626: B. Dylan Hollis Took the Wildest Roadtrip Across America to Make the Sweetest Cookbook

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. One of my things that I do online is I shout out mispronunciations of ingredients. And there are people who will shout across the concourse, eggy or simonym. And it's so weird to hear that. It makes you really cock the head. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59Have you ever eaten a prune with pie? How about a pickled cheesecake? Well, B. Dylan Hollis absolutely has. The popular TikTok and YouTube creator has racked up millions and millions of views by baking his way through vintage cookbooks that fit his three W's. Wacky, weird, and wonderful. Dylan is back with a new book, Baking Across America, which has him visiting dozens of states to track down recipes and stories from America's amazing baking past. We talk about the crazy travel that went into this unique book project and what he's been baking in his kitchen. We love catching up with one of the sharpest minds in the baking game.

1:37I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:43B. Dylan Hollis, welcome to This Is Taste. Great to see you. How are you doing? I'm doing all right, Matt. Thank you for having me. It's a beautiful morning here. It really is. And it's the morning of your release of your second book. Yes, I know. I'm a bit buzzing. I'm a bit vibrating. It's, you know, it comes at you, you look at it on the calendar, and then when it arrives, it hits you hard. It's a beautiful book, and I really like it. It has a lot of journalistic integrity. We're going to get into it because your first book was a huge hit. I mean, like, truly one of the biggest selling cookbooks of that year.

2:14I mean, it was amazing. And much credit to you, Just having a real vision and really understanding cooking, nostalgia, and just really being smart with the way you develop recipes, thinking about history. What got you into history and baking? You know, it's one of those strange things because I don't really know because as far back as I can remember, I've always been enthralled with it. You know, I've always held on to the records that my grandparents had. I would play those. I would collect old things. I owe a lot to my mother because one of the first things, you know, when you're a kid, you always want, there's one big thing that you want.

2:50You know, I want a car one day. I want this one day. And I was obsessed with this vintage vacuum tube radio I saw on eBay. And, you know, I was like seven. I was like, Mom, can you please get me this? And I convinced her. And that was one of the first things I had in my bedroom when I had a bedroom to myself was an old vacuum tube radio. And, of course, here I was listening to AM stations. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it got me interacting with old school things. And I kept collecting them. My first car was a 1963 Cadillac. I named him Ernest after old country musician Ernest Tubb.

3:28And that's actually on the front of the book. So I'd always surrounded myself with old things. There was something about them. They carried a weight, sort of an echo of yesteryear that I felt was cool bringing that into the modern space. Yeah. And I had collect, like I said, books and stuff. And the covid pandemic, as I always say, we tried new things. We ventured out. Some people learned all sorts of different things. Folks learned how to cook. Folks learned how to bake. And I did, too, from old cookbooks, because that's what I had around. Well, your obsession with music probably had something to do with it as well.

4:04You're a musician yourself and you studied music. And tell me a little bit about in Bermuda growing up and how music and later baking kind of got into your life. That's a great question because my country is a tourist destination. And back in the heyday in the 1950s and the 60s, Americans primarily would go to Bermuda and they would expect different things. They would expect music and, you know, old school British Islander hospitality. mentality. So every hotel on the island had their own Calypso band. My grandfather on my mother's side was a Calypso-nian. John White, he had a band called The Travelers.

4:44And I had his records, you know, it was so cool. So cool. Listening to your grandfather on a record, oh, it was neat. But it was this old school music. And that's, of course, just like I mentioned with baking, that's how I got into music too. So I started playing these old tunes because I spent a lot lot of time with my grandmother, who I dedicated my first book to, Peggy, who's still alive, 94. Oh, beautiful. And it was cool that I could play songs that she knew, and she would tell me, you know, I said, Granny, what should I learn next? And she would list off all these old tunes, and I would learn them.

