Dan Pashman: This episode contains explicit language.

Dan Pashman: So I had read that when you're testing recipes, which I guess is a lot of the time, that you eat a lot of cereal.

Molly Baz: Yeah. Mmm. 

Dan Pashman: What are some things you do to doctor a bowl of cereal?

Molly Baz: Oh, I'm so glad you're starting this out this way, because I feel so passionate about this subject. I, actually — you know what? 

Dan Pashman: Yeah?

Molly Baz: I started making my own cereal.

Dan Pashman: Oh, wow.

Molly Baz: I'll just get a little bowl for you.

Dan Pashman: Oh my God. This is so exciting.

Molly Baz: When I'm developing recipes, and especially when I'm working on books, there are so many flavors flying around my kitchen and entering my mouth and sometimes the best antidote to that is just, like a bowl of cereal that's, like, not challenging to the palate. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Molly Baz: And so I've invested deeply in my cereal collection and there's, like, six or seven in my house at all times 'cause I really like to mix and match. But I recently started making cereal and so this bag here has puffed rice, puffed kamut, sesame seeds, sliced almonds, and then the syrup that I made for it is honey, turmeric, coconut oil, vanilla, and sea salt. 

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. 

Molly Baz: And then you just bake it for, like, 30 minutes and ... [CEREAL SHAKING] There's my cereal. 

Dan Pashman: I've seen Jerry Seinfeld interviewed, and he talks about how, like — and I think this is true of a lot of comics — that they’re, like, every interaction is an opportunity to come up with a new bit. 

Molly Baz: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: I feel like that's kind of how your brain is with recipes.

Molly Baz: A hundred percent. When I need to take a break from recipe development, I eat cereal and then I just go into my cereal cabinet and, like, develop a recipe out of my cereal. 

Dan Pashman: Right, right. [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: It never sleeps. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Cookbook author Molly Baz first found her following online ...

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): This is a tried and true recipe that we have. It's BA's "Best Carbonara", and what's special about this ... It's Baz TV. Not BAs TV .. Okay, we have 30 seconds, we're ordering ... I'm wearing sneakers that are embroidered with the words "Cae" and "Sal" for caesar — caesar salad!

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Molly was one of the biggest personalities to come out of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen YouTube channel. And she parlayed that stardom to create a whole lifestyle universe for her followers. She's written two best selling cookbooks: Cook This Book, and More Is More. She'd got a wine brand and a wildly popular paid online recipe community called The Club. She was even on a Times Square billboard recently, which we'll get to later. 

Dan Pashman: Everything Molly puts out seems so perfectly cool and stylish, so carefully considered, so intentional. But yet also, so authentically her. I wanted to know: How does she do that? On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I went over to her house to talk with her, and to try to get a deeper understanding of how she works. Starting with how she develops a recipe.

Molly Baz: I'm just pulling up the recipe here, but I have been working on this fricking cornbread recipe for the last couple of weeks. 

Dan Pashman: We're in Molly's kitchen. You might have seen it on Instagram or in her books. It's a sunny, colorful space, with walls that are painted butter yellow. When Domino Magazine did a feature on her house, they described it as “mid-century inspired, California cool.” The day I’m visiting, Molly is about 8-months pregnant, so we agree that when we’re not working in the cooking, we're gonna head over to the leather armchairs to sit down and chat. 

Dan Pashman: When I asked Molly to let me watch her test a recipe, she picked one that she’s been developing for her weekly recipe newsletter. Her initial idea was for a yogurt cornbread with feta and za'atar. But it’s been a struggle, from the very first version. 

Molly Baz: It ended up just tasting like some pizza without the tomato sauce. Like it tasted like, kind of like Domino's breadsticks — like oregano, [Dan Pashman: Right, right.] dried oregano, like overcooked cheese. Like it was just like — it just wasn't it.

Dan Pashman: Molly tried adding tomatoes in one test, then she swapped out za'atar, instead used the Japanese seasoning furikake in another version. Then she took away the tomatoes again, nixed the feta … Still, none of these combinations were quite working. 

Molly Baz: Today, this is maybe the sixth version, it's going to be a sweet corn and furikake cornbread and on half of it I'm going to dollop in fresh ricotta and see whether having like creamy pockets of ricotta is welcome there or not. So we're gonna have, like, a half and half. So that's kind of the genesis of this motherfucking cornbread. 

[LAUGHING]

Molly Baz: That I kind of hate right now, but that's okay. We're pushing through.

Dan Pashman: Yeah. [LAUGHS] But like, is it possible to even get to a point with this and just be like, forget it?

