Award-winning food blogger Molly Yeh talks about her life on a beet farm and the influences that inform her colorful recipes. Molly Yeh chats with host Jaymee Sire about the recipe that skyrocketed her blog to popularity after its conception in 2009 and how her life now closely resembles a romantic comedy. Molly talks about her childhood as the daughter of professional musicians and why she chose to study percussion at Julliard. She also reveals what music was playing in the delivery room when she was born and what she is currently listening to in the kitchen. She talks about the various cultures that influence her recipe development and her number-one piece of advice for aspiring food bloggers. Molly shares what her day-to-day looks like on a fifth generation beet farm and why she used to call her husband “eggboy.” She talks about her experience filming both Girl Meets Farm and Ben & Jerry’s Clash of the Cones and what she would name her own Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor.
Award-winning food blogger Molly Yeh talks about her life on a beet farm and the influences that inform her colorful recipes. Molly Yeh chats with host Jaymee Sire about the recipe that skyrocketed her blog to popularity after its conception in 2009 and how her life now closely resembles a romantic comedy. Molly talks about her childhood as the daughter of professional musicians and why she chose to study percussion at Julliard. She also reveals what music was playing in the delivery room when she was born and what she is currently listening to in the kitchen. She talks about the various cultures that influence her recipe development and her number-one piece of advice for aspiring food bloggers. Molly shares what her day-to-day looks like on a fifth generation beet farm and why she used to call her husband “eggboy.” She talks about her experience filming both Girl Meets Farm and Ben & Jerry’s Clash of the Cones and what she would name her own Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor.
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Find episode transcript here: https://food-network-obsessed.simplecast.com/episodes/molly-yehs-advice-for-aspiring-food-bloggers
[MUSIC PLAYING] JAYMEE SIRE: Hello, hello, and welcome to Food Network Obsessed. This is the podcast where we dish on all things Food Network with your favorite Food Network stars. I'm your host, Jaymee Sire, and today we have a trained percussionist turned food blogger with us to talk about her journey from Juilliard to James Beard nominee, her sprinkle collection, and what it's like to move from New York City to a sugar-beet farm on the North Dakota, Minnesota border. She's the creator of the award-winning blog, My Name Is Yeh, cookbook author, musician, the host of Girl Meets Farm, and the brand new competition show, Ben and Jerry's Clash of the Cones. It's Molly Yeh.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Molly, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you. How are you doing today?
MOLLY YEH: Thanks, Jaymee. I'm doing great. It's a beautiful day on the farm.
JAYMEE SIRE: That sounds wonderful. Well, speaking of which, I feel like if a person were a melting pot, it would be you. You are Chinese, Jewish, Juilliard-trained percussionist turned professional food blogger. You're living on a sugar-beet farm on the North Dakota, Minnesota border with your husband. Honestly, it kind of sounds like the plot of a romantic comedy. Does it feel that way to you sometimes?
MOLLY YEH: That's how I planned it. I was born, and I was like, I think I just want to live out a real life romantic comedy. So I'm just going to do all these things for that exact reason.
[LAUGHTER]
JAYMEE SIRE: You are living out your dream, and this diversity of influences can certainly be felt in the recipes on your award-winning blog, My Name is Yeh, that you started in 2009. Let's go back to that point. What was the spark that made you write that first entry?
MOLLY YEH: I have always loved documenting, and I have kept diaries since the day I could write. I have all of these little Hello Kitty journals that I kept from-- I don't know-- the time I was like six or seven, and I would write about drama that happened at school, or boys I had crushes on, and I was just always into the style of diary keeping that I would see in magazines.
I don't know if you remember those books, Amelia's Notebook? They were really fun and conversational, and there were adorable pictures that went with the diary entries, and so I kept these diaries just continuously. And as digital cameras became popular, I started taking a lot of pictures and printing them out and cutting out magazine cutouts and making these scrapbooks, which I still have somewhere.
