when you want, where you want.
Molly Baz Is Mostly Mayo These Days
Illustration: Ryan Inzana
“Every time a Grub Street Diet comes out,” says Molly Baz, whose cookbooks, legions of social-media followers and recipe club have made her one of the food world’s most prominent voices, “I’m like, goddamn, where’s mine?” The time has come and we happened to have caught Baz at an interesting moment: She’s launching a mayo, or rather a line of mayos called Ayoh, which means she’s eating an inordinate number of sandwiches in the spirit of testing and promotion, while also flying to the Milwaukee production facility to oversee an initial production run. “This just happened to land on an insane, mayo-centric moment of my life,” she says. “So you know what? That’s the cards.”
Thursday, November 7
Today starts as most days do: I wake and head straight for the espresso machine. Thankfully, my husband has already been up for a few minutes, which means the espresso machine is on, water pressure is high, and we’re ready to rock. I pull a shot of espresso, steam some pistachio milk, and sit down to my cappuccino. The goal here is to get at least half a coffee in before the baby wakes up, because once that happens, I am tied up breastfeeding, and my coffee goes cold. Success.
I don’t normally eat anything until midday. I think most doctors and nutritionists would say that at the very least I should eat something small to fuel my daily workout but that’s just not the way this bod was built. I need to work out on an empty stomach or I am a slug. I should also mention that I drink a fuck ton of water throughout the day. By 10:30 a.m. I’ve already had at least 24 ounces. I head out for Pilates.
When I get back home, I turn the oven on, throw on an apron, and start to set up for a day of recipe development in the kitchen. Today I am working on some recipes for my digital recipe club, The Club, that will drop sometime in January. I just got through most of my holiday recipe development — Thanksgiving happened about three weeks ago in my house — so today I’m tackling what I assume people will want come January 2: a big-ass salad. I’ve been making these delicious, sesame-crusted roasted sweet potatoes lately. I decide to incorporate them into this salad. While the sweet potatoes roast, I snack on an apple. It’s a particularly large apple. By my calculation if I eat a third of it and put the rest in the salad, that will be the same as one regular-size apple in my recipe.
By the time I finish making and shooting the salad, I am ravenous. I sit outside in the sun on my picnic table with yet another glass of water, and wolf that mother down. Lunch lasts six minutes. I got shit to do.
I arrive at Bub and Grandma’s, a truly splendid sandwich shop not far from my home, where I will be throwing the launch party for my new mayo company, Ayoh, in just a couple weeks. The chefs at Bub’s have created a tasting of three different sandwiches using Ayoh, for my sign off before the party. They absolutely nail all three of them. I wash the sandos down with an Arnold Palmer and take a coconut-cream doughnut to go.
By 7 p.m., I have successfully fasted for three and a half hours, which might sound silly but is a necessary distinction to make when you cook for a living, eat constantly, and need to stay hungry. I arrive at Dunsmoor to meet some friends for dinner and we linger over a long meal featuring what I belive to be one of the great dishes in Los Angeles: the pork and hatch chile stew. Brian, the chef, makes his mom’s original recipe at the restaurant. It is braise-y, warm, fatty, and spicy, topped with melted cheddar, and served with charred flour tortillas. It’s one of those super low-key, if-you-know-you-know kind of dishes and I feel lucky to be in the know.
And you can’t go to Dusnmoor without ordering the sour-milk cornbread. It puts all other cornbreads, including any I have ever developed, to shame instantly. Simple greens, tuna crudo, and a side of roasted brussels sprouts round out the meal. We all agree we are uncomfortably full and couldn’t possibly fit anything for dessert.
Out comes the pie, and behind it, a scoop of coffee ice cream, and a plate of salty buttered dates with date ice cream. We are scared as they land, but we plow through them like champs.
Friday, November 8
Today starts the same way: I make myself a pistachio-milk cappuccino. After about 30 minutes, I feel regretful that my cappuccino is over, so I make another. This time, it’s decaf. I don’t want to feel jittery, and I haven’t yet worked out.
I’d been hoping to make a boxing class today, but time got away from me. I head out on a big brisk neighborhood walk instead. On my way back, I pick a grapefruit from my neighbor’s tree. It is underripe, and I don’t end up eating it.
My first call of the day is with my internal social team. I know they won’t care that I am loudly crunching on Stacy’s pita chips throughout the whole thing. I’d thrown an Election Night party featuring a big batch of chili that I topped with pita chips, labneh, and pickled onions on Tuesday. The results were so devastating that barely anyone ate anything at all, and I was left with a lot of pita chips. Normally Stacy’s hit real hard, but for whatever reason this batch tastes kind of rancid. I eat them anyway.