Molly Baz: Oh, a hundred percent. And normally, at this point I would, but because you were coming, I was like, you know what, let's give it one more, like, hurrah.

Dan Pashman: So there’s a lot of — there's high stakes here, Molly. 

Molly Baz: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: This is make or break for this recipe.

Molly Baz: This is ... This is it. Yeah.

Dan Pashman: Okay. 

Molly Baz: It's this — if we don't like this, it's fine. Like people will hear about it on the podcast and it will never make its way into the world. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Molly Baz: Which is fine. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: All right. Should we start mixing up?

Molly Baz: Yeah. Okay. So let me just pull up my recipe notes. So, it's just like a one to one ratio of flour and cornmeal, which, just through my testing, has proven to be a good ratio. This one has more sugar than some of the other cornbreads I've developed. I like a kind of sweeter cornbread, as it turns out. 

[COOKING AMBIANCE] 

Molly Baz: And then the thing that I think makes this kind of special — I'm adding a tablespoon of furikake here [DROPS SPOON] — is that I have the skillet preheating right now in the oven [PULLS OUT TRAY], I'm going to add butter to the skillet as well as to the batter and then pour the batter into this piping hot skillet, which get like immediately will start to cook the batter and creates — it's a cornbread that has like much crispier, browner edges than just like your average cake pan cornbread, which is something I'm here for, personally. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] That sounds so good. You're pretty far away from the initial inspiration now. Like, you've lost — 

Molly Baz: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Like the za'atar is out, out now, right? 

Molly Baz: There’s like nothing about the original recipe here, to be honest. 

Dan Pashman: Right. So how common is that when you're developing a recipe that you end up so far away from the original idea? 

Molly Baz: I would say that 50 percent of them come out, like, pretty close to the way they were initially envisioned, and the other 50 flop right out the gates. And I will table those, and they stay in my Notes app. And more often than not, like six months down the line, I'll have some sort of a creative kind of breakthrough where I'll be like, "Oh, that's what that recipe that I was working on six months ago was missing." It's all about, like, bringing something fresh to that idea. Like that's where the breakthrough almost always happens. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, it feels a lot the way musicians describe songwriting, which is like sometimes ... You know, sometimes a song comes out in eight minutes and it's just perfect. Other times, there's these kinds of fragments of ideas that you sit on for a long time.

Molly Baz: Yeah! It’s exactly the same thing. And I feel blessed when the ratio tips more in the direction of like the eight- minute miraculous wonder. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Dan Pashman: The butter in the skillet has melted …

[MELTING BUTTER IN A PAN] 

Dan Pashman: There is, like, a lake of butter. 

Dan Pashman: So Molly pulls the pan out of the oven to add the batter.

Dan Pashman: Now the batter is going in.

Molly Baz: So you can see that it's bubbling at the sides already [SETTING PAN DOWN] and like starting to puff. It almost looks like an omelet. Okay, let me go back in the oven — 40 minutes-ish. [PUTTING PAN BACK IN OVER] Okay, I'm gonna set a timer ... 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: With the cornbread in the oven, Molly and I sit down in the armchairs to chat. I ask her about her roots, and it turns out that her interest in food does not come from her childhood.

Molly Baz: My parents don't love when I talk about this, but I've done it on national television, so it's fine. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: Yeah, we ate, like, pretty simply. It wasn't unhealthy, but they weren't particularly inspired cooks. Food growing up was like, you know, a pork chop. There was a lot of, like, dry pork chops, randomly mint jelly in the fridge all the time. You know, that, like, bright green stuff?

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Molly Baz: And I was always just, like, smothering it on my — the overcooked meat, whatever was served because it tasted like something. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

[LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: And it, like, moistened it up. Frozen peas — we ate a lot of those — chicken cutlets, buttered egg noodles …

Dan Pashman: Despite the dubious dry pork chops and jelly, Molly was still curious about what was on the table. And that led her to question her dad ...

Molly Baz: One day was like, "Why are you drinking beer and I have to drink milk? What is that in that bottle that tastes so good?", and I tried his Rolling Rock and I was like, this shit's delicious. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: And so from then on, I got to have a little splash of Rolling Rock in my whole milk and it flavored the milk. Like Rolling Rock, and that's how I got it down. And that was like our little secret that's not a secret anymore. 

[LAUGHING] 

Molly Baz: And probably could have gotten Child Protective Services involved.

Dan Pashman: Yeah. But I mean have you ever developed a recipe inspired by that combination?

