Abigail Koffler Still Needs Hot Sauce

A newsletter early adopter on carving out a different path to working with food and media.

Abigail Koffler publishes the food newsletter This Needs Hot Sauce, teaches cooking classes, and writes for various publications. Check out the other half of this interview on Strange Work.

Abigail, what are you up to?

I’m currently a full-time freelancer. I have a small media company—This Needs Hot Sauce Inc.—incorporated last year. That combines a bunch of different things. I write a newsletter twice a week. I freelance write for a variety of outlets, mostly about food. Some travel stuff. And then I teach cooking classes with a colleague of mine, Erica Adler. We mostly teach virtually, but we’re hopefully moving into some in-person stuff.

When I was growing up, I thought that eventually I would have a job. But I was always really fascinated by food as well. My favorite thing to do was play “restaurant” or play “store” or whatever. I was obsessed with our pizzeria and our local diner. Even though I didn’t know if I wanted to do that stuff, I was very curious about it. 

Did you ever get to actually work in the diner or pizzeria you were obsessed with? 

The diner is now a Dunkin Donuts, unfortunately. It was very sad. The owner gave us these really cool old-fashioned tin ice cream cups when they closed. The pizzeria is still there, but I’ve never seen a woman work there in my entire life. I don’t think I could handle the heat. I did work at a bakery after I graduated from college. 

How do you transition or apply your cooking experience into working with and writing about food as a job?

What I’ve noticed is that people who cook regularly are terrible at following recipes. If you have an instinct or muscle memory for cooking, you just know your own taste or your own techniques. Like, I want this soup to be a little bit brothier, or I know I need to double the amount of garlic in that dish. Teaching a cooking class and having to develop recipes with very precise measurements has definitely been a challenge. 

“What I’ve noticed is that people who cook regularly are terrible at following recipes.”

A lot of my newsletter readers are not in New York. Cooking is a big part of my life, and I think it gives the newsletter a broader appeal—it has something for people who live anywhere. Another thing is that I’ve been a vegetarian for about nine years. When I was initially thinking about going into food, I was a little bit like, “Will this hold me back in some way?” I don’t think it has. But my sneaky agenda with the recipes is to broaden people’s minds about what eating vegetarian food can be. I don’t really brand it as a vegetarian newsletter. But if people wind up trying a vegetarian recipe that I talk about, or making tofu or something, I’m like, okay, cool. I never want to be preachy or didactic though. 

As someone who came to it early, what do you think about the state of newslettering, on Substack or elsewhere? 

I started using Substack in May 2018, I believe. It was pretty new at that point, and a lot of features definitely weren’t there yet. I had to migrate everything manually from TinyLetter. The functionality has gotten a lot better. Honestly the biggest thing about newsletters is consistency, and that’s where most people just completely abandon them. I’ve read and subscribed to over 100 newsletters, and most of them are defunct. There’s nothing wrong with that. There are so many ways to be a writer, or to have a voice in an industry. 

But I think a lot of people start newsletters because it’s so easy to set one up, and then six months later, they’ve written two posts. The advice I give people is to think about whether you actually want do this regularly.  

You were selected for a Substack grant, right?

In  2020, they did a grant program at the start of the pandemic. I got $2,500 from them. And I’m in another program now—it’s not money, but it’s a six-week seminar series trying to help people figure out ways to grow on the platform. I wish they were a little bit more active on moderation and content guidelines. But it’s not like Facebook is any better.

How do you feel about Substack’s various rounds of uproar regarding who they platform or support?

I wrote about it at the time, and I continue to be in disagreement with their policies. Considering size of my businesses and the history I have with Substack—me leaving and depriving them of whatever small percentage of money they’re getting from me is not really making a statement. It doesn’t really help a cause to put my own business in jeopardy. I can support the trans community and other marginalized groups by linking to those writers. I can boost their work. That’s more of my focus than moving off Substack. The paid arm of the newsletter also makes it a little bit more complicated to move. If everyone has to re-enter their credit cards on a new platform, I know I’ll lose a lot of people. 

What are some other food and dining newsletters you like?

I love Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. She’s down in San Juan and she’s also a vegetarian. She does recipes on Fridays, usually for paid subscribers, which is great, and essays on Monday. I also really like Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith. She writes about fat phobia and diet culture, sometimes about parenting and sometimes just living on earth. I also like Boss Barista, which is Ashley Rodriguez’s newsletter. She writes about coffee shop culture, and coffee as a crop and how it’s grown. And she also does a lot of interviews. I read a lot of newsletters, but I try not to read every food newsletter so I can keep my thoughts somewhat original.  

It doesn’t seem like there are any particularly divisive characters in the space. No Glenn Greenwald of food newsletters.

God, if there is one, I hope I don’t know about them. I also get newsletters from other sources. Like I love Tammie Teclemariam’s newsletter for Grub Street. And Daniela Galarza’s newsletter for The Washington Post is good. 

What’s missing in food newsletters or food media in general? What would you like to see more of?

The food industry is so big that it’s hard to have anything comprehensive. I’ve always tried to include articles about agriculture or production. We’re talking more about labor in everything we’re doing. Zagat Stories always did a good job with that. It’s a whole different type of reporting. You have to be on the ground in rural Arkansas or whereever, and you’re going up against something like Tyson to get into those stories. Alice Driver does really good reporting on that. She’s written a lot of stuff about COVID outbreaks and meatpacking workers. 

I love to see perspectives from different people. A lot of food writing is very New York-centric, which I’m guilty of too. So I like reading about people’s experiences in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world. But you don’t need to wait for permission to start talking about something. People are so used to reading the same kinds of stories over and over again at certain places. It’s on some of these publication to be open to different things, to be more accessible, and pay people better.