5:23And I don't know, it just got me seated in this old school. I'm an old soul. When I was born, one of my aunts said, you know, he's been here before. It's like it's absolutely a time warp, but it makes a lot of sense. You're surrounded by these very vintage emblems of British culture and of tourism. And you're on an island, so you're not leaving a lot. So you're really surrounded by this culture. And you're also just very curious, obviously, as a young person. And honestly, it's really special that you've been able to translate it into baking. What is baking like for you growing up? Are you in the kitchen with your grandmother baking?

6:06That's the interesting thing with what I do insofar as I didn't truly bake until 2020. Right, right. You know, I took, we called it FNN in my high school work academy. It's an old private school back on the island. And, you know, you learn your basics, your how to cook, how to bake, you know, and mix things together. So the first thing I ever baked, I think, was a lemon bread. It was a quick bread with Miss Anne Coakley probably in 2008. And I did not interact with bakery much after that. Yeah. So you decided around the pandemic that baking would become your focus. You're clearly you're a musician and then you became a baker.

6:51Let's back up a little bit and just reflect on your celebrity because now you're big. I mean, I know in Wyoming you probably have people stopping in the streets. But when you travel the country and this second book, Baking Across America, you went to 19 states and D.C. What's it like for being Dylan on the street? I mean, people, you're very recognizable. What's it like? What's that been like for you? It's hard to process and it's always so strange because if you look at the genesis, the nexus where I started, it's me in a kitchen alone in the pandemic talking to my phone. And that was the case for two years.

7:33And, you know, school had gone online. Life had gone indoors. So I wasn't out and about. You know, never mind the fact that in Wyoming, you know, there aren't many people to begin with. So I remember through online fame, it was getting bigger and bigger. But you only ever see comments and shares and talks about it on browsers and on your phone. And that's how, you know, DK, my publisher, got into things. And we wrote the book, as many did, online. And then all of a sudden came the time to release the book. And that was the first time since I had started that I was out in the world, out of, you know, the black hole that is Wyoming.

8:17And I'm getting stopped. And I'm like, what is happening? That's weird. Because there was no gradual introduction of this. It was, okay, now I landed in New York and bam, people are in the airport, which is strange because in New York, I feel like people like walk about, no one really cares. Yeah, New York doesn't really, you don't stop like celebrities. If you're a true New Yorker, you play it cool. Yeah. Yeah, you're like, I don't want to, but no, I mean, you're in the airport. You're landing. Yes. I remember it was it was I got a request for a picture for a missus and her kid must have been eight outside of like a Hudson News.

8:56And I was like, you know, you must be mistaken. And it's strange because one of my things that I do online is I I shout out mispronunciations of ingredients. And there are people who will shout across the concourse, eggy or simonym. And it's it's so weird to hear that makes it makes you really comfortable. shock the head. All that to say, it's super fulfilling that something that I enjoy to do, that is experimenting with old cookbooks on camera, I have so much fun. It is incredibly fulfilling that that also brings other people some joy. That seems, I mean, what more could you ask for? It's very rewarding, something that isn't inherently complicated.

9:46It's curiosity. Yeah. And you write your recipes and you create your videos with with such love and respect. And I think people feel that with you. Like, really, they do. They feel that you are playing by it honestly. And I think some creators, true or not, the perception is they're just doing it for the show. They're doing and you're not like that. I mean, that seems to be a little bit of your special sauce. Because there's special sauce in these pages. Yeah. You know, it's – and it was a necessary approach from my end. As someone who is not well-versed in cookery, someone who is not trained, who, you know, doesn't know all the cool restaurants, someone who doesn't know how to properly laminate pastry, how can I get into the cookery space respectfully, publicly, with due care?

10:44Well, you go back and you look at the wild and the wacky and the wonderful things that people really don't, people haven't explored in modernity. Take my first recipe on TikTok, for example, on, you know, one of my first shorts, which was a pork cake from 1915. An old Five Roses flower cookbook, a Canadian flower company. It was a fruitcake with a pound of pork in it. Nobody is going to comment and say, oh, you made that pork cake wrong. Right. So you've got some liberty there. You can show enthusiasm for something that you don't know too much about and you can present that in a food sphere. But without all of the respect that's needed normally, if I was to say, here's a spaghetti bolognese.