Molly Baz: No, I mean, that's so foul. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: No one's gonna click on that recipe. Or maybe they will just because …

Dan Pashman: I don't know. I mean, if the headline started with, like, milk beer ...

Molly Baz: Or maybe I could do like a milk braised meat dish that's, like, got beer, and milk …

Dan Pashman: There you go. 

Molly Baz: You know, like milk braised pork energy, but, like, involve beer.

Dan Pashman: Right, right. See? Molly, it's already coming together. 

Molly Baz: Okay. [LAUGHS] I’ll work on it.

Dan Pashman: All right. 

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: The spark for Molly's interest in food came during a college semester abroad in Florence. Her program placed her in a home stay with an older single woman named Graziella.

Molly Baz: She was, like, in her late seventies at the time. She was an amazing cook, but not in a highfalutin fancy way at all. And in fact, like, she would be so embarrassed to hear me say that she is a great cook, cause she would just be like, I'm just living. I'm not a chef. I’m making dinner because we have to eat tonight. But the dinners that she was making because we had to eat tonight were so delicious. That experience over there of being exposed to really simple, but, like, really flavorful, delicious home cooking kind of changed the game for me and was part of the moment in my life where I realized I wanted to be in food.

Dan Pashman: When Molly returned to the States to finish her degree, she jumped right into cooking. 

Molly Baz: I started this really embarrassing ... [LAUGHING] Supper club, as I called it, when supper clubs were a thing and everyone was doing these like underground restaurants out of their home. So I did that at my off campus house and I called it the Private Dining Experience. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: P.D.E. for short, which, like, really makes me cringe, but also I kind of love myself for having done that. 

Dan Pashman: What do you love about the fact that you did that?

Molly Baz: That like, it was so uncool of me. And I just kind of like, love that I was such a dork.

Dan Pashman: Tell me about the menus. Like, tell me, what were you ... 

Molly Baz: Well, I guess, that's what was the most embarrassing part of them ...

Dan Pashman: Okay. 

[LAUGHING]

Molly Baz: If we're gonna get into specifics. Like the way that we wrote about the dishes, it was very, like, fine dining, which is totally the opposite of my experience eating in Florence, but like, it would be, like, a seven-course menu. And like the first course would be like, foie gras macaron, period. Grape coulis, period.

[LAUGHING]

Molly Baz: Sesame crumble. And like that obviously was also a phase in restaurants where like a very less is more kind of, like, minimalist approach to talking about menu items — which is very un-me now. And yeah, we were just very ambitious with our flavor profiles mostly and learning as much as we could. And so we would tackle all sorts of new, like, molecular gastronomy kind of techniques. 

Dan Pashman: And you had not had any professional training.

Molly Baz: No, no, no, no. It was just — we would sit in our bed, me and my best friend, we lived together, we would sit in our bed and just pore over cookbooks. I was obsessed with the Flavor Bible. Do you know that book?

Dan Pashman: I've heard of it, I haven't read it.

Molly Baz: Okay. So the Flavor Bible is a reference book that lists pretty much every ingredient under the sun, like from all cultures and cuisines. And then under each ingredient, it lists every other ingredient that has been, like, scientifically proven to pair well from a flavor perspective. And so, it was like an amazing resource when we were scrolling through, like the French Laundry cookbook, and we would see some like poached lobster with chives and, I don’t know, hazelnut foam. And we would be like, well, what's a version of this that we can make? How can we make it ours? And maybe we would decide, okay, like we're going to do poached cod instead of lobster and pistachio instead of hazelnut. And I would consult the Flavor Bible and be like, "What pairs well with pistachios?", because at that point, I didn't have enough eating experience under my belt to be able to just, like, make that connection on my own. And there would just be like this long list of ingredients. It would say like creme brûlée or coffee grinds and it got our creativity and, like, our creative juices really flowing and that's how we kind of came up with a lot of our menus. 

Dan Pashman: Um … 

Molly Baz: I need to check on the cornbread, one sec.

Dan Pashman: Oh yeah, yeah. Let's do it.

Dan Pashman: Molly and I head back to the kitchen …

Molly Baz: Oh! Okay, goodbye ricotta.

Dan Pashman: The ricotta's sunk in?

Molly Baz: The ricotta has sunk. But that's okay, we're not mad about it. We're gonna leave it in. It's not quite ready.

Dan Pashman: All right. 

