How Molly Yeh Became One of the Most Popular Food Bloggers in the Game

“She lives...on a farm?” “In North Dakota or something?” “It’s pronounced, Yay.”

This is how a lot of conversations about Molly Yeh begin. The blogger behind My Name is Yeh did, yes, move from New York to North Dakota to start a new life on her husband’s beet farm, and in the process managed to turn a cooking and photography hobby into a full-fledged business.

If I typed this in all lower case it would be more on Yeh-brand, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t quite work out as well. Because Yeh represents a shift in the world of recipe editing and food writing—we feel like we know her, we really know her. With the natural progression of time, whether it’s tater tot casserole or mini marzipan hamburger cakes, we get small installments forward in her life, and because her life is so different from our own (beet harvest this weekend! Where does she find all this light?), it’s even more memorable. It’s as if food blogging took more inspiration from serial novels than The Joy of Cooking. This isn’t to say she invented the form, but she’s arguably perfected it: If you’re an obsessive devourer of food social media, you could probably recognize a Molly Yeh cake by lighting alone, her style is so solidified. Cheery, perfectly dripping frosted cakes on marble, stone, or smooth hardwood. Clear dishes in focus, the background blurry. Crowds of cupcakes artfully askew. Everything lit as if on a day you should maybe carry an umbrella. You can’t say the same about many other food sites.

But despite this crazy changing digital world, nothing is still quite real until it exists between cardboard, until it can pick up oil splatters and be marked by time, not a timestamp. Which is why it’s sort of confusing that Yeh’s first cookbook, Molly on the Range, comes out this month. Aren’t all of the recipes online? Mostly, yes. It was a hard decision, anti-instinct, but she was convinced by her mother and husband, who encouraged her to create “this physical thing,” that encompasses her whole life’s story in one sitting, rather than the day-to-day format of the blog that takes years to tell the same. But in the way that her very digital life coexists with the opposite, the very physical world of farming, living by the land, cooking from scratch, she’d “rather stain a page of paper with soy sauce than ruin my computer.”

So how did it all begin? And how did she turn this personal blog into a successful business without sacrificing her soul to sponsored content?

Yeh was bored. She was on vacation with her family in Los Angeles in 2009 and logged into Blogspot (the site’s now on Squarespace). Back then it was more diary-like, and became a place for her family and friends to check in when she moved to New York to study percussion at Juilliard. Posting recipes was a casual hobby until she moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota with her husband (trombonist at Juilliard) in 2013 and “suddenly I had all this time on my hands...because I had nothing to do.” She had a job at a local bakery, the 1 a.m. bakery shift, where she learned to frost a cake and make elaborate wedding creations that took hours upon hours. Then she took some work contributing recipes for Betty Crocker, which was a challenge said Yeh, because the audience was so different than her blog’s. Some recipes fell flat (lesson: hold the tahini), but it was “a fun challenge to work around those parameters.” Chicken teriyaki meatballs, a baked polenta dish for Easter, recipes she wouldn’t have done on her personal blog, but it was good to “step into that zone.”

The first recipe that took off on her own blog was a pretzel challah in 2013. She ordered some lye and “played with it for a few weeks” while her husband was in the fields for 17-hour harvest days. After burning a few kitchen utensils—and her esophagus—experimenting with the extremely basic liquid (as in base, not acid), she made this stunning pretzel challah. It photographed beautifully, and caught the eye of Marian Bull, a writer at Food52 at the time. After that, her “repins” on Pinterest took off, she starting developing recipes for Food52, and her site’s traffic started to really grow, getting anywhere from 200,000-400,000 visitors a month. In addition to the occasional Betty Crocker gig, she realized “Wow, this could be a real possibility, doing this full time."

In 2014, she was nominated for a Saveur blogging award and suddenly agents started contacting her for a book proposal. In 2015 she was named Saveur’s “Blogger of the Year.” By then, she was dabbling in sponsored posts, some that she wrote for other sites, and then she shifted to keep them on her own.

There was a lot to learn. “In the beginning, it was just this whole new world,” she said, “I was like, ‘Whoa. I know how to make a cake, but I don't know how to negotiate and read a contract. What do all these words mean?’” She looked to a private Facebook group for advice from other bloggers about rates and contract terms. “There were some things that I didn't even know that you could ask for in these partnerships,” like when she realized you can ask a brand to pay for a product giveaway, on top of the product, for the labor (and advertising) of photographing it, shipping it, vetting the contestants, etc.

Now she’ll do a few sponsored posts a month, it goes up and down. She only agrees to partnerships with brands she loves: Kerrygold butter, King Arthur Flour, California Olive Ranch. “I'm really not changing up the content more than linking to their product and talking about how great those things are,” she explained. The posts look like any other recipe with tons of surreally lit photos, the usual personal postcard-from-Molly voice, and a note at the bottom about the sponsorship: “thank you so much, king arthur flour, for sponsoring this post!”

Readers and aspiring bloggers often ask her how to transition to doing it full time. "I'll tell them that for me it was when I started working on my photos, because I was able to then use photos through Pinterest to drive traffic to my blog," she said, "Then, that got eyes on my blog [from people who] would then email me and hire me to do recipe development or a blog post for them as a job."

At first there were Google ads, but now the ways for bloggers to make money are growing: sponsored Instagrams, event appearances, kitchenware lines. "It's important not to just get really stuck in your ways because there's always going to be something new and a new way of doing things. It's difficult to really see the future and what's going to happen next."