If you were to ask a cookbook author about their favorite recipe, they’d probably break out that old chestnut: “Oh, I couldn’t possibly choose. It’s like picking a favorite child!” Andrew Rea, on the other hand, isn’t one for cop-out answers.
When I present him with the dreaded “favorite recipe” question during a recent phone interview, the creator and host behind the popular Binging with Babish YouTube channel thinks for a moment before taking me through every chapter of his latest cookbook: Basics with Babish (on sale tomorrow).
This in-depth rundown ends with — what else? — desserts! But not just any dessert. “It’s far and away the master cookie dough recipe,” Rea says without hesitation. The recipe is “very personal” for the online gourmand, who would often bake cookies alongside his mother before she passed away when he was 11-years-old.
“She continues to influence me and everything that I do … all of my recipes are steeped in her love and memory,” Rea adds. “It’s one of the few emotional recipes in the book. Most are pretty silly and and irreverent, but this one really pays tribute.”
After interviewing him several times over the last few years, I have come to the conclusion that Andrew is something of a culinary Mr. Rogers; a kindly and understanding home cook never afraid to own up to his own flaws and vulnerabilities in the hopes of teaching others. That philosophy lies behind the Basics with Babish cookbook (inspired by the web series of the same name), which is just as much about screwing up in the kitchen as it is about putting together mouth-watering dishes.
“The origins of the cookbook are just my experience [of] learning how to cook. It’s been trial by error since the beginning,” explains Rea, who has no formal culinary training. “If you watched Gordon Ramsay screw something up, you’d probably be like, ‘Well, I could probably make this, too!’”
To that end, each recipe not only comes with an explanation of how Andrew initially screwed it up, but also a number of “troubleshooting sessions posed as a Q&A between me and the reader,” he reveals. “There’s some humor in there, but there’s also a lot of practical advice. As a result, this cookbook has ended up being quite a bit thicker than the last ones, because it’s so chock full of information.”
That wealth of information includes a nifty glossary of kitchen terms meant to both “demystify” certain concepts and provide the user with more leeway by helping them adapt the recipe to their specific kitchen appliances. “Whatever your home stove setup is, be it gas or electric or induction, the power and the way that the power of that stove is translated into your food is going to vary wildly compared to the way that it was tested,” Rea notes. “Even if you follow a recipe as rigidly as humanly possible, it can still not turn out correctly because of those kinds of variances.”
Unlike his last two books, however, Basics is not based on the foods of pop culture, the recreations of which helped build the channel into what it is today. Don’t worry, though, Rea assures me that traditional Binging episodes “will continue to be the the backdrop for the growing Babish Culinary Universe.” Still, moving away from the world of film and television was almost like taking off a pair of training wheels.
“I got to lean on pop culture and fandom [for the previous books] and if things didn’t turn out very good, how did you expect the breakfast dessert pasta from Elf to taste? That’s not my fault. But when it comes to these recipes, these are recipes that I worked to develop on my own and with my contributing author, Kendall Beach.”
And despite being a little more grounded in terms of content, Basics still maintains that wacky charm and humor fans have come to expect from the BCU.
“There’s some crazy out of left field stuff,” Rea continues. “The whole chapter intro for chicken is a fever dream. It’s hardly even related to cooking. It’s more just about that conversation that I’m having with the reader. There’s almost an arc throughout the book. In the first chapter, we’re almost sort of getting to know each other; by the middle, we get into kind of a fight; and then at the end, we say goodbye. I wanted it to feel as much as possible like you were reading the book version of my show that has humor and information, but also just some irreverent, self-effacing personality.”
As he prepares to embark on an international book tour that will run into into early November, Rea fills me in on what other appetizing enterprises he’s got simmering on the stove like the highly-anticipated Bed & Babish, “a foodie retreat in the Catskills,” that is “nearing completion.”
He has also entered pre-production on an intriguing short film, whose overall goal is to shine a spotlight on “the vast web of complexity of people and resources that go into any given bite of food.” Take the humble ham sandwich, for example.
“The wheat [for the bread] was grown in five different fields in five different states and traveled hundreds of miles to sit in a silo for a year before being processed. There’s an incredible number of people and distance traveled and resources expended to make things that we virtually don’t even pay attention to sometimes.”
Not exactly basic, but hey — that’s what the book is for!
Basics with Babish: Recipes for Screwing Up, Trying Again, and Hitting It Out of the Park goes on sale tomorrow — Tuesday October 24 — from S&S/Simon Element.
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