Dan Pashman: When Molly graduated college, she stopped doing the Private Dining Experience. But it did help convince her she wanted to cook in restaurants. So she worked different jobs in fine dining, learning the fundamentals of cooking, and how to meet the high standards her bosses expected. She also learned some less obvious skills:

Molly Baz: Working clean and organization, you can't be a scatterbrain in a restaurant, you'll just get swallowed up. And so it really taught me principles of organization and self management, time management. Because it's like you have this laundry list of prep that you have to get done and it's like, see you at five o'clock when we set up the line, hope you make it. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Molly Baz: That’s the other thing is like, it's a physical dance. You don't want to waste a step, especially when it's eight o'clock and you're on the line and there's a hundred tickets in the window — making an extra couple of, like, turns around to your oven is just so fumbly and gets in your way. And when you're really, like, in a flow, as cheesy as it sounds, really feels like you're kind of, like, dancing around. There's no jerky movements and you're not bumping into things, and once you master that movement, cooking can be so fluid and satisfying.

Dan Pashman: Molly liked the high pressure kitchens she worked in in New York and Boston, and she learned a ton. But eventually, she felt like she hit a ceiling. She knew she didn't want to open her own restaurant because she didn’t want to live the life of a restaurant owner, being chained to the place for 80 hours a week. And she didn't want to be a line cook forever. So she decided to try her hand at food styling for photo shoots, and recipe testing for magazines and websites. That's how she first got her foot in the door at Epicurious, the online sister publication to Bon Appetit. She landed a freelance job testing recipes a couple times a month in their test kitchen. But she knew she wanted to turn that very part-time gig into something bigger.

Molly Baz: I wasn't like, okay, as soon as I'm done testing recipes, I'm going to clock out and go home. I was like, "How else can I help?" I would walk into the studio next door where they were shooting, you know, some spread for the magazine and just be of service and be like, "Oh, can I get you this? Can I do that?", just like truly what happened is that they were like, "We, like, need you, Molly," like we can't survive without you because you're doing more than just testing your recipe and going home. 

Dan Pashman: Molly says her advice for younger people today was her mantra for herself back then: Make yourself indispensable. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Recipe testing invigorated Molly, it made her feel like there was another path in the food world outside of restaurants. But as a freelance recipe tester, she still wasn't able to let loose creatively. She was always testing other people's recipes, tightening the screws on things other people had built — kind of like when she was a restaurant cook taking orders from the head chef. 

Dan Pashman: But eventually, after she became indispensable in the test kitchen, Bon Appetit brought her on full time as a food editor. That meant she would get assignments for recipes to develop or maybe even start to create recipes of her own. And that new job was when things started to change. 

Molly Baz: The first recipe that I ever was assigned to develop on my own was an eggs benedict recipe for a crowd. And I really liked the challenge there of being like, okay, so there's a million eggs benedict recipes out in the world. How can I bring something new to the conversation and figure out how to, like, poach and hold the poach in batches, so that you're not poaching à la minute for your guests. The english muffins are all broiled on a baking sheet so that you're not, like, using the toaster oven 17 times, and it was like a bit of a puzzle. So it wasn't full creative freedom by any means, but I really liked the challenge of, like, here are the constraints of this assignment, now go use your creative brain and figure it out. And then eventually, the assignments got looser and looser and it was more like, "We need a spring pasta recipe." And then you get to like, really use your creative brain and be like, "Okay, what's available in springtime and then what would Molly make?"

Dan Pashman: It's interesting to say, "What would Molly make?" Cause at a couple of points in our conversation, you've said variations like, "You know, doing it the way I would do it." 

Molly Baz: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: "This is to my taste," like, you come across as someone who has a certain — like, a sure-footedness.

Molly Baz: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: It feels like from a pretty early point in your career, you kind of knew what you liked.

Molly Baz: Yeah, I think that's just part of my personality. Like I know what I like and I am pretty bullish about it in like, hopefully, not an obnoxious way, but some people probably think it's obnoxious, but that's okay. Like I think it’s always been in me. I've always had my preferences, my taste, my palate. It's not like I one day was like, "Oh, and now I have a palate."

Dan Pashman: And where, where do you think that belief in your own taste comes from?

Molly Baz: It's just not that hard to decide whether you like something. Like, I … When something goes in my mouth, I'm either like, this is — this tastes great or not. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Molly Baz: And if it tastes great, the question is why. And it seems like a lot of the time it ends up falling into this category of like, oh, well, it's really briny and it's really acidic, and there's this like really fresh element to it, and there's like good fattiness, there's a lot of balance. So I don't find it hard to find my own taste because it's not an active thing. It's just like, "Is it good?" 

Dan Pashman: Right, right.