My husband has all these fireproof safes that he puts documents from the farm in, and he put all my diaries in there. Anyway, so when blogs became popular, I was in college, and I was away from my family, and I started reading all these great little diary-esque blogs, and I thought, wow, what a really cool and easy way to pair pictures with diary entries and then share them with my family.
Because really until then, I thought, well, no one's ever going to read my diaries. No one's going to read my scrapbooks. No one's going to care. Maybe if I bury them in my backyard, in a million years aliens will find them, and maybe they'll be able to decipher them and understand them. But when the rise of the internet gave way to these blogs, I thought, what a cool medium.
So I started the blog as just an extension of my diaries, and it was a way to keep in touch with family and friends and keep track of my adventures in New York, and it very quickly became clear that all I wanted to write about, all I wanted to document and take pictures of was food. It was restaurants in New York. It was food trucks. It was the schnitzel truck that was my favorite place to go for lunch, and it just sort of snowballed from there.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah, well, I mean, it makes sense, because I mean, you do treat your blog like your diary. You have your signature all-lowercase style, the cheery tone of voice that we're hearing right now, but what was the turning point where it went from just being a blog to really being a business.
MOLLY YEH: It was when I moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota. So this is confusing, so I live in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. It's right on the border with Grand Forks, North Dakota. When Nick, my husband, and I first moved out here, we lived downtown in Grand Forks, North Dakota, until we moved out to the farm to East Grand Forks, Minnesota. So that's just your geography lesson for the day.
JAYMEE SIRE: I'm from Montana, so I'm vaguely--
MOLLY YEH: You get it. Yeah, OK, you know this region. So when we moved to Grand Forks, I didn't know anybody. I didn't have any friends. I had a job at the bakery in town, but other than that, I had a lot of alone time, because we moved back right before Nick went in to harvest, and harvest is very time intensive. So he was away for these 18-hour days, and I was working from midnight to 5:00 AM.
I couldn't really find that much to do in town, because the town is like, if you can imagine Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls. It's very small, and of course, it's not like New York where there are restaurants to try every single day. All I wanted to do was work on my blog and work on recipe development and improve my photos and network with other bloggers, learn how to do a Pinterest board, learn all of these components that went into a blog.
Before we moved here, I had wanted to do all of that, but it wasn't until we got here that I felt the focus and the energy and that I had all of the resources and the time to do that. I spent just so much time alone in my little apartment in Grand Forks, North Dakota, working on my photos, learning Lightroom, learning all of these components of a blog post, learning how to promote them. And so it was within a few months of moving here that I felt like, OK, this is something that I can treat more seriously as my job. I can work less hours at the bakery. I can put more resources into my blog, and that's when it actually started to feel like a job.
JAYMEE SIRE: Do you remember the specific recipe that really kind of skyrocketed things?
MOLLY YEH: I think one of the first recipes that remains one of my favorite recipes that got a lot of traction on Pinterest-- that's how I measured things in those days, they got a lot of repins-- was an entire loaf of challah that I pretzelled, and it was so tasty. There was this time period right when I moved to town where I was like, I ordered a bottle of food-grade lye, which if you don't handle it correctly, you can really hurt yourself. You can like burn your esophagus. It comes in this box with like a skull and crossbones on it, and you have to-- yeah, you can't you can't touch it with your hands.
You have to wear gloves. You have to wear protective eyewear, and I was pretzelling all these things. I was pretzelling potstickers, and I was pretzelling pie, and I was just dipping all these foods in lye, and then I would eat them. And at one point, I really did think that I injured my esophagus. I think that was when I made the pies, but I've since recovered. It was the pretzel challah that it all lined up for me. The recipe looked good. The photo came out the way that I wanted it to, and then I pinned it to the right Pinterest boards, and it got some traffic.
JAYMEE SIRE: It is so fascinating the things that really take off on Pinterest and get traffic, and you have such a fascinating background. I mean, you grew up in Illinois. You are the daughter of two clarinetists.
MOLLY YEH: Partially true. So that's part-- if you know anybody at Wikipedia, this is an edit that I haven't figured out how to edit. So my dad's a clarinetist. My stepmom is a clarinetist.
