The best American food of 2025

It's Been a Minute

NPR

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4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are you hungry? Brittany has some irresistable recommendations.

In this episode, Brittany steps out to find the best American recipes: peanut butter egg rolls and the juiciest fried green tomatoes. Along the way she uncovers the stories of these dishes - ones that could have only come from the Midwest and the South.

This is... Food for Thought. And for the past few weeks, Brittany has been looking at the way food and dining shape our communities and culture.

And for the last episode in the series, Brittany chats with Chicago Tribune restaurant critic Louisa Kung Liu Chu and food writer and cookbook author Nicole Taylor about summer staples that taste like home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
0:05.4	RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.
0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:17.9	Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:37.1	When we first started thinking about a food and dining series, I knew I wanted to do something on regional summer foods.
0:45.0	Being from Michigan, this is the time of year where I'm craving a bowl of fresh cherries or some fried pickle.
0:51.0	And when we started looking for guests, we anticipated foods like baby back
0:55.2	ribs, tomato sandwiches, and of course, hot dogs. So we are so Chicago hot dog crazy.
1:03.1	That is Chicago Tribune restaurant critic Louisa Chu. Chicago is one of my favorite food
1:09.0	cities, and I knew that the all-beef hot dog was their thing.
1:13.2	We actually have two iconic Chicago-style hot dogs. Yeah. So there's the one, which is the Depression Dog.
1:21.7	The name kind of gives it up a little bit, and that is usually like a super skinny natural casing hot dog and then like the bare bones
1:30.9	kind of topping but the thing that makes it a meal almost everywhere that you'll get that kind of a
1:35.3	hot dog are like a huge mess of fresh cut fries and then there's the other which is kind of the more
1:43.2	colorful Vienna beef stylestyle hot dog,
1:46.7	which has like the poppy seed bun, white onion, red tomato, neon green relish,
1:54.5	pickle spear, sport peppers, and celery salt.
1:59.3	But then she told me about another year-round Chicago staple that rocked my world.
2:05.6	So one of my favorite regional Chicago foods is the Chicago-style peanut butter egg roll.
2:15.2	Yes, you heard that right, peanut butter egg rolls. Louisa grew up making
2:19.2	these in her family's chop suey restaurant, but you can imagine that would probably throw a lot of
2:24.3	people for a loop. And like a lot of hyphenated American cuisine, it has some baggage around it.
	...

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