky. I mean, that's why it's great for searing meat and searing proteins. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's totally doable. And I have even fried eggs in triply stainless steel and lived to tell the tale, so- CHRISTINE: Yes. You were able to eat them. It was fine. MARILYN: Yes. CHRISTINE: What about some of the appliances that have nonstick coatings, like air fryers, rice cookers, some of these other smaller appliances? MARILYN: So I would start with air fryers. Most pod-shaped air fryers, including our picks by and large, they use nonstick coatings on their baskets and in the surfaces inside the air fryer. And this is why most air fryers don't go above 400. Like if you're cooking in your oven, it's very common to want to roast something at say 425. And people will be confused why air fryers don't go above 400. And this is why because of the nonstick coating. As Katie said, above 400 temperatures, it starts to become more volatile. But here's the thing is the way heating elements and temperature probes work, it's not perfect. It's not like your air fryer gets to 390 and then stops exactly. The heating element is still going. The air in there is going to often heat above 400. And so that means that your nonstick coating in the air fryer is going to be getting heated to these pretty high temperatures, right on the borderline of what's recommended. So we've always maintained that toaster ovens are more versatile, longer lasting than air fryers. And at the end of the day can do a really good job with a lot of things that air fryers do. And if you're looking to limit your PFAS exposure, all of that, it just becomes all the more true, right? We have this small toaster oven that we recommend the Panasonic Flash Express. KATIE: I love mine. MARILYN: I love mine too. That's sitting on my counter at home and it just cooks beautifully. It's really even, it can handle frozen tater tots, frozen french fries. It does the job really well. And because it's small and compact, it also heats up really quickly and isn't going to be lacking in a ton of the things that you're looking for from an air fryer. CHRISTINE: What about rice cookers? My sister actually recently asked me this because she didn't want to have a rice cooker with a non-stick coating on the insert. And it seemed really hard to find one that didn't have non-stick. MARILYN: Yeah, rice cookers is a tough one. We have always maintained that of all the appliances with non-stick coatings, a rice cooker is one where it's actually pretty reasonable. And I say that because rice is sticky. They used to make glue from it in China in my grandmother's day. And so really what a rice cooker is doing is heating your water to boiling temperature. So that's 212 degrees. And then the keep warm setting is probably around 170-ish that range. And so the temperatures are not getting very high. They're well under that 400 point of volatility. And then you've got a much easier container to wash when your rice done cooking. And so we've always felt like that's one of the most reasonable uses of non-stick coating in any of the appliances that we recommend. But we also get that for some people, they're really, really trying to get to that almost no exposure of PFAS in their home. And so we are planning to focus on that for our next rewrite of the Rice Cooker Guide. We'd like to test, and we have tested some options in the past. We've tested clay, we've tested stainless steel and have found that the level of stickiness and everything. . .You get to a point where you may not even want to use the machine anymore. And so is that realistic? Is that helpful for someone who wants a rice cooker in their home? But we are going to focus on a few more options just to do more due diligence. I will say in the meantime, I have used my Instant Pot to cook rice and- CHRISTINE: Which just has a stainless interior, right? MARILYN: Yes. The Instant Pot uses a stainless interior and it gets the job done. It's not going to be magical levels of fluffy- CHRISTINE: Yeah, we've done side by side with the Zojirushi or something, and the rice wasn't quite as good, but it was fine. MARILYN: No, but yeah, it's fine. It works. CHRISTINE: I think there's one more category that sometimes people overlook, baking sheets. MARILYN: Yes. There's so many nonstick cookie sheets out there. So for baking sheets, we recommend Nordicware. They are aluminum pans and they are not nonstick. There is no nonstick coating on them. But they bake and wash beautifully. They're super durable. They will last you forever. CHRISTINE: And then if you're concerned about a nonstick coating, you can always put parchment paper down, right? MARILYN: Yes. CHRISTINE: Yeah. MARILYN: Absolutely. We have cake pans that we recommend too, and a lot of them are made by USA Pan. They do actually have a nonstick coating on them, but they are silicon-based. They don't use the same forever chemicals that say a nonstick cookware does. CHRISTINE: We're going to take a quick break, and when we're back, we'll talk through what you should know about the best swaps for plastic utensils and plastic food storage.. We'll be right back. CHRISTINE: Welcome back to the show. It's our first round table episode. Our guests are Wirecutter sustainability Editor Katie Okamoto and Senior kitchen Editor Marilyn Ong. ROSIE: That's right. And today we are unpacking the concept of detoxifying your kitchen. What that actually means, where to start, materials and products you can consider if you're looking to shift away from plastics. CHRISTINE: Katie, you came on the show to talk about microplastics a few months ago -- we'll link to that ep -- and you told us that the most important plastics to pay attention to in the kitchen are anything that might be getting heated, like food storage containers you might use in the microwave — and any plastics that get a lot of wear and tear, where they might become scratched or worn down —like cutting boards—-and then single use plastics, such as disposable water bottles. KATIE: Yeah. I would really start by thinking about eliminating plastic from food or drink uses where they'll be heated. Where it's single use plastic, and where you're routinely going to be scraping or scratching that plastic. And this is again about exposure over time. And so we're thinking about the big picture here, not perfection. ROSIE: Katie, can we talk about black plastic specifically? KATIE: Yeah. ROSIE: I'm curious about this. There was that report last October about flame retardants in black plastic utensils that gave me pause. I'm curious how you processed that and what you can say about them? KATIE: I actually reported on this as well and ended up updating that article because the study that galvanized all these headlines around black plastic had a significant math error in it by an order of magnitude. The study overall was looking for evidence that black plastic, which is often made from recycled electronics, can leach flame retardant chemicals that are in electronics into food. And so this was a study. There have been other areas of research into this question, but this was a study that did find that there was evidence of leaching some of those chemicals that have been linked to cancer in some cases, leaching that into food. And so the correction found that the highest level of one chemical, which was linked to cancer, was actually at a significant lower level than the reference dose that the EPA sets. The reference dose, just to explain that, it's the maximum allowable daily dose that the EPA has determined will not lead to serious health impacts over a lifetime. But not including cancer. And so the authors maintained after this correction that the conclusion stands that black plastic used for food is concerning due to the potential for leaching some of these chemicals. I would say clearly this is one of those instances where it's a question of your relationship to risk. And I understand that that can feel quite unhelpful. I would kind of back up and say experts say there is a risk that plastic of any color might leach potentially harmful chemicals and/or tiny plastic particles into food. And so that just goes back to the advice that we were talking about a little bit ago. Taking your relationship to risk into account since the research and regulations are works in progress. But in general, trying to scale back plastic specifically in these heating contexts in the kitchen. CHRISTINE: That all just sounds too complicated for a cooking spoon. Like why we have to think about that for a cooking spoon? We shouldn't have to be like- KATIE: 100%. Let's not do more math than we need to, use wood. CHRISTINE: Marilyn, if someone is looking at their kitchen, they see their food storage containers, they see the plastic cutting board, they see the plastic utensils. What are some good swaps here that people can make? MARILYN: If you are routinely storing your leftovers in a plastic container and then zapping into the microwave, I would suggest switching to glass food storage containers. So we have two top picks. The Pyrex Fresh lock and Snapware Total Solutions glass container sets. Those are actually identical sets because the companies have combined. But because those lids are plastic, I would recommend removing that lid if you're going to be microwaving your food. We also are making the Pyrex Ultimate set one of our picks. And that's a set that has glass lids with silicone kind of gaskets around it. And those are not airtight, they're not locking, but they don't leak super easily. And so for everyday use in your fridge, they should be fine. And that is a completely plastic-free option. CHRISTINE: What about cutting boards? MARILYN: There is evidence that plastic cutting boards can expose someone to up to like 50 grams of plastic annually. Also, one of the experts that Michael Sullivan, our cutting boards writer, spoke to during research for that guide. Was telling him again, the exposure is on the small side compared to everything kind of globally. And so again, you make your choice whether to use wood boards, which are heavier and more expensive. Or if you need the lightness and the convenience of a plastic cutting board, you just have to know the exposure budget that you're spending on that. But we do recommend quite a few wood boards that come in different sizes. The Jones Wooden Cutting Board is beautiful. It's a maple and grain cutting board. And again, the wood cutting boards will last you a long, long time. CHRISTINE: That's great. What about utensils? We talked about not cooking with plastic utensils. What are some good swaps that we recommend on the site for cooking utensils? MARILYN: So we have a full spatula guide, and I think every recommendation we have on there is either wood, metal, and we do have some silicone recommendations. If you stop using nonstick pans, you can use metal spatulas because cast iron and carbon steel pans are not afraid of a metal utensil. CHRISTINE: Right. KATIE: You'll be free. MARILYN: Yes, you'll be free. You'll be free of that worry. And one of my favorite tools of all time is the fish spatula. It is thin and bendy and you can do so much with it. CHRISTINE: Marilyn, what about electric kettles? I know sometimes these have plastic on the inside. Some of them. MARILYN: Yes. Yeah, I mean some of them have full bodies of plastic, so definitely don't recommend that. Our top pick, the Cuisinart Perfect Temp is a great kettle. There are a couple small parts of it that do touch the water. So if you want a completely non-plastic option, the Cuisinart Gooseneck kettle