Meatballs for the masses
Molly Baz’s ‘favourite meatballs of all time’ one of many recipes in latest book
Soothing piano music played in the background when Molly Baz joined a recent video interview, which was appropriate. Her latest book, “More is More” (2023), furthers the immersive video experience of her debut, Cook This Book (2021), with audio cook-alongs via QR codes. Baz guides listeners through select recipes, allowing ample time to complete tasks while listening to calming classical music. The recipes are broken into tracks, so you can skip back to relisten and forward if you finish a section before the music has ended.
“I’m definitely an audio-oriented person. We listen to a lot of music in this household (which she shares with her husband, designer Ben Willett, and Tuna, a miniature dachshund). But the audio component of the book was born out of a desire to figure out a way to better teach my readers and support them in the process of cooking these recipes, knowing that cooking is so overwhelming for most people who aren’t professionals,” says the Los Angeles-based cookbook author, recipe developer and video host.
While Baz loves writing cookbooks and has a collection she plans to keep for the rest of her life, they have their limitations, she adds. “So much information gets left out of a recipe on a page. And my whole m.o. is teaching people how to cook and not just giving them recipes to muscle their way through without learning anything about what they’re doing.”
Podcasts such as Food52’s Play Me a Recipe follow a cook-along format, but Baz had never seen the concept in a cookbook. She worked with the audio media company Salt to produce what ended up being her favourite part of “More is More”.
From Cook This Book, Baz learned that many of her readers aren’t familiar with QR codes and realized that she needed to educate them on the interactive features of “More is More”. “People are not expecting to have any kind of augmented experience when they buy a cookbook.” Authors are increasingly incorporating codes linking to video tutorials of more involved techniques, such as in Pailin Chongchitnant’s Sabai , or atmosphere, like in Karan Gokani’s Hoppers, featuring travel clips from Sri Lanka. As readers see codes pop up more and more, Baz believes they will become second nature.
“I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what I can do with this technology in my books, but I hope to be able to keep pushing it forward. By the time my next book comes out, who knows what the status will be with AI, but perhaps there’s an integration there that I haven’t even thought of yet. And that’s what’s so exciting to me about the future of writing cookbooks, is that the script is still unwritten in terms of what I can do with them, and I love the possibility there.”
“More is More” is the culmination of Baz’s experiences working in restaurants but
with home cooks in mind. The 100 recipes are bold and colourful, an aesthetic mirrored in the book’s design. They strike a balance between everyday meals and dishes for entertaining, with chapters dedicated to snacks, salads, carbs, surf and turf, chicken, vegetables, sandwiches, breakfast and sweets. With both her books, Baz did a “gut check” to make sure there was a range of recipes for different moments and kinds of cooks. For the ambitious home cook, for example, her stuffed focaccia with spicy greens and cheese comes together over two days. On the other end of the spectrum, her misobraised chicken and leeks is perfect for a weeknight dinner.
Instead of a typical introductory pantry section, Baz ran the numbers and presented her most-used ingredients in a pie chart. Lemons loom large (32 recipes), followed by Parmigiano Reggiano (19), sesame seeds (12) and dill (12). “It’s what my brain looks like and my fridge looks like,” she says, laughing.
There’s an eight-page interlude featuring Baz’s last-meal menu (inspired by a 1950s New York steak house) — good for a party conversation starter, as well as for enjoying on a less morbid occasion than a death-bed dinner. “With this book, I took the liberties to have a little bit more fun and be less regimented with the structure of the book, which is very much in line with this 2.0 philosophy of “More is More”.”
The maximalist approach of the book is, in many ways, the opposite of how Baz was trained as a fine-dining line cook, where the mindset was “less is always more.” After graduating with an art history degree from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, Baz made a conscious
decision not to go to culinary school “because I felt like the hands-on, real-life experience would serve me better.” Instead, she cooked in restaurants for five or six years before working in food media as a recipe developer and food editor for publications including Bon Appétit.
She bounced around a lot during that time, Baz recalls, spending a year at a restaurant, learning as much as she could from a chef and then moving on to the next. One of the fine-dining restaurants in particular, the now-shuttered Michelin-starred Picholine in New York City, was an education in more ways than one.
“I just felt so not at home there. And I did it. I took the job, and I forced myself to work there because I knew I was going to learn a lot and that I was going to learn about techniques that I would never learn at a more rustic, farm-to-table restaurant. I saw the value there — especially having opted out of going to culinary school, where you learn those classic French techniques. And it was a pretty miserable experience, to be honest, all around, and we were treated like garbage. But in retrospect, not only did I learn a lot, but I learned a lot about who I am as a cook in relation to what I’m not through that experience.”
This education percolated in the back of her mind as Baz moved from restaurants to food media. Focusing on the needs of the home cook instead of the needs of a diner, she realized what set her apart from non-professionals: “My confidence and ability to go for it and level up at any given moment, without fear of taking a wrong turn.”
She also concluded that she didn’t want to cook in a meticulous, minimalist and
restrained way.
A “More is More” approach doesn’t mean lengthier ingredient lists, excess or gluttony, Baz underscores. It’s about learning how to use each component to its fullest potential. She layers mint into her “favourite meatballs of all time,” Mollz Ballz , three ways, for example. In her tangled leek pizza, she uses the entire allium, melting the greens into a cream sauce and charring nests of julienned strips of the rest.
As in Cook This Book, Baz starts with some ground rules. “More is More”, as a philosophy, may be about cooking with abandon, but Baz believes you need to know the rules before you can break them. “The rules of the book encourage what I like to call a ‘don’t stop until it tastes delicious’ mentality, which is to say that the home cook is empowered to ensure that what lands on the table is something that they want to eat, that they find tasty and that suits their own preferences, and that there are a lot of ways to get there.”
Crank up your burners to achieve the golden-brown colour that’s a huge part of the enjoyment of food and the development of flavour. Don’t be afraid to go heavy on the herbs, add a generous pinch of salt or an extra glug of vinegar.
“Those are all things to explore on your journey towards figuring out who you are as an eater and a cook. They’re there to guide you in terms of not stopping or settling for mediocrity.”