Justine Doiron knows her early videos were not good
Our conversation on the evolution of her style, where she gets inspiration, burnout, and her debut cookbook.
With a few million followers across her TikTok and Instagram, her first cookbook, Justine Cooks, makes its debut later this month (you can pre-order it here!). We chatted about the evolution of her style, where she gets inspiration, burnout, and her debut cookbook.
Brianna Plaza: Can you tell me a bit about your background?
Justine Doiron: I've always had a generalized interest in food, but I always tell people I did not come from a food family growing up. We enjoyed eating, but family dinners were at the Macaroni Grill. My parents never challenged my palate. My dad was the cook of the family, so we'd have big dinners with him, but those were four times a year max. So it wasn't like food culture was deeply, deeply ingrained in us. I am so jealous of people who have a cooking foundation. It was a humongous insecurity I had because it feels like every chef, every cook, starts with this story of, "My mother taught me this.” It felt like such a foundational piece of my life that was just not there. If I get really into the weeds, it's because my mother struggled with an eating disorder, so food was not an exciting thing for her.
So I went to college for hospitality, but I was definitely looking more at the hotel management side of it all. I got a very base culinary knowledge, but since it wasn't the career I was pursuing, and since I was making $35,000 a year, I kind of left that hobby and interest dormant until Covid hit.
I had a boss and I knew she was going to ask me how TikTok worked because it was really burgeoning during that time. We thought we were going to be out of the office for six weeks and I was like I’m going to learn this new still and come back with this really marketable skill. What can I do online to help me learn the platform? The best way to learn something is to create. I had previously dabbled with doing a baking YouTube channel, so it was always in the back of my head. So I just decided to start doing little cooking videos.
I thought that was for kids, so I was doing the barest of the bare. And since the app was so new, they started to gain traction. It became really fun, and that's when I started leaning into becoming a self-taught cook. First sharing the base of knowledge I have, but then also sharing the food I like to eat. It kind of allowed my audience to learn and grow with me. I come from the barest bones of no professional background to self-taught through cookbooks, and now I'm definitely trying to create a food culture of my own that I can pass along. It’s become such a part of me because I want to fill up that blank space that I didn't have. Reclaiming food has been meaningful.
Brianna Plaza: Tell me about the decision to go all in on food TikTok/Instagram.
Justine Doiron: I was recently talking to my partner and was like, “It used to be so much easier. Now there's 17 more things I need to do for one recipe.” In the old days, I wrote down the recipe in the TikTok comments. That was it. But people really couldn't find the recipe in the comments. So to appease them, I would screenshot my TikTok, and then I would put that screenshot unedited on Instagram, and I'd write the recipe in the Instagram caption. At that point, TikTok only allowed 15 words per caption, and people couldn't find the recipe in the comments. You couldn't pin a comment.
So I would tell people it's on my Instagram. I remember making my Instagram account with the same name because I was annoyed that nobody could find the recipe. At around 230 followers I started to take it a little more seriously. I’d make the TikTok, take a photo, then put it on Instagram with the caption. Everything was being done from my phone.
And then Instagram rolled out Reels. And here's the thing: my videos were not that great. I was making them in my Hoboken apartment, and as much as people say that you can become a content creator with anything, I believe that you also need the right environment. My stuff just wasn’t translating well to Reels at all because it was a less forgiving thing. I was very reluctant to post Reels, but I saw an uptick in numbers and continued to do that.
Then finally, maybe two years into it, I was confident enough to put the same videos on both platforms. Interestingly, both of my audiences still remain relatively separate. A lot of people will be on TikTok and say, “Oh, I didn't even know you had an Instagram", and vice versa. I think it goes down to preferences.
Brianna Plaza: You said early on you’d appease your followers. How do you manage that now?
Justine Doiron: I hope that didn’t sound bad. I started my TikTok and Instagram not that far apart, so I was so new to it. I didn’t take it seriously until I had been doing it for nine-plus months.
In terms of listening to my audience, I have a few key North Star guidelines that reflect in my food and I hope translates to how my audience sees the value in what I'm creating.
The first one is that all my recipes are designed to be “keeper” level, which means that they're approachable enough that you can riff on them yourself, repeat them, adapt them as you need to, but they're also specific enough that they won't let you down. So that appeased a lot of audience comments like, "there are no weight measurements or how do I know what a small tomato is?" Stuff like that.
