The recipe Brooke Baevsky has been making since she was seven years old, a carrot and potato cheese sauce built around nutritional yeast, is a staple on the plates of Adam Sandler’s children. It has also landed on the plate of Mindy Kaling’s daughter. 

Brooke, known professionally as Chef Bae, operates across five simultaneous roles: celebrity private chef; YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok creator with more than 1.5 million followers across platforms; product collaborator; cookbook author; and nonprofit founder running food equity programs across Los Angeles and New York. She coordinates all of it through In The Kitchen With Chef Bae LLC, and she returns to the same answer when the question is which part is the real business.

“At the end of the day, I’m a professional chef, and I’m a professional recipe developer,” she says. “Whether I do that for celebrity clients or for brands developing products.”

Nine Allergies and a Business Degree as a Cover

Growing up, Brooke’s household carried nine food allergies spread across five people. Her younger brother was allergic to dairy, nuts, legumes, and more. The products available at the time were what she describes without affection as “Tofuti ice cream sandwiches and rubber dairy-free Amy’s mac and cheese.” She started cooking to fill the gap, and from that came the carrot-and-potato mac and cheese that still lands on celebrity children’s plates today.

“I saw this need in this niche really early on,” Brooke says. She looked for food that everyone could eat … and also want to eat. The industry was not making it.

The drive to fix that has extended beyond private kitchens. For more than a decade, Brooke has run nonprofit cooking programs for children and families in New York and Los Angeles, building hydroponic gardens in underserved schools and instructing after-school classes for families on food stamps. During one session at the Henry Street Settlement in New York, a young girl approached her after class to say she had made the veggie lasagna at home. The girl was calling it “my Paris Hilton lasagna.” 

“When it comes to adults, it’s much more challenging to change their dietary and lifestyle habits,” Brooke says. “But that next generation of kids, if they’re so inspired, what inspires them to eat healthy is when their heroes and the people they look up to eat that way.”

Her parents steered her toward business school over a culinary program. She earned dual degrees from Syracuse University, studying Advertising, Product Development, and Retail Management with a Food Science Focus. “Study every single interest, do it all, because you never know when it’s going to come back,” she says. “What I’m doing now wasn’t even a career until after I graduated college.”

A BuzzFeed Experiment and a Future Worth Chasing

The moment that clarified her direction came during her senior year at Syracuse, when a BuzzFeed intern visited the Newhouse School of Communications with a pitch for short-form, hands-in-frame food videos. What would become BuzzFeed Tasty was, in that classroom, still just a student experiment.

“Light bulbs went off in my head,” Brooke says. “I’m like, ‘This is going to be my career. This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

BuzzFeed told her there was no budget to hire her. She spent the following years building the technical foundation she would need: corporate food product development at Macy’s, allergen-friendly and keto meal kit work at Freshly, and the chef team at Nestlé after Freshly was acquired. A health-supportive culinary arts program followed, specifically chosen because traditional culinary curricula devoted just one class to nutrition. For Brooke, the corporate years were not wasted time. They were architecture.

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What No Other Chef Is Posting

The private cheffing side of Brooke’s business occupies a specific space. She posts content from inside celebrity clients’ kitchens, without NDAs, documenting the actual work: dietary constraints, grocery logistics, the custom supplement protocols she builds from bloodwork, hormone panels, and DNA analyses.

“No one does this online,” Brooke says. She describes a gap she has built a business around: most celebrity households employ a nutritionist and a chef who operate independently. “They don’t speak to each other,” she says. “I bridge that gap.”

What Separates a Product Line From a One-Post Launch

The difference between Brooke’s product collaborations and a standard creator-branded food drop, she argues, is the depth of commitment before a single piece of content goes out. Her collaboration with Levain Bakery on a gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free cinnamon roll muffin involved months of formulation and commercial scaling work. She had to ensure the gluten-free batter could be prepped overnight without going gummy, then baked from scratch at scale in under 20 minutes in a commercial oven.

“I don’t just want to be a content creator or an influencer that stamps their name on a product,” she says. Brooke says the muffin sold 4,000 units in its first 36 hours of national launch. In Chicago, four batches sold out before noon. She was calling the location herself.

Not every launch has gone that cleanly. An early jumpsuit line included a style that went to production before she approved the final sample. Returns were immediate. “I should have just not even launched it,” she says. “You learn.”

What makes collaborations last, she argues, is genuine investment from both sides. “It really is a collaborative effort,” she says. “We both put so much energy and effort into it that it’s never just putting my name on something and calling it a day.”

Long Form for What Reels Miss

Brooke runs distinct strategies across platforms. Instagram carries carousels, lifestyle photography, and polished highlight-reel clips. TikTok operates differently. “It can be a little bit more unhinged,” she says. “There are fewer rules there.” 

YouTube is where the full story gets told. She produces 10-to-30-minute episodes documenting the actual scope of private cheffing, the kind of material that no 60-second reel has room to carry.

Her cookbook, “It’s Basically A Salad,” forthcoming from Union Square & Co. in fall 2027, extends the same logic into print. “I want it to almost be like a coffee table book,” she says. “I want it to resemble an early 2000’s gossip magazine, as ‘The Chef of Hollywood.’ I’m so excited to be a published author. There is something special about having your recipes physically in kitchens around the world.”

Helping a Community in Need

In January 2025, when the Los Angeles wildfires displaced thousands and overwhelmed frontline workers, Brooke pivoted from celebrity kitchens to emergency food production. Working 20-hour days in partnership with Holy Smokes Kosher Barbecue, she organized the preparation and delivery of more than 2,000 high-protein meals per day for first responders. She raised $260,000 in one week. The funding came in part from the same clients whose kitchens she cooks in.

“What matters is being there for your community when they’re in need,” she says.

Fire departments and police stations could not legally accept anonymous food drop-offs. Her commercially sealed, nutritionally complete meals got through where ad-hoc donations could not. “They’re risking their lives fighting the front lines,” she says. “They need nutritious meals.”

The next chapter is open. TV projects and new product launches are in development. The cookbook arrives in fall 2027. Her food equity programs continue alongside everything else. “I love being on camera as much as I love cooking,” she says. “My life needs to be a show.”

Five years out, she expects no single identity to take precedence.

“All of the above,” she says. “All of the above. In five years, I’ll be a household name.”

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