that we also recommend in our guide. That one, the entire body of the kettle is metal. CHRISTINE: I'm curious also about silicone because I see silicone products everywhere. Katie, I know you've written about silicone, the pros and cons of using silicone. But what are the plastic implications of silicone? Is it shedding just like single-use plastic or is it different? KATIE: It is a different material. Silicone is a synthetic silicon-based polymer, and it's considered safer for health at high temperatures than plastic. But there are some studies that show that it does shed. And we just don't know yet enough about the potential health impacts to say what that means. People usually are looking to silicone to replace single-use plastic bags, and it does obviously address the reduction of single-use plastic, which we do know can shed quite a bit. And so I think with silicone bags, it's kind of like thinking about the environmental big picture. When you're buying any kind of reusable replacement for a single-use disposable thing, make sure you're going to reuse it and keep reusing it. Otherwise, the environmental impact can be comparatively high. And also I would think about what's the problem we're trying to solve by going for something like a silicone bag? Sometimes we can find alternatives that aren't a one-to-one replacement. You could maybe use a glass jar or some other kind of container. So yeah, I think long story short, it does shed, but we don't really know exactly what that means yet. CHRISTINE: So I just wanna pause for a moment and recap what we've learned so far about plastic. Wherever possible, you wanna replace plastic in your kitchen that is exposed to heat or abrasion. Most of the time, the swaps are gonna be things like metal spatulas, wood cutting boards, or glass food storage containers. And big plus to these is that they are gonna last longer than the plastic versions. We'll link to some picks for those. You also wanna look out for appliances that might have plastic or nonstick elements and upgrade to models with maybe a stainless steel interior the next time you're in the market for one of these. Silicone in the kitchen is probably okay – but there might be some better things you can use and might actually last you longer that you already have in your kitchen. ROSIE: Before we wrap, we always ask our guests that final question. So Katie, you first, what's the last thing you bought that you really loved? KATIE: I'm trying to do a low-buy this year. CHRISTINE: Can you explain what that means? KATIE: Oh, sure. I'm just trying not to buy things that I don't need. But my Achilles heel is cookbooks, and the book that I recently purchased is Amrikan , which is by Khushbu Shah. It's all recipes from the Indian American diaspora, and it's so good. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I make Indian-inspired pizzas on sheet pans for friends and just me. It's just like an amazing cookbook. ROSIE: Living your best life. Marilyn, what was the last thing you bought that you loved? MARILYN: So I did not buy this. I volunteered to long-term test this Homedics Shiatsu massage pad thing. It's a cushion. I love those giant massage chairs. We've tested them in the office, but they're $3,000 and I can't fit one of those in my house. So I volunteered to test this cushion, and we just strapped it to the back of our IKEA pawing chair that we also got secondhand from a friend. And it is like the most ramshackle massage set, if you can imagine. But we love it. CHRISTINE: And it gives you a nice back massage? MARILYN: Yeah. ROSIE: Well, Katie Okamoto and Marilyn Ong, thank you guys so much for joining us. KATIE: Thank for having us. MARILYN: Thank you. ROSIE: Katie and Marilyn, now, veterans of the show. CHRISTINE: I love both of them so much. ROSIE: Between the three of you, I really got a good sense of some of the ways I can think about reducing maybe plastic use and toxicity in the kitchen if it exists. CHRISTINE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the great thing about what both of them had to say is there's just, first of all, I don't think people need to be as scared as some people seem to be about- ROSIE: Right. CHRISTINE: . . .different materials in the kitchen. But if you are concerned, there are just so many good options. And I think a universal theme here is that if you are looking to reduce some of these things like plastic or nonstick coatings in your kitchen, the swaps are actually much more durable. They're the kind of thing that will last a lot longer. You'll probably be able to get many more years of use out of them, and they're probably healthier for you in general. ROSIE: So sustainability and also health, which I think- CHRISTINE: Yeah, absolutely. ROSIE: . . .is sort of a one two punch. What are your main takeaways? CHRISTINE: Well, one thing that I hadn't really thought too much about, but I really loved in this conversation is this idea around an exposure budget. Everyone is going to have a different exposure budget. Everyone will have sort of different factors that are more important to them than others. And for me, that really means personally reducing plastic when it comes into contact with my food. So I've pretty much gotten rid of all of my plastic food storage containers. I have glass containers. But for me, I'll continue using some plastic tools in the kitchen. And I will continue to use the nonstick insert in my rice cooker because as Marilyn mentioned in the episode, the rice cooker doesn't get so hot that you really have to worry about off-gassing or something. ROSIE: Right. CHRISTINE: So I think that's just a really good thing to keep in mind. You don't necessarily have to reduce everything. It doesn't have to go to zero. Just focus on where it's most important for you personally. ROSIE: I think that's perfect. And I also think that my takeaway is similar. My exposure budget is slightly different than yours. I have little kids, so I'm really trying to do those swaps where I see them. The reality is we have plastic containers in our home. They work for a myriad reasons, but I'm bearing in mind we're not going to heat them up. We're going to throw them out or recycle them if they have a abrasions, if they have cuts. And then we also have nonstick pans that work really well for us. But I think a thing I learned from this is that 400-degree mark, so bearing in mind that we have to use these pans correctly. Keep the heat below 400 degrees so that we're not worried about those fumes releasing from Teflon. CHRISTINE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of these products like the nonstick cookware, the plastic Bento box or like Kids Snack container, these really useful. And they can be the right thing at the right time, so you shouldn't feel guilty or you're poisoning your family or anything. It's just about sort of choosing the right tool for the right time. ROSIE: Love it. We should also mention before we go that this is a huge topic, we covered a lot, but we did not cover exhaustively. We'll talk in the show another time about water filtration and when to think about doing that. And also air pollution in your kitchen when it comes to your gas stove. One solve there is induction – which is a big category that Wirecutter has done a lot of testing around. So look out for those conversations later! If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, Marilyn Ong's reporting, Katie Okamoto's reporting. If you want to check out any of the products we recommend today, check out the website, or you can find a link in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Christine, we got Caira back next week. CHRISTINE: That's right. I'm looking forward to it. ROSIE: Off we go. CHRISTINE: See you. ROSIE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher and General manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's Editor-in-chief. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening. MARILYN: No joke, I left a gas stove on low with a cast iron pan on it for a week. CHRISTINE: What? MARILYN: Because we went away and we came back and found our cast iron pan still seasoning on the stove for a week. Don't do that.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Wirecutter Show Episode 37: Level Up Your Sound System
BRENT: Tracy Chapman Fast Car is generally regarded by audio scientists who have proven this in testing as the best song for evaluating audio equipment. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CAIRA: This episode is called Level Up Your Sound System. ROSIE: Hey, team. CHRISTINE: Hi. ROSIE: I've been shopping. CAIRA: For? CHRISTINE: Shocking. ROSIE: No, it is shocking. I have to say since starting to work here, I think I have shopped less, but I've been shopping recently for a new speaker setup in my apartment. CHRISTINE: Tell us more. ROSIE: I'm a big, I'm indoctrinating my children in the sense that we dance as often as possible. We dance through the decades, if not evening dance parties, certainly weekly. Their vibes are great. However, we only have one main speaker in our living space, and so I've been thinking about maybe Sonos or maybe some kind of connected system system. CHRISTINE: Don't do it, don't do the Sonos. CAIRA: Christine is scared. CHRISTINE: I have the Sonos and. ROSIE: Don't be suckered into it? CHRISTINE: I just find it problematic. ROSIE: Well, that's the thing. I'm like, I don't quite know what my options are and I know that Wirecutter has done a lot of coverage on speakers and I would like something great, something that is going to sound great in our space, but I also really don't want to spend that much money. CHRISTINE: But you don't have to. ROSIE: No. CHRISTINE: Actually we bought some speakers this year and we got some for under 200. It was really great, a paired set. But yeah, we had gone through this similar situation, Rosie, where we had something in our living room, something in our kitchen, nothing connected, and it was annoying. You want to be able to turn on the music and have it pumping. ROSIE: Right. I cobbled together or I've collected, maybe, is a better way to put it, these little Bluetooth speakers that I can put around the house, but it's time for an upgrade. CHRISTINE: Yeah, there's just so many options and sometimes you need a guide, and we do have a guide here at Wirecutter, not just a written guide with recommendations, but a physical person who can actually walk us through this. ROSIE: A human being. CHRISTINE: In our little journey through speaker world. So we're going to have Brent Butterworth on the show today. He is our senior writer who covers audio devices and he has literally decades of experience testing speakers specifically in all kinds of audio equipment. And he's also a musician, so he has a very high bar for good audio. And I think what's lovely about this episode today is he has some really great advice about how to find great speakers that won't cost you a lot. CAIRA: Or almost free things that you can do to upgrade the speaker system that you already have. CHRISTINE: That's right. So if you've got a couple Bluetooth speakers hanging out in your house, he can give you some hot tips for how to make them better. CAIRA: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to Brent. CHRISTINE: So after the break we will chat with Brent. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Brent Butterworth, who's a senior staff writer covering audio devices, musical instruments, and recording gear for Wirecutter. Brent has been reviewing audio gear since the nineties and he worked as a testing consultant for some of the world's largest audio companies. He's a huge music fan who plays upright bass, ukulele, guitar, and records his own music. Brent, welcome. BRENT: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. CHRISTINE: Brent, before we jump in, I want you to tell us a little bit about how you test speakers. Paint us a picture of how you do this. BRENT: As much as possible. I think the standard procedure that we do that me and Lauren Dragon, who's our headphone editor, do is we get in as many products as we can. We give them a listen and weed out the ones that we know people aren't going to like, because going to be some. CHRISTINE: Duds. There's always duds. BRENT: Some poor products that just aren't going to make it, and then we narrow it down and then we bring in listeners and get second opinions. Because people have different opinions about audio. CAIRA: It's very subjective. CHRISTINE: Yeah. BRENT: One of the really key things is it's good if it's not people that are really super hardcore audio people, if you have what they call in scientific testing, a low anchor, and that's one that can I say sucks? CHRISTINE: Yeah, I know I say that. BRENT: Where people can go, oh, okay, that one's bad, so at least I know that one's bad. And then they relax and they can judge the rest of them. ROSIE: So what are you asking your listening panel to look for, Brent? BRENT: The key thing, I think, for most people that's the easiest to evaluate is voice quality because we listen to voices all day long every day. Does the singer sound natural or do they sound excessively boomy or do they sound excessively sibilant or whatever? That's what gets people comfortable is if they can listen to the voice, then they can start listening to the instruments. And then if they're more into audio, if they're musicians, I can start to ask them about distortion, and sometimes they'll bring that up, and distortion is when things start to sound unnatural. We've all heard that if you hear really cheap little speakers and things like that. The classic example is the drive-through speaker at Taco Bell or wherever. ROSIE: Which sounds like it's underwater. BRENT: I'm not picking on Taco Bell. They're pretty much all bad. ROSIE: Are you often going to get distortion at louder volume? BRENT: Almost always, yeah. ROSIE: So are you cranking these speakers up when you're testing? BRENT: I do both. I actually, I crank them all up. There's a ZZ Top track that was produced by Rick Rubin who was notorious for really loud recordings that I play and I measure them with a sound level meter and I crank them up as loud as they'll go, and I measure that sound level. And then for my listening test though, I usually bring it down to a normal level. Yesterday we were just testing record players at Wirecutter, turntables with built-in speakers, and we started with everything at matched levels and normal, moderate listening levels and we did all that, but then we turned everything up full blast to see what it would do, and that changed some people's minds because some of these things would play really loud and some of them wouldn't. CAIRA: I got to sit in on your record player testing yesterday, which was really fun. I didn't know that you were doing that and I was just in the office, which is great. And you played Beyonce, you played Led Zeppelin, and who was the last? It was a country singer. BRENT: It was Steve Earle. CAIRA: Steve Earle, and it was all amazing. You really could hear the difference in the sound qualities, especially based on the genre of music. We were wondering if you have a favorite song to play when you're testing speakers. BRENT: Tracy Chapman Fast Car is generally regarded by audio scientists who have proven this in testing as the best song for evaluating audio equipment. CAIRA: So I went to go buy my stereo system that I have now. He only played Bohemian Rhapsody because he said the same thing. He was like, this is the best song to listen to if you're testing the quality of speakers. BRENT: It's not. Great song. Not so great for testing speakers. CHRISTINE: Well, what is it about this Tracy Chapman song that makes it so awesome? BRENT: The more the song fills up the frequency band, the better it is. So it has some bass in it, some bass guitar, and then it has acoustic guitar, which is real, a lot of high frequency and delicate and you can hear if the acoustic guitar sounds bad, it'll sound muffled or it'll sound grating or somewhere in between. And then you can hear her voice, and the way her voice is recorded on that is really clear, but a lot of speakers start to make it sound distant or a little bit like she's singing in a cardboard box or something like that. So I put that on with a speaker and it's just like, nope. Or maybe I get a $30 speaker, I'm like, oh, that was a good speaker. You can tell so much and once you get used to doing this, you can tell so much in about 30 seconds. ROSIE: All right. So Brent, I'm guessing the majority of people in your professional life are deep into the topic of audio. This episode is not necessarily going to be for them. Today is for the curious novice, so those of us kind of looking to take our indoor or outdoor audio setup to the next level, ideally without breaking the bank. If I come to you for advice, what questions are you going to ask me in order to lead me in the right direction before I make a purchase? BRENT: I usually ask how much money they want to spend. Then I can, some people are like no more than $30. Okay, I know where I'm at with that. A lot of people are just like, whatever I have to get good sound. And I start to ask them what kind of music they'd listen to because some kind of music, if they're jazz and classical fans, they don't need deep bass. They can get by with some fairly small speakers. If they're listening to a lot of hip hop or EDM or something, they need something with more bass, otherwise, some of the music is just going to disappear completely. And then where are they going to put the speakers? Are they going to put it in a bedroom? Are they going to put it in a big giant living room? Do they want to have dinner parties? Do they want to have, people sometimes have, I can't conceive of this, but sometimes people have dance parties in their homes. ROSIE: Oh, hell yeah. CHRISTINE: Come on. CAIRA: Why is it so inconceivable? ROSIE: Weekly. BRENT: We sit at home and close our eyes and listen very intently, seriously. But it depends on do they want to use it outside. A lot of people want to use their stuff outside, in which case it probably needs to be waterproof to some degree. I usually just start talking to them about what they're going to do with the speaker. ROSIE: If you're thinking about sound systems then, what are the categories that are available? BRENT: Okay. The big one I think for most people nowadays is a wireless speaker, and that can be a Bluetooth speaker, it can be anything from the little things you buy for $20 up to about $1,500. But usually they're small and they're portable and they're waterproof to some degree, and you hook them up to your phone and you play whatever, and some of them sound great, some of them don't. The next step up from there is going to be probably a pair of stereo speakers, which could be what we call computer speakers that you put on your desktop or maybe on a bookshelf or something. And they're pretty small, but a lot of them sound really, really good. Then you go up to what we call bookshelf speakers, which is a bigger, probably want to put them on a stand or something because a lot of them are big, and that's when you start to really get into serious high quality sound, and a lot of the bookshelf speakers for, we have a pair in there for 400 bucks. It's been a top pick for probably five years and oh, they sound so good. They're just really, really, you'd have to really spend a lot of money to beat them. CHRISTINE: And these bookcase speakers and the computer speakers, these are generally ones that are wired, right? You're going to plug them in, they'll have a wire coming out of them, or are there ones like that that are also portable and you can move them around without being plugged in? BRENT: Yeah, there were usually wired. You plug them into the wall, you Bluetooth into them, you WiFi into them. Some of them you can hook up a record player, some of them you can hook your TV to them, all sorts of stuff. CAIRA:: What is the difference, in your opinion, between a great Bluetooth speaker and a bad one? BRENT: The fundamental thing is you put it on with Tracy Chapman Fast car and it sounds good. So it's the voice clarity, and a lot of them, they don't have that. Between you and the speaker is a lot of plastic grills sometimes, and sometimes that rattles and there's a lot of electronics. All of these have digital sound processing inside them and they can make bad decisions when tuning that, they can make good decisions. And so it's just how natural it sounds. But then as you get into a lot of the really tiny ones, you've probably heard, they don't have any bass. So there's a tune by Audrey Nuna called Damned Right, that starts with bo bo bo bo, bo bo bo bo, and you play that on those little Bluetooth speakers and it's like the tune hasn't started. You're like, what happened to the tune? Because you cannot hear that bass. It just filters it out because it knows it can't do it. CAIRA: Right. So when you're playing a song and you're like, I feel like the song started five seconds ago, but I'm not hearing anything, it's probably your speaker. BRENT: Yes. So with a lot of these things, they just can't do it. And there's one of our top picks called the JBL Go4, it's maybe 40 or $50. It's the size of, if anybody remembers cigarette packs, it's a thick cigarette pack, but they come in cute colors. You could probably throw it across the room and it wouldn't break and you could dunk it in a meter of water and it won't break. And it actually sounds - classical jazz, I put on my jazz stuff in the morning and it sounds good. I listen to it all the time, and a lot of Wirecutter staffers have bought that same speaker and love it. But then you get into the bigger ones and I think we have $100 pick. It's got the Fender logo on it, the people that make the guitars and the guitar amps. It's actually made by a German company called Teufel, and it sounds really good. It's actually got some bass. You can play hip hop stuff on it or something and it's not going to shake your floor, but you won't feel like you're missing the music and it sounds really clean. CHRISTINE: I think that most people just use one Bluetooth speaker at a time. But you told us something when we were preparing for this episode that surprised and delighted me that you can actually pair Bluetooth speakers, which I later that day told my husband. And we did it. We did it with our budget pick from Tribit and it was great. Tell us more, how do you know if you can pair Bluetooth speakers? BRENT: Almost all of the ones made in the last four or five years can be paired. That's if you have the same speaker from the same company, there's usually a button on it that allows you to pair it and you have to look in the manual. They all pair a little differently. Some of them you have to go into an app to pair it. You compare them for stereo, so you get a bigger sound. Some of them, you compare them in mono, so they both have the same sound, so you can put one in another room. I like to have sound on my back patio and sound in my kitchen, which is right next to my back patio. CHRISTINE: And for stereo sound, what would be the