JAYMEE SIRE: Ah, OK.
MOLLY YEH: My mom is a social worker. Everybody in my family loves food, but, yes, I am from Illinois.
JAYMEE SIRE: OK, OK, so that part is correct, and as you mentioned, you moved to New York. You attended Juilliard. You got your bachelor's in percussion. So I'm guessing music was very much a part of your household growing up. Is that what inspired you to go that route initially?
MOLLY YEH: Yes, I grew up waking up early on Sunday mornings to my dad teaching clarinet lessons, for better or for worse. I mean, on one hand, I was woken up really early, but on the other hand, I was surrounded by music. I listened to him practice for hours every day. I went to his concerts.
I grew up going to this magical place outside of Chicago called Ravinia, which is where the Chicago Symphony plays their concerts in the summers, and I would listen to classical music. A recording of my dad playing the Mozart clarinet concerto was playing in the delivery room when I was born. So literally, the first thing that I heard was classical music, and for a lot of my childhood, I was thinking I really would rather be listening to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.
JAYMEE SIRE: Who wasn't?
MOLLY YEH: Right? It wasn't until I think eighth grade that I learned how rewarding it is to practice music and to learn about these great works in history and to go down and see my dad's concerts downtown. That's when I think I really realized how lucky I was to be able to grow up around all of this music.
And I had an amazing youth orchestra outside of Chicago called Midwest Young Artists where I learned to play all of these amazing works, and I met so many friends, and it was amazing. I was so into it. You know when you're a teen and super hormonal, and you want to listen to this intense romantic orchestra music. It was all I wanted to do. It was such a fun upbringing.
JAYMEE SIRE: And why percussion specifically? What was it about that?
MOLLY YEH: Hitting stuff. You get to hit stuff. You get to hit stuff and make music out of it, and I was so into it. I didn't understand why anybody wouldn't want to play percussion. I always knew that that was the instrument that I was going to play, and it fit my personality so well because I could practice one instrument, and if I ever got bored of it, I could go to another instrument. Because percussion is infinite amount of-- it's literally anything that you hit.
So I never had the option to get bored because there was always another instrument to play, and I think that's why I was really into blogging too, because there are so many components to it. There's the photography. There's the recipe development. There's the writing, and I am the type of person that needs to focus on one thing, and then I'll get bored of it for a little bit, and then I'll go to the next thing. I needed a lot of different tasks to do,
JAYMEE SIRE: Was food a huge part of your life growing up as well, or is that something that you kind of fell in love with later on?
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, in the same way that I was surrounded by music growing up, I was also surrounded by food. My mom is an amazing cook, an amazing baker. I was very picky growing up. I went through a mac and cheese phase. I went through an oatmeal phase. I didn't really eat a lot of vegetables until I was an adult, but when I moved to New York to go to college, I just became enamored with this world of restaurants. And then when I got my first apartment, it just felt natural to me to spend an afternoon baking, just like I would if I was at home with my mom. And so I would call her up for all of our family recipes and such.
But, yeah, growing up, food was always seen as this celebratory joyous thing. We would always look forward to the next-- we would be, like, eating one meal, talking about what our next meal was going to be, and then it was also seen as a way to show people that you care. If a friend of ours was going through a happy time or a sad time or a celebratory time, it was always, OK, what are we going to bake them? Food was such a joyous thing in our house.
JAYMEE SIRE: Food and music. Do you have a style of music that you listen to while you're cooking?
MOLLY YEH: These days, I've really gotten into older, like '50s, Elvis.
JAYMEE SIRE: I really love that.
MOLLY YEH: The Beach Boys. I have no idea where it came from.
JAYMEE SIRE: I feel like that seems very on brand for some reason.
MOLLY YEH: It got really difficult to keep up with a lot of the new music coming out. So I thought, OK, well, I'm just going to go backwards.