Molly Baz: [LAUGHS] I think that, like, I have innate confidence, which has served me well in my career. But even more so than that is like a desire to prove myself to myself. I don't know what — it would probably take years of therapy to figure out exactly what caused that in me ... 

Dan Pashman: So what are the components of a quintessential Molly Baz recipe?

Molly Baz: Well, it depends. I think there are certain ingredients that people see in a recipe, highlighted in a recipe, and would be like, "tThat's so very Molly Baz." And those are like mortadella and pistachios and anchovies and lemon and whatever. But beyond that, I think it's like very approachable food or food that feels really familiar, but then it just has like this one little twist about it. And it's just, like — it's got a wink. And my flavor profiles tend to be, like, very bright and herbaceous and salty. And so if those things resonate with you as an eater and you try my recipes, you're like, "Oh, that's a Molly recipe," you know?

MUSIC 

Molly Baz: Oh, there's our timer.

Dan Pashman: The cornbread timer goes off, so Molly and I make our way back to the kitchen to see if it’s done.

Molly Baz: Here we go. It's looking better now, huh? Nice and browned on top. 

Dan Pashman: Beautifully golden brown. The furikake looks very pretty.

Molly Baz: Yeah, it does. Okay, we're clean. We're coming out clean. 

Dan Pashman: How's it smell? 

Molly Baz: Interesting. [SNIFFS] You know, furikake can be kind of funky sometimes, cause obviously, there's a lot of seaweed in it. But, so it's kind of got like a ... It’s not fishy, but it's funky. It's got a funky smell, but I'm not mad about it.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Molly declares the cornbread to be done. It’s a deep golden brown, very dark around the edges, with flecks of blackened furikake on top. I think it looks amazing, but Molly says it’s gotta cool before we try it, so I have to cool my jets a bit, and wait to taste it. Coming up, Molly gets a new assignment that changes the course of her career — and we find out whether this cornbread recipe is a keeper. Stick around.

MUSIC

+++ BREAK +++

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, if you’re new to the show, or just dragging your feet a little bit, I hope you’ll check out my new cookbook, Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. It’s full of non traditional pasta recipes — no tomato sauce in this cookbook, okay? We got a scallion oil bucatini with a runny egg on top, kimchi carbonara, a zucchini and feta number with za'atar toasted bread crumbs on top, and much more. And hey, just in time for summer grilling season, there’s a whole chapter of incredible pasta salads, entitled “Pasta Salads Redeemed: Fresh and Bright, Hold the Mayo.” To pick up your copy go to Sporkful.com/book. And hey, if you want to hear our series on the making of the book, which I think will totally change how you look at cookbooks, scroll back in our feed to March and check out our series, Anything’s Pastable. Thanks.

Dan Pashman: Okay, back to Molly Baz. While we wait for the cornbread to cool, Molly and I sit back down to talk about the big break in her career. When she was a food editor at Bon Appetit, her bosses asked if she would appear on camera in a video for the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen. At that point, the YouTube channel was in its infancy. The company was still trying to figure out what they were doing, experimenting with different formats and hosts. And Molly was asked to do a video demo of that recipe for eggs benedict for a crowd. She said yes. But once the shoot started, it was a little nerve-wracking once the shoot started.

Molly Baz: I really do remember just, like, my hands shaking as I, like, stood on the other side of the counter from everyone, and I was like, "This is gonna be so awkward because, like, my knife is gonna be, like, shaking all over the cutting board, and then YouTube is gonna, like, rip me apart and be like, she doesn't know what she's doing," and [LAUGHS] it was so scary. And I remember the first two minutes, like, I was really jittery.

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): Guys, I'm kind of nervous. Okay, hold on, getting it out. Okay ... 

Molly Baz: And then I just started cooking. And once I was, like, in the zone, just cooking and explaining what I was doing, I knew what I was doing. I was very confident in my recipe, all the jitters went away. So after that first experience, I was like, I think I can probably figure this out. 

Dan Pashman: Molly definitely figured it out. That first video went up in early 2018, and as she did more, her videos became incredibly popular, racking up millions of views on the BA Test Kitchen channel. She did instructional videos like the eggs benedict one, but she also shot a video where she tried everything on a specific restaurant’s menu, or learned how to butcher a whole pig or cook ostrich eggs. And all the while she was building her own following, too. Within a year of becoming a Test Kitchen star, she signed a deal for her first cookbook, which would become Cook This Book. And the process of writing that book led to a big shift for her.