difference in what I would hear if I paired these speakers in stereo versus mono? BRENT: So stereos came out in the late fifties, and you have a separate left speaker and a right speaker, and so the music producers will pan some of the sounds to the left and some of the sounds to the right. Usually the vocals will be in the middle and you might put the guitar a little to the left, and if you have a drum kit, you might spread it from left to right so it sounds more like a drum, a full set of drums in front of you rather than just a bunch of drums crammed into one little tiny space. So it sounds more like an actual band on stage. And mono, everything comes out of one speaker, and so it's the same, even if you have two speakers paired, it's the same in mono, it's the same sound coming out of both speakers and it's not like you're going to suddenly hate whatever band you like because they're in mono. But if you want a big, more exciting, more spacious sounds, you're going to want stereo. And that's one thing that one Bluetooth speaker can't give you. So you pair the two in stereo and you put them six feet apart and you put yourself in between the two so you're getting an equal balance of the two, and then you get this big enveloping sound. If you're in the right place, it sounds like there's a band in the room. CAIRA: We've covered a solid Bluetooth speaker situation. What happens if you want to graduate beyond that? What do you suggest is the next step up? BRENT: The computer speakers that we have, they range from little things that you might just plug into your laptop to get louder sound out of your laptop, to things that you would actually use first low-end music production. So a little bit more serious of a speaker, but usually those will have amplifiers, well, I think they all have amplifiers built in, all the ones that we pick now. And so you plug them into your computer, Bluetooth into them from your phone. Some of them you can hook up a record player. Those will have usually a separate woofer for the bass and then a tweeter for the high frequencies. So they'll sound clearer in the cymbals and acoustic guitars and voices will sound clearer, but then those low frequency boom, boom, boom, things will start to sound a lot fuller and more satisfying. And those of us who do brand concealed audio tests have a saying, "bass wins". If your product has more bass, it's probably going to win. If your product's bass-deficient, it's probably going to lose. ROSIE: Why is that? BRENT: People like bass. CAIRA: It's fun. BRENT: To a point, I don't like it when I'm hearing a lot of bass from my neighbors or when I hear one car going down the road with loud bass. But people like bass because it's visceral, gets you moving a little bit. Nobody dances to a violin, I guess you could, technically. The bass is what gives you the pulse and the rhythm of the tune. So if you don't have any bass, you are missing a big giant chunk of the tune. CAIRA: So we've talked about the basic Bluetooth and now we've talked about a little bit more complicated speakers. Are wired speakers the next step up, the classic two speaker system, and if so, why would somebody choose to do that to themselves? BRENT: It will sound better. As they say, you will hear what the artist intended because every record that you've heard was mixed on two stereo speakers like that. And they can be wireless in terms of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. They all plug into the wall. In most cases, you'll have a wire connecting the two speakers. You may have an amplifier for them. There's all sorts of different configurations, but generally speaking, that is going to be the best sound and it's going to be what the artist intended for average use. You can buy our bookshelf speaker picks. So we have a Polk in there, I think it's 230 a pair. They sound really, really, really good. CAIRA: I want to talk about the amps a little bit more because it's a word that just keeps popping up and a lot of people may not really know what an amp is or what it does. Can you just explain what stereo amps are, what they do, and why people will probably need one for a two speaker system? BRENT: Basically what an amplifier does is the signal that comes out of your Bluetooth from your phone or maybe your record player or maybe you have a CD player, those are coming back, any of those signals, it's really low voltage. It's a volt or something. It's not much. It's really weak and it's enough maybe to drive a set of headphones, but it's not enough to push speakers back and forth. You got a big cone, you got to move back and forth, and you got to move a lot of air, as they say. So the amplifier just basically boosts that signal that comes out of whatever your source is, your record player or your phone or whatever. And so it boosts it to the point where it can drive a set of speakers. But with normal speakers, like those Polks I talked about, any amp will drive those. You can buy a 20 $30 amp off of Amazon and it will drive those and actually sound okay. CHRISTINE: Okay. Brent, I just want to pause for a moment because we've talked about a lot of different types of speakers and it would just help me, personally, to be able to run through the options. So if you are wanting to just dip your toes into getting a basic sound system, the most affordable and accessible option would be to start at a Bluetooth speaker. You could get one, you could get two if you want to pair them and do stereo sound. Next go for two speakers. BRENT: Right. CHRISTINE: And you have a couple of options there. You could go with small computer speakers, which have a built-in amp, so you don't have to buy an extra amp. They're pretty affordable. They sound pretty good. If you want to go up from there, you would get bigger bookshelf speakers and some of those have an amp built in and some you have to buy a separate amp, right? BRENT: Yeah, if you're more of a serious music listener, I would definitely go with the two speakers, absolutely positively. But any of the two speaker options is going to be good for you. CAIRA: We are going to take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk about the most common mistakes people make with their audio equipment. Be right back. CHRISTINE: Welcome back. This episode we're talking all about speakers and the things you can do to upgrade the audio equipment in your home. So Brent, you mentioned earlier we were talking about how you can really jump up in quality of sound when you get to speakers, especially if you're getting these wired speakers, maybe they're either computer speakers or bookshelf speakers, these larger ones. I am personally intimidated by shopping for speakers. My brain shuts off a little bit, but I am curious, we talked a little bit about price before, but what do you think people should expect to pay to get something good in the category of wired speakers? BRENT: Okay, those Polk ones. CHRISTINE: The Polk ones you mentioned earlier, BRENT: Those are 230 a pair and then you'll need an amp, but almost any amp will work. We have a budget pick though, from a company called Micca, I think those are about a hundred a pair. And I was just using them the other day with the Wim amplifier and I'm just like, oh, these things sound really good. I was listening to one of my own recordings, too, so I know what it's supposed to sound like and they're shockingly good. So you can do that if you want. I think the Polks are a better place to start. They're going to have more bass, but I would recommend going up to 2 or 300 for your amp and then you're up to 500 bucks. CHRISTINE: That seems reasonable. CHRISTINE: Brent, where does something like Sonos fit into this world of speakers? Is it a computer speaker? Is it something else entirely? BRENT: It's something else entirely. They have the whole category of Wi-Fi speakers to themselves. Lots of other speakers can do that, but they are the ones who really pioneered it. What the Wi-Fi does for you is you can stream music into lots of different rooms of a house. You could put different Sono speakers in different parts of your house and they all synchronize, so they all sound good, and the Sono speakers themselves are actually, by and large, really good speakers. CHRISTINE: Everyone I know who has a Sonos in the last couple of years has done nothing but complain about their Sonos. They like the sound of it, but the app seems to be pretty glitchy. There seems to have been some quality control issues over the last year or so. What are some other options in this category? Do you have to go with Sonos or if you want this wireless experience where you can have the speakers all over the house, they're all connected, maybe you have one that you can take outside. Is there another option out there besides Sonos? BRENT: Absolutely. There's Apple Airplay 2, which lets you do more or less the same thing. There's Google Chromecast, which lets you do more or less the same thing. Apple Airplay 2 and Google Chromecast are available in a wide variety of speakers from different brands, which Sonos is not. The Amazon Alexa speakers can do the multi-room thing, too. You can go buy those things for 40 bucks a pop or something like that, 50 bucks a pop, and you can sprinkle six of them around your house for almost nothing, and they'll all talk to each other and their app is pretty easy to use. ROSIE: And so for these streamers, Sonos, even Alexa, I apologize for anyone listening on a speaker. BRENT: Oh no. ROSIE: Are you going to get the option of listening to music in mono and in stereo for all of those? BRENT: Yes. So you can pair those so you can say, okay, I want one in my bedroom and one in my kitchen or whatever. Or you can say, I want two in my bedroom so I can sit in my bed and listen to stereo and just one in the kitchen. And you can actually configure them all within the apps. Apple has their own thing and different companies like say JBL or a Bowers and Wilkins or somebody will have their own app that lets you configure everything. ROSIE: So Brent, these two terms, Bluetooth speakers and wireless speakers, talk about the differences and what do we actually mean? BRENT: So Bluetooth is a wireless technology. I think we've all Bluetoothed our phone into our earbuds or into our car or something, and you don't have a wire connecting them. There are other wireless technologies like Wi-Fi based technologies, like Sonos, where the audio device is streaming wirelessly from your home network or maybe from your phone or your iPad or your whatever. People also sometimes talk about wireless speakers as speakers that don't have any wires attached to them at all. A stereo pair of speakers probably has a wire connecting them so they can talk to each other. And then they have probably a wire somewhere that plugs them into the wall for power. So the only thing that's purely wireless is a portable Bluetooth speaker. There are no wires. And then once you go beyond that, you're going to be running into wires. Sorry. ROSIE: All Bluetooth is wireless, but not all wireless is referring to Bluetooth. Fair? BRENT: Correct. ROSIE: What are the functional differences between connectivity via Bluetooth versus connectivity via Wi-Fi? BRENT: Wi-Fi requires an app, Bluetooth does not. So Wi-Fi is going to be more complicated, although usually it's not that bad. ROSIE: But more finicky. CHRISTINE: And if your network goes down, you can't use it. BRENT: Yeah. ROSIE: I'm curious, what is the most common mistake you see people making with their audio equipment, in general? BRENT: They don't pay attention to where