11:27Yeah. Oh, I mean that. Yeah. When you start tackling bolognese, you've got like, you know, so many comments. Let's go back to this. Let's go back to this pork cake. Yes. I mean, is it good? Because, I mean, I have to ask, like, it doesn't sound traditional, but I'm going to be open-minded about a pound of pork in a sweet dessert. I like your approach. Yes. Because it was not inherently bad. It was this sort of, back in the day, you would make your cakes if you didn't have butter, if you didn't have lard, if you didn't even have suet. you could get by with a pound of ground pork if it were relatively fatty as a replacement for the fat in your quick bread.

12:09So there are savory notes to it which don't exactly play well. It's one of those things where your olfactory senses seem to kick in before the taste. So you can tell something's wrong. I mean, like a roasting pork is very iconic. It's a very unique meat, right, and protein. It just, it wafts your house. And it sure did. It wafted throughout my house. It was one of those things where the smell worried you. But when everything came down, it was a fruitcake that frightfully presented naturally. It was it was risen. It was like it was the right color. You couldn't see anything. And that was like, wow, OK, are there more recipes that do things like this?

12:56It's so cool. I love it. I love everything you're doing. I really mean it. It's really, really special. And, you know, there's like food science programs, there's food history programs, there's academics studying this stuff. And they're all wonderful, too. I think you're taking in such a different approach using the source texts, but you're admitting that you're not a professionally trained pastry chef. And you're creating these kind of homages to these old recipes. And it's just, it's wonderful. Thank you. Well, let's from February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story.

13:40The 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time. Montreal's top restaurateurs will reimagine 65 years of the city's iconic astronomy, crafting inventive, nostalgia-inspired dishes with a modern twist. Prepare your palate. World-renowned chefs, including several Michelin-starred talents, will team up with over 80 of Montreal's finest local chefs to create unforgettable, one-of-a-kind menus. The full program is available at MontrealOnLumiere.com Presented by Lotto Quebec in collaboration with National Bank This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames If you're one of those last minute shoppers, you might know the feeling Ideas are running low and the clock is ticking Here's a fun idea, Aura Frames Aura Frames is the solution with a gift that feels personal, a little curated, and sent with love and a gift that can be purchased in no time with a few clicks of the mouse.

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15:14For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get$35 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames, named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code TASTE at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code TASTE. The deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about the second book. You know, Baking Yesterdayer obviously was done at your home, and you're mining through this massive cookbook collection. You decide to do something that I really respect.

15:53You go on the road. You photograph the book on the road, which my own personal books, I do that myself, and I really like that approach. I think it really gives a lot of life to recipes that maybe aren't given in a studio setting. But Dylan, man, this was quite the journey that you went on. So tell me a little bit about when you were looking at the whole United States map and you're like, I need to cover the country and I need to go to these places. What's that like, the planning of this trip? Almost insurmountable from the outset, because the United States is one country. But boy, is it like you have 50 odd countries, you know, around.

16:33And they're so different. You look at Laramie, Wyoming, where I am. You know, if you go two hours in either direction, you're in completely different biomes, completely different. You can start in the high mountains and then you'll be in a sun-drenched desert with completely different sensibilities. So we sort of zoomed out and we said, what are the distinct areas of the United States? And then instead of thinking of all of these states, you start thinking of, and this is sort of divorced from the idea of food. You start thinking about the Southwest. You start thinking about the Pacific Northeast.

