Molly Baz’s Joyful Holiday Kitchen Secrets and Traditions: ‘I’m Here to Inject Spirit Into Cooking!’ (Exclusive)
The celebrity chef talks festive meals, cozy soups and playful holiday fun
Celebrity chef Molly Baz, 37, is beloved for her commitment to bold flavors and her unpretentious, friendly approach to home cooking, and the bestselling cookbook author’s latest project is a great fit for her delightfully quirky sensibility.
Just in time for Christmas, the social media star has paired up with Vanity Fair napkins to promote their limited edition Mr. Napkin Head party pack, inspired by the scene in the hit 2006 Nancy Meyers film The Holiday in which Jude Law adorably entertains his two daughters (and shows Cameron Diaz what a good dad he is) by goofily putting a napkin and glasses on his face.
The party pack, available exclusively from Walmart’s website, has everything you need to recreate the Mr. Napkin Head scene at home. “I’m a huge fan of the movie, and I’ve watched it religiously every year since it came out,” Baz says. “My son is one-and-a-half now, so I think it’s the perfect moment to introduce him to Mr. Napkin Head,” she adds with a laugh.
Molly Baz sat down with Woman’s World to discuss her holiday traditions, finding comfort in cooking and more.
How seafood, soup and coffee cake became holiday essentials
“I’m a huge fan of the holidays,” Baz says. “I love holiday traditions, but I don’t feel strongly about never breaking from them.” Unsurprisingly, food plays a major role in the chef’s celebrations. “On Christmas Eve, we do the Feast of the Seven Fishes, even though we’re not Italian. I just do it because I love the culinary tradition of having a huge feast on Christmas Eve. However, a bunch of my family members are picky about fish, so I have to work around them,” she says.
“The other thing that we do is we make the Silver Palate Cookbook coffee cake every Christmas morning, but we prepare it the night before,” she adds. “It’s always my dad’s job to prepare it and then bake it first thing in the morning, but year after year, for whatever reason, he messes it up. One year he forgot the sugar and one year he doubled the eggs. It’s always an epic fail, but we eat it anyway, and it’s become part of our tradition to have that failed coffee cake,” she says, proving that even professional chefs don’t necessarily expect perfection in the kitchen.
Like many of us, Baz also loves cooking cozy comfort food during the holiday season. “I’m a big soup person,” she says. “I made a ‘clean out the fridge’ soup before going away for Thanksgiving. I had three-quarters of a cabbage in the crisper drawer, and I was like, ‘This has to be the base of dinner tonight,’ so I made a soup with cabbage, white beans, anchovies and herbs, with a cheesy bread crumb situation to finish it off. I’m making cozy, long-cooked soups and stews about once a week this season. I usually make double batches and freeze half for later.”
Molly Baz’s stress-free approach to cooking
Baz’s Instagram page has drawn nearly 900,000 followers thanks to her love of bright colors, catchy abbreviations and unexpected yet delicious recipes. “I love a good laugh, but in a much deeper, more profound way, I’ve always held that the only way to truly convince people to adopt the practice of cooking in their daily lives is to make it fun and not stressful,” she says. “It can be a little messy but still delicious, and that’s the whole point.”
“There’s a bit of whimsy in everything I do. That’s how I feel when I’m cooking, and that’s the mood that I really want to convey to people,” the chef continues. “Cooking doesn’t have to be that deep. If it’s not fun for people, they’re never going to want to keep doing it, and they’ll just keep ordering food and going out to eat. I’m here on this planet to inject some spirit into cooking so that people adopt it as a practice in their homes.”
From chef to mayo maven
Molly Baz added the entrepreneur title to her long resume last year when she launched Ayoh!, a line of mayonnaise in unique flavors like pickle, dijon, miso and giardiniera. “People either love mayo or they hate it,” Baz acknowledges. The mayo-loving chef started her brand after realizing that sandwiches made at home were inevitably disappointing compared to the ones available at sandwich shops. “I realized that people aren’t willing to spend a lot of time on a sandwich. It’s the type of food that needs to have a high impact while being made quickly,” she says, noting that if you get a sandwich from a restaurant, it’s lovingly prepared with high-quality ingredients.
“Most of us aren’t braising meats and making sauces from scratch at home,” Baz says. “I started Ayoh! because I wanted to pack all the handmade artisanal sandwich fanfare into a bottle of mayo and allow people to have a one-stop shop. People can have their basic sandwich ingredients and all they need to do is spread on one of the mayos, and all of a sudden there’s a kaleidoscope of flavor that’s more akin to the sandwiches you can get out in the world.”
Finding work-life balance and overcoming adversity
As a working mom juggling multiple projects, Baz admits, “The hardest part of finding work-life balance is making sure that I’m spending enough quality time with my son, rather than just focusing on the quantity of time.” “Work can be really all-consuming, and I’m grateful that I have so much of it. I love my work, but there’s a whole other creature in my life now who requires a lot of me, and I want to be really present for him,” she adds.
“Last year, my son wasn’t really aware enough to know what the holidays were. He was just a blob on a cushion,” Baz says. “This year, we just put our Christmas lights up, and every time we come home, he points at them and is in awe. As someone who deeply feels the magic of the holidays from all of the amazing things that my parents exposed me to at this time growing up, I can see his joy and feel it again for myself. That’s been the most incredible part of raising a human so far.”
The joy Baz feels this year is hard-won, as she and her family recently endured a traumatic loss. “My house burned down almost a year ago in the Altadena fires,” she shares. “I stopped cooking for a while because I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t even have a pair of socks, and I was like, ‘I’m sleeping in someone else’s house. What’s going on?’”
Navigating this tragedy was a complicated journey, but it ultimately taught Baz just how powerful cooking can be. “I certainly wasn’t cooking at first, but eventually I started to get that itch again. I realized that I hadn’t had a dopamine hit in a while, and I needed to cook in order to find that light inside myself,” she says. “I started cooking again about three weeks after our house burned down, and it allowed me to move forward. Going through this really solidified the importance of food and cooking in my life. It’s not just a career, it’s part of the blood that flows through my body”—and she’ll continue sharing this passion for cooking with her countless fans throughout the holiday season and year-round.
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