they put the speakers. There's two things you got to worry about with speakers. The first thing is the closer the speaker is to a wall or a desk or a floor, or especially in a corner, the more it's going to reinforce all of the sound, especially the bass. So when you push speakers up against the wall, there's going to be a lot more bass, and that might be good. It might be bad. Big speaker, if you go up against the wall, it's probably going to sound really boomy. With the little speaker, these little Bluetooth speakers, these little portables, they probably will sound better up against the wall. So you have that variable right there. So the more bass you want, move it closer to the wall. Also, with stereo, you need to have left and right to get it to work, and your head needs to be about the same distance from both speakers for it to work right. And I've seen a lot of people have stereos where they put the left speaker on top of the right speaker. Oh, ROSIE: Because it just looks so damned cool. BRENT: You really need to put the stereo speakers equidistant from your ears. And also a lot of people will put the stereo speakers, put one in the right place and they'll put one on a different wall, and that's going to sound not good. What we look for is what we call a center image. So if your head is the same distance between those two speakers, it's going to sound like there's a singer coming from between the speakers. We call that imaging. It's actually awesome once you hear it, but if you don't have your speakers placed right, you will not hear it. ROSIE: The bass and the treble knobs on, what am I meant to be doing with these? Because I noodle around with them based on the song and what I'm trying to get out of it, but I really don't think that, that is what I'm meant to be doing. BRENT: Okay. ROSIE: Help me. BRENT: Oh, boy. This is such a good, I mean, there's the classic example of you get in a rental car and you turn on the stereo and you find the bass and treble are both turned all the way up. That's a common mistake people make. Generally, you should start with the bass and treble controls centered, and that's usually going to be what we call flat response. In other words, you're not boosting anything, you're not cutting anything. It should sound the most natural. So I normally recommend that people just leave those centered all the time. However, if you have speakers that maybe don't have quite enough bass, you can boost the bass a little bit. If you boost the bass too much, it's probably going to distort, but you can boost the bass a little bit. Or maybe your speakers sound too boomy, you turn the bass down a little bit, or maybe they sound dull, as if someone's got a singing through a blanket. You can boost the treble a little bit. CHRISTINE: And that'll just make it sound almost sharper or something? BRENT: Something. Yeah, sharper. That's a good word. CAIRA: So my question is how do you turn the treble and the bass down on your neighbor's speakers when they're too loud? ROSIE: Is there any technology you're excited about? Any emerging stuff that you're intrigued by? BRENT: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There's a new thing coming out called Oracast, and it's a subset of Bluetooth. So what Oracast lets you do is you can stream, normally with your phone, you can stream to one or maybe two Bluetooth speakers. With this, you can stream to an unlimited number as long as they're within range of what we call the host speaker. So you stream from your phone to the host speaker, then you can put 10, 50, 100. Theoretically, they can be of all different brands, so you don't have to match them, and also it works with headphones. CHRISTINE: So you could have, for my kids, for instance, I am always annoyed because they each have Bluetooth headphones and I want them to be able to listen to the same music. We have to connect a separate phone to each headphone, and that's annoying. CAIRA: So you want to pair their headphones. CHRISTINE: I'd love to be able to have them listen to the same songs on both of their headphones. BRENT: It's happening, and I have experimented with it some, but it's still going to be at a primitive stage for I think another year. But then more people will have it, and I think it's going to be in every hearing aid in another probably two years. All the wireless earbuds, it'll probably be in those in two years, three years. It's going to be in every Bluet ooth speaker in another probably two, three years. CHRISTINE: Okay, Brent. So sometimes we like to do a really quick paced lightning round at the end of our episodes to just get in those last questions. So I don't want you to overthink any of these, just say what comes to your mind. Indoor concert or outdoor music festival. BRENT: So hard, but I'm a jazz guy, so indoor. CHRISTINE: Subwoofer essential or overhyped? BRENT: Essential. If you are watching movies or you're into hip-hop, maybe heavy rock, EDM, stuff like that. CHRISTINE: Which sounds better. CD or vinyl? BRENT: Oh, you got to get me in so much trouble here. CD. I don't listen. I listen to vinyl sometimes because it's fun. But I listen to digital. I listen to MP3s a lot. CHRISTINE: Oh, I think this was a very controversial answer, but we'll take it. All right. The one speaker brand you wish more people knew about? BRENT: Micca, the one I talked about. I can't say they're all great, but that one that we have, oh God, it's so good. It's so cheap. CHRISTINE: Your desert island album? BRENT: The Yes album by the seventies progressive rock group, Yes. CAIRA: Before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question. What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved? BRENT: The Wirecutter top pick for screwdrivers. It is really fabulous. It has a whole bunch of bits built into it, so every weird screw that you might want to access, you can pull the bit out and it's really well-built, you can get a lot of torque and really get the screw in tight. And I'm building a new deck on my home right now, and this screwdriver is coming in very, very, very handy. ROSIE: Brent, thank you so much for joining us. This was really, really fun. BRENT: Well, thanks for having me on. CHRISTINE: Thanks, Brent. BRENT: It's been great. CHRISTINE: Speakers, Brent. So much information. CAIRA: He's so good. ROSIE: We love Brent. Wow. CHRISTINE: Wow. I feel like I was the one lagging in this conversation. ROSIE: No. CHRISTINE: You two were ahead with Brent and I was behind trying to pick up the pieces and figure out all the details because I'm not an audiophile. CAIRA: No, but you enjoy good music, good sound, and you got there. CHRISTINE: I do. I just want someone else to think about it for me. ROSIE: Well, I think Brent is that person. What did you take away? CHRISTINE: So I really love his tip about pairing Bluetooth speakers. That really blew my mind. So that was very cool, and I will continue to pair my Bluetooth speakers at home to create stereo sound, which now I understand what that means. CAIRA: That's so good. ROSIE: They go deep, I love that. For me, I am very grateful for the final explanation of the differences between connectivity via Bluetooth and via Wi-Fi, and why you might opt for a speaker system that could connect via Bluetooth, maybe over Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi, as we know, can be a little fiddly, and so Bluetooth, at least right now, is more reliable in that sense. So I loved that. I also loved that Brent had the final word on the song to listen to, to check whether your speakers are great. Tracy Chapman, Fast Car. CAIRA: Love it. ROSIE: That song truly can do anything. CAIRA: Yeah, I think my takeaway is that honestly, I got into stereo systems and speakers because of my dad. He really taught me what good sound can be, but I think that I relied a little bit too much on him to tell me what these things do. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to actually read the manuals for all of the devices that I have and see what I've been missing out on. CHRISTINE: Yeah, the whole world will open up probably. CAIRA: Yeah. ROSIE: Also good if you are looking to cure insomnia. CAIRA: Sure. Yeah. ROSIE: Well, if you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, any of Brent's reporting, or if you want to check out the products we recommended today, check out our website or you can find a link in the show notes. That is it for us, Christine, Caira, my friends. See you next week. CHRISTINE: Bye. CAIRA: Bye. ROSIE: Peace. CHRISTINE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Episodes are mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. Hosted by Caira Blackwell and Christine Cyr Clisset. Thanks for listening. BRENT: Nobody dances to a violin. I guess you could. Technically. I guess they did on the Titanic? In that movie? But that's all they had to work with. And look what happened to them.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Wirecutter Show Episode 36: Stop Killing Your Houseplants
DARRYL: If the plants could tell you and scream at you like, "What do I actually need?" Light is the first thing. Of course you still have to water, but none of those things can work unless the plant is working. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called Stop Killing Your Houseplants. ROSIE: Caira, Christine, so obviously we're talking about houseplants. CHRISTINE: Yes. ROSIE: I get the sense that Christine, you have a little bit of a green thumb. CHRISTINE: I do. ROSIE: A light green thumb? CHRISTINE: It's a light green thumb. It's like I have a lot of houseplants, but I neglect them. But they somehow, I think, have enough going on that they can stay alive. CAIRA: That sounds like a green thumb to me. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I mean it's not like I'm doing a lot to them. It's just like they... I water them every once in a while and they're fine. CAIRA: I can never say that. ROSIE: What's your situation? CAIRA: I used to have plants. Guess where they are? ROSIE: I feel like they're six feet under. CAIRA: Yeah, and they're not growing back. ROSIE: They're compost. CHRISTINE: What about you, Rosie? ROSIE: I have actually moved away from having houseplants, because I've gotten so bummed out over the years after killing so many. I want to do better. CHRISTINE: I absolutely think this is a problem a lot of people have. ROSIE: I do too, yeah. CHRISTINE: A lot of people in my life have told me this. I just can't keep this thing alive, or it's just not thriving. Why do they not look like the beautiful things I'm seeing on Instagram? And this time of year is a really great time to be thinking about your indoor plants. You might be seeing some flowers budding outside, but the indoor plants, they need some care in the spring, too. And so this is a great time if you're trying to figure out how to make your current plants look nicer. Or if you're plant curious, you don't really have plants but you want to bring some home, this can be a great time to do that. CAIRA: Yeah. So our first guest today isn't a Wirecutter journalist, but he definitely fits right into the Wirecutter ethos. His name is Darryl Cheng, and he runs the website and Instagram handle House Plant Journal. He's a trained engineer who takes a very specific approach to growing houseplants. It's very left brain. So he's going to be sharing some tips for making your houseplants, you know, survive. CHRISTINE: And a little later, we'll talk with Wirecutter senior staff writer Rose Lorre about great ways to get new houseplants on the cheap which I'm very excited