Sohla El-Waylly Cements Her Starring Role With a Thrilling Debut Cookbook

Sohla El-Waylly is a culinary maverick of our time: She knows how to deactivate the surface starches of rice for the perfect pilaf, she’s made crudités sexy by sheer force of will and she’s spoken truth to power with lasting impacts.

El-Waylly’s highly-anticipated first cookbook, Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, is the this-is-just-the-beginning hat tip of a chef who’s quickly won over the hearts of home cooks all over the world — and who’s already planning her next book.

Back in 2020, El-Waylly said she wasn’t being equitably compensated for her work as an assistant food editor at Bon Appetit, a public statement that became a part of a much larger racial reckoning in food media. It also launched fan-made supercuts of every time El-Waylly was called over by white colleagues to temper chocolate or give her expert advice on using masa harina, all uncompensated. It’s the classic story of an undervalued woman of color shamelessly confused with the other South Asian woman in the office by her own boss — but onstage at the 92nd Street Y for the whole internet to see.

El-Waylly launched herself out of Bon Appetit and into everywhere else: Food 52, the History Channel, the New York Times Cooking channel, the Babish Culinary Universe and an HBO series that she co-hosted with actor Dan Levy. Her obvious culinary mastery that doesn’t stop at how to cook something but why you cook it that way — on a chemical level — coupled with her punchy witticisms and flaky salt-of-the-earth sincerity has earned her prime time in the pantheon of unmistakably cool internet personalities.

“I always struggled to learn the way I was supposed to learn, whether in the high school geography class I had to repeat or in a restaurant kitchen following a chef’s blunt commands,” she writes in the book’s introduction.

What emerges from El-Waylly’s candid trove of fumbles and failures is a person who really knows what she’s talking about — who can tell you exactly where you went wrong because she’s been there herself.

Ahead of her San Francisco book tour appearances on January 29 and 30, I talked to El-Waylly about how to host a dinner party that will cure winter blues and what she ate the last time she visited the Bay, as a depressed undergrad over 20 years ago.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

********

OLIVIA CRUZ MAYEDA: Your new cookbook weaves in guidance and anecdotes that feel resonant in the kitchen and outside it, too. What do you hope people take with them from Start Here as they move through the world?

SOHLA EL-WAYLLY: I think the biggest message is that you’re going to mess up, and it’s going to be okay — that’s the main thing. I think that a lot of times people don’t even try stuff because they’re afraid of failing or just not being good at it. But I think it’s important to remember that everyone’s terrible at everything in the beginning, and you just have to push through that phase of maybe making a lot of bad food, and it will eventually get good. I think that really applies to everything in life.

@sohlae Here’s another peek from my cookbook, START HERE! (Have you preordered yet!?) In it, I teach you techniques, so eventually you won’t need recipes any more! Like this method for the best crispy, juicy, seared & braised chicken thighs. Make it like me with salsa verde and zucchini, or make it your own with cauliflower & curry, carrots & bone broth, or however the hell you want! Photos @Laura hi ♬ Sweet Dreams – Trinix

The New York Times called your cookbook “the new Joy of Cooking.” What cookbooks or food personalities most influenced you when you were starting out?

Every day after school, I’d watch Jacques Torres. He had this show on PBS called “Desert Circus.” It had a really fun intro, and he’d roll around on roller skates. He did a chocolate sculpture once, and he had all these molds. And then he was like, “Anything can be a mold.” And he grabbed that air conditioner filter and molded chocolate on that, so then I went and I grabbed the filter out of the air conditioner! A lot of people can be a little rigid and, especially with pastry, be like, “You have to get this piping tip,” you know, “and you need this cake pan.” But he showed how you can make things work with what you have. And I feel like that really inspired me.

What are you looking forward to during your visit to the Bay Area? Any foods in particular?

Well, I haven’t been in a really long time, but I went to school at UC Irvine. And I was really depressed. So the thing to do was to just drive to San Francisco all the way up [the Pacific Coast Highway]. And then get clam chowder at, like, five in the morning. I want to go to that pier that I went to and try to get some clam chowder.

I first encountered your work when you were still working at Bon Appetit, where you were part of a racial reckoning at the publication but also in food media at large. Do you feel like any meaningful change has happened since then?

It does feel like there’s more diverse voices that are out there now. But I think that the biggest thing — and I don’t even think this has anything to do with anything I did or anything that happened — is just that people have their own platforms now. With social media, the people are picking who gets to be uplifted. I really like that there’s a lot of cool independent creators who I don’t think would have had a huge voice with traditional media. One of my favorite people is — Black Forager is her handle — Alexis Nicole. I love her. I learn so much from her videos. And she’s someone that did it completely on her own, and the people picked her. I just love that there’s more and more voices like that because we don’t need the traditional media anymore.

I only exist because of the people who support me. I know that. And it’s really heartwarming that I have this support and this really loving community. And it’s also scary because I hope I’m giving them enough, you know what I mean? I totally exist because of individuals who believe in me, not because of one big, faceless corporation.

There’s so much heaviness in the world right now from the Congo to Sudan to Palestine. You signed onto — along with Berkeley chef Samin Nosrat — the Hospitality for Humanity pledge, a coalition of food and beverage workers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, co-organized by another Bay Area chef, Reem Assil. How do you hope food and chefs can play a role in social justice and political organizing?

It’s tough. I feel like a lot of what happens is people just repost things, which I also was doing for a while, but I stopped because I saw a lot of prominent people who posted misinformation by accident with the best intentions because we’re not journalists, we’re not politicians. It’s easy to not know exactly what’s a real post.

So I think the better way is just to focus on bringing awareness with what we do best, which is food. And I think it’s really important, especially with what’s happening in Palestine, to humanize the people there by just sharing more of their culture. I like talking about the food and celebrating the positive things that are happening over there.

I love the deep dives into food history and food science that feel like throughlines in your work. Is there anything you’ve been nerding out about recently?

Well, I’m currently working on my next book. The first one, I knew exactly what I wanted the book to accomplish. So for the next book, I don’t really have a plan, and I’m just letting myself learn about things that are interesting to me, and I’m just cooking stuff that I’m into. So I’ve just really been into princess cake lately. I’ve always seen them, but the ones from the grocery store are usually not very good, if we’re being totally honest. That marzipan is a little stale. But making a fresh one kind of blew me away with how delicious it is. So now I just want to learn more about princess cake and marzipan. I want to be someone where anytime you come over to my house — even if it’s a Tuesday — I made you a princess cake.

I’m having a small dinner party tomorrow with a few friends. What’s a menu from recipes in your book that you’d recommend for a vibey but not super high-maintenance dinner to cure our winter blues?

I think for appetizers, there’s a shrimp cocktail in the book that’s really fun, and broiled oysters. But most of the time when we have people over, I can’t wrap my head around all that. So I’ll make a quick crudités plate. I love having some crunchy veg before a meal because it’s kind of like palate cleanser vibes. Try radishes and some Asian pear. There’s a ranch fun dip recipe in the book using pistachios — that’s fantastic. So put all the veggies on ice and get a nice glass bowl for the fun dip. People don’t give crudités respect, but you can make it really sexy.

For the main, maybe make those braised short ribs. You can make them the same day, but they are a lot better if you dry-brine them tonight. And then I really like to serve that with steamed vegetables, like some really nice broccolini and carrots.

And then dessert: I think you should go for the chocolate pudding pie.

El-Waylly will be signing copies of Start Here at Omnivore Books (3885 Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco) at 4 p.m. on January 30, following her sold-out book event at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on January 29.