JAYMEE SIRE: Well, while you were in New York, you met your husband, who is also a musician, in addition to being the fifth-generation beet farmer. You both, as you mentioned, then moved to the North Dakota, Minnesota border, as we've covered, and you're working on his family farm. So what is a typical day on the farm like for you?
MOLLY YEH: A lot of my day could happen anywhere. I work on the internet. I sit behind a computer either writing books or recipes or blog posts, and so you know, I could be working from New York. I could be working from LA, whatever, but what's different about living on a farm is that then, at the end of the day, I'll drive out to Nick and go and visit him during wheat harvest and ride on the tractor sitting next to him while he harvests wheat, and we'll eat a sandwich for dinner.
And, of course, like just being able to look out my window and see the farm fields is energizing. It's very relaxing to me, and it's beautiful. I feel like I'm in one big practice room, as if I were back in music school. Just, I can focus here. So while a lot of my work doesn't necessarily have to happen on a farm, whether it's recipe development or working on my computer, it's the surroundings on the farm that give me the energy and the inspiration really to work as long as I can.
JAYMEE SIRE: Do you miss New York at all?
MOLLY YEH: I miss the pizza. I miss the bagels. I miss those hand-pulled noodles from Xi'an Famous Foods.
JAYMEE SIRE: But it seems like you've really found your happy place there on the farm.
MOLLY YEH: Especially now that there's things like Goldbelly that will send you the bagels.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah, there you go. You can still get them. Well, you mentioned your recipe development. We get to see your kitchen on the show, which is this pastel retro dream with lots of personality. I think that's why I feel like listening to the '50s music kind of makes sense for you. It is a true representation of who you are as a person. How important is color to you and your everyday life and your recipes?
MOLLY YEH: Oh, I just had so much fun with it. I love to be creative. Creativity is something that comes first for me in my work. And so to have a palate, so to speak, of different colors, whether they're naturally colored foods or artificially colored foods, I love the visual aspect of it. And I don't know if that comes from coming up in a social media driven world.
Just sort of seeing that a lot of those colorful foods are really eye catching to photos, or if it's just me. It's kind of, at this point, hard to separate what came first. The desire for all of the colorful foods or the photos. As you know, I have tons of fun with it. It is something that if I had a free day, I would probably take Bernie into the kitchen and just have a lot of fun with frosting and sprinkles and cake.
JAYMEE SIRE: Well, speaking of sprinkles, we have to talk about your sprinkle collection. Do you pick up sprinkles everywhere you go? How do you--
MOLLY YEH: They're the best souvenirs. They're amazing, because they fit in a suitcase really easily. They don't go bad. You don't have the risk of-- it's not like--
JAYMEE SIRE: It's not liquid.
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, it's not liquid, but the coolest part about it is that you can go to another country and go to their regular everyday grocery store and find the one brand of generic sprinkles, like the French version of Betty Crocker will have that one rainbow mix of sprinkles hidden in the baking aisle, and they're different.
They are different colors. They're different shapes. They come in different packaging, and to a French baker, it's probably like, oh, yeah, those are just super normal. Why would you want to buy those? But to a foreigner, it's really cool to see, and so I've collected these generic brands of sprinkles from different countries, and they're like really cheap and really small, and they fit the suitcase, and then nobody else in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, has them.
JAYMEE SIRE: Do you have favorite ones that you can think of off the top of your head?
MOLLY YEH: I love any sprinkle that's naturally colored. I love the muted tones, nothing too bright, although there is a time and a place for the bright sprinkles. But in general, my fallback sprinkle is something that is naturally colored and a muted rainbow palette.
JAYMEE SIRE: If you could give anyone out there who's thinking about starting a blog or being in the food-media space, what advice would you give that person?
MOLLY YEH: Be yourself. I know that sounds so cliche, but I believe that it's the little things about people's day-to-day lives that really can be special. So it might be super mundane to you that you had cinnamon toast for breakfast, but I don't know what that cinnamon toast looks like, and I kind of want to see. Did you have salted butter? Did you have unsalted butter? How toasty do you like it?