about. We'll take a quick break, and then we'll be back with Darryl Cheng of House Plant Journal. CAIRA: Welcome back. This episode, we're talking all about houseplants, and ways to make yours thrive. Our first guest today is Darryl Cheng, and you might know him from his very popular Instagram account Houseplant Journal. His latest book is the New Plant Collector, the Next Adventure in Your Houseplant Journey. And he's just a wealth of knowledge on how to give plants what they need and how to diagnose problems your plants might be having. And the tips we're covering today apply to all plants by the way, really universal guidance for helping plants thrive. CHRISTINE: Darryl, welcome to the show. DARRYL: Hello, thanks for having me. CHRISTINE: I'm really pumped to have you here. I have followed your Instagram account for years, so I'm like very into all the plant inspo. I've been looking at your new book, and trying to diagnose plants in my living room with what's going on with them. So I'm very excited for this conversation. Something I think is super interesting about you is you have an engineering background, you're an engineer by training. How does that impact your approach to plant care? DARRYL: I think it actually falls back to the story of how this all started, which is many years ago when I was still living at home with my mom, she said to me, "Hey Darryl, can you decorate the house with some houseplants?" And I said, "Sure." But she added, "You need to figure out how to take care of them because I'm quote unquote bad with plants." Well yes, we hear that a lot and we laugh about it. But I thought, wait a minute, mom, you taught me how to do outdoor gardening and you're pretty good at it. What's so different about indoor plants? But she went back to the narrative of oh, I have a black thumb, I kill everything. So I did like any good millennial wood and bought a bunch of plants, and tried to Google the care tips and stuff. And what I found was a lot of vague, hand wavy type of things. If you try and google houseplant care advice, you'll find a lot of just dos and don'ts. But as an engineer, I want to know how things work so that I can choose what action to take rather than be told. So that's really how it began. And engineers love to measure things, and so I realized that a lot of the very important growth factors for plants are never really measured. In the houseplant realm, we don't often talk about any measurements, and instead we go to very vague things like bright indirect light or oh, it likes medium light. My engineering mind just said, "You know what? This kind of way of talking about plants doesn't really work for me, and so I'm going to try and decipher it for myself and even come up with my own framework, if you will." ROSIE: So I think I probably am aligned with your mom, although I don't even have the outdoor gardening skill. But I've historically considered myself to have a black thumb. I have a black thumb, but I also have a black thumb, and I've just had a really tough time keeping plants alive. But every time I've had to say farewell, I'm like, "I'm going to do this again. I can do it better. I know I can get this." I'm curious for myself, but also for the folks who have had trouble in the past, what does it mean to get back to basics? If you really strip this all down starting at square one, what does that look like? DARRYL: If we're going to talk really, really right down to before you even buy a plant, what's the mentality of owning a houseplant? And I think a majority of people believe that if I am able to quote unquote care for this plant correctly, then I should never ever lose a leaf and the plant should look perfect all the time. And right then and there, I will say that's completely wrong, and let's shift it towards the fact that every individual leaf has a limited lifespan. It doesn't last forever if only you care for it correctly. But rather the goal of owning a houseplant in the long term is that your growth outpaces the decaying of the older leaves. And the last point is that your plants will change. They'll grow and they'll keep changing, and there will be a point where you don't like the structure of it anymore, and then you have to know what to do in order to reset that structure. And all of that should be an expectation of owning a plant for the long term. CHRISTINE: That really resonates with me. I've had some monsteras that have gotten too big for their britches and I don't actually like the way they look anymore. But I actually have more frequently had the opposite problem where it's a failure to thrive. The plant isn't getting big, and beautiful and lush, and I'm like, "Oh no, I don't like the shape." It's like, "Oh no, the leaves are yellowing, or I'm losing you, you're half the size of when I got you." What do you think are the most important things that people miss in terms of when their plants are just not thriving? DARRYL: At least when I first realized this, there's another hit of reality, which is that the shape of the plant that you buy is what's the result of growing in a nursery. And if you were to objectively measure the light in there, let's just throw the numbers right out. It's between 1,000 to 5,000 foot-candles of light hitting it for most of the day. You take that same plant and you bring it home. Let's say you follow some Google advice that says, "Oh, it's okay in low light," and so you decide to put it far from your window. You measure the light far from your window, and it's 50 foot-candles. CHRISTINE: And the foot-candles, that's a way of measuring light. Just to be clear, that's how you measure the light that's coming through the window? DARRYL: Yes, that's right. Ignoring the unit, just think of the number. At a nursery, you take out your light meter, it's 1,000. In your house far from the window, you take out your light meter and it's 50. So we're dealing with even less than 10 times difference here. So what's the result of that? Your plant is now having one-tenth the productivity. What is photosynthesis? It's just the plant making its own food, which is a really amazing feat if you really think about it. Now its little engine is running at one-tenth the speed, and therefore pumping out carbohydrates at one-tenth the speed. It would show. CAIRA: It sounds like you suggest that people really should have a light meter, and take it to the plant store where they're buying the plant and use it in their own homes. Do you have any suggestions for people who don't have a light meter? I imagine that most people who just want to buy a couple of plants for their house don't really want to spend the money on that. So what can you do to gauge the light in your own home or when you're going shopping? DARRYL: Yeah, I'm not suggesting that everyone has a light meter. I'm saying if you have more than 10 plants or if you're starting to spend in the range of several hundreds of dollars, I would hate for you to spend that much money only to be disappointed with what your plant looks like because you didn't know the light levels in your home. So let's say, yeah, you just want to get a few plants to decorate your space, you don't want to use the light meter? Then my advice is the plants have to be right in front of the window. Not 10 feet away, right in front. CAIRA: Got it. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I feel like I see that in New York City. You'll walk by people's apartments, and you'll just see the windows are full of plants. And I fight with that in my own apartment, because I want the light to come in and hit the humans in the apartment, not just the plants. But like you're saying, it is really just that you got to get them as much light as possible. DARRYL: Yeah. And the second part is, don't expect your plants to grow as nicely as somebody who has simply larger windows. ROSIE: Right, so it's really expectation setting. It's understanding that wherever your plants came from was likely more of a conducive environment for growth than where you're taking them. Unless you're really setting up the conditions in which your plant can thrive, by which we mean placing them somewhere in front of a lot of light. DARRYL: I have a funny saying, where I say anybody who you think has a green thumb probably just has exceptionally large and unobstructed windows. ROSIE: Okay, so I love that. Let's talk about that though. Explain it to me like I'm in preschool, the difference between direct sunlight, indirect sunlight. How do I know that what I'm being told is true in terms of someone selling me a plant that needs indirect sunlight, and I go home and I put it where? DARRYL: In my mind, telling someone bright indirect light, telling someone high, medium and low. I actually think that whole system should be just put to the trash. ROSIE: It seems very subjective. DARRYL: It is completely subjective. And another often stated system is saying, "Oh, it's an east window, it's a north window, south window." That doesn't make any sense. Nobody's windows are exactly the same size. Nobody's windows have the same obstructions outside. The way that we talk about temperature outside is to tell you what you should wear outside, obviously so you know if you need a parka or if you can just go with a windbreaker. But if we were to say high, medium and low temperature, that doesn't make any sense. We all need to have the actual degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit in order for us to make a judgment about how to go outside. With light, saying bright indirect light and high, medium and low is actually completely useless. It's either you use the numbers, or you just have to put it right in front of the window and hope for the best. CHRISTINE: Okay, we've talked about how important light is. It's get those plants right up to the window if you can. What if you are dealing with a situation where you really love houseplants, you want to have this lush, beautiful houseplant garden in your home, but you don't have optimal light. What are some options for people who just don't have great light? DARRYL: Well, the great news is nowadays, we have white LED lighting, so you can use that type of light to grow most houseplants. Pothos, ZZ plants, snake plant, monstera. These kinds of plants have much more modest light requirements. And I'm so sorry, going back to measuring again, because I've seen thousands of people's questions who show me hey, why is my monstera doing so badly even though I use a grow light? And then I say to them, "Show me a picture of how you've actually set this up." And the grow light is pointing at the monstera five feet away. If you measured it, you would see the number is a 100 foot-candles or whatever. Every inch that you move a grow light closer will change the number dramatically on a light meter. So my saying about grow lights is this. If you're using a grow light without measuring it, it's like you're using an oven without knowing what temperature you've set it at. Sure, you could just turn it on and hope for the best. But what I'm saying is I've seen enough examples of it failing that it's not worth the failure. ROSIE: What is the percentage do you think of times you're answering people's questions with get a light meter? DARRYL: I would say it's 50 and 49 of two different issues. One is the light, poor lighting, and they're not aware that it's poor lighting. And the other 49% is the expectations. Like, "Oh no, this leaf is yellow, what am I doing wrong?" Your plant is fine. It's always supposed to lose that lowest leaf. CAIRA: This is so interesting. I don't have any plants right