After a Zoom interview with Fast Company, I am utterly starving. Luckily, I have one sliver of pine-nut financier cake leftover from recipe testing earlier in the week. I am impressed with how good it is on day three.
Lunch consists of a few bites of each of the leftover sandwiches from the Bubs tasting. They held up incredibly well, and are even more delicious on day two. This gets me thinking about how real the truth is that leftovers are almost always better the next day, and I wonder if I should start making a motion for day-old sandwiches?
That coconut-cream doughnut never got consumed. I cut it in fourths and share it around the house with my assistant and our nanny. In my heart of hearts I wish I weren’t eating both doughnuts and cake before 1 p.m. but life is short and Trump got elected so here we are folks. The doughnut is also surprisingly good day-old. Am I onto something????
It’s content capture day and because I am weeks away from Ayoh launching, my content is almost exclusively devoted to sandwiches. Today I am shooting a fried mortadella sando on a pretzel bun with Ayoh Dijonayo, and a spicy turkey club with soppressata on Japanese milk bread with Ayoh Hot Giardinayo. I take two bites of each and dole out the rest to the team. I have hit my sandwich quota for the day it seems.
Realizing I haven’t been outside much today I take an afternoon call from the backyard. Before I head out, I stuff my pockets with shelling peanuts so I have something to snack on while I chat. I drop the shells on the grass and wonder if my husband will notice them. He won’t be pleased if he does.
It is a long day that bends my brain in too many different directions. I head to the bedroom to engage in some horizontaling for an hour before going out to dinner with my fam, and shove my hand into a box of Cracklin’ Oat Bran and grab a handful on my way to bed. I love a cereal in bed moment more than you know.
We roll up to Queen St. for dinner. It’s my husband’s favorite restaurant, but we haven’t been in a minute. Mr. Boots, my son, comes with us, though, sadly, he’s too young to enjoy the food. I give him a bottle of milk while I wait for my glass of wine. It’s a skin-contact Pinot Grigio from Italy. I am thrilled to be drinking a glass of wine. We are told they need to flip the table by 8:30 and I am an early-to-bed kind of gal: We order everything quickly and all at once. The mackerel crudo comes out first, absolutely smothered in dill and held together with crème fraîche. It’s served with Ritz crackers and is a near-perfect dish in my humble opinion. From there we have a tuna tostada with grated tomato and ginger, an apple-and-long-bean salad, and the smothered pork chop with slow-cooked cabbage. I rarely eat pork chops because they’re not worth the risk of being dry and tough, but I know that Ari won’t serve me an overcooked pork chop, and I am not wrong. So delicious. What a Friday. One more glass of wine to polish things off and we’re back in the car headed for bed. I think I ate too much today.
Saturday, November 9
You guessed it: another pistachio-milk cappuccino. I am notoriously bad at latte art, though I attribute this weakness to my preference for alt-milk. If I were a whole-milk girlie I know I’d be slaying that daily rosette. Today my latte art looks like a caterpillar. It’s pretty cute.
I head out to a hot-yoga class that I know will drain me in a way that most other workouts do not, so unlike other days, on this morning, I choose to eat. Breakfast is a handful of cold pulled rotisserie chicken because as I scan the fridge looking for protein, I realize I have the choice between that and cooking some eggs and because I don’t have time for the eggs, it’s a palmful of cold chicken for me. This is an arguably unpleasant start to the day.
I am feeling virtuous after yoga. I decide to lean in and make another salad using the leftover sweet potatoes. I’m out of kale at this point. I scrounge around and find half a head of radicchio and a box of arugula instead. I still have leftover cashew dressing, but it has thickened quite a bit. I thin it out with some apple-cider vinegar, and then whisk in some more oil to balance. I shave some gouda into the bowl and finish it with some crushed toasted pistachios and a sprinkle of flaky salt. I like Gouda that’s aged, like my sandwiches.
Another day, another handful of Cracklin’ Oat Bran. This cereal is basically small-format oatmeal cookies made to feel healthier because they contain oats. I am no fool, but I’ve let myself get fooled yet again.