Just these little everyday things. I love to see the inside of people's spaces, where they work, where they live and breathe, and I love reading people's blogs who are just genuinely themselves, because everybody is one of a kind and each experience going through life is so unique. And there are so many beautiful things about it, and I think that focusing on little things and not trying to be somebody that you're not is what can make readers feel like they have a new friend.
Like, they're learning about somebody on the other side of the world or whatnot, and put in the work. For me, when I moved out here, I made the decision that I was going to work seven days a week as many hours as I could until it really got to a point where I was comfortable with it, and I don't know. Maybe that's a recipe for burnout, but for me, putting in the hours was really important. There's no easy route to it. It should be hard. There should be a lot of learning experiences, and the hours are what are going to make a blog successful.
JAYMEE SIRE: Well, we see that certainly on your blog, and definitely on your show on Food Network, Girl Meets Farm. It is very wholesome. It's whimsical, but it's also very practical and delicious. How would you describe your cooking style and the recipes on the show?
MOLLY YEH: It's food that I just genuinely love to eat.
JAYMEE SIRE: That's important.
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, yeah, check box number one. It's food that I feel like I can tell a story through. Of course, my influences-- I'm heavily influenced by my Chinese and Jewish heritage, by Nick's Scandinavian heritage, and the Midwest surroundings, our travels, and just food that we feel really passionate about. And so everything that I make, I want there to be a reason that I make it.
I don't necessarily want to make recipes that can be found in a bunch of other places online, unless there's a very specific reason, unless there's a specific technique that I want to focus on, or a specific ingredient that might be slightly different than the expected. I want there to be a reason that this recipe would take up space in the world, whether it's to tell a story or talk about an ingredient that might not necessarily be typically used in this dish or just celebrate a holiday in a unique way or celebrate an aspect of my heritage or Nick's heritage.
Bernie's heritage, I guess. And also, really just dive into the cuisine of the Midwest, the upper Midwest specifically, which is very different than the cuisine of Chicago that I grew up with and show it to the world, because it's so good. It's so comforting and crave worthy. And when I moved here, I learned about so many new dishes that I was shocked that people outside of the upper Midwest didn't know about, like hot dish or cookie salad, or there's this soup called knoephla soup, which is this creamy potato dumpling soup that is everything you want in the winter. I'm obsessed with it.
JAYMEE SIRE: I had to know about cookie salad. What is cookie salad?
MOLLY YEH: Cookie salad is this magical-- it's fudge-striped cookies crushed up and mixed with Jell-O instant vanilla pudding that you make with buttermilk. So you get that tanginess, and Cool Whip, and then there are different variations with the fruit. So I like canned Mandarin oranges. Some people put bananas in it. I don't like bananas. Some people will put crushed pineapple. My mother-in-law puts mini rainbow marshmallows in it. Nothing about it is a salad, but it's so good. I think if you get past the fact that it's called a salad and that it doesn't have vegetables in it, and you look at it look at it more of like a trifle.
JAYMEE SIRE: That makes more sense.
MOLLY YEH: You might warm up to it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAYMEE SIRE: When we come back, Molly is talking all about Girl Meets Farm, and the new competition she's hosting called Ben and Jerry's Clash of the Cones.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Obviously, you had a ton of success as a blogger, which we've covered. How is filming this show different from your blogging process?
MOLLY YEH: There's a lot more people involved.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah.
MOLLY YEH: Which is really cool. I love working with people and having a whole crew come to my house and pile in, and there's somebody for every job. With blogging, for a long time at the beginning, it was, I'm going to be prepping the recipe, styling the recipe, setting up my lighting setup, and doing the photos, and editing the photos.
And at the end of the day, I would just be totally wiped out, but with the show, it's just so cool to see each different crew member be experts in their specific field. Like, there's the lighting expert, and there's the sound expert, and there's the camera crew, and then there are these food stylists who just make everything look so pretty, and we've become this family.
