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Cooking up a storm: How Nagi Maehashi turned RecipeTin Eats into a global hit

Bianca Hrovat
Bianca Hrovat

Going global: Nagi Maehashi at home on Sydney's northern beaches.
Going global: Nagi Maehashi at home on Sydney's northern beaches.Alan Benson

Nagi Maehashi once baked 89 variations of vanilla butter cake before publishing the final "foolproof" recipe on her cooking website, RecipeTin Eats.

An amalgamation of Japanese sponge cake and Western butter cake, the "very best vanilla cake" recipe uses simple ingredients to create a delicate yet sturdy dessert, guaranteed to stay fresh for four days.

Maehashi and her mother Yumiko in the kitchen.
Maehashi and her mother Yumiko in the kitchen. Rob Palmer
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"Once I started I couldn't stop," Maehashi explains.

"Every time I did it, another question would come up. What happens if I use a different type of flour or up the sugar? Can I use older eggs instead of fresh eggs, how long can the batter sit around for, and how much lemon juice can it take?

"I just want to make sure my recipes work. I don't want to waste anyone's time."

I learned what a food blog was, stole my mother's second-hand camera and taught myself how to take photos.

The cake is hardly an outlier. There are around 1000 recipes on RecipeTin Eats and each has undergone rigorous, almost obsessive, testing in one of Maehashi's three home kitchens.

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"I'll create something like a German pork knuckle and end up making it 20 times," Maehashi says.

"After the third time, you get sick of it, but not being able to figure it out irritates me. I want to be able to explain the problem, I want to get it right."

Maehashi and her dog Dozer.
Maehashi and her dog Dozer.Alan Benson

Maehashi shakes her head and laughs. "So yeah, then I won't make German pork knuckles for the next five years."

Going global

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Her meticulous approach to home cooking has earned the trust of more than 4.6 million social media followers from across the globe. RecipeTin Eats is now one of the most popular food websites in Australia, attracting upwards of 15 million visitors each week and racking up more than 335 million views in the past 12 months alone. She is a regular contributor to Good Food, where her recipes are hugely popular.

RecipeTin Eats' chipotle salmon tacos.
RecipeTin Eats' chipotle salmon tacos.Nagi Maehashi

On October 11, Maehashi released her first cookbook, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. It features more than 150 recipes, each with their own QR code leading to an online video tutorial.

It's a massive achievement for Maehashi, a self-taught cook and self-professed "dork" from Sydney's northern beaches who is often spotted "dashing out to my local [supermarket] with no makeup on, crazy hair and in my tracksuit".

Business savvy

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Recipetin Eats: Dinner the cookbook.
Recipetin Eats: Dinner the cookbook.Nagi Maehashi

But don't let her fluffy ugg boots fool you: Maehashi is a seasoned businesswoman for whom success was always part of the plan.

Prior to launching RecipeTin Eats in May 2014, Maehashi spent 16 years building a career in corporate finance, most recently working as the group deputy chief financial officer of multi-billion dollar global construction company Brookfield Multiplex.

Maehashi first stepped onto the corporate ladder at just 18 years old when, fresh out of North Sydney Girls' High School, she was selected to be part of the PricewaterhouseCoopers cadetship program.

"It was a practical choice," Maehashi says, explaining how the cadetship allowed her to gain financial independence, move out of home, and ultimately obtain a bachelor of commerce from the University of Technology Sydney.

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"I had always wanted to get ahead in my career," she says. "We grew up pretty poor, so I started working from the moment I was allowed to at 14 and I've never looked back."

Humble beginnings

Maehashi was raised in a single parent household, watching her mother Yumiko struggle to support three children. She remembers the second-hand uniforms, the lack of birthday parties and feeling too embarrassed to ask friends over, but says she never understood just how hard Yumiko worked to keep the wheels turning.

"I was 12 when my parents got divorced, but I didn't understand how badly off we were until much later," Maehashi says.

"[Yumiko] was a single mum of three kids trying to pay off a mortgage at an 18 per cent interest rate and she'd get to the end of a pay cycle with, like, $8 left in her back account.

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"She'd be terrified that one of us would get sick because she couldn't afford medicine."

A growing passion for food

Instead of dining out, Yumiko would take the children to Balmoral beach where they'd wade through shallow water, picking wild abalone from the rocks.

"We'd gather sticks and have a charcoal seafood barbecue on the beach," Maehashi says.

