How Chef Molly Baz Is Doing Motherhood Her Own Way
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Molly Baz is used to stirring soups and sauces—not stirring up controversy. But earlier this year, the 36-year-old found herself having to defend her Times Square billboard for lactation cookies, which help new mothers stimulate milk production. The advertisement featured Baz’s pregnant belly and breasts covered by two big oatmeal cookies, with the tagline, “Just Add Milk.”
Despite the fact that Times Square billboards often show models wearing swimsuits or in their underwear, the campaign was reportedly “flagged for review” and removed after just three days. “I’ve come up against a lot of opinions, pushback, and censorship around the choices I have made about my body and my child,” Baz reflects now. “And it shouldn’t be that way.”
Instead of backing down, the two-time New York Times bestselling cookbook author, YouTuber, and budding mayo entrepreneur leaned into what she sees as her most important role yet. “A lot of the work I was doing before I got pregnant was squarely focused on food and cooking,” she says. “Now, I want to empower women to make their own choices around the way they feed their children and feed themselves during pregnancy.”
For her, that means prioritizing projects with impact. Last month, she returned to Times Square, appearing on a billboard for organic baby formula company Bobbie, which showed her breastfeeding her baby son, Gio. “The cool thing about the campaigns I’ve been doing as a mother is that breastfeeding, formula feeding, and bottle feeding—and everything about that controversy—is all still feeding, which is core to what I do,” she says. “It’s about food and eating and nourishing.”
Unlike a food recipe, there is no step-by-step guide to motherhood. Since giving birth, Baz has made it her mission to normalize figuring things out on your own terms. “Whatever is right for you and whatever is best for you and your baby is what you should do,” she says. “I think that I am able to represent young, new mothers who are navigating everything for the first time—and who really just need a kick of confidence.”
After working at a number of iconic New York City restaurants, like the since-closed Lincoln Square hotspot Picholine, Baz pivoted to food media in 2015 as a recipe tester for Epicurious. Three years later, she moved to Bon Appétit and quickly became a fan-favorite on the magazine’s beloved YouTube channel, garnering millions of views and legions of fans who referred to themselves as “Bazheads.” During the summer of 2020, when the publication came under fire for allegedly fostering a toxic workplace and racist work environment, she stood in solidarity with her co-workers, reportedly writing on Twitter: “I will not appear in any videos on Bon Appétit until my BIPOC colleagues receive equal pay and are fairly compensated for their appearances.”
There’s still a “really long way to go in terms of representation and inclusivity in the food world,” Baz says now. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of years, but it’s going to take a really long time to get to a place where all cultures and cuisines are equally represented and respected and appropriately credited and honored.”
She resigned from Bon Appétit in October 2020 and released her first cookbook, Cook This Book, one year later. She has also successfully launched a digital recipe subscription called The Club. Almost a million die-hard “Bazheads” now follow her on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, where she regularly posts cooking tutorials and recipe videos. “I had to learn not to listen to the outside voices that may challenge the way that I am, the food that I cook...and the way I show up in the world,” Baz says. “It’s a really hard skill, because other opinions can feel so personal and so real—especially when they’re so specifically tied to something that you have done or put out in the world.”
Looking back, she believes all of those experiences have led her to be more confident than ever in who she is—and what kind of cook she wants to be. “This is going to be an evolving chapter,” she says. “Every phase of life is going to reveal new things to me and influence me. But thus far, I feel like I’ve connected so much more with my womanhood, as cringey as that may sound.”
When Baz and her husband, furniture designer Ben Willett, welcomed Gio last June, she took three months of maternity leave. That meant no new recipes for The Club, a break from YouTube, and hitting pause on brand partnerships. One of her first days back at work was for a photo shoot with Ayoh, the flavored mayo brand she helped launch earlier this month. “I experienced every emotion you could experience over the course of two days: fear, sadness, attachment, not wanting to leave…it was super hard for me to leave Gio at home and I cried at the airport,” she says. “Then there was this element of I can do this, I can do anything. My career is still alive and thriving, and how incredible is it that I get to launch a company alongside launching a baby?”
Her second work trip to Ayoh’s production facilities didn’t prompt any tears—but she did experience a heavy dose of new-mom guilt. “These thoughts started creeping into my head, like, ‘Oh, maybe you don’t love your child enough; it’s easy for you to leave. He’s still so young, you should be upset that you have to be pulled away from him for two days,’” Baz says.
It was a good reminder that, sometimes, it’s okay to not be okay. “There’s no wrong way to feel,” she explains. “It’s a clusterfuck, it’s a roller coaster.”
Since then, Baz has learned to embrace—and even love—all of the ups and downs that come with being a new mom. “I am a woman who gave birth to a child, who nurtured a being within my body,” she says. “It’s kind of cool to pivot my interest to this new category and explore it for myself. There’s something about that duality and being able to straddle both worlds that I find super empowering.”
But getting to this point hasn’t been easy, Baz caveats, and she certainly didn’t do it alone. “It takes a village,” she says. “You should lean on the people who you know can—who can help you to be a better version of yourself and a better mom, because you’ll show up so much better.”
Being a mother also “takes a lot out of you,” she adds, “but it gives so much back in terms of this sense of wonder and curiosity for the world and excitement for what’s coming next.”
Next month, Baz will promote Ayoh through a first-of-its-kind collaboration with restaurants all over the country offering limited-edition sandwiches using the product. She is also working on an exciting forthcoming project with a major plant-based fast-food restaurant; and writing new cookbook titled Less Is More, which will feature 100 of her recipes, all focused on simplicity and using fewer ingredients, steps, and techniques.
It may all seem like a lot, but Baz approaches everything she does with intention. “I grapple with this notion of focusing on the few, which means instead of spreading myself so thin and trying to do one million different things, because there’s so much that I want to accomplish and so much that I want to get done and so many things that I’m excited about, I’ve had to be really real with myself about how much I can take on,” she says. “Everything starts to suffer when you overload your plate, and so focusing on the few—meaning picking the three or four or five, whatever kind of capacity you have to hold, most important things—and focusing on them is much more gratifying and nourishing than trying to do at all.”
She can’t wait to introduce Gio to new foods, and pass down recipes, like her family’s legendary icebox cake. “I hope that will be Gio’s [first] birthday cake, if he will accept it!” she says.
Until then, she will continue pushing the boundaries in every facet of her life, including giving Gio a very unconventional first taste of “real” food. “Everyone who I told I was planning to feed my child a pickle as his first food was like, ‘You’re insane, he’s going to spit it out, he’s going to make this crazy sour face,’ [but] he was obsessed with it,” she says with a laugh. “It was a fun reminder that there’s no right way to feed your baby; I’m going to do it my way.”
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