I don't know. Everybody knows each other so well, and we hang out on the weekends sometimes, and I love seeing them. They actually just got back here yesterday for filming. We start filming again tomorrow. It's like they never left. It's just so lovely hanging out with them all day, and I don't know. It really is like a family. It sounds so mushy, but they're incredible at what they do, and I love spending time with them.
JAYMEE SIRE: No, I love hearing that. We had [? Valerie ?] on. We had [? Cartier ?] on. They said the same thing. It's just this huge family, and obviously that's important when you're inviting all of these people into your home. That's very important. I also love just how candid you are about mistakes that happen in the kitchen, because obviously they do. That's just life. How did you learn to take those in stride?
MOLLY YEH: I think I've never been a person to really take mistakes seriously. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing, but I'm naturally really good at shrugging things off, and if I'm not, then Nick, my husband, is so good at talking me out of them. So I don't know. For me, there's just not a whole lot that a big bowl of ramen at the end of the day and some good reality TV can't totally fix, but you know, yeah, mistakes happen, and you learn from them. It's always a learning experience. If you make a mistake with a cake, you can always just throw it in a milkshake, and it's still going to taste good.
JAYMEE SIRE: I mean, you mention your husband, your daughter, your family and friends. A huge part of the show, whether you're cooking for a get together, whether they're joining you in the kitchen. How important is it to you to share your food with those that you love?
MOLLY YEH: I mean, that's why I do it, right? There's no point in cooking if you can't feed it to people you love and see their faces, like seeing Bernie's face the first time she had freshly-baked bread. It was just such a magical experience. I do remember she had her very first ice-cream cone last year at South Beach Food and Wine with Duff at his like ice cream social event, and it's like the facial expression. Seeing the face, that's what it's all about. That's the follow through. That's the grand finale.
And so, yeah, it's so fulfilling to me to cook and bake for other people, but it starts with them. Like, it starts with, OK, what would Bernie like? What would Nick like for his birthday? What kind of taco have I not made him for his birthday yet, and then I have my time to make it, and then just seeing the look on his face when he eats it is-- it seals the deal. It's the best.
JAYMEE SIRE: Does Bernie like joining you in the kitchen war or getting out on the farm?
MOLLY YEH: Honestly, both. She loves both. She loves going to visit Nick during-- it's wheat harvest right now, and she knows the difference between a combine and a tractor, which I still don't even know.
But she also loves cake decorating and throwing the sprinkles on whatever we're making or mixing up batter. You know what she's learned already is how to clean as she goes, so she's very good at wiping down surface. She gets that from her grandma.
JAYMEE SIRE: She's only like two, right?
MOLLY YEH: She's almost two and a half, and she cleans better than I do. She knows more about the farm than I do. I don't know. This child is going to take over the world, I think.
JAYMEE SIRE: What is her full name?
MOLLY YEH: Her name is Bernadette Rosemary Yeh Hagan, and Bernadette, it comes from Nick's great great grandpa [? Berndt, ?] who came over from Norway and started the farm, and then my Great Grandpa Bernard on my mom's side, who came over from Hungary. So whether she was a boy or girl, she probably would have been Bernie. I like Bernadette better, so I'm glad she was a girl.
And then Rosemary was my mom's mom's name, and also one of my favorite herbs. It was in my wedding bouquet, so that's her name. I hope she never wants to be Bernadette, because I just love Bernie.
JAYMEE SIRE: It's so cute. I love it. I feel like it fits for sure. You guys have chickens on the farm. Are eggs a staple in the house?
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, for sure. We love eggs, both, of course, in baking and cooking, and just eating a good scrambled egg with really buttery toast and ketchup.
JAYMEE SIRE: I know you jokingly call your husband Egg Boy on the blog when you guys were first dating. For those who don't know, where did that come from?
MOLLY YEH: Nick is naturally very tall and very skinny, like some would say scrawny. No matter how much he eats, he's so skinny. He wanted to bulk up. When we had first started dating, he wanted to get muscly. I think the kids call it swole these days. I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
I just learned that word. But he read in an issue of a men's health magazine that in order to bulk up for one of his movies, Zac Efron ate a dozen eggs every day or something gross like that. And so Nick thought, well, maybe that's the secret. Maybe I can eat a dozen eggs every day.
