B. Dylan Hollis grew up in Bermuda, studied jazz piano in Wyoming, and found his food career almost accidentally in 2020 by baking odd recipes from old cookbooks and giving the results an unusually funny, skeptical test drive.
Nobody plans a baking career around an estate sale. B. Dylan Hollis got his by accident: born and raised in Bermuda, he went off to the University of Wyoming with plans built around jazz piano and arranging. Baking was nowhere in the picture.
Then came 2020. Quarantine boredom collided with a vintage cookbook from an estate sale, and he filmed himself investigating one of its recipes — genuine testing, rapid jokes, and the occasional shock of something old tasting good.
He can be theatrical about what he finds in those pages. Tomato soup in a cake. Mayonnaise. Potato. Canned odds and ends that a mid-century pantry apparently considered dessert-adjacent. But the theatrics never replace the work, because he does not stop at reading the ingredient list aloud and mocking it. He bakes the thing. The joke lands because the recipe still has to face an actual oven — and every so often, the oven takes the recipe’s side.
That habit grew into Baking Yesteryear, a decade-by-decade collection of vintage recipes, and then Baking Across America, which follows regional American baking and the local food history underneath it.
What Hollis demonstrates, over and over, is that curiosity does not require solemnity. An old recipe can be cultural evidence and a comedy prop at once — and occasionally it turns out to be excellent food. The humor lowers the barrier. The test keeps the premise honest.
His publisher keeps a proper biography if you want the career without the faces he makes. For the rest of this series: Why B. Dylan Hollis Actually Bakes the Horrible-Sounding Cake covers the method, and B. Dylan Hollis Gives Bad Old Recipes a Fair Trial makes the case for caring.
Part of Food People & Ideas.