Around six we make a late-breaking decision to throw a dinner party. I am feeling depleted from the events of the week (politically speaking), and need to surround myself with people who fill my love cup up. Our friends Nora and Lauren come over for a steak frites and game night. Nora is my favorite person on the entire planet to cook with and I know that being in the kitchen with her will set me straight. The evening starts modestly with some plates of charcuterie (mortadella and calabrese salami) and giardiniera pickles. I twist up a few Eventides, gin and Cocchi Americano cocktails that I have become obsessed with. It feels like a cocktail is in order after the chaos of this week.
In classic Molly-and-Nora style, we over index entirely on the food: Wagyu ribeyes with ponzu butter, homemade French fries, curried scallops with brown butter, garlicky broccolini and spigarello, creamed corn, simple greens with shallot vinaigrette, Bub & Grandma’s semolina bread with French butter and anchovies, and a beautiful bottle of Gamay Pinot blend.
For dessert, we pass around TJ’s frozen peppermint Joe-Joe’s and Reese’s peanut-butter cups.
Sunday, November 10
Pistachio-milk cappuccino before heading to the airport to fly to Milwaukee. We are about to commence our first production run of Ayoh at our co-packer — 60,000 bottles of mayo! — so my business partners and I have to be present for quality control and formulation-tweaking purposes. I had intended to make a smoothie for the road but got jammed up packing. It’s a frozen banana in the Uber type of life for me. I did have the foresight to pack my own lunch. One thing I have gotten good at in life is packing meals for airplanes.
In the United terminal I spot a fresh-squeezed OJ machine and it is SPEAKING TO ME. One fresh-squeezed OJ on the rocks later, and I’m boarding the plane.
I am squeezed between two husky middle-aged men but you best believe that doesn’t stop me from cracking open my Tupperware. Lunch is a container of cottage cheese, roasted sweet potatoes (they won’t leave me alone!!), medium-boiled eggs that my brother harvested from the chickens on his farm, and a sprinkle of dukkah. I fall asleep and when I awake I realize I slept through in-flight service. I hate to miss out on an opportunity to snack but the flight attendant kindly hooks me up with some pretzel snack mix despite my tardiness.
Time change is weird: I deplane, hop in an Uber, and suddenly it’s 8 p.m. God damn, I hate a travel day! I spent the majority of the plane ride avoiding my to-do list and instead Googling spots for dinner and landed on what I think will be an absolutely epic choice. It’s called Three Brothers — it’s a family-run Serbian spot right in Milwaukee. I am starting to get HYPED. From the looks of it online they make a mean MF borek. But I get there and … FML it’s closed.
I am momentarily devastated. Then I remember that I polled my IG audience for restaurant reccos last time I was here and I have a list. I have a list!! Things are looking up again. Got a lotttt of people vouching for a place called Goodkind and it happens to be around the corner and that’s where we land. We start the meal with a round of brewskis. I choose an amber ale. I think it’s locally made but I might have made that up?? It tastes better if you tell yourself that. We plow through a bunch of shared plates — chicken-liver mousse, sourdough bread and Wisconsin-made butter, carbonara, roast chicken, and yes, more French fries. What do you know? Once again, I am stuffed.
Monday, November 11
Production never sleeps. I’m up at 5 a.m. driving out to our co-packing facility. I stop at the same place we stop every time we come out here for an almond cappuccino. It’s got that particular kind of webby, super-fluffy Starbucks foam that I normally hate, but somehow has been endeared to me out here.
I feel like I just finished dinner, so I pass on breakfast, until we make a quick stop for gas and the convenience store attached smells incredible inside. When I ask them why they tell me they’ve been making breakfast sandwiches in the kitchen all morning. I cave and grab thre of them, all on English muffins, each with a different variety of hyperprocessed meat. You best believe I’m gonna take these with me to the mayo plant today and slather ’em up.
By 7 a.m. I’ve gotten through a successful pickle tasting for our Dill Pickle Ayoh and am wolfing down half of a ham, egg and cheese sandwich slathered in Hot Giardinayo. It HITS. I’m feeling good about this day already.
I eat a chicken-cutlet sandwich that makes its way to our conference room for lunch and by the afternoon. We’ve been tasting, tweaking, tasting, tweaking, all day long, and in the afternoon I figure I must be comprised of at least 80 percent mayo. I’m slightly horrified and also totally energized by this realization.
For dinner, we opt for a Greek restaurant where I know I am unlikely to find any mayo at all. I choose this restaurant because they appear to have a bowl of avgolemono soup on the menu and I have a weakness for rice-thickened soups. It also feels like it will save my mayo-slicked soul. The soup is perfectly lemony. It could use some black pepper but I have palate fatigue and need blandness tonight. For once in my life, I choose not to zhuzh.
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