Since Finding Your Roots debuted in 2012, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. has sat down with some of the most influential people of our time, from Barbara Walters to Samuel L. Jackson to Deepak Chopra. Already on this season of the popular PBS series, the Harvard professor has examined the ancestral histories of Joy Behar, Michael Imperioli, Lea Salonga, and Amanda Seyfried.
But the season 11 episode that premiers tonight heads a little closer to home. Titled “Family Recipes,” it features World Central Kitchen founder Jose Andrés and Sean Sherman, the Twin Cities chef behind the award-winning Native restaurant Owamni and Indigenous food systems nonprofit NATIFS.
Sherman almost had a very A-list episode himself: “Originally, they were going to have me paired with Sharon Stone,” he laughs. And while we all love Basic Instinct, this is probably a better fit.
Sherman says he and Andrés have actually crossed paths many times since meeting close to a decade ago. Both have been awarded the Julia Child Award (Andrés in 2019 and Sherman in 2023), and Sherman has done work with Andrés’s nonprofit World Central Kitchen, which provides meals to those impacted by natural disasters and during humanitarian crises. “He’s been very supportive, and he always takes time to chat when we run into each other,” Sherman tells Racket.
Over the 52 minutes of “Family Recipes,” you’ll also see some similarities in their family histories. Like all episodes of Finding Your Roots, Gates takes the chefs (and viewers) on a journey into the past, exploring history through their family trees.
To uncover that history, PBS had Sherman take DNA tests—“I guess they’ll have my DNA, but who doesn’t at this point?” he remembers thinking—in addition to interviewing his parents and family members. “And then they have their team that sleuths and just digs through lots of paperwork and tries to piece some of the trails together,” he says.
Sherman has always been interested in his family history, a fascination that’s increased as he’s gotten older. “Plus, my work took me down a path of having to learn, truly learn, American history, especially through an Indigenous lens,” he says. “I became really well versed in what was going on in America in the 1800s.”
His familiarity with history, both America’s and his own, is evident during the episode. Especially in its earlier moments, when Gates asks if he knew about the history on his mother’s side, the Owamni chef often responds with a variation of, “I did know that, yes.” Sherman says that during the lunch break in their daylong shoot, Gates joked that the researchers better have some real surprises waiting on the other side of the family tree.
Which doesn’t mean that the history is particularly easy, or neat, or straightforward. We learn that one of Sherman’s great-great-grandfathers on his mother’s side tried to profit from western expansion, petitioning the government to start a reservation.
Throughout the episode, Gates often asks Sherman what he thinks his ancestors must have felt about something that was happening to them—for example, his great-great-grandfather on his father’s side, Thomas Shepard, was a buffalo soldier who was wounded while fighting against Native people. He’d go on to marry a Lakota woman and live out his life on the reservation.
Sherman struggled to find answers to those questions. “It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of everybody, of what was going on not only for themselves but also for the world in general,” he says. “History’s tricky like that—it’s hard to know why people did what they did.” We don’t know those people or their hardships, he explains.
And Gates, ever the clever historian, does get to surprise Sherman with some pieces of family history during the episode’s second half.
“It was definitely a fun episode to do, and it was fun to hang out with Dr. Gates for the whole day. He’s such a big personality … and I just enjoyed talking to him,” Sherman says. “It was kind of fun to talk to another history nerd.”
And it’s fun to learn a little bit more about Sherman, who grew up on “lots of Hamburger Helper” as a latchkey kid in the ’80s, started cooking in his teens, and, by 27, was an executive chef.
The Finding Your Roots season 11 episode "Family Recipes" premieres Tuesday, February 4 at 7 p.m. Central on PBS.
Oh, and don’t worry about Sharon Stone. She got paired up with Chrissy Teigen instead.
