Great Ones is a celebration of humans we admire — and an exploration of why they cook, not just how. Justine Doiron started sharing recipe videos in 2020 as her pandemic hobby. After garnering a following of people who love her plant-forward recipes and videos, she’s now debuting her first cookbook: Justine Cooks. We met up with her in her Brooklyn kitchen to learn more about how cooking is a form of self-care, how she hopes to reach food lovers with her new book, and the inspiration for her green-tea coffee cake (she shared the recipe, lucky us!).
Note: This content includes brief mention of disordered eating, which may be sensitive for some readers.
I was always really interested in baking as a kid. It was my hobby, but I grew up in a house where it wasn’t allowed to be your hobby. So I started sneaking my baking. My parents would go out on a date night, and I’d be like, Okay! This is the perfect opportunity to make cookies. I’d make a batch of cookies, hide them, clean up the kitchen, and that was my tell. My parents would come home, see that I cleaned, and be like, She baked.
I suppressed my cooking and baking interests because I didn’t want to be a bother. I did have a lot of disordered eating in high school and college, and that made me shy away from food. Only when I started to really heal that relationship in my early 20s did I pick back up with cooking as a hobby, and it became a huge part of my healing.
Food allows me to inject self-care into my day and every recipe I make.
Cooking is a big vehicle for creativity and connection and fostering connections in my life. It’s my job, which is very cool, and I meet a lot of people who also have it as their job, so I connect over that. Food allows me to inject self-care into my day and every recipe I make. When I make a recipe it’s an act of self-care for myself, but I also hope it can be the same for the people who make it.
I have a fiancé, and he and I eat on pretty different schedules, so a lot of times I’m cooking for us two to have leftovers over the week. That is really helpful for my recipes because I try to have recipes that serve four people. I tell my YouTube audience that I’m here to serve your family of four, or just you four times a week.
A book was never, ever on my radar. Working for myself was never on my radar. I knew I liked to work hard; I like the sense of accomplishment. I fell into a job I was good at, which was public relations. I did that for some consumer packaged goods. I did it at ABC News for a bit. I burnt out on politics quickly because I was working weekends, and it was during the 2016 administration, which was a very tumultuous time to be in politics. I then moved to a cushier PR job doing documentary-style shows for Discovery Network, and I loved that job.
I transitioned from my PR job not out of desire but out of necessity. Making videos on my phone started as my pandemic hobby, and I had tried out a YouTube channel the year before, so I had some experience. I started in April 2020, and in January 2021 my job asked me to disclose what I was doing, and my last day at that job was May 2021.
If I had been looking at the big picture the entire time I don’t think I would be able to accomplish as much.
People always say hindsight is 20/20, but I had such goggles on about my work at first. You’re always your harshest critic. Even when this fully became my job, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. My entire goal was engagement on my videos, just having videos that people wanted to engage with. If I had been looking at the big picture the entire time I don’t think I would be able to accomplish as much.
For a long time I had a bunch of people telling me to write a book, and I wasn’t ready. People were telling me to hire a writer or a recipe developer, and I just thought, Why write a book if you don’t want to write a book? Eight months later I was hit with this idea and a thesis for a book: “home made.” It was about why I consider myself a homemade cook and how through cooking I built myself a home. I sold that book in fall of 2022, and I think the thesis still reverberates in this book, but we expanded it to be more about the recipes, being plant forward, and my ethos as a cook.
I hope this book reaches food lovers … It’s for people who can’t stop thinking about food.
I hope this book reaches food lovers — not people who hate thinking about dinner and just want something in 20 minutes. It’s for people who can’t stop thinking about food. People who are obsessed with learning new techniques, or who want to learn about sourdough or cooking with a whole lemon. That’s the audience I really want to reach.
It’s fun to serve something so vibrant on serving ware that is so vibrant.
I made green-tea coffee cake. I loved using Stir Crazy because I need a bowl for every aspect of this cake! There’s a crumble topping, a cinnamon-sugar center, and then the batter itself. I was inspired to make this recipe because I had green-tea coffee cake at Golden Diner three years ago. I remember having matcha flavor in this classic, dense coffee cake and just thinking, I need to have this again and again. I love that it comes out this vibrant green color, and I love that it’s moist and dense, especially for a cake of this style. It has a little bit of tang because it uses crème fraîche in the batter. I think it looked great on the cutting board. It’s fun to serve something so vibrant on serving ware that is so vibrant.
I obviously love savory food, but that’s something I make every day. The holidays are when I lean into desserts.
