Wishbone Kitchen Creator Meredith Hayden Actually Prefers Store-Bought Pasta
The culinary-content phenom on her new favorite shape and the benefits of practice.
Image Courtesy of Barilla
Spending time on Wishbone Kitchen creator Meredith Hayden’s social media accounts, which have collected millions of fans and followers, can feel like visiting with a friend. As she shares recipes, culinary tips and details from her enviable life, her authenticity, unpretentiousness and relatability come through.
A culinary school-trained chef and recipe developer with a background in fashion, Hayden, 30, went viral a few years ago while posting day-in-the-life videos about her experiences working as a personal chef for a designer and his family, who split their time between New York City and the Hamptons.
She has since parlayed her TikTok and Instagram success into a best-selling cookbook, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook; a long-form YouTube series, Dinner With Friends; a recently purchased beautiful house in the Hamptons (a frequent subject of her videos) and partnerships with brands. The latter most recently includes Al Bronzo by Barilla, a now certified-organic pasta line whose new shape, Radiatori, Hayden calls “next level.”
“It's a shorter noodle with ridges and grooves that really just soak up pasta sauce,” she says.
Barilla says the pasta shape features a “five-winged, layered structure designed to capture and hold every drop of sauce for a more flavorful bite.”
It’s no wonder people are calling Hayden Gen Z’s Martha Stewart. I recently caught up with the culinary-content phenom over Zoom to discuss pasta, kitchen tips and cooking as a feminist act. Alas, her Bernese mountain dog and frequent co-star, Poppy, did not make an appearance.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s your favorite pasta shape?
My longest-standing favorite pasta shape is a bucatini noodle. It's a slightly thicker spaghetti with a hole down the middle, which really soaks up all the amazing pasta sauce. My new favorite has to be the Al Bronzo Radiatori shape that [Barilla] just launched. The entire line is designed to hold onto the maximum amount of pasta sauce from that bronze-cut technique they use while making it. It creates this beautiful texture on the outside of the pasta. More texture means it's gripping onto the sauce better, and more sauce, more flavor.
And your favorite pasta sauce?
My biggest source of inspiration for pasta sauces is working with seasonal ingredients. I love to cook dishes that don't require a long list of ingredients and lean on high quality, simple, beautiful ingredients to create a very elevated-feeling dish. So now that summer's coming up, I'm excited to be making lots of fresh tomato-based sauces. When you source high-quality ingredients, whether an heirloom tomato or this new Al Bronzo Barilla organic pasta, they make a big difference in the final dish.
So do you usually make your own pasta or use store-bought boxed pasta?
I almost never make fresh pasta at home. The one week of the year I might is the week between Christmas and New Year's, when you're in your PJs, hanging out around the house all day and doing all those fun crafts you didn't get around to all year round. But I love the texture of a dried pasta noodle. It has such amazing bite that a fresh noodle doesn't necessarily bring. So I am team boxed pasta all the way.
What advice do you have for people cooking store-bought pasta?
Try not to get overwhelmed with a really fancy recipe and stay realistic with a simple recipe. And then simple techniques like thoroughly salting your pasta water and cooking the pasta for the last two minutes in the sauce so that it soaks up all of that amazing sauce.
Pasta on a first date, yes or no?
Yes, but maybe not a long noodle, because you don't want to slurp. A noodle like the Radiatori is really great for just like, fork, mouth, done. With the slurping, I am such a messy eater, I feel like the sauce would just get all over my face.
What general culinary advice do you have for someone learning to cook?
Start small and try not to take on too much at once. Something that also helped me was starting with one cuisine at a time, because you'll find that each individual cuisine uses a lot of the same techniques and ingredients over and over. So when you're able to repeat those techniques and work with those same ingredients, you'll gain more confidence and familiarity with that specific niche. Then you can build on that as you start to expand into other cuisines.
What goal or mission guides you as a culinary content creator?
I like to make recipes that are realistic. As a content creator, it's easy to fall into a pattern of wanting to create videos and recipes that will potentially go viral or get a ton of traffic. I think virality is a blessing and a curse, and if you become too obsessed with it, it will negatively impact your creative process. So I always try to put my lived experience at the forefront of each recipe I make and think about how this recipe served me in XYZ scenario — like different holidays or circumstances like getting off of a long flight and coming home and not having anything to eat, but wanting something out of your freezer or something. Those are the conversations I have with myself when developing a recipe.
You've written your cookbook, you've traveled to Japan — these were big goals for you. What's your next goal?
The past few years I've been kind of all over the place, starting this new, amazing career and buying a house and getting a dog. So these next few years, I'm focusing on just getting settled and forming a routine around this madness I've found myself in. And when it comes to content, creating functional and repeatable recipes for my audience.
Do you still love cooking now that it's a job? How do you keep the passion for it when there's all this pressure?
The thing that sometimes replaces passion is, not pickiness, but I'm very particular. If I want a specific flavor combination, I love being able to cook it for myself — whether out of convenience or to express myself and try new flavor combinations. So even when I'm burnt out and I'm like, Oh, I really want to eat X, Y and Z, I know if I want to eat that, I'm going to have to make it, because no one makes it the way I like it. That’s what replaces passion when I'm in an off mood.
In one video, you described a single-serve packet of raw chicken breast as “the most feminist thing” you'd ever seen. What does it mean to you to cast cooking and nesting as a feminist act, as opposed to “trad wife” content?
It’s the same conversation we've been having since Julia Child popped up on the scene. At that time, homemaking and cooking was seen as a woman's responsibility, their duty and role in society and family dynamics. When something is an expectation and put on to you like that, it becomes like a prison. But when you get to a place where you get to choose, you want to create this home or meal for yourself, you’re doing it out of want and need, rather than force or requirement, it's really freeing. The whole feminist mindset is having that freedom to choose whether it be your career, your family, your future. Those small decisions are what I think of when I think of being a feminist — being able to choose to use your free time to do needlepoint or something else. I think sometimes people over-associate those classic homemaking activities with the times before feminism. But now, I’m doing it as an act of self-care for me, and not necessarily to serve others. I think that's the biggest difference: You’re doing it for you rather than for other people.
I think people relate to your authenticity and resilience. Do you feel like cooking is a good way to cope with life’s challenges?
This is the first time someone's called me resilient. Cooking is a great example of if you really want something, you can go out there and make it happen if you're willing to put in the time, effort and energy. You can take great ingredients and make a great meal, or you can just continue to sit and wish you're eating a great meal; it’s not going to appear right in front of you. It's a great example of putting your own thoughts into motion.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started out cooking?
I wouldn't tell my past self to do anything different. I think the way I figured everything out was really important in my development. But if I were to talk to any new or young cook, I’d suggest reframing cooking not as a step-by-step, direction-based process, but as a fluid activity. Allow yourself to make instinctive decisions and to make the wrong decisions and then learn from them so you can, in the future, make the right decisions. There's a reason why the greatest cooks are our grandmothers: It’s because you have to learn through experience. You can't just pick up a cookbook and create something excellent without putting in a lot of hours of practice.
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