Food for Thought – Poppy Cooks
In November last year, Poppy O’Toole went to bed a Michelin-trained chef and woke up a TikTok star. “It went bigger than I ever, ever expected,” O’Toole tells me. And I can see why; one viral video flipped her fortunes upside down. She went from an impressive 200,000 followers to over 1 million almost overnight and is now sitting on a comfortable 1.3m followers.
I meet O’Toole on Zoom, where she is fresh from an at-home workout – a workout, which she says, is part-motivated by upcoming publicity surrounding her new book, Poppy Cooks – to be published in September. We go back to the beginning, and O’Toole explains how her culinary career has spanned a decade (she is only 27). She started in a care home, cooking beef hash for residents before eventually ending up training in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Birmingham. O’Toole then worked at The Wilderness, an experimental Birmingham restaurant, “a splashing sauce on the plate, ants in pudding type gig”. She then made her way to the big smoke in 2017, where she worked at a corporate catering company, serving food for prestigious banking clients, such as the former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Afterwards, O’Toole moved onto working in a female-led kitchen, which she loved, but like so many others in the hospitality industry, she was made redundant at the start of the pandemic.
O’Toole admits that although being made redundant was a crushing blow, it was also a big relief. “You do get sexism in the kitchen, and you have to prove yourself a bit more,” she explains. “When I was younger, I was told no one would employ me at 25 because I’d be wanting kids. You hear from other chefs that “women don’t have fire in their belly” to stay in the kitchen and are only there as a means to keep “calmer”. But hospitality is changing from the old boys club it used to be. Social media means you can have a career without the burnout or sexism – hopefully, I can help initiate the change.”
As a result of her redundancy, O’Toole swapped her gruelling 70-hour week to set up her own kitchen on the video-sharing platform, TikTok. What started as merely filming recipes slowly ballooned into a fanbase: “I once got a message from a keyworker saying she made my tomato sauce,” O’Toole recalls. “She made it for her family after a long shift and loved it. I then realised I could make a difference, big or small, and so it was worth maintaining.” As the first lockdown progressed, O’Toole realised video series led to high levels of engagement and came up with the idea: “What a chef eats in a day”. A video within the series – a recipe for a crispy parmesan and parsley potato – hit around 100,000 views – her biggest yet. It was a light-bulb moment. O’Toole realised people liked her recipes but loved her potato recipes.
O’Toole masterminded a “25 days of potato” series in the second lockdown – a potato-advent calendar of sorts. The daily videos featured everything from: pommes anna, hash browns, latkes, Korean glazed fries, pomme souffles – you name it, she’s done it. However, one video within this series took her sky-high. O’Toole’s “Welcome to Potato TikTok” video – compiling all her potato recipes to date – received over 4.3m likes and launched O’Toole into the millions: “I went to bed on 200,00 followers, and I woke up with 1 million! I thought it was a glitch! I owe everything to potatoes.”
But why potatoes? What is it about the noble spud that is getting everyone hot under their collar? “This is what people want to see,” O’Toole tells me. “They want to see a delicious, crispy potato. I think people are bored with the Instagram-perfect plate nowadays. You could take a photo of an aesthetic blueberry smoothie, but I don’t eat that, I eat potatoes, I eat brown food – most people do.”
I tell O’Toole she should have named her upcoming book “Confessions of a Spudaholic”- she laughed and said that could just be the name of book 2.0. Preparing her first book has been a dream realised for O’Toole – “whilst girls were planning their weddings, I was planning my recipe book!”, she tells me, explaining that her book is different from most recipe books as it focuses on honing culinary skills to use with multiple dishes rather than just making an Instagram-worthy one dish wonder.
For the ultimate palette-cleanser, I ask O’Toole what her last ever supper would consist of. To start with, she would have French onion soup followed by a smorgasbord of TGI Friday’s food – hot wings, ribs, potato skins and mozzarella dippers. For pudding, it’s ice cream – a sundae jampacked with mint chocolate chip, dulce de leche, chocolate and coconut. To wash it all down, O’Toole’s last drink would be a “bubblegum daiquiri”, a choice that caught me somewhat off-guard. “I’ve been to TGI Fridays every year for my birthday – I’m a child, and I love it,” she proclaims.
O’Toole is unashamedly herself, and her joie de vivre is engaging. But what comes across most is her authenticity. I can sense it through my screen, clearly so can her 1.3 million other followers. The power of TikTok remains unrivalled and should not be underestimated for it is changing the face of so many industries – advertising, journalism, fashion and cooking. O’Toole is a case in point of how anyone can emerge – spud, or no spud.
Poppy Cooks is released on the 16th of September on Bloomsbury. Available for pre-order now.
A Shrove Tuesday recipe: American-style pancakes with berry compote
For the pancakes
140g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
40g caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
70g melted, salted butter
130ml milk
1 egg
For the Berry compote
Around 400g of your choice of berry, here I used blackberry and blueberry
2-3 tbsps icing sugar
Method
Melt your butter and mix all your wet ingredients together.
In a separate bowl mix all of your dry ingredients together.
Gradually mix the wet ingredients into the dry, mix until combined. A few lumps are good here, once its mixed leave it to rest for around 5 mins.
In the waiting time make a quick, sweet berry compote. Chuck the berries of your choice into a sauce pan on a medium high heat.
Once the berries start warming up add the icing sugar, this will help the berries to begin realising their own delicious juices. Keeping an eye on it leave it cooking until a thick, lovely, juicy mass of berry has formed.
Whilst that’s on get a non-stick pan on the heat, medium heat. Leave the pan dry DO NOT add oil or butter.
Add a good sized ladle full of pancake mixture into the pan, giving it a little spread with the base of the ladle. You want it to still be thick though. Once bubbles start to appear on the surface of the pancake, FLIP IT (I use a spatula cause I’m no good and pan flipping).
Cook on the other side until golden and repeat the process.
As you continue cooking your pancakes, you may have to reduce the heat of the pan for a more even cook and colour.
Once all your batter is cooked, stack them high and cover in compote and an extra sprinkle of icing sugar.