Molly Baz: I think that's when I realized, like, oh, there's — someone sees value in my perspective — me, Molly's perspective, not me, Molly for Bon Appetit's perspective. And that is when I really started to think about, well, then what is that perspective. And not that I had to force it in any way, but that I sort of had to like, put some barriers around it to understand it for myself and be able to, like, package it and understand what my sort of value is as a recipe developer and what I'm good at, what my strengths are, why people would come to me and my recipes.

Dan Pashman: If I can jump in real quick with my own perspective here, this is such a key insight that I think is important no matter what you do, and when Molly said it, it really resonated with me. Early on with The Sporkful, I became a contributor to NPR — okay, this was a big opportunity. And I remember thinking, “All right, NPR can find a million people to come on and talk about food and cooking. What am I bringing to these segments that’s unique to me?” I realized I had to lean into my obsessive nerdiness about the minutiae of eating. So for Valentine's Day, instead of talking about chocolatey desserts, I did a segment about eating alone, and I even interviewed Deepak Chopra on the best way to do it mindfully — that kind of thing. Anyway, working on Cook This Book helped Molly answer these questions about what she could bring to the table. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: While she was writing it, she unexpectedly ended up a free agent, because in 2020, her colleagues at Bon Appetit alleged unequal pay for people of color in their workplace. Molly supported her coworkers, writing on Instagram that the company had been allowed to “get away with atrocious pay inequities for far too long.” Eventually, most of Molly’s left the company and so did she. She wrote on Instagram “I’ve asked Conde Nast Entertainment to release me from the video obligations of my contract. I will no longer appear on the BA YouTube channel.”

Dan Pashman: Now that she was on her own, she continued working on her first cookbook, and started a subscriber service called The Club, where she began sharing weekly recipes with paying supporters. She infused The Club with her trademark confidence in her own taste, both in her recipes and in her visual aesthetic, which is a huge part of her social media, books, and website. 

Dan Pashman: How would you describe that aesthetic?

Molly Baz: That it's, like, very bold and unabashed and, like, the photography is very like high contrast and it's just like it's ... It's food that knows what it is and is self assured in that, and the branding kind of supports that. And actually, the initial branding and kind of like color design of my first book was very much inspired by my desire to want to be a teacher and that food and cooking can be fun is a huge part of my whole brand. And so, the branding and the books and the colors and the shapes and the fonts are all fun and, like, big and bold and they're, like, playful because I feel, like, if people don't enjoy cooking, they'll never do it.

Dan Pashman: Molly says her husband, Ben Willett, has played a big part in helping her develop that visual aesthetic. He's a furniture designer, who’s also worked in graphic and spatial design. As Molly put it to the Taste podcast, she has a creative director built into her marriage.

Molly Baz: So he really has helped me figure out how to express all those things I just mentioned that I know about myself as a cook in a visual language that could then translate to like a website in a book and a recipe layout, et cetera.

Dan Pashman: Molly was thinking about all of these things as she was building The Club, and also as she was finalizing her first cookbook, and that led her to make very specific design choices for the book. For one, she decided to use primary colors to communicate that the book was accessible, familiar. And she went much further than that. For most cookbooks, including mine, the author typically hires an outside photographer to style and shoot the photos. But the publisher’s in-house team actually designs the book. They take all those photos and the writing and they figure out the fonts, the colors, the layout, the cover — they bring it all together. But for Cook This Book, Molly hired an outside design firm to put it together. 

Molly Baz: Yeah, and not only that, an outside design firm that doesn't work on cookbooks and had never designed a cookbook before …

Dan Pashman: Why?

Molly Baz: [LAUGHS] That were from France. 

Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: [LAUGHS] Because I was like, I want to bring something new and fresh to this landscape. I wanted an agency that has never thought about a recipe before to put, like, their blank slate eyes on what a recipe could look like and how it could show up in a book and how a cookbook could be designed. So I chose this graphic design firm, Violaine et Jeremy, from Paris, who already had an aesthetic that was like, I felt very resonant with me. It was, like, very colorful and bold. And I love their — they have a type foundry where they make all their own custom fonts and I loved all of those. And I did that also with my second book and I will continue to do that always because I think otherwise everything just becomes so, like, derivative and iterative and It can be boring.

Dan Pashman: It’s not just that Molly wants her books to look different. She wants to make the recipes more functional. Most written recipes you see have an ingredient list, that list both the ingredient and amounts. So let’s say 3 tablespoons of olive oil, right? But the instructions will say, "Add the olive oil to the pan." So when you get to that instruction, you have to look back to the ingredients list to remember how much olive oil you're supposed to be adding. As Molly thought about the design of her book, she realized she didn’t like this format.