Another — and a lot of people will disagree with me — is I don't really believe in paywalling my recipes. In my early 20s, I could barely afford reasonable groceries. I was not going to pay $5/month for somebody’s Substack. A lot of people are willing to pay for my Substack, and I appreciate that so much. But I feel like my audience pays me with their time and attention, and I pay them back with a recipe that's free and accessible for them to use. Even producing one recipe a week is a difficult task, and I am doing three right now. And that is a very unsustainable momentum. I love it. I have too many ideas to hold in my head, which is why I do it. In the future, I might ask people to pay for recipes just so that I can maintain a reasonable momentum.
The last North Star is that while it is a reciprocal relationship with my audience, I do have the final say. I learned that the hard way. You're never going to please everybody.
Brianna Plaza: Where do you get inspiration from?
Justine Doiron: Inspiration comes from a lot of places. I'm very visually inspired. One of my most famous viral recipes is the baked kale salad with crispy quinoa. That was visually inspired by a crab tostada, which has wildly different ingredients. I just like that the tostada was piled high like a cone. And I like that the cotija cheese was crumbled all over the top of it. It was the dead of winter. I was going to do a quinoa salad at home but what if I put the quinoa on top? And the momentum got going. So visual inspiration comes from anywhere. It can come from art, it can come from other food that I see. I think it is totally fair to say you see something on Instagram, and it sparks another idea, and that momentum happens.
I also think travel is a huge inspiration, but it could be any kind of travel. I went to St. Louis, my hometown, and it was super inspired by a sandwich. And that led to very literal inspiration, which was a recreation with a few twists. Or like going to Edinburgh and being really inspired by the type of cuisine they make in that climate and then adapting that to what I have available in New York.
And then sometimes something just sounds delicious, and those are strikes of creativity you can't explain. Like a pineapple salad dressing I made recently. I was in a beachy LA kind of mood. So I can't really pinpoint where inspiration comes from in that regard. And I feel like a lot of cooks and chefs will say the same thing, but the best inspiration is just to keep eating and keep discovering what you like.
Brianna Plaza: You post a lot. How do you deal with burnout?
Justine Doiron: My schedule is such that sometimes I am a well oiled machine. Other times the machine falters. But normally, the well-oiled machine films Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, edits Thursday, tests Friday. And the momentum keeps going. What's interesting is my burnout doesn't come from my creativity or working. My burnout comes from the emotional parts of the job that come along with that.
The emotional parts of the job are things like comments that maybe the person didn't intend them to be mean, but they are draining because they sound harsh. The other emotional aspect of the job is a post not performing well, and then you're in this stress of, "what if I lose it all?" As a highly motivated person, there are stressors that come from presenting yourself for feedback, every single day. It's a different kind of pressure that’s very public all the time. There are also things that I never thought about, like body dysmorphia. Because I edit my videos, I look at myself every day.
So those are the things that cause burnout, where if I were allowed to produce recipes, and film, and create in a vacuum, there has never been the issue of burnout for me. So to maintain my sanity, I'm trying to set firm boundaries with what feedback I take in, because feedback is so important, but you can't take in everything.
I think about how much energy I expend on community management. I have a lot of friends who outsource that job. I would never do that, because you have to maintain that relationship. I’m trying to do a lot of internal work to not put so much pressure on myself and every single aspect of my business performing on all cylinders. No business works that way.
Another interesting part of the job that I have to dissociate from is planning my career for the next 30 years. I had a call the other day where somebody asked me what's next? I have three-year goals. I have five-year goals.
Brianna Plaza: How do you think about your style and its evolution?
Justine Doiron: I personally love the style I film with now. It took a long time to get there and it took a lot of imitation to get there. I started off making videos with the camera over the bowl and I was just putting things into the bowl, and that worked back then. I moved apartments and I had to adapt to working there, but I was still very much doing the same thing. Environment is a huge thing.
I realized over time that I wanted to be in my videos because otherwise there's no real connection. And they forget there’s a human. I see videos online all the time of just bowls and you forget the human connection.
