Cult RecipeTin Eats cook Nagi Maehashi reveals gruelling secret to her success
From accountant to food success story writing the biggest-selling book in Australia in 2023, Nagi Maehashi reveals the secrets of her success.
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Fame and being a household name are of no interest to Nagi Maehashi.
But writing the biggest-selling book in any category in Australia in 2023, which also became the first and only cookbook to win the Australian Book Industry Awards book of the year, and attracting half a billion hits on her website annually, does rather draw attention.
However, even after the success of this mega-selling book, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, which also made the New York Times bestseller list, Maehashi remains serious about keeping a relatively low profile, knocking back offers of TV shows and product endorsements and concentrating on her core business, which is developing recipes that people are crazy for.
And using some of her earnings for the greater good – funding and running a food bank that turns out 130,000 meals a year with plans to double that output.
“That’s what makes me happy,” she says over the phone.
It’s all a long way from life 10 years ago, when this 46-year-old resident of Sydney’s lower North Shore was a chartered accountant who wanted to step out of the corporate grind to work for herself.
True to her profession she did her due diligence and thought she could make a go of a recipe website if she could differentiate herself.
“My niche is that it works,” says Maehashi, who migrated to the city from Japan with her family when she was three.
“It’s the single biggest feedback I get from people, whether it was literally a Menulog scooter driver who I parked behind earlier this morning who recognised my dog from the book, and he said to me (of her recipes) ‘they work; they just work’.”
This is not down to chance, Maehashi has an obsession with making sure her recipes are rigorously tested, with her record standing at cooking the vanilla cake from her first book 89 times before she was happy with it.
“A lot of people on social media are into viral hits and so on but that’s so far from what I do, I’m into the reliability and the trust,” she says.
“Once they learn to trust you they keep coming back and back and back and that’s really what I focus on. I don’t want to waste people’s money. I hate it when I make a recipe and it doesn’t work, it’s such a waste.”
With two likes for her first post on her RecipeTin Eats website (named for the tin in which she stored recipes) in 2014 – one was her, the other was her mother – it wasn’t a dynamite start.
But within months Maehashi’s penchant for writing reliable recipes for simple, tasty food that carefully explained the way through any potentially tricky parts, saw the numbers steadily climb until she now has a social media following of more than five million people.
That remarkable response led to her first book and the wild success of it has led to another, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight, to be published October 15, which she dedicates to her “chief taste tester” Dozer, her adorable 12-year-old golden retriever that is a big part of her brand and cookbooks.
The new book of more than 150 recipes is designed to answer that commonly asked question, “What’s for dinner?”, with sections devoted to the fastest recipes and favourites made easier, as well as Sunday suppers for when people have a bit more time on the weekends.
Maehashi describes her food as being dominated by quick and easy midweek meals but “really focusing on things that are just a little bit elevated … but without hunting down strange ingredients in Asian stores and difficult-to-source ingredients”.
She says that accounts for 90 per cent of her recipes “then I think it’s the other 10 per cent that keep people a bit interested, because it’s throwing in the curve balls, things like crispy pork belly, and there’s a little bit more time in that but breaking it down so an average home cook can make a German pork knuckle or a spanakopita or beef rending or a vindaloo from scratch”.
But with her new book she had the advantage of being able to take on board the feedback from readers of her first.
“I can’t deny where the demand is, it’s these midweek dinners, the quick and easys, doing something a little bit different with them,” says Maehashi, who knows what was in greatest demand from her previous book courtesy of downloads of the how-to videos that come with each recipe via QR codes.
She says the key feedback from readers was that they wanted “things that were even easier than the first cookbook”.
“There are many more recipes in this new cookbook that are faster and more accessible and I thought that the first cookbook was pretty easy, although it had a few challenges like beef Wellington and things like that,” Maehashi says.
“Ironically, the easier the recipe is the harder it is to come up with,” she says. “The challenge is coming up with things that are different but are still hitting that quality, with less ingredients, less technique.
“I did a lot more testing and experimenting with this one than the first book.”
Maehashi says one of her favourite recipes from Tonight is the upright pasta pie.
“It sounds strange but it’s basically large rigatoni pasta that stands upright in a cake pan and you fill it with bolognese, cover it with cheese and then bake it and it comes out looking like a cake – it’s spaghetti bolognese in cake form,” she says.
“Everyone just goes bonkers over it, I love it, there’s something about it, it’s cosy but simple, a little bit different, people get so excited when they see it.”
Maehashi says success to her is being able grow her food bank, RecipeTin Meals, and she says it will be her number-one focus after her publicity tour.
She now has a staff of 10, with several chefs involved in making the food bank meals, part of which involves translating the RecipeTin Eats recipes to be suitable for large-volume production. “I will shamelessly use the publicity for my cookbook to talk about my food bank … I’m not one of those people who’s driven by profit and financials. I’m much more driven by personal satisfaction, that’s what makes me happy,” she says.
“I would like to double in the next 12 months, I would like to be making 600,000 to 700,000 meals a year and not just in Sydney as well. There is actually an opportunity in Brisbane that I’m looking at.”
Maehashi says to do that the project would need more staff, more funding and to set up a volunteer program.
“We will never be able to satisfy all the need in our community,” she says. “It’s a sad thought but we do what we can to make our contribution.”
Other than that, and continuing to cook, photograph and share recipes with Dozer by her side, Maehashi isn’t looking too far ahead.
She says that despite the offers she doesn’t have any desire for her own TV show.
“Some people want it, I’m happy to chat with people on my computer screen and say why they had trouble with that pie they tried to make,” she says, revealing that she’s excited about her upcoming book publicity tour as she loves meeting people who use her recipes.
“I love hearing about occasions that they used them for or how happy they are that they cracked something that they never thought they could make, I’m really looking forward
to that.” ■
Serves 4
Prep 15 mins Cook 10 mins
Ingredients
1 tbsp canola oil
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp finely minced ginger
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
500g beef mince (see note 1)
3 tbsp white sesame seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
2 tbsp water
Sauce
1 ½ tbsp dark soy sauce (see note 2)
1 ½ tbsp Chinese cooking wine
1 tbsp sesame oil
3 tbsp honey
2 tbsp oyster sauce
To serve
White rice of choice
1 green onion, very finely sliced diagonally
Cucumber ribbons
Method
Sauce:Measure out and add the sauce ingredients to a bowl in the order listed. (The honey will slide right out of the spoon coated with sesame oil!) Mix until combined.
Cook: Heat the canola oil in a large non-stick frying pan over high heat. Add the onion, ginger and garlic and stir for 1 ½ minutes.
Add the beef and cook, breaking it up as you go, until the beef is no longer red.
Add the sauce and continue to cook for 1 minute or until the sauce is mostly evaporated. Add the sesame seeds, stir, then leave the beef undisturbed for 30 seconds to give it a chance to caramelise. Stir, then leave it again for 30 seconds.
Repeat twice more or until the beef is nicely caramelised, as pictured.
Finish and serve:Add the water and stir for 30 seconds – this will juice up the beef a bit. Serve over rice, garnished with extra sesame seeds and green onion, with the cucumber ribbons on the side.
Notes
1 While this sauce has been made specially to complement the flavour of beef, this recipe can also be made with pork, chicken or turkey mince.
2 Dark soy sauce stains the beef a rich mahogany colour and adds soy flavour. Using light soy sauce or all-purpose soy sauce won’t achieve the same flavour or colour, but they will make an adequate substitute in the event of an emergency!
Leftovers: Fridge three days, freezer three months.
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