JAYMEE SIRE: And look like Zac Efron.
MOLLY YEH: And look like Zac Efron. Yeah. So when we first started dating, he was eating just tons of eggs. And he would make this thing that was kind of like a scrambled egg, but he didn't want a dirty up a bowl before pouring them in the pan, so he would just crack the eggs directly into the pan.
He would cook the living daylights out of them, and he wouldn't add salt. He would just dump a bunch of dried basil on there. It was so disgusting. And so he made them for me on I think it was our first date, and I said, OK, you're never cooking an egg for me again. I'm going to show you all of these great ways to enjoy eggs. And he liked them and he ate a lot of them, so Egg Boy.
JAYMEE SIRE: So that's where Egg Boy was born. Well, you are hosting a new competition challenge on Food Network, which is super fun, also on Discovery Plus. It's called Ben & Jerry's Clash of the Cones.
So you've got six ice cream masters. They've been handpicked for this opportunity to create an original Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor of their own. Each episode, you challenge these ice cream makers to really capture the essence of a celebrity or a pop culture icon into a new flavor. What was your favorite part about hosting the show?
MOLLY YEH: Spending time in Vermont was magical. Wow, what a fantasyland. It's green and hilly, and really good food is just everywhere. And then on top of that, I was getting to eat tons of ice cream every day. And then a really cool part was that one of the judges, his name is Chris, he was a flavor guru. I think that's his actual job title at Ben & Jerry's.
JAYMEE SIRE: How cool is that?
MOLLY YEH: Dream job. He develops flavors for Ben & Jerry's, and he's been doing it for years. And to be able to just talk to him about how that works, about flavors that haven't worked out, about how you manipulate different flavors to taste a certain way once they're frozen into ice cream, or what the consistency of a brownie has to be before it's put into the ice cream so that when the ice cream is churned and frozen it has that tasty chewiness. Whether we were on camera or off, I was always just interrogating him about the secrets of ice cream and Ben & Jerry's, and it was really fun.
JAYMEE SIRE: How fun was it just filming at the Ben & Jerry's factory?
MOLLY YEH: I had this completely out of body experience when I got there, because when I was five, my parents took me to that exact same spot.
JAYMEE SIRE: Really?
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, to the Ben & Jerry's factory, and we have a family photo album from it. And we drive up there for the first day, and there's this field with these cow sculptures, these life-size cow sculptures in it, and I drove up there and I was like, oh my god, I've been here. This is where I was. That's where I stood.
It was so crazy. I couldn't believe it. It was just the weirdest feeling ever, because, of course, I did it totally remember when I was five being there, but it came back to me. It was a weird, magical feeling, but it all just fit in with the whole magical vibe of that week.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah, it does seem very magical just watching a little bit of it. Did you find yourself starstruck by any of the celebrities?
MOLLY YEH: Yeah. I mean, yeah. There was Ludacris. There was Duff and Buddy. There was Kevin Bacon. It was just amazing.
JAYMEE SIRE: Now, it sounds like such a fun project to work on. Do you have a favorite Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor of all time?
MOLLY YEH: I'm classic. I'm chocolate fudge brownie all the way. I dig out the brownies. And then I also like a flavor that has since been discontinued called Blonde Brownie Sundae. So I would dig out the blondies too. But, yeah, anything with blondies or brownies.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah. I like Americone dream. I think that I go for that one a lot. If you were to create your own Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor, what would be in it?
MOLLY YEH: Italian rainbow cookies.
JAYMEE SIRE: Oh. I love that idea.
MOLLY YEH: Yeah, they're almondy and soft and cakey. That is my dream ice cream flavor. I love almond and I love the colors and I love the chumminess, and just enough chocolate and just enough fruitiness from the jam in between the layers.
JAYMEE SIRE: I like that. Maybe Season 2, you can have a little guest--
MOLLY YEH: Pay off one of the competitors to make it for me.