There was a particular creator who I imitated for a while until I realized that what looked good for them simply does not look good for me. But what it did was give me a few things I liked and a few things to experiment with to help create the video style I do now. I like a lot of cuts, but I also like everything to be incredibly beautiful. The food is what's beautiful. When I left my most recent apartment, it had become essentially a studio space. I was so stressed because I was like, my style is going to be gone. But in my new house, I realized the style comes with the creator. It doesn't necessarily come with what's around.
I went through a phase when I was writing the cookbook. TikTok's algorithm is very smart and it recognized patterns really well, and it was recognizing that my stories did well. And what's frustrating is that it made me feel like every recipe video had to have a story. And sometimes something is just absolutely delicious and I want people to cook it. I was continuously seeing those metrics perform, so I felt really pressured, and it made me turn out bad material. I was cooking inauthentic things, and was overly emotional when the recipe itself was just really good. I was doing that because I was so focused on writing the book that I didn't really have time to internalize where my content was going and to make it work for me. I'm now training my audience to not expect storytelling.
Now that the book process is in the marketing phase, I am realizing in the long term, I want my food to speak for itself first and my personality, my story, and my connection with food to be a very distinct side to that, but definitely not the main focus. I want people to know me. I'm going to keep telling stories, but it's not going to be the main crux of my brand.
Brianna Plaza: Tell me more about your debut cookbook, Justine Cooks.
Justine Doiron: A few years ago, I had a ton of people telling me to write a book. Anyone with an audience is told to do it. I was told to hire a writer and recipe developer to write a book. It was a nightmare. They were asking me to just use my name, which is so common. It didn’t feel right at the time, but in 2022, the concept for my book just fell into my head. As a content creator, you really do think you’re going to lose everything all at once. So people sell their book way too early when their audience is too small. I really do think waiting helped. I said goodbye to anybody I talked to in 2021 and I found a new book agent. It would have been difficult to pitch my agent if I didn’t already have a 70-page proposal that I came with, so you still have to do the work. Your name will not get you far.
The original concept was called Homemade, and it was about me being self-taught and not having any food background. But the book process is so long: I pitched it in 2022, was writing it in 2023, and now selling the book in 2024. The book evolves and changes and grows. I realized as my debut book, I just wanted it to be my most exciting recipes. So we changed the title to Justine Cooks because it’s definitely about my evolution and also recipes that are true to my brand. Recipes that are delicious, relatable, with tons of beans, and tons of vegetables.
I was reading through it the other day — you truly forget the recipes you developed a year ago — and I was looking at a sea bass recipe and I was like, “this slaps.” The book has exciting recipes that I want people to bring into their kitchen.
Brianna Plaza: What made writing a book a natural extension of your brand?
Justine Doiron: I looked at what people come to me for, and they come to me to cook. If people came to me for lifestyle or a product, then it would be different. I think that's why you see a lot of people who do what I do come out with food products. But people come to me to feed their family and the most powerful and economic way I could do that was through a book. In terms of cost and worth, a book is the best value for recipes. You’re getting 110 really well-tested recipes for $35. When you’re buying cooking magazines, you’re getting 10,12 recipes for $20. Books and magazines of course serve different purposes, but to me it was like, “what a treat for me to be able to write this.”
It’s very interesting to see how your audience translates. My agent and I didn’t even discuss selling a two book deal because the book proposal I had at the time was such a story and vision in itself. My next two books, which I’ve thought about conceptually, I can sell as a package deal.
Brianna Plaza: What comes next?
Justine Doiron: I don’t think people on the internet searching for recipes is going away any time soon. I want my blog to be beautiful, well photographed, and super, super accessible. So I'm going to put it out there; I’d like to get a million page views per month. I am currently at a half a million, so I have ambitious goals to double my traffic. This is my manifestation. My traffic is very responsive to my social media, so how do you slow down a posting schedule and reach lots of people? That’s what my business is trying to figure out now. I want my blog to continue to be the cornerstone of what I do.
I’d also like to write a second and third book. I think being a serial book author is a career that really lights me up.
If you’re interested in pre-ordering Justine’s book, you can do so here.
Excellent interview! I really enjoyed reading this. It's got me thinking about food and recipe development in new ways.
Adored this interview! And FWIW, I got *so* many great ideas for food and wine stops on a recent trip from Justine's Edinburgh trip recap...chef's kiss.