How a Utah cookbook author built a big online community, and won the Oscar of the food world

Carolina Gelen looks into her cameraphone with a timid smile, holding a cocktail glass in each hand, which she fills with a pink concoction that she calls the “truly perfect summer dessert.”

In the video posted July 7 on Instagram, Gelen — wearing a linen shirt with peach-colored stripes, her wavy brown hair falling to her shoulders — tells her followers that in Romania, her native country, the dessert is called “spuma” (Romanian for “foam”), but she renamed it “raspberry mousse.” The dessert made with fresh raspberries, sugar and egg whites “comes together in just five minutes,” she says, adding that her mother used to make it all summer long for Gelen and her friends.

It’s one of many recipes, inspired by her childhood and her mother’s cooking, that Gelen features on her social media platforms. She has perfected recipes in her Utah kitchen and compiled them in her first cookbook, “Pass the Plate.” The book, published last September, recently won Gelen the prestigious James Beard Award, sometimes called the Oscar of the food world.

For Gelen — a wildly popular blogger and viral food influencer with a community of more than 2 million followers across platforms — publishing the book is “a dream I never dared to dream.”

Gelen’s cooking journey began as a young girl, when her mother let her assist in the kitchen. It’s where she started developing her love of food, and the joy of deconstructing and reshaping traditional Eastern European recipes to make them accessible to home cooks in America.

“We used to make this pie, and if you look at it, it looks like a spanakopita — but in Romania we have a cheesier version of it and we used to make our own pastry, which is very difficult to make because it’s very thin,” Gelen said. “It would be like a whole day’s process, because you would have to rest the dough, which was very fussy to work with. … It would be so rewarding to eat the pastry that you made.”

When Gelen moved to Park City eight years ago, she said she started working at resorts and restaurants, sometimes working 90 hours a week — an experience, she said, that “deepened” her love for cooking. She also started posting her recipes on Instagram, and that’s when her career took off.

Food as a bridge between countries

Gelen was born in Transylvania, and like many people from that area, she shares both Romanian and Hungarian heritage. Blending the two, she said, is not difficult because the food is similar in both countries.

In her recipes, Gelen skillfully combines those Eastern European influences, making them accessible for her community of social media followers.

“I always say this joke: in Romania you would take three days off to make a cake for someone’s birthday, because there are so many layers to bake and so many fillings,” Gelen said. “A lot of Eastern European foods, especially desserts, require a lot of labor.”

She added: “Using certain short cuts really manages to capture the essence of the desert while making it more approachable and easier for people to recreate at home.”

One example of a recipe Gelen modified for her book is “Cremes,” a popular dessert in both Hungarian and Romanian cultures. In those countries, baking the pastry layer to perfection is time-consuming. So she eliminated that step, opting for store-bought puff pastry.

For the filling, a vanilla custard, she said, “all it requires is making it in a pot with milk, eggs, sugar and vanilla. It actually comes together very easily, and you have a very delicious desert with not so much labor.”

Another streamlined recipe is Gelen’s take on a traditional Romanian dish: Cabbage rolls.

In Romania, particularly around Christmas and New Year’s Eve, women will spend days rolling hundreds of cabbage leaves, filling them with a mix of meat and rice, and placing them neatly into big pots — which then cook in the oven or on the stove top.

Rolling the cabbage rolls “takes so much time,” Gelen said. So, to give her followers the experience of the flavors and aromas of cabbage rolls without getting discouraged by the labor involved, she did what next-generation home cooks in Eastern Europe might do: She took out the rolling.

“I was able to capture the flavor of the cabbage rolls while layering them, like you would layer lasagna,” Gelen said. “You have layers of the meat mixture, a tomato sauce for them to simmer in, and the cabbage. You bake them together and everything cooks really well.”

Testing and retesting recipes

Conceiving a recipe, she said, is only the first step. There’s also a lot of testing and retesting — and when she’s satisfied with the result, she passes a recipe on to another cook to test it again.

“I make it enough times until I make sure that it works, to tweak it and adjust things,” Gelen said. “Sometimes a pastry needs more sugar, so then I’ll test it again with more sugar. Once I land on a version that I like, then I test that and make it multiple times to make sure it works out every time. Once I have my final version that is tested by me, it also gets tested by someone else.”

Having a second cook retest the recipes sometimes results in minor changes, she said. She might need to add an instruction, or remove an unnecessary step.

Working on the book, Gelen also traveled to New York, to work with a team of photographers to create the images to accompany each recipe.

“It was very interesting to watch the whole book come to life, and it was very rewarding seeing everyone on the photo team just enjoy the recipes in real life,” Gelen said. “I was also able to get one more round of feedback from them.”

The chocolate cake recipe in the book took between 12 and 15 tests, Gelen said, before she was happy with the texture and the “certain feel” she wanted the dessert to have.

