Molly Yeh Is Reimagining Classic Jewish Desserts

I met Molly Yeh back in 2017, when she was a guest on my podcast Unorthodox. She was a Juilliard-trained percussionist turned popular food blogger who incorporated her Chinese and Jewish heritage into her recipes. Oh yeah, and she lived on a farm on the Minnesota-North Dakota border with her husband Nick, a fifth-generation sugar beet farmer she met at Juilliard. She brought sprinkle hamantaschen for us to try on air, and we all fell in love.

At lunch afterwards, I mentioned that I was getting married that fall. Molly immediately offered to make my wedding cake. I was thrilled, but I also figured she’d forget all about it in a day or two. 

But Molly is from the Midwest. When she says something, she means it. 

Fast forward to September 2017: There was Molly at our wedding, along with the world’s coolest cake:

Molly is now a Food Network staple, with her Sunday morning show Girl Meets Farm in its 14th (!) season. She films the show in her extremely Instagrammable farm kitchen, and in addition to sharing recipes inspired by farm life (plus a lot of hotdish), she continues to showcase her Jewish and Chinese culinary inspiration on-air. It’s that mix that makes her so unique as a food personality. Plus, she really is the most delightful person. 

Ben and I were lucky enough to visit Molly and Nick on the farm a few summers (and kids) ago. 

Molly’s third cookbook, Sweet Farm!, came out this week. She and I chatted about it at a Midtown cafe between her appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show and her Breads Bakery babka launch. 

Below is an edited version of our conversation. 

Also, we’re giving away a copy of Molly’s new book! Stay tuned for details at the end of this email. 

In the introduction to Sweet Farm! you refer to the people who eat most of your sweets as “big burly farmers and tiny, cookie-loving kids.” I feel like that’s a good place to start: tell us about these big burly farmers and these tiny little paws. 

The tiny little paws are easy. Those are my kids, my three-year-old and my almost six-year-old. 

And then the big burly farmers are the people who are around the farm on a regular basis. In the fall, that's a lot of truck drivers who help with the sugar beet harvest. During harvest I have a little pop-up bakery in our workshop, where I put out fresh treats for everyone when they start and finish their shifts. 

If it's a good recipe, you know it because they're all gone by the end of the day. And if it's a bad recipe, there's just a ton left over. 

That's kind of like the perfect informal focus group. 

It is a built-in focus group, and they don't realize it yet. 

But that's something that I like so much about you: You're on the Food Network, you have all these cookbooks, but you're still making cookies for the guys who work on the farm. And when you opened Bernie's in East Grand Forks, you didn’t make it one of those chichi restaurants in town where it’s like, ‘oh there’s a famous food person who lives here, let’s go there.’ You made a cafe that opens early in the morning, because that's when the farmers are going to work. You added a breakfast burrito for that specific group of customers. 

What's funny about the breakfast burritos is that we were only going to serve them for the first hour of opening, and they were going to be the most basic breakfast burrito of all time. And do you know what our number one seller is?

Is it a breakfast burrito?!

It’s a breakfast burrito. 

Do people wake up early for them, or did you have to extend the hours?

Well, they will come in early to get the free coffee with the breakfast burrito. But then we started offering it all day because we couldn't not! We were selling too many of them.

We put a grain bowl that I loved on the menu and nobody bought it, so we had to take it off. It's a little bit soul crushing, because this breakfast burrito is so simple. But it's what people want!

Does it still feel surprising to you that you live on a farm? 

I just hit 13 years of living on the farm. If I'd lived in New York for that long, I would be a New Yorker by now. But I still feel quite new to the farm. 

You show people, week after week, what your life looks like in this really fun way on Girl Meets Farm. 

Oh, my life doesn’t look like that! 

Or you show us the Food Network version of your life, where everything comes out delicious and perfect, and ends with, like, a cute brunch.