now because... Well, I always thought that I had a black thumb. But I've also historically always lived in apartments with pretty terrible lighting, including right now. I basically live in a basement. So what are some good species for people to consider if they have this issue? Well, what do you think is pretty dummy proof? DARRYL: I actually don't like calling it that, because then it implies that you are incapable of taking care of a plant. Whereas really it's just am I going to be happy with how this plant looks in one year's time? And that's more of a subjective thing that you could adjust in some ways and not make it totally based on just your own skills, so to speak. The ones that you will notice the least change is snake plant, ZZ plant, pothos. You should buy one of each type of those plants, and two of them keep them right in front of your windows and one of them put them wherever you want. And then two months later, switch it out. Switch out the one that's in the decorative position, and then put that other one back to the window so that it doesn't starve. CHRISTINE: So that would work even in like a windowless room. DARRYL: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. CHRISTINE: So I have a question around pets and plants. DARRYL: Yes. CHRISTINE: I have a geriatric cat who loves to go munch on my plants, and it's a constant struggle. What's your advice for people who have pets? DARRYL: I don't have any pets right now, but I took care of my friend's two cats for about two weeks. And one of them was quite munchy, and I've learned that with cats, if you say no to them, you have to give them a yes right after that. CHRISTINE: Yeah, they're like children in that way. DARRYL: Yes. So what I did was I quickly grew some cat grass, which is the actual grass that they should eat a little bit of, moved the plants out of the way so that they're not so inviting. But then right where I had those plants before I put the cat grass, so that that way when the cat came up to it, it was allowed to eat it and it was fine. And really, all it was is what it just wanted to munch on something leafy. CHRISTINE: Right. Okay, I love that. CAIRA: Well I had a question about... Earlier, you talked about how a lot of people don't think of indoor plants as having seasons like an outdoor plant would. DARRYL: Yes. CAIRA: But it is spring now, and to that end, what should a plant parent really be doing differently now versus other times of the year? And does that even depend on where you live, like the outside climate? DARRYL: So in an indoor setting, the temperature change is not nearly as dramatic as for outdoors. So interestingly enough, there's a misinterpretation that, for example, winter has "Less light." Yes, if you're outdoors in the middle of an open field, there is less light. But the sun's angle is much lower in the sky. Plus, there are no leaves to block the sun. So in fact in the winter, the sun peers into my living room longer than it would in the summer. People say, "Oh, water less in winter." Well, not necessarily. If you're getting more sun, plus the air is drier in the winter, then everything is actually evaporating faster and being used up faster. So you could be watering more frequently in the winter, which is why I say if you're observing your soil dryness as your cue to water and not just the rote schedule, then you won't be affected by the changes, and rather just observe how the soil dries. CHRISTINE: I really love that, because it really brings the thing that outdoor gardeners do in their gardens but it's this real attunement with nature. I think the thing with plants for a lot of people is they see these beautiful pictures on Instagram. They see these beautiful lush spreads in magazines, and plants for a lot of people are this part of decor. In your most recent book especially, you talk about some reasons you should think beyond that for being a plant parent. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Why do you think that someone who is approaching taking care of indoor plants should think about these plants as more than just decor? DARRYL: I call it the ABC of houseplant appreciation. A is for the aesthetic. So that's the main part, which is like... Okay, yes, the first thing people think of is it looks nice, the plant looks nice and makes my space look nice. Which I'm not saying it doesn't, it definitely does. But then beyond that there's B, which is for biology. And that's when you can appreciate how the plant grows, and even how... It's very different than how humans live, because we can't chop off a piece of our arm and have it grow another person. But the plant can do that. And then the last part is C, which is companionship. When I have my monstera for a long enough time that you couldn't simply replace it with another monstera, it wouldn't be the one that I grew. So there's actual companionship with this as a living thing. CHRISTINE: Okay, Darryl, sometimes we like to do a rapid fire lightning round of questions at the end of an episode, so we thought that would be fun to do with you. We want to ask you for your plant recs for different spaces. Are you game? DARRYL: Yes, let's do it. CHRISTINE: All right, answer the quickest thing that comes to your mind. Basement apartment with just a few tiny half windows, what would you recommend? DARRYL: A ZZ plant. CHRISTINE: I want plants in my windowless interior rooms. This is for me. DARRYL: Fake plants. Oh, okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. Actually, you buy three plants, two of them in the window, one of them in the space, and rotate. CHRISTINE: Okay. I live in the desert with barely any humidity. DARRYL: Cactus. CHRISTINE: Tiny apartment with big plant aspirations. DARRYL: I think a pothos would be good. It'll grow fast, you'll have too much to handle in one year. CHRISTINE: Sunroom with drafty windows, with freezing temperatures outside. DARRYL: A freezing temperature. Okay, you got to start venturing into outdoor gardening. Hibiscus, for example. You keep it outside in the summer right in the sun, it can so-call overwinter. Even in a garage, it can still tolerate a cold room that's bright. It'll just defoliate for most of the time until springtime, and then it grows new leaves. CHRISTINE: Lives alone and travels a lot. DARRYL: I would also say cactus. CHRISTINE: Okay. ROSIE: Okay, so I just want to recap because I think the most important thing I'm taking away from this conversation is a reminder of how photosynthesis works from biology. You're talking about light, light, light. If all else fails, understand that light is how your plants get fed. DARRYL: Yes. If the plants could tell you and scream at you like, "What do I actually need?" Light is the first thing. Of course you still have to water. Of course I do all those things. But none of those things can work unless the plant is working. ROSIE: And I think the other thing that is jumping out from what you talked about is setting expectations, understanding that these are living things, and that I'm not always thriving, let's be honest. So why would my plants always be thriving? DARRYL: So you do your best with the care, and you try to set up the environment as best you can. But nature is still going to happen, decay is still going to happen. If you wanted it to look the same or always perfect all the time, then that's where the fake plant comes in. ROSIE: Darryl Cheng is the author of the books: The New Plant Parent and The New Plant Collector . Darryl, thank you so, so much for joining us. Appreciate it. DARRYL: Thank you very much. CHRISTINE: Thanks Darryl, thank you. We're going to take a quick break and when we're back we'll have Wirecutter senior staff writer Rose Lorre on to talk about the best hacks for getting houseplants on the cheap. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Before the break, we chatted with Darryl Cheng about how to keep your houseplants happy this spring. Hint hint, it's all about light. And now we're going to talk about how to get great houseplants on the cheap. I don't know about you, but I find houseplants incredibly expensive. They really are plant shops, so I'm excited to hear about this. CAIRA: Yeah, that's right. I am so ashamed about all the money that I've put into houseplants that I killed immediately, but that's why we're going to talk with Rose Lorre, who is a Wirecutter senior staff writer. She's written about how to find plants for a fraction of what you'd pay at a fancy plant shop, and she really does know how to find a bargain. She's going to share strategies for where and how to shop, and even how to propagate plants yourself so you can just get it for free. Rose, welcome to the show. ROSE: Thank you, it's so great to be here. How are you all? CHRISTINE: Good. ROSIE: Good. CHRISTINE: And we're excited to talk to you about plants. ROSE: I'm always excited to talk about plants. ROSIE: All right, rose plants, pots, all the stuff involved. Let's set aside for a minute. You don't have a good track record of keeping them alive, even aspirationally, this stuff gets expensive. You have something like 57 houseplants in your home? ROSE: Last I counted, yes. ROSIE: That's incredible. You got them for all about $50, total? ROSE: From the best of my recollection, I think it cost me in the ballpark of $50. ROSIE: Where are you finding these plants? ROSE: Honestly, most of them I'm finding through some sort of local buy nothing or buy nothing like group. There's a few that I belong to. Some are specific to plants, some are not. And I do a lot of buy-sell-swap trade of plants just from there. People, they want to trim their pothos plant. Those trimmings become new pothos plants, they give them away. A lot of people, myself included, their plants get too big for their space. And unfortunately you have to know that it's time to say goodbye to that plant, because you just can't care for it the way it needs to or should be cared for. So yeah, it's not a strict one-to-one trade, but like it's a community of folks that you know are up for helping each other out. ROSIE: What are some other reasons you would want to swap or re-home a plant? ROSE: Sometimes a plant just doesn't thrive in your air, in your environment, and it can be tricky sometimes to pinpoint why. And then you just... It's the same thing where it's like, "Well I just have to see if someone else wants to try and take this on. I can't figure out if it's a light issue, or a humidity issue or whatever the case may be." So I think that's the reason a lot of people... Or it's just like, "I have too many plants." I have to admit that I've done that too. I've downsized from time to time. CHRISTINE: It's time to purge. Can I ask, when you're looking for a buy, sell or buy nothing group in your area, what are you doing? Are you Googling Facebook Marketplace plants? If somebody's just curious, they want to find- ROSIE: It's a keyword search. CHRISTINE: Yeah, what is the keyword search? ROSE: I think you hit... If I were starting from scratch, I would search on Facebook, I would look plant, buy, sell, swap, trade, local. I would put my town name in. Gardening, that's another thing that I've noticed that even if you find it hard to find plant communities, meaning houseplant communities locally, try gardening next. And there are people who garden who will also like have indoor houseplants, and so you can find people that way too. CAIRA: I've also seen it all over Reddit. It's very easy to find your local subreddits for plants. CHRISTINE: Ooh, a little subreddit community. ROSE: I didn't even think about that. That's