Back to School with Katie Quinn

After years of creating popular food videos, articles, and two books, taking her lumps in culinary school to nail those fundamental skills.

Katie Quinn is a food writer, videographer, and producer among other avocations. She created food videos for Tastemade, still makes videos for her YouTube channel, and also produces a podcast. She is the author of two books, Avocados and Cheese, Wine, and Bread. Some time ago, we worked together on a series of videos for Serious Eats—some of which are still online, like videos about cheeseburgers, cookies, and boiling water. Check out the other half of this interview on Strange Work.

When did you first think you might want to work in food?

When I was an NBC page. It was my first year in New York City, and my eyes were just opened to all the different foods out there, the different cultures. I remember getting on a train and going out to Flushing. I had read about some place on Serious Eats, and I led a group of friends out there. It totally blew my mind because there was nothing like that in my experience of living and going to school in Ohio. 

The year after the page program, I was working my first job at NBC, and I applied to be an intern at Serious Eats. I was like, I’m obsessed with this website, and they take interns! So I would go and work this 9 to 5 job, and then I would take the train downtown to Chelsea where the Serious Eats offices were at the time, and from 5:30 to 8pm I would do whatever random things they wanted me to do. And that’s when I was like, oh, food media—this is an actual way I could steer my career. 

Later at NBC I was working for Today.com—the digital arm of the Today show, very separate at the time—and my role was to go backstage at the show and interview the guests. And I got to choose which guests, so I interviewed all these incredible chefs who came by the Today show to do these cooking segments. Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Ina Garten, Daniel Boulud.

How’d they do?

A lot of chefs ... they could be the best chefs ever, but they’re not necessarily practiced in interviews, in front of the camera.

Even without a camera, I’ve had awkward interviews with chefs who even had extensive experience on TV or in media. It reminds me of the Serious Eats videos we did together with Kenji López-Alt. Kenji had done some other videos before those, but like a lot of new on-camera talent, he was often nervous, or too wooden from memorizing lines. He’s a whiz at it now of course. But back then, the best coaching strategy I came up with was: When saying your lines, pretend like you’re telling me a joke. People don’t memorize jokes exactly, but they tell them like little stories, and thinking that way sometimes helps people act more naturally on camera. Do you have similar strategies to coach people on camera, given your considerable experience?

It’s much easier if I can actually interact with the person on camera. It’s easier for them to just fall into a natural conversation. It’s way harder if you just have the lens in front of their face and are coaching them on how to be natural. I think the coaching is pretty hard, and I also think on-camera work is an actual skill. Certain people maybe have a predisposition to it, but it’s a skill just like anything else. And practice, practice, practice, just like any other skill—it goes far. 

By the time we made those videos, you were working fully in food, with Tastemade among other stuff. How comfortable was that transition? 

I think the reason I was able to go so fully into food is that when my YouTube channel started, food was something I could take action on as a solo creator.  I could make a dish in my Brooklyn apartment. I could shoot it and edit it. I could just do all of it from A to Z. I was able to just pump out all of this stuff. And when that got popular, I was able to say, “Oh, this is the way my career is going, which is awesome, but I don’t actually know what I’m talking about.” That’s what led me to go to culinary school in Paris.  

That seems like a somewhat unusual step, as a solo entrepreneurial creator—to seek out formal training at that level, without the intention to, say, open a restaurant. Off the top of of my head, I can’t think of anyone else who’s taken that route.

I don’t know anyone else in my shoes who has done it, though I’m sure they exist. I’m not trying to say I’m unique. My motivation was twofold. The first and biggest motivation was impostor syndrome. It felt like a lot of people thought I knew what I was talking about. But I didn’t know! So I just wanted to believe in myself a little bit more. 

The second motivation was I wanted to live in Paris. I could have applied for Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco, or the French Culinary Institute in New York. But I saw this as an excuse live in Paris for a while. 

So what was it like going to culinary school, given your background and experience thus far? 

It kicked my ass. A lot of my classmates were younger than me. A lot of them were right out of college, or maybe just a couple of years out. I was 29. I was an old grandma lady. And because I had my cooking show on my little YouTube channel for a while, I thought, “I know how to cook. I’m just going to learn some basics.” Which I guess makes it sound like I had the opposite of impostor syndrome, right?

“I did not expect to leave every class with new cuts, new burns, sweating from head to toe. It was a physical feat.”

But I did not expect to leave every class with new cuts, new burns, sweating from head to toe. It was a physical feat. “Yeah, sure Katie, you know how to cook at home when you’re listening to an NPR podcast. But you don’t know this intense restaurant style of work. You don’t know how to cook in that way.” That’s a really different environment to cook in, and and that’s what culinary school trained me to do. 

How did that experience change what you wanted to do with food? 

It helped deepen the respect I have for the people I interviewed, and it helped me step in the shoes of people in the hospitality industry

But you weren’t doing this to actually enter the hospitality industry—you were trying to acquire a foundation of cooking skills?

Absolutely. For example, it helped me even with something as simple as knife skills. And it helped me with my confidence. I did Food Network’s Chopped after culinary school, and I remember the producer calling me to ask if I wanted to do it. I would have absolutely said no had I not gone to culinary school. But as it was, by then, I knew my way around a kitchen. Of course, I didn’t win that episode of Chopped, but I also wasn’t the first one out. 

For a long time, I was oblivious to how mastering classical or traditional culinary skills can serve as a benchmark for being taken seriously in food. Thinking back again to working at Serious Eats, I once proposed that Kenji and our other culinary director, Daniel Gritzer, might do a collaboration with a popular YouTube chef. This guy seemed very nice, friendly, and cooked lots of different things to great acclaim online. But Kenji and Daniel took one look at his videos, and they were like, “No way. He’s holding his knife wrong. And he’s salting that meat totally incorrectly.”

That is the perfect example. People who know, they know, and they can spot someone like that instantly. 

After you left Tastemade, were you still doing commercial food videos as well as your personal work?

I kind of did and kind of didn’t. I got some incredible clients though—life-changing stuff, like when I got a project that I pitched to the Comté Cheese Association. That opened my eyes to the world of cheese. 

And so from that point, you were just all cheese all the time? 

Yeah, all cheese all the time. That’s exactly right. I was really looking for a pivot from the career that I had known with my videos. I’m a writer and had always wanted to write a book. I got this idea about fermentation and cheese and wine and bread, and I started pursuing that, which turned into Cheese, Wine, and Bread. 

I’m always curious when a food writer focuses in on a very particular or niche topic like that—were you worried about being typecast, so to speak? About becoming the cheese, wine, and bread lady? 

I’m definitely not just the cheese, wine, and bread lady! I think of the book as another branch of my career. I’m still the “trunk”—the book and the fermentation project was a branch that I grew. I enjoyed every flippin’ second of it, but now I’m like, okay, what’s the next branch going to be?