17:10You start thinking about, you know, rather the Pacific Northwest. And then, you know, the New England. So these identities begin to show up and then you can tackle it from that space. You say, OK, I can't go to all of the desert states, but we can hit Palm Springs. Is that sort of the capital of all the deserts? And that's how we came to like culture capitals. So, you know, Palm Springs was a culture capital. Boston, Massachusetts was a culture capital. Now, when you do these things, invariably, you're going to miss some areas. But the idea was to capture the essence. And that's how we started.

17:54And we mapped them all out. And when we were photographing this book, man, we began in May and we didn't close up until August. Wow. And you're on the road. Tell me a little about the traveling party. Like, what's it like? Are you flying city to city? Are you in a car driving around? I mean, again, 19 states plus D.C. Most cookbooks just can't tackle that scope. And it's amazing that you're able to do this. I really love that you put in the work and it shows in the book. But what's the travel like? How are you? And are you going to restaurants and are you doing the research on the fly as you're visiting these cities?

18:28A lot of the research, of course, had to be done beforehand. The recipe testing and all of these things had to be done beforehand because we not only did we photograph the book, we baked the actual the actual recipes on the road. That's insane. It was. And it caused a lot of stress, a lot of excitement. But to answer your question, let's take our the first leg that we did was in in the south. So me, a college friend of mine, Kaylee Stalder, who was a great baker, acted as my baking assistant. I wanted someone who knew me, knew my insanities, and knew my sort of non-standard way of approaching these things to help me with ingredients and help me prep these things.

19:14My editor, Alexander Rigby, and we had picked Mackenzie Smith-Kelly as our photographer, a wonderful photographer based out of Texas. And that was the crew. So take this first trip. We all flew separately into Savannah. We rented a car. We met each other in the baggage claim. Kaylee had the list of ingredients for, you know, the recipes that we were making. There was a sorghum. We have a sorghum and honey pecan pie in the recipe and a few others. But our first stop was a grocery store. We checked into this Airbnb. We got to work. And the next morning we were slinging a pecan pie outside of Forsyth Park.

19:57And then, you know, we drove from Georgia right the way through all the states to New Orleans, Louisiana. I was in charge of parking a car in the French Quarter, which was perhaps one of the most stressful parts of the trip. But that was repeated on all the culture capitals. Some required more work and more planning. For example, we photographed in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park. Now, there's no Airbnbs there. So here I was baking recipes, putting them in a bloody suitcase, having to bear proof them so that once we landed and we were walking to our photograph location, you know, we weren't assaulted by wildlife and mammals.

20:45and then we would unpack everything and shoot and hope for gold. And I feel so lucky that we got some gold. You really did. And just baking in real time in Airbnbs and unfamiliar kitchens. I mean, that's its own book, How to Bake in an Airbnb, because we've all checked into them and we're like, are these really the pans? How did you deal with that, like actually baking on the road? Oh, my goodness. I mean, there lied the necessity to pivot on the heel. We had, you know, there were some Airbnbs that didn't have metal bowls. So our, you know, double boiler situation to make something like a boiled frosting for a fully assembled lane cake.

21:34Here we were, you know, using, I think we ended up using a glass bowl that was used to hold decorations on the coffee table. Oh, yeah. I've done that. You just pick whatever's in the house. Yeah. And, you know, you melted a spatula here and there and you had to apologize. It was stressful. I remember the gooey butter cake that we had to make. and I don't know if you've ever interacted with a really old electric oven that has... I've rented in New York City, so absolutely yes, 100%. But as you know, they have a top element sometimes, which when it comes to baking, does some different things. Yes, it does.

22:17So I recall being astounded that we were able to completely burn a gooey butter cake in seven minutes. It was like a broiler function from the start. I should have known because we turned it on and, you know, the rest of the house's lights dimmed. It was a bit scary. But there's a lot of stories to tell. Yeah. And one of my favorite was we baked. Well, it isn't baked. We assembled. Do you know about the dirt cake? Do I know about the dirt cake, my friend? Of course. I am from Michigan. So we, Dirt and Worms was like literally every one of my growing up, like I would say functions, birthday parties.

