How David Chang Turned This Super Picky Eater Into a Culinary Whiz
All photos courtesy of Stephanie Le
Stephanie Le has one of the most popular food blogs around — aptly named I Am a Food Blog — but her success wasn’t always a given. Her skills in the kitchen developed slowly and deliberately. In fact, few might have guessed that the one-time picky eater from Vancouver, Canada, would one day blossom into a culinary whiz.
When we say picky, we mean picky: Growing up, Le didn’t have an appetite for anything outside her very limited comfort zone. “My favorite meal was white rice,” Le recalled. “My mom kind of just rolled with it, because it wasn’t a battle that she wanted to fight. It was that and cereal.”
Bullying at school hampered her dining options even further. “I was like one of those standard Asian kids, getting teased at school because you eat weird food,” Le said. “Once I brought Shanghai fried noodles, and some kid told me they looked like worms and I freaked out. I just cried. I went home and told my mom, ‘I never want to eat Chinese food again.’”
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Spicy shrimp and zucchini noodles.
Thankfully the declaration didn’t stick. As Le grew older, she slowly branched out at family barbecues and potlucks. “Being around food so much I started trying things,” she said. “I got older and realized that maybe people are telling the truth.”
Soon, she began experimenting in the kitchen. In high school, Le would doctor bowls of instant ramen for an afternoon snack, jazzing them up with greens and slivered onions. In college, she borrowed titles from her brother’s immense cookbook collection and tried a few recipes. But it’d be years until a cookbook came along that changed everything.
“In 2010, my husband gave me this cookbook, Momofuku,” Le said. "David Chang’s story really resonated with me. This guy has passion and he did it for himself. I thought, ‘I’m going to cook through this book and teach myself to cook.’”
It took Le six months, but she did it — making a new dish almost every day and documenting it on a blog called Momofuku for 2. Her skills improved by orders of magnitude. But things didn’t always come easy.
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“It was definitely more difficult than I thought it was going to be,” she admitted. “Sourcing the ingredients was hard, because he asks for interesting things, like Jonah crab claw, Benton bacon, and crawfish.” And many recipes called for components that themselves required cooking, which caught Le off guard. “I did’t realize how much prep needs to go into it before you get the final plated dish.”
Still, Le followed recipes by the book. When Chang called for white soy sauce, Le bought white soy sauce. When Chang called for meat glue, Le wrote to a meat glue company for samples. “I was militant about it,” she said. “I’m kind of obsessive compulsive, so when I do something, I want to actually do it.”
When she reached the book’s end, Le was triumphant — for a time. “I thought, ‘I did it! I’m done!’ But then I thought, ‘What the heck am I going to do next?’”
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Crispy coconut waffles with mango.
Two years later, Le embarked on another blogging journey — this time with her own recipes. The dishes on I Am a Food Blog skew eclectic with an Asian-inspired bent, ranging from bacon and egg breakfast ramen to Vietnamese fish tacos. Everything is sumptuously styled and photographed, and posts feature colorful big format photos. The combination has resonated with readers: The blog counts more than 85,000 followers on Instagram alone, and in 2014, I Am a Food Blog was named Saveur’s food blog of the year. The same year, Le wrote a cookbook, Easy Gourmet.
Despite her success, Le doesn’t know precisely what the future will bring. “I’d like to do another book, but I’m not too sure when that’s going to happen,” she said. “I just want to keep doing it for myself, you know? I think it’s really important to have that consistent creative outlet. Sometimes if you don’t have that consistency, you just lose it, because it’s hard to write. But having the blog there and writing for myself, it’s nice to have a personal journal. I want to keep it going strong.”
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