Benny Blanco Wants You to 'Open Wide'
06/05/2024 15:01
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Benny Blanco mentioning his height. "I'm five-foot-five on a good day," Blanco, an acclaimed music producer, begins in his debut cookbook,Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends. Published last week, the cookbook includes recipes for every occasion: pool parties, Thanksgiving, trying to get someone to sleep with you, the morning after. Should that not be a clear enough indication of whether Open Wide is for you, the second sentence of the cookbook will be: "I love eating, sex, music, and taking the perfect shit."
Open Wide is entertaining and unpretentious, though not necessarily accessible. Blanco lives in a $9.2 millionL.A. mansion, co-wrote Kesha's "TiK ToK," and is currently dating Selena Gomez. The book's first recipe is Blanco's favorite way to eat caviar (atop potato chips with crème fraîche and chives). The final recipe is titled Ed Sheeran's Fried Rolex, which is exactly what it sounds like: a tongue-in-cheek guide to breading and deep frying a $16,500 Rolex gifted to Blanco by Ed Sheeran. (Visual learners can watch a video tutorial of the process by Blanco and @cookingwithlynja.) The recipes in between swing from extreme decadence (e.g., a sea urchin "sex plate") to cookbook standards (e.g., Caesar salad, steak, macaroni and cheese) to the 3 a.m. ramblings of a frat pledge (such as a quesadilla cooked with a clothing iron). His pantry staples include Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust, yuzu koshu, saffron, and taco seasoning. One of his must-have kitchen tools is "bowls." There's a recipe that calls for "whole-ass cowfat titty milk" and another that requests "good olive oil." What remains consistent throughout the book is Blanco's appreciation of delicious food and his refusal to take it too seriously.
If you aren't familiar with Benny Blanco, yes, you are. He's been inescapable leading up to and amid the release of Open Wide. Perhaps you've seen him making salad with popular TikTok foodie @BakedByMelissa or drinking horchata on Instagram with @HalfBakedHarvest. Maybe you wondered why he's hanging out with Katie Couric or making Bloody Marys with Paris Hilton. On the day of his book launch, Blanco went on The Tonight Show and made Jimmy Fallon take a shot of olive oil. As Blanco also mentions in the book, it's a trick to prevent hangovers that he learned from his friend Nino and "these old guys from Italy." Cure-all or not, every Tonight Show guest should be allowed to make Jimmy Fallon take one cooking-fat shot of their choosing.
Blanco is best known as a music producer and songwriter. (Open Wide includes a party playlist in a brief chapter titled "music … the only section I'm actually qualified to talk about.") He's co-written and produced hit songs for Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Maroon 5, Rihanna, and Charlie Puth, to name a few. And, as the book's subtitle suggests, Blanco names more than a few of his famous friends and colleagues throughout the cookbook. The section on cocktails includes a note about a "half-naked Justin Bieber" singing in the bathroom at Odell Beckham Jr.'s birthday party. In the introduction to pool-party recipes, Blanco writes about the time his friend Dave, a.k.a rapper Lil Dicky, tried and failed to shoot his shot with Kendall Jenner. Also, Hailey Bieber was there. There's a vegan cinnamon-roll recipe from Maggie Baird, who is the mother of Billie Eilish and Finneas. There's mention of the pump-up trick Beyoncé once taught Blanco: "Smile widely and say to yourself in the calm, bright tone of a smooth operator: 'Ready!'" (This is under a section titled "weed" — cannabis is one of the book's central characters — and is written by Blanco's friend Ben Sinclair, an actor and co-creator of HBO's High Maintenance.) SZA loves Blanco's banana pudding, DJ Cashmere Cat thought his spanakopita was too salty, and Sia prefers to take a 45-minute nap in her SUV before attending any party. One name he doesn't mention? Girlfriend Selena Gomez. (Though Gomez has her own cooking show, the closest to a food-based collaboration we've gotten from the couple are a handful of Instagram posts about their sharedmeals.)
Aside from co-hosting a five-episode YouTube cooking show with chef Matty Matheson, Blanco's foodie persona has most recently been established by his (usually stoned) TikTok food reviews. In March, Blanco posted one of his most-viewed reviews to date: a taste test of Filipino fast-food chain Jollibee in which he said the adobo rice "tastes like butt" and the spaghetti "smelled like fuckin' vomit." He faced immediate backlash in his own comments section and posted a new, more positive Jollibee review the next day.
In Open Wide, Blanco isn't claiming to be an expert, often including stories and recipe ideas from friends who are professional chefs, have started food companies, or are otherwise well-versed in the food industry. Plus, Blanco's co-writer, Jess Damuck, is an expert. She has a best-selling cookbook of her own, Salad Freak, and a decade of experience working as a food stylist, editor, and producer for Martha Stewart.
I'm about as qualified to write a cookbook review as Benny Blanco is to write a cookbook, but I'd be remiss not to try the first recipe of the book: Chips and Caviar. Per Blanco's instructions, I got a little high, turned on his party playlist, and assembled my suspiciously affordable caviar, expensive crème fraîche, chives, and kettle chips. Whether it was the weed, my low bar for caviar, or Open Wide's persuasive enthusiasm for food, Blanco is right; this dish absolutely fucks.
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