Now, she’s developing a banana muffin recipe, “and I am at my fifth tests right now,” she said. “I am still not happy with them.”

Because Gelen lives in Utah, her recipes reflect the state’s altitude. For some recipes, especially for soups and egg dishes, there are differences in cooking times between Utah and states at lower altitudes.

“We — me and the tester who was at sea level — would have to adjust our times,” Gelen said. “I think that made the recipes better.”

Gelen cooks nearly every day, she said, so there are certain staples always present in her kitchen.

“Salt is very important in every recipe, and black pepper is a huge spice for me,” Gelen said. “It has a more significant role in some recipes, like in a lemon-pepper roasted chicken.”

Other ingredients Gelen keeps on hand are olive oil and garlic. She also said she uses a lot of paprika in her cooking, and a good-quality paprika is a must in any kitchen.

Gelen also discourages people from buying in bulk, and encourages them to work with what they have before adding more groceries to their pantries.

Finding treasures in thrift stores

Gelen said she grew up poor during the early years of Romania’s democracy.

“We were not able to afford a winter jacket from a store, so thrifting was a huge part of my life,” Gelen said. “It was something I learned to enjoy, but I also learned to conceal it from my classmates so they don’t make fun of me.”

Gelen said she developed her shopping skills in thrift stores. Shopping in regular clothing stores often is “overwhelming,” she said. Now, when she runs errands in the city, she said, she will Google the locations of thrift stores; her favorites are Savers, Goodwill and Deseret Industries.

“Thrifting is how I was able to get the kitchen items that I needed when I moved here,” Gelen said. “You have so much stuff in these thrift stores that it’s easy to find things that you need for your kitchen.”

Recently, Gelen said she found an ice cream bowl attachment for her KitchenAid mixer — which retails for $79.99 — for only $16. Ice cream is the one food Gelen said she cannot live without, and the attachment will help her level up her ice cream game.

She shares her thrifting with her followers, with a series of Instagram stories, “Sunday Thrift.”

“I take viewers with me to thrift stores, and I have a poll on each item if I should thrift it or if I should pass on it,” she said. “I recently left a jacket I posted a photo of … everyone on Instagram said to go back.” Once voting closes, she goes back a few days later and buys the winning items.

Sustainability is a huge part of why she thrifts, and she also considers affordability. She calls thrifting an intentional way of shopping, but it is also what she does in her “downtime” to relax.

“It’s just something in the journey of searching for items and looking at what people are donating and just being in the thrift store that feels recharging,” Gelen said. “So many of the items that you can find in a thrift store are of such better quality, too, so they last you for a much longer time.”

Making connections, winning an award

A day after posting her raspberry mousse recipe on Instagram, the recipe had received nearly 8,000 likes, had been shared more than 1,000 times, and her followers had written hundreds of comments.

Gelen said her success comes not only from her constant work to simplify recipes, but also from how she interacts with her online community. People send her pictures of food they make following her recipes, or they ask for advice — and she strives to answer everyone.

“Someone sent me a picture of some dumplings and asked me if the batter looked good or if they should add more flour,” Gelen said. “It’s very nice to connect with them in the comments, even if it’s just them sending me a photo of what they made.”

Gelen said she was thrilled to be nominated for the James Beard Award, but she didn’t think “Pass the Plate” would win. The general cookbook category, she said, “is very hard to break through.” One of the nominees in her category was Matty Matheson, the Canadian restaurateur who co-stars on FX’s “The Bear.”

On the day of the ceremony, Gelen wore a black off-the-shoulder cocktail dress that she bought at a thrift store for $13. She said she was excited to be in the same room with talented cooks she admires. On the ride to the ceremony, Gelen started writing an acceptance speech, just in case she won, on the back of her event ticket.

When she heard “Pass the Plate” announced as the winner, she said, “I got very emotional. I wish I was more calm, cool and collected, but the nerves really got the best of me. … I got on stage and I thanked everyone who made the book possible and who helped bring it to life, including my parents, who were watching the livestream.” When she ended her speech, Padma Lakshmi, the former host of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” put the Beard medal around her neck.

It was 2 a.m. in Romania, and Gelen’s parents stayed up to watch their daughter win.

“They were very sweet,” Gelen said. “Very proud and happy for me. I called them and we talked and then we hung up the phone. I got a call back five minutes later and they were like, ‘Thank you so much for mentioning us in your speech.’”

Gelen’s next career step, she said, is focusing on making her Substack page “a little bit more defined, more consistent and more focused.” She also said she would love to write another cookbook, because she enjoyed both the production process and meeting people from her online community in person.

“It’s just amazing how food can bring so many people together, people that might not even know each other,” Gelen said. “How we’re just in a room together for the love of food, which I think is very special.”

Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.