Molly Baz: That's not how a human brain works. And especially, a novice cook, who's like trying to juggle so much information at the same time. 

Dan Pashman: So Molly decided to format her recipes differently. There’s an ingredients list with quantities, and within the instructions she repeats the quantities. Another big change from the norm: She put the prep steps within the instructions, at the time you should actually do it.

Molly Baz: I don't see the value in a recipe where the ingredients are listed out and it says, "One onion chopped, one bunch of cilantro finely minced...", and then you don't end up using the cilantro until the end of the recipe. And it's like, were you supposed to just go and, like, chop and mince everything at the top of the recipe because that's what the ingredient list said? Why would you be mincing your cilantro four hours before you serve your braise that it's going to garnish? And that's not how a real cook cooks. And so my recipes tell you when to do every step of the recipe, including all of those prep steps, because it's efficient and it's, like, good practice as a cook.

Dan Pashman: Apparently, lots of people agreed with Molly’s recipe design choices. Her first book was a New York Times best seller when it came out in 2021. She followed it up last year with a second best seller, More Is More — same juicy fonts and bold primary colors, and the same authentic Molly.

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Dan Pashman: These days Molly is at work on a third cookbook, and she’s putting out weekly recipes for The Club. She also has a Crate and Barrel line, and a wine brand. But this isn’t any old wine with Molly’s face slapped on the label. Her friend Andy Young is the winemaker, and he created these wines specifically to go with Molly’s tastes.

Molly Baz: He basically cooks through my recipes and knows my palate really well and understands my food, and then creates wines that he thinks will pair well and live well in the context of my food. And so if my taste resonates with you, you can rest assured that the wines are probably going to satisfy you as well.

Dan Pashman: One of Molly’s more recent brand collabs got a lot of media attention: Molly appeared on a billboard in Times Square with her pregnant belly on display, holding a couple of her homemade lactation cookies up to cover her breasts. The caption read: Just Add Milk. The billboard was for a breastfeeding company called Swehl.

Dan Pashman: It was a bit saucy, but certainly not any more risque than the many scantily clad underwear models plastered all over Times Square. Still, Clear Channel, the company that owns the billboard, flagged the image and swapped it out for a different version. On Good Morning America Molly had this to say:

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): It’s super disheartening and infuriating to me that my first public foray into being a public mother was one that was deemed inappropriate… From my perspective the imagery that we put together was no different from any of the other ads that are in Times Square. 

Dan Pashman: On Instagram she was even more pointed, writing, “Bring on the lingerie, so long as it satiates the male gaze.”

Dan Pashman: A week later, a company called Seed donated their space on a billboard so Molly’s ad could run. And this all happened after I was at Molly’s house, so I didn’t have the chance to talk with her about it. But the incident both deepened her brand, and felt like a step towards advocacy. Her public statements were more pointed than her typical content. And when I was with her, we did talk about this idea of Molly Baz as a tastemaker and a brand.

Dan Pashman: So, Molly, I have a quote here from a profile that Eater did of you from 2023. I want to read this to you and get your thoughts. So they write, “Molly Baz has an uncanny ability to make her choices feel like the cool choices. Even if you hate olives and anchovies, you still want what she's making. She's created her own in group, one that never seems totally out of grasp. The most uncool among us can still emulate Molly Baz in our cooking, even if we'll never be able to afford the gorgeous home or conceptualize our own viral recipes, or look great in a messy bun and apron, or possess a preternatural ability to find the right pose for Instagram every single time.”

Molly Baz: [LAUGHS] Um, yes?

Dan Pashman: Like, how intentional is all that? 

Molly Baz: People ... 

Dan Pashman: Well, how do you feel about that description, and how intentional is it? 

Molly Baz: I feel a little embarrassed by it, because I'm a human being. And like, it's a little bit cringey because it makes it feel like I've constructed this world in a contrived way to put a certain image or vibe out. And what I hope is understood is that it's more about me achieving my own goals and satisfying my own tastes and living life the way that I want to internally, that then gets projected externally, because I'm a public figure and the work that I do gets put out into the world, and less about being like, let me craft this perfectly imperfect version of myself to project into the world. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Molly Baz: You know what I mean? And there's just like a nuance there where like, I think it comes from an authentic place of just, like, me being me and not, and if it lands that way, that may be the case. But not because I sat down with my team and was like, "Now, how can we kind of shape up this picture that's being put out in the world? What's missing in the Molly brand?" Like, it's not like that. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Molly Baz: And that's kind of the nuance that's maybe missing from that statement. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Molly Baz: And by the way, like I don't have some degree in marketing where I'm like, okay, here's like the strategy here. Like I don't — I just know how to cook and I am a human. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Molly Baz: And so, yeah, there wasn't a lot of like or something training or something to, to like, put this out in the world.