23:05I mean, Dirt Cake is definitely part of my life. Yeah. I should have known. Of course, being from Bermuda, you talk, I talked to, you know, my friends on the phone. They said, what are you talking about? Is that like the mud pies you used to make as a kid? I said, no. But yeah, it's, as you know, it's the, you know, layered puddings and cookie crumbs. Do you put gummies in it too? Oh, of course. Of course. Of course. You have to state it optionally because in modern times, people have their opinions. Sure, sure, sure. Although I don't think those people from the start would make a dirt cake. We call it dirt and worms, actually.

23:36Really? That's the way we call it. Yeah, dirt and worms. I like that one better almost. For some reason, I found that the state of Missouri seems to pen a lot of the dirt cake recipes. Yeah, totally. But my favorite, to circle back, one of my favorite was we rented this sort of haunted mansion in Kansas City. It was built in 1900 by a cattle baron. It was called the Byers Mansion. And it was, you know, it was the 1900s and it seemingly never left. And it was this big ornate parlor, you know, big huge sort of ornamentation and crown moldings. and here we were in this grand room and we were just making dirt cakes in individual servings and we shot that in this mansion.

24:26So here's this pretty like bureau and then a little in one of those fancy cocktail glasses from the 19 aughts is this dirt cake with a gummy worm hanging out. It was so great. So cool. Absurd. And I think there's fun in the absurd. Oh yeah, you really hemmed it up a lot in the photography. There's some absurdity. It has a point of view. I mean, you're in D.C. and you're out to the Watergate Hotel and you're wearing like Nixon T-shirts. What a fun photo shoot. I love that. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about some distinctly American ingredients. At the beginning of the book, you make a list.

25:03And one of them is graham crackers, which I love that you focus on it. The other is Jell-O, too. How did you think about these traditional American products and what are some recipes that maybe use them in a cool way? Graham crackers are one of my favorite things. You know, Graham flour back in the day, you know, Sylvester Graham, health reformist. He had the idea to make this special type of it's a whole wheat flour, but just the milling process is different. keeps a few more parts of that in the flour mix itself. And it lends itself to a very particularly old school flavor. And if you thumb through cookbooks from the 19 aughts and 1910s and 20s, they would call for graham flour almost as commonly as they would all-purpose or bleached.

25:58And that's what got me started on the path of, you know, what is this? Who's graham? It was Sylvester, of course. But graham crackers are very interesting because you see them so much in so many icebox pies in the U.S. I mean, even the key lime pie now, you know, it's required. A lot of the no-bake pies are required. You can buy them preassembled, and they're not elsewhere. In the U.K., there's none of this. Back home, there's none of this. So in Bermuda, I grew up with this because we get a lot of stuff from the United States. even though everything is in kilometers and degrees centigrade. But I needed to open Baking Across America because a lot of the recipes in my first cookbook called for these things.

26:50And I got responses from folks in the UK and Australia saying, Hi, I can't bake these. Do you have any replacements? So, of course, you think of the key lime pie with graham crackers and then jello. Now, here's a very interesting thing. Everywhere has unflavored gelatin crystals, but to have a pre-sweetened, stabilized gelatin mixture that serves as the base of almost the entirety of the 1960s and 1970s Midwestern no-bake cookery area, you can do so much with it. In baking yesteryear, there is a cake flavored primarily with Jell-O. Not only the cake itself, but the frosting. We called it the color vision cake.

27:41I remember that. Wonderful recipe. It's pink. And there's utility there. Jell-O was not made for buttercream frostings. But it stops it from sort of deteriorating in heat. It colors it and it flavors it. Now, this is devoid of whatever you think of its health benefits. It's buttercream frosting from the beginning. But it's a really cool idea. And I think only in America could someone take something completely intended for something different and shove it into baking. Yeah. I mean, you mine those community cookbooks and just like books from the mid-century and just see this innovation and you really respect it.