We do have cute brunches. We do have cookbook club. It doesn't come out of nowhere. The Girl Meets Farm meals and the parties and the get-togethers and family time, that's all based in reality. Because we're not going to restaurants. We might go to Bernie's to work, but we don't have a food scene here.

You clearly love Jewish food. How do you get it there? 

I make it! 

What are your staples?

I make a lot of pita, a lot of hummus. My girls love matzo ball soup. I use matzo mix for my matzo balls, and sometimes it's available in our teeny tiny microscopic kosher section at the SuperTarget, other times it's not. So I do have to load up a suitcase of it when I go to Chicago. 

We started offering challah at Bernie's every Friday, and people are catching on. They love the challah.

Do they call it egg bread?

They call it challah bread.

Ah yes, challah bread! At least they're talking about it, right?

They’re talking about it, and they're eating it, and they're enjoying it.

Fans of yours know that you incorporate your Jewish heritage in your recipes, and there are a lot of Jewish desserts in this book. But you have a lot of fun twists on them: Cinnamon Sugar Chocolate Rugelach, Chewy Frosted Tahini Cookies, Chocolate Chocolate Halva Hazelnut Cookies. 

I really need to know about the Earl Gray Black-and-White Cookies. 

What I like about the Earl Gray Black-and-Whites is that the flavor of the Earl Gray is not a crazy departure from your traditional black-and-white. It's a little something different, but the soul of a classic black-and-white is still there. 

There's a really great texture in this cookie, which took a lot of trial runs. There’s extra fat in the form of coconut oil, which helps with moisture. Black-and-white cookies are basically little cakes, and when you're baking such a tiny, tiny little cake, the risk of it drying out from over-baking, even by 30 seconds or a minute, is high. So the extra coconut oil helps. 

Earl Gray has beautiful notes of citrus in it. And of course, the unsung hero of a black-and-white cookie is that little bit of lemon zest in there. The Earl Gray kind of just brings that to a Level 10. 

I like how you describe it in the book: “It's just different enough to make you tilt your head and notice it in a new light. Did you do something different to your hair? Have you worn that lip color before? It’s still your old friend the B and W, but with a new and interesting story to tell.” 

Okay, so speaking of new and interesting: Mandel Bread Cereal. 

Oh, I love mandel bread. I think mandel bread is underrated.

Do you remember when pancake cereal was big? It was kind of one of the first major viral recipes, I think it was during the pandemic. And then there were a bunch of other cereals that grew out of this trend. I remember somebody made rugelach cereal. I made Pop-Tarts cereal. 

I remember that!

We don't have time to make a million little cookies anymore. But mandel bread is the original slice and bake cookie. So how do you easily make a bunch of teeny, tiny cookies? You make one long cookie and then slice it into a million pieces. 

I love that. And another innovation you came up with is the Black Sesame Babka.

Yes, the BSB!

It's not only something you can make from this book. It's actually a collaboration with Breads Bakery.

Yes, it's available at Bread's Bakery. It’s something that we came up with that is inspired by the recipe in the book. This is me in a pastry, because it's Asian and Jewish. And glossy. 

It's black sesame with all of its supporting flavors: there's orange zest, there's coconut, there's chocolate. All of these things bring out the best in black sesame, and they come together for a really nice, soft, doughy, layered babka that is just really fun. 

And there's a crumble on top, too. I like a crumble on top. 

So you have two kids, you must make them the most amazing things. Please tell us that they love plain food as much as all the rest of our kids. 

Nothing on their bagels. They love a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I spend months planning out Bernie’s lunches sometimes…

I see them on Instagram! I love them.

She’ll come home with those sometimes, and they’re untouched. 

You’re like, ‘Do you know how many people liked this?!’

Do you know how many people on the internet are not getting this lunch?

Mazel tov to Molly on Sweet Farm! 

She has graciously offered a few copies of the book to GOLDA readers. To enter the giveaway, reply to this email with your all-time favorite Jewish dessert. 

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie