Practicality is at the forefront of the recipes in the TikTok influencer’s debut cookbook, ‘Justine Cooks’
What you don’t see in the videos are the rolls of tape: one stacked on top of the other, an iPhone leaned inside. This is how Justine Doiron — 2.3 million followers on TikTok, a million on Instagram — gets her shots of sugar and salt sparkling in the sunlight. For overhead clips, she’ll grab her cheap Amazon phone stand. Otherwise, she says, it’s “tape for everything.”
Only recently has Doiron, who’s known across all social media platforms as @justine_snacks, acquired what she calls a “normal” kitchen. The white-and-wood galley-style space is enviable, especially by New York City standards (a dishwasher, ample cabinets and counters, a proper range hood, and a full-sized fridge), but it isn’t quite the unattainable Pinterest fodder of Alison Roman’s wood-burning oven or massive celebrity kitchens with double islands.
So many of TikTok’s food creators built their platforms on relatability, but some have succeeded to the point of rendering themselves unrelatable, with lofty Architectural Digest-esque kitchens and deals with luxury fashion brands. Doiron, while similarly successful, maintains a down-to-earth air; her audience wants a recipe provider, not a lifestyle influencer, she says. Accordingly, “I bought this house because the kitchen was so normal,” Doiron tells me as she films herself preparing the crust for a zucchini tart.
The kitchen in her previous New York apartment was so ugly, Doiron adds, that it was vetoed as a shoot location for her forthcoming debut cookbook, Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen, out October 29 from Clarkson Potter. It also wasn’t the most functional: She had to roll her cart, portable burner, tools, and ingredients to a window, creating a makeshift space in which to cook and film. It led to a somewhat clunky, more complicated approach to writing recipes. “Since I was already carting all my stuff over to another side of the room, I was like, well, what’s another piece of equipment?” Doiron explains. “It felt like fake cooking.”
Doiron’s new kitchen — sunny and bright, nice but not perfect (she spent the first month without a working oven) — has already reshaped how she can think about recipe development. “Even in the two months being here, my recipes are better because I’m thinking like a normal person,” she says. To prep and assemble, Doiron still drags her cart over to the spot with the best light — right in front of the glass-paned door to her backyard — but she can cook on a real stove now, feeling the limitations of a real kitchen as opposed to the ones of her approximated setup.
This is the appeal of the creator class: normality, especially in comparison to the food establishment’s lack thereof. What has drawn fans to Doiron is a sense of authenticity and accountability that has remained consistent even as her follower counts have shot her into FoodTok’s top echelons; she still seems like she could be your friend. A public figure with all the baggage that brings, Doiron is facing the same question that has accompanied her on her rise, but now, with the advent of her cookbook, is especially pertinent: How does a creator grow without losing what made them so appealing to viewers in the first place?
What TikTok has upended, like the food blogs that came before it, is the belief that a cook needs credentials in order to create a following through food. Some of the platform’s most beloved cooks make no pretense about their expertise relative to that of their audience. While Doiron acknowledges that her education at Cornell’s school of hospitality taught her the foundations of cooking, she’s also clear about the fact that most of what she knows came through her social media experiments. Her lack of formal culinary training was a source of insecurity until she realized that “I went through the same crash course that other untrained cooks go through — I just had the opportunity of doing it publicly,” she says.
Like many creators, Doiron didn’t plan to end up here. She found her way to TikTok in 2020, while she was working in public relations at Discovery, a media company. She saw it as a potential platform for her clients, not herself. But she’d played around with recipe development and cooking videos in the past — she had recreated BuzzFeed Tasty recipes for a “millennialcore” YouTube channel — and decided to give TikTok a try.
In April of that year, she posted a video of herself making “five-ingredient flatbreads.” Though the video now has over 27,000 views, it wasn’t an immediate hit, getting just about 500 at the time, Doiron recalls. Out of pandemic boredom, she continued filming herself sporadically. Her early recipes were often “hack”-oriented, like banana pancakes with sneaky cauliflower, but by the end of 2020, she’d differentiated herself through honest voice-overs; in one video, she discussed her history with disordered eating while making French toast. By 2021, the channel had grown to the point that Discovery asked Doiron to leave either TikTok or her job. The rest, obviously, is history. In early 2022, she hit a million followers on TikTok.
On the day of our August meeting, Doiron is doing a test shoot of a baby-zucchini tart, its crust speckled with pumpkin seeds. When I arrive at her Brooklyn home, she’s pulling a tray of blueberry-pistachio cookies out of the oven; it’s their final test and all that’s left is to shoot the photos for her blog. The tart, however, is in an earlier phase of development. “The thing I’m trying to learn today is if cooking the zucchini beforehand will remove enough moisture that the tart cooks through all the way without par-bake,” Doiron says. “I’m also trying to see if I can’t get by without a food processor.”
As it stands, she isn’t optimistic. This gets to the heart of what’s so endearing about Doiron: She’s also just figuring it out and giving her viewers insight into her process. That’s not to say that she takes recipe development lightly; she does two passes on each recipe before sending it off to a final tester in Seattle. It typically takes her week to 10 days between coming up with a recipe and posting the finished video on TikTok, and about 80 percent of her videos correspond to a written recipe on her blog. Recently, Doiron decreased her production on TikTok from three recipes a week to two. “I’m very scared that the algorithm is going to punish me,” she says. “But three high-quality, well-tested recipes a week is too much for me.” (The trade-off: launching long-form videos on YouTube.)
In the fragmented food media ecosystem, this seems to be the strongest sell of the creator class: It is easier to trust an individual like Doiron, with her earnestness and imperfection, over an institution, whose machinations are opaque and bureaucratic. For so many consumers of online cooking content, the implosion of the Bon Appétit test kitchen still feels fresh; nobody wants to get burned again.
Both PR and content creation are concerned with brand-building, but in Doiron’s experience, the biggest difference between the two is that PR is about crafting a story and controlling it, while being a creator is about, as Doiron says, “letting it all hang out.” Through content, a regular person becomes a personality and a viewer finds affinity with that persona — that’s how an audience is built.
For a while, Doiron was synonymous with earnest storytelling. (Of course, what is sweet to some provokes snark in others.) In a series that she called “My Daughter’s Kitchen,” for example, Doiron explored the idea of culinary inheritance. Coming from a family that “did not care about cooking in a family sense,” she didn’t have it, she says, so the series questioned what she could one day provide to her own potential future children.
When we meet, she points out that she hasn’t done a “story” video in months. This is an intentional choice. “I’m trying to rebrand to where my work can stand on its own,” Doiron says. “I was tired of having to tap dance for people to pay attention to my food when I thought, My food’s pretty freaking good.”
In this era of algorithmically dictated feeds, an insidious facet of posting content is the degree to which we — even those of us who do not consider ourselves “creators,” or what we post as “content” — can internalize the algorithm and the audience. What “works,” according to engagement metrics, and what we want to do aren’t always the same thing.
For Doiron, this was the problem with stories: She started to feel like she was throwing her family under the bus. “I told a few very authentic stories that I wanted to tell and then the TikTok algorithm kept rewarding me, so then I started telling stories that I didn’t want to tell,” she says. “I want people making the recipes. And when I was telling stories, I felt like it detracted from the food.”
Being a recognizable personality is, naturally, profitable. As anti-establishment as TikTok once appeared to be for the food world, freeing creators from the staid culture and gatekeeping of traditional media, it has predictably circled back to it: If you gain a lot of followers, you’re expected to then publish a cookbook with a big publisher, which is still considered a sign of making it and of being taken seriously. So much of the publishing industry today is driven by the misguided idea that followers will translate to sales, and TikTok is a big reason why.
Accordingly, one can argue that there are simply too many cookbooks today; these cookbooks coast on viral moments or prioritize a creator’s popularity over their sense of culinary perspective, assuming there is any perspective in the first place. And whether a creator actually develops good recipes is sometimes beside the point.
For Doiron, this aha moment about how publishing works came in late 2021, when she talked to a literary agent about a potential snack-focused cookbook. At the time, Justine Cooks wasn’t even an idea. “[The agent] was like, Hire a writer, hire a recipe developer, sell the book,” Doiron recalls. She came away from the conversation realizing that “I don’t need to be writing a book if people just want my name on a book,” she recalls. She decided not to pursue it.
In a post-Instagram world, “integrity” and “influencer” aren’t often in alignment. As much as viewers support the creator economy, they are also deeply skeptical of it. Doiron seems — more than most — committed to staying true to her values, even if it comes at a cost, like holding off on a book idea or sitting out a trend. In general, she says, “I think I fall on the sword for myself way more than I do [for] my audience.”
Take, for example, the fact that at the time of our interview Doiron hasn’t yet “made a cucumber,” as she says. She’s referring to the much-copied viral videos in which Logan Moffitt, now known as TikTok’s “Cucumber Boy,” slices a whole cucumber into a deli container and turns it into a salad. But she knows this game as well as anyone: In 2022, a video in which Doiron casually made the “butter board” from Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons cookbook set off a cultural phenomenon that proved as polarizing as it was popular. Though she was already known to TikTok users, it introduced her to the less-online crowd, getting her name into the New York Times and the Guardian.
The crowds even turned against Doiron herself, accusing her of being a shill for Big Dairy. She was, but not in the way that people thought. Though Doiron had previously worked as a paid sponsor for the industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., she says that the video in question wasn’t a part of the partnership: She just wanted to share an idea that was so easy she was skeptical that anyone would want it.
The butter board video’s success — 8.9 million views and counting — prompted an outpouring of partnership inquiries. Doiron didn’t take them, nor did she do like so many other creators and repeat the viral concept until it became her “thing.” She “resisted the trend,” Doiron says, because she didn’t want old-guard media to lump her with what she considers to be accounts that are just “juicing views” with time-wasting hacks and recipes that don’t work. Resisting trends, she adds, can be a way to maintain trust with viewers: She’s only doing what she’s excited about.
Doiron estimates that she turned down “probably $50,000 worth of brand deals” resulting from the success of the butter board video. Not only was it not her recipe, she didn’t want to make the whipped cream or cream cheese boards that the partnerships would have required of her. “I lose a lot of excitement when I see accounts leaning into everything that’s the ‘next big thing,’” Doiron says. “It feels like it robs you of their point of view. And I think, especially in a world where anybody can be a creator, point of view is so important.”
Justine Cooks is the clearest way that Doiron has let her food speak for itself. The idea for the cookbook, and the feeling that she was finally ready to write one, came in 2022, months after that conversation with the agent about the snacks concept. She sold the book in the fall of 2023.
Unlike some creator cookbooks, which lean into the understanding that their readers are already followers, Doiron’s scarcely mentions TikTok (it appears just once) or even her virality. (The butter board gets a shoutout only in the book’s acknowledgements, in a thank you to McFadden.) Even when she’s sharing stories in its pages, she maintains a level of distance. She isn’t hiding her fiance, Eric, and she memorializes her late father and his cooking, but she also isn’t confessing in the way she did in “My Daughter’s Kitchen.” These choices seem to echo her current approach to TikTok: “There’s so many great chefs out there who have great brands, and I don’t know anything about them,” she tells me.
Instead, the book’s focus is on the food. As much as Doiron’s recipes are inspired by fresh produce, she relies heavily on repeated pantry ingredients and advocates for humble staples like canned legumes. Her recipes are streamlined and unshowy; Doiron wants them to be foundational, not flashes in the pan that were made only because a viewer saw a dish on their feed.
Doiron admits that she’s lost some social media virality in forgoing pizzazz for practicality, but she also recognizes that there have been times when she was trying so hard to be different and interesting that she didn’t think about the practical home cook. On a feed, a creator has to stand out, sometimes to the detriment of the recipe. With a cookbook, “there are certain things everybody’s looking for,” she says.
“It took me about two years of posting to feel like a mature recipe developer,” Doiron says. To her, that means the point at which “I was cooking not just for show, but [that] I was cooking for the kitchen.”
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