Dan Pashman: Right. And honestly, I think that all this surface-y stuff, notwithstanding, I think that underlying that, people sense your confidence in yourself and that's more of the appeal than, like, how the room is decorated.

Molly Baz: Yeah, totally. But then, like, the way it gets described involves the butter kitchen, which we love. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Yeah. Should we eat some cornbread?

Molly Baz: Yeah, let's eat some cornbread. 

Dan Pashman: All right. 

Molly Baz: I feel like it's ready.

Dan Pashman: We head back into Molly's kitchen, where the cornbread is now finally cool enough to slice into, and ...

Molly Baz: Ooh, look at that pocket of ricotta!

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. 

Molly Baz: That's fun. This is from the non-ricotta side, but it's peeking through. 

Dan Pashman: Oh wow. 

Molly Baz: It's nice and steamy.

Dan Pashman: Molly, what are your observations slicing into this?

Molly Baz: Okay, well, I'm loving how moist the crumb is, actually. It's almost custardy, like it's almost corn pudding in a really fun way. And then I'm loving the color that we got on top. I baked this at a higher temperature than I did last time.

Dan Pashman: As Molly cuts slices, she tops each one with a dollop of butter … 

Molly Baz: Here, did you get some butter on yours?

Dan Pashman: And a generous sprinkle of finishing salt.

Molly Baz: Okay, here's yours.

Dan Pashman: You want to take the first taste?

Molly Baz: Yeah. Are you gonna taste with me or I'm ... 

Dan Pashman: Yeah, I'll taste with you. Let's taste together.

[SILVERWARE CLATTERS]

Molly Baz: Mmm. That is a moist fucking cornbread. 

Dan Pashman: Molly is right. I mean, so often cornbread is dry. This might have been the moistest cornbread I’ve ever eaten, it was almost melty.

Molly Baz: It's really good. Okay, well for starters, I know I want more furikake already. I love the addition of the sweet corn. 

Dan Pashman: I love it. 

Molly Baz: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: But I agree with you, you could use more furikake.

Molly Baz: Yeah. If we’re gonna spend money on an ingredient, let’s make sure we can taste it.

Dan Pashman: Right. So, to be clear, this was a good enough test to save this dish from the trash heap.

Molly Baz: It's true. I said it was either going to be in or out after this. We're staying in. 

Dan Pashman: It lives to fight another day.

Molly Baz: I've made six cornbreads now in the last nine days. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Molly Baz: That's a lot of cornbread to have in your house.

Dan Pashman: Molly tells me that once she does another pass and finalizes the recipe, she'll take better photos and publish it to her recipe club. And then, hopefully, her fans will make it and love it.

Molly Baz: It is so nice to see having this experience then translate out into the world and have people like, you know, take pictures at a picnic and be like, "@MollyBaz, we brought your cornbread and like, it was a game changer and everyone's eating it, and like it's so convivial and bellies are fed ....", like that's the best. That's everything, really. 

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Dan Pashman: That's Molly Baz. And hey, good news: Molly just posted the recipe for that cornbread! It’s only available through The Club, which is Molly’s recipe subscription. To sign up go to mollybaz.com/club, and there's a 7-day free trial, so sign up, get the cornbread recipe, check out everything else going on there, and if you like it, stick around. Also check out my Instagram to see photos of that cornbread and a video of the exact moment that Molly did her taste test. On Instagram, I'm @TheSporkful. And be sure to check out Molly’s cookbooks: More Is More and Cook This Book.

Dan Pashman: Finally, some exciting cereal news: Molly is appearing on a special edition of the Special K cereal box! She did a photo shoot a couple weeks after I saw her, in the wake of the dustup around the lactation billboard. The shoot was just days before she gave birth. Molly wasn’t kidding when she said she loves cereal. Oh, also, since I talked to her, Molly had her baby. They're all doing well. That’s exciting, too.

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Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, we are searching for The Donut King, a man named Ted Ngoy who fled genocide in Cambodia and started a donut empire in southern California. But not long after, he lost it all and disappeared. We'll try to find him. That's next week. 

Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one, check out last week’s episode with Chef Yia Vang, who was the first ever to sell Hmong food at the Minnesota State Fair. Find out why Hmong food is Yia’s family legacy, that’s up now.

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