JAYMEE SIRE: I love it. Well, this has been so much fun chatting. We're going to finish things off with some rapid fire questions, and then one final question. So here we go on the rapid fire round. Music beats or vegetable beets?
MOLLY YEH: Music beats. I don't like beets.
JAYMEE SIRE: You don't like beets?
MOLLY YEH: No.
JAYMEE SIRE: That's hilarious. Favorite way to prepare eggs?
MOLLY YEH: [INAUDIBLE] with salami.
JAYMEE SIRE: If you could put a fortune in a cookie, what would it say?
MOLLY YEH: The grass is greenest where you grow it.
JAYMEE SIRE: Favorite pizza toppings?
MOLLY YEH: Salami and something green, like a fresh green thrown on at the end like a salad.
JAYMEE SIRE: A pizza salad. One food you hate?
MOLLY YEH: Bananas.
JAYMEE SIRE: Must have ingredients?
MOLLY YEH: Salt, butter, olive oil, lemons, the usual.
JAYMEE SIRE: Butter or jam?
MOLLY YEH: Butter for sure.
JAYMEE SIRE: And casserole or salad?
MOLLY YEH: I'm going to say salad.
JAYMEE SIRE: Is it a cookie salad or--
MOLLY YEH: No, as long as there's something super junk foody on top like fried goat cheese salad and some maybe prosciutto or just a really good crouton or falafel. Anything fried on top of a salad is my ideal.
JAYMEE SIRE: I like that. It's all about balance, right? All right, well, before we go, one final question that we ask everybody at the end of our conversations here on Food Network Obsessed, what would be on the menu for your perfect food day? So we're talking breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Take us through the progression of the day. There are no rules, so you can travel or you can stay in one place, somebody else can cook, whatever. There's no rules.
MOLLY YEH: I love this question. All right, so I would have breakfast number one in Chicago, in Chinatown. I would go out for dim sum with my family and I would have just all of the steamed buns and dumplings and potstickers. And then I would have a breakfast number two instead of lunch, because I love breakfast.
So I would then I would go to New York and I would go to probably Barney Greengrass or Russ and Daughters and have the bagel and lox and scallion cream cheese. And a black and white cookie and an egg cream. And then [CHEWING NOISES].
I think my breakfast number two took up the lunch spot, which I'm OK with.
JAYMEE SIRE: That's OK. I think that's fair. That's fair. We can move on to dinner.
MOLLY YEH: Dinner, I would probably go back to Chicago and have Lou Malnati's deep dish pizza. There would be sausage and peppers and onions on it.
JAYMEE SIRE: So you're a deep dish over New York style?
MOLLY YEH: I love them both equally, but, oh, maybe I like deep dish a little bit more. It's that nostalgic quality.
JAYMEE SIRE: I mean, you're from there.
MOLLY YEH: It's what I grew up with.
JAYMEE SIRE: Yeah, that's fine. And then dessert.
MOLLY YEH: Oh, I have room for dessert. I think I would just have another slice of pizza.
JAYMEE SIRE: OK. I [INAUDIBLE].
MOLLY YEH: I would go and watch a movie. Yeah, I would go and watch a movie, and then I would come back to the kitchen, and by this time the pizza is room temperature because it's been sitting out, and that's my dessert.
JAYMEE SIRE: I mean, listen, I support a pizza for dessert any day of the week, so I think that sounds perfect. And it's your day, so it's perfect for you. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your laughter and your positivity and your energy. We love it so much, and it was so much fun.
MOLLY YEH: Thank you so much.
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JAYMEE SIRE: What a ray of sunshine. You can catch Molly hosting Girl Meets Farm and the new competition show Ben & Jerry's Clash of the Clones both on Food Network and streaming on Discovery Plus. As always, thanks so much for listening, and please follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts so you do not miss a single thing.
And, of course, if you did enjoy today's episode, please, please rate and review. We always love it when you do that. That's all for now. We'll catch you foodies next Friday.
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