a great idea too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. CHRISTINE: What about, I've sometimes seen the botanic garden close to me doing plant sales. Did you ever hit up local plant communities in that way? ROSE: I do, I do. In fact, you just reminded me that I forgot a prop I was going to bring because I thought you guys would get a laugh out of it. So the town next to mine in New Jersey has a garden club, and every spring they do a huge three or four day sale. The prop I was going to bring was they send me a postcard every year to remind me, and the postcard is good for $1 off a purchase of $10 or more. And I just think, but like I will take that dollar, thank you very much. That's how cheap I am. So I do find that gardening clubs, botanic clubs, botanic gardens, definitely check those out. ROSIE: To be fair Rose, you did bring a couple of props including your shirt. What does your shirt read for folks that- ROSE: My shirt says easily distracted by plants. ROSIE: Love it. ROSE: Which is true. ROSIE: And then also there's a prop on the desk here. What do you have? ROSE: Rosie, this is not a prop, this is a gift.. Y'all can have some snake plants to take home. ROSIE: Oh, I love this. CAIRA: Oh my god. So this is a cutting, it's not a whole plant, right? ROSE: Correct. Well, more or less, yes. This is most snake plants that you would see potted, there'd be more stalks than what I have here. But it could be. CHRISTINE: Rose, I'm very curious about how you go about finding good, healthy plants. When you're kind of looking on Facebook marketplace or other places online, how do you kind of gauge whether something is healthy and worth your time? Have you run into any issues with unhealthy plants when you get them off of Facebook marketplace? ROSE: I did once get a plant years ago that slowly looked like it was flagging, dying. And I did ultimately investigate, meaning I de-potted it, and there were ants in the soil. That's the only time I've ever had that problem. But also, I got that plant for free. That's one of the reasons that I... I'm a natural cheapskate. But one of the reasons that I like doing plants for free is some plants die. You're not going to have 100% success. And if I didn't pay anything or next to nothing for the plant, then it stings less. That's all. CAIRA: Don't you run the risk of bringing basically a sick plant into your environment though, and then it can affect the others? ROSE: The way that it can affect the others is if it has some sort of an infestation. Something like fungus, gnats, mealy bugs, spider mites. Very small bugs that live either on the leaf, often the underside of the leaf, sometimes where the leaf meets the stem, sometimes in the soil. Now it would have to be a very severe infestation to actually kill a plant, but it's certainly not ideal and it's not always pretty to look at. And yeah, you definitely want to avoid it. So yes, when you get a new plant, look at it real close. You want to look for spider mites. Honestly, you should have a magnifying glass or an app on your phone that works as a magnifying glass. If you look at the guide to buying plants online, you can see a couple examples of this. Sometimes you can't really see the spider mites, but you can see their strings. They just look like very thin white threads. So you should definitely inspect your plants when they get home. One of the things that I try and do as much as possible, and you do need to have the space for this in your home. You should quarantine any new plant that comes in, no matter where you get it from. If you can quarantine it in a room where it's the only plant in the room, great. If you need to just make it a corner of a room. The most you can do, you should do for about a week. CHRISTINE: Okay, so let's just do a quick recap so far. You don't need to spend a lot (if anything) on new plants. Try to find local buy-nothing groups and garden clubs, make plant friends who can give you cuttings, and dial-in your plant keyword search on Facebook Marketplace. And when you do bring home a new plant, it's a good idea to quarantine it for about a week to make sure it's healthy and won't spread anything to your other plants. CAIRA: We wanted to ask you, because you did test how to shop for plants online last year, and I have a two part question for this. First of all, why are people shopping for plants online? Because it just seems like there's a wealth of options in most local areas. And then if you do want to do that, is it worth it? ROSE: That's a great question. So the first part, I honestly would say that an online plant purveyor should be your last option. It's good if you want to send a gift long distance. I live by snake plants and pothos plants. I like my bread and butter plants. But I also like plants that have pink in the leaves, I'm a real sucker for that. I just got a cloche, a glass dome. I got it from a garage sale, of course. I've always wanted to grow a plant under a cloche, because you can create a little micro high humid environment. And so I'm thinking for that, since there are specific plants I would want to grow in that, I might splurge on a dot com type plant purchase. But yeah, for the most part that to me is like your last option. I would look for neighbors, I would look for garden sales, I would look for local plant shops. Everyone's probably got a big box store near them. Home Depot has a section, and Lowe's usually has a section. They're not expensive, but they're usually not in the greatest shape. They just don't get the attention that they need. But you can probably rescue from there if that's your best option. Online plant purveyors to me are for gifts, or special plants that you're... I want this plant, I'm willing to splurge over my usual. CAIRA: And you think that they travel well? I just imagine plants coming in a box and I'm like, "Wouldn't that kill it?" ROSE: Right. A good plant purveyor will either include for free when necessary or they'll ask you to spend like another five bucks on a heat pack, which is just the ones that you break and put on your sore leg or what the case may be. And we found that those can work pretty well. And they should be packed very, very well. We actually timed how long it took us to open each package, because between the dirt, and leaves getting bruised, or bent, or damaged or snapped off, there's a lot of reasons why this thing really needs to be packed well. It should have a lot of signage on the outside. We counted up how many, like this side up live plants inside all those sorts of stickers. So for the most part, the delivery was not as bad as you might fear. There was one snake plant that did meet the worst possible fate it could have met. It did not have a heat pack, and it arrived. The leaves were soggy and spongy, and flopped over. It was dying. It took all of what, two, three days in transit to basically kill this thing in a cold snap. But for the most part, the plant will survive those two or three days. CHRISTINE: But by and large, just go local. ROSE: Oh, yes. CHRISTINE: Just go local if you can, and skip them. ROSIE: Unless you're trying to buy a rose that you can put under a cloche like in- CAIRA: Beauty and the Beast? CHRISTINE: Like in Beauty and the Beast. CAIRA: Okay, Rose. Well before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question. What's the last thing you've bought that you've really loved? ROSE: First of all, I have been trying to buy less in 2025, just in general. But there are things that you have to buy like toilet paper, and I have been trying to find ways to bring less plastic into my home and into my life. So I- ROSIE: I'm terrified of whatever this is going to be. CAIRA: This is a real setup. ROSE: It is? All right, well the punchline is I bought Who Gives A Crap toilet paper. That's the punchline. CAIRA: I love Who Gives A Crap. ROSE: I bought the Who Gives A Crap. CHRISTINE: And this is toilet paper we recommend, right? CAIRA: Yes. ROSE: Yes, it is. And that's- CAIRA: And it comes wrapped in this pretty paper. It's almost like a gift. ROSE: Very pretty paper. Okay, so you've used it? CAIRA: Yeah, I love it. ROSE: There's one roll in the box that has a little label on it that says, "Open this one last," and I haven't opened it. I'm really curious to see what happens. CAIRA: I'm not going to ruin the surprise. ROSE: If anyone can make toilet paper fun, they've found a way. But yeah, the packaging, which is paper, is very appealing. It's just fun, and there have been no complaints. CHRISTINE: Is it really soft? CAIRA: Yes. CHRISTINE: What's so great about it? Yeah. ROSE: I think it is soft. ROSIE: Thank you so much for joining us, Rose. ROSE: You're welcome, thank you. CHRISTINE: Thanks, Rose. CHRISTINE: All right. That was a lot of plant info. CAIRA: It really was. CHRISTINE: What do y'all think? ROSIE: I loved it. CHRISTINE: Yeah. ROSIE: I feel empowered actually after that. I think the combination of Rose suggesting you can get plants very, very cheaply if not free, and Darryl reminding me about photosynthesis- CHRISTINE: Yes, science. ROSIE: ... and how essentially light is how you feed plants. CHRISTINE: I knew that, but I forgot that I kept thinking, oh, if I just give my plants more fertilizer, maybe they'll perk up a little bit. ROSIE: Totally. CAIRA: Or water. ROSIE: Water, yeah. CHRISTINE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. CAIRA: Just over-watering, I think that was my problem before. And also I've always lived in apartments that just didn't have much light at all. But I think if I really wanted to take care of another plant baby anytime soon, I think I would just get a pothos and hang it directly in the one window I do have and let it do its thing. CHRISTINE: Let it do its thing, yeah. CAIRA: And not expect it to grow into a big, huge flowing plant, it's just going to be a little one. CHRISTINE: Set your expectations, yeah. I also think I might want to get a light meter, because I think that I'm ready. I have maybe 20 plants in my apartment. CAIRA: Oh, that's definitely enough. CHRISTINE: Yeah, maybe I'm ready to actually get a little scientific. And I would like to welcome some more plant babies into my home, so I think I'm going to keep an eye out this spring and summer for plant sales. Rose's great advice around look for plant sales at garden clubs or locally. I don't think that I have the patience for Facebook Marketplace for finding plants, but I would dip into a little plant sale. CAIRA: Find your community. CHRISTINE: That's right. ROSIE: As ever, if you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, head over to our website or you can find a link in the show notes. CHRISTINE: And Rosie, if you would like to learn more about fake plants, we also have a fake plant guide to the least terrible fake plants. ROSIE: I love that. I prefer faux because it makes me feel- CHRISTINE: Because it's classier. ROSIE: Yeah, it makes me feel a little bit better, but I'm going to check that out. Darryl Cheng's two books, the New Plant Parent and the New Plant Collector are available now. And you can check him out @HouseplantJournal on Instagram. That's it for us. CHRISTINE: See you. ROSIE: Bye. Bye-bye. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alicia Byetu and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's Editor in chief. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening. [BLOOPER] CHRISTINE: Botanic, botanic. ROSIE: Botanic. CHRISTINE: Botanic. CAIRA: Rose, sometimes I see the local botanic garden close to me has no- ROSIE: Still no. CAIRA: I'm not saying it right, I'm sorry.