But hunting for fresh seafood was more than a financial necessity. When Maehashi's family migrated from Tokyo to Sydney in 1981, it was near-impossible to find sashimi, octopus and abalone in Australian supermarkets.

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"My parents wanted us to fit in. They even made us speak English at home. But the one thing they wouldn't bend on is food," Maehashi says.

"We would spend our weekends catching fish in the Sydney Harbour, literally down at Pier 1, so we could have yellowtail sashimi."

Maehashi loved her mother's tempura, yakitori and bento boxes but felt self-conscious about eating them at school. She longed for a plain Vegemite sandwich.

"When we were growing up we ate a lot of great food without realising it," she says, remembering how disappointed she'd be to have teppanyaki for dinner.

"I just wanted to be normal."

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Natural love of cooking

With independence came culinary freedom. As an adult, Maehashi found the chopping board more relaxing than the television, often retreating to the kitchen with a classic Women's Weekly cookbook after a long day at work.

"I started cooking the minute I moved out of home and I just never stopped," she says. "I loved everything about it. It didn't matter what time I got home, my idea of relaxing would be to cook dinner."

But Maehashi didn't consider cooking to be anything more than a hobby until her mid-30s, when she stumbled across a "really rundown beach shack with amazing views" during a weekend walk through Mona Vale.

At this point in her working career, Maehashi was exhausted. She'd spent more than a decade commuting from the inner west into the city, travelling across the world with her colleagues and pushing for promotion after promotion.

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"I loved my job but I genuinely just wanted to do something for myself," she says.

Making the leap

Though the house was a 90-minute commute to the office, Maehashi contacted the owners and arranged to move in "literally the following weekend". It was the impetus she needed. The long commute "just didn't work" and Maehashi handed in her resignation soon after.

"It was now or never," she says. "I wanted to enjoy my new lifestyle."

There was no clear back-up plan, just the vague notion that within six months Maehashi would have to find another source of income. While she toyed with the idea of opening a cafe or developing an iPhone app, neither seemed financially viable.

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"Then I stumbled across this article talking about food blogs and how people actually made money out of them and I thought, 'Wouldn't that be good?'," she says.

"I started doing more research. I learned what a food blog was, stole my mother's second-hand camera and taught myself how to take photos."

More than a passion

But unlike many food blogs of the time, RecipeTin Eats was not merely a passion project.

"It was a bit taboo to admit that you were doing it for money when so many other blogs claimed to be doing it for the love of it," Maehashi says.

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"But I was not going to spend 100 per cent of my time on a project that I didn't intend to turn into a business. I needed to be able to make a living. I don't come from a wealthy family. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have that luxury."

As a business, RecipeTin Eats aims to put the reader at the centre of every recipe. Budget, nutrition and accessibility are key considerations, as are simple steps and easy-to-follow video tutorials.

"I think about it from the audience's perspective. What will help them? What do they want to see? And how can I help them make it successfully?" Maehashi says.

Hitting her stride

It's an approach that has resonated with an unusually wide demographic. While the bulk of RecipeTin Eats readers are aged in their mid-20s to late-30s, Maehashi says she's also "somehow collected the young crowd, the older crowd and the foodie crowd".

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"Oh, and the dog crowd," she laughs.

The addition of Maehashi's golden retriever, Dozer, proved a huge hit with readers. The beautiful dog, now aged 10, began appearing at the end of recipes as a joke ("I made this and my dog loved it!") but soon garnered a fan base of his own.

"People just started obsessing over him," Maehashi says.

"It got to the point where people would be upset if there wasn't a picture of him at the end of a recipe, so we created a Jump to Dozer button on the website. It's so funny."

Giving back

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Maehashi's success has allowed her to pursue her ultimate goal: RecipeTin Meals, a food bank that addresses issues of food insecurity by supplying 400 home-cooked meals each day to Sydneysiders in need.

"It's definitely the thing I'm most proud of," says Maehashi. "I want to grow it as much as I can and hopefully create a business that will keep going long after I'm gone.

"Maybe subconsciously I did it thinking of my mum, but honestly, it just makes me feel good. I just think it's the right thing to do."

RecipeTin Eats: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi is published by Macmillan Australia, RRP $44.99. Buy now

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Bianca HrovatBianca HrovatBianca is Good Food's Sydney-based reporter.

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