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Makenna Held cooking in the kitchen at La Peetch. Photo by Leslie Choucard.

“I was always told not to go into the food world,” says RecipeKick CEO, Courageous Cooking® Method visionary, and Mostly French: Recipes from a Kitchen in Provence author Makenna Held.

Growing up in a family that was deeply connected to the corporate food and beverage world, the prevailing attitude was always to steer clear of a career in food. This is because, Makenna explains, “it’s one of those industries where it can go horribly great or horribly wrong, and there’s frequently not much in between.”

With this in mind, Makenna kept the culinary sphere as a hobby rather than a vocation, especially because she didn’t want to monetize something she’s passionate about simply for the sake of monetizing it. “You can enjoy food without working in food,” Makenna asserts. “I had many opportunities to work in food, and every time something would come up, I would say no. And so, it was kind of happenstance, honestly, getting into food.”

When La Pitchoune (or “La Peetch”), Julia Child’s former vacation home in the south of France, went on the market in 2015, “it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up,” Makenna recalls. The legacy of the property, paired with Makenna’s extensive passion for food and cooking, seemed to be a fortuitous match. And while it certainly wasn’t an “easy” first foray into the culinary sphere from a career standpoint, Makenna reflects, “It was a beautiful way to get into food.”

Determining the path forward

In taking this leap of faith, Makenna realized that her prior work experiences coincided with the hospitality field. Rather than strictly related to food and lodging, she describes the broader realm of hospitality as all about how you make someone feel throughout an experience. This was the industry to which Makenna was drawn, operating retreats and working as a ski instructor, which she notes is “as much about hospitality – because people are on vacation – as it is about actually teaching people to ski.”

Once La Peetch was at her fingertips, though, she was quickly launched into the food-centric side of hospitality. “It was one of those things I couldn’t evade forever,” Makenna laughs. “My entire world is now food.”

But how was she planning to use this historic and notable space? Makenna describes her realization as transpiring in just a matter of seconds. She couldn’t teach other people’s recipes, and she was not yet developing her own, so there was only one viable way forward: teaching recipe-free.

Developing the recipe-free approach

“All the dots kind of connected, and a lot of that had to do with being aware of how food systems work and being aware of the way in which recipes are a snapshot of a time,” says Makenna. “They’re historical records of how one cooked when, right? When we’re looking at Julia’s books, that’s how people cooked French food in the 1950s into the 1980s and still today, but there are a lot more efficient, more modern ways of cooking, and cooking French food, and to me that was really important to capture, but I was in no place to cook my own recipes. I wasn’t developing like I am now.”

Makenna was thinking about how to communicate deliciousness in non-scientific, non-cheffy ways to people trying to cook at home. She was not the only one pondering this topic at the time. Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat was released in 2017 and remains a wildly successful consideration of this question on Makenna’s mind: “how can we explain cooking in new ways?”

This is an especially important query when the approaches we learn early on can become ingrained in us. But “courageous cooking” as a mindset is not anti-recipe, nor does it require an entire overhaul of your behavior; rather, Makenna describes it as the “calculus” of cooking, bringing in more complexity and variables but not discrediting any other approach. It’s a method of cooking that can allow you to read recipes better while even being able to devise and perfect recipes of your own.

Starting a school & teaching the fundamental framework

Makenna’s initial venture, the Courageous Cooking School, was named with Julia Child in mind. The hat tip comes from a moment when Child was flipping a potato dish in a pan and explained, “When you flip anything, you really, you just have to have the courage of your convictions.” Immediately after, she flipped the potato and it crumbled, some of it going onto her stovetop. 

Makenna strived to recognize Child’s impact and legacy while also paving the way for her own unique exploration of cooking. “I wanted something that had my moment of connecting to Julia, but I wanted it to be very much my own,” Makenna notes. “I didn’t want it to be devoid of her historical importance in the house.”

From here, they had to test the idea of recipe-free cooking to ensure it was not just a gimmick, but a viable pedagogical approach. The Courageous Cooking School initially opened in 2017 and ran until 2019, after which it went on pause for a year and a half because of the pandemic.

As educators, Makenna and her husband Chris Nylund then had the unique opportunity to revisit their material, including their lecture notes and teachings, to determine their core pedagogy and better understand how to connect with the average learner through their curriculum. 

They had an extensive sample size to look back on – over 70 weeks of teaching with six guests a week – and after re-immersing themselves in the content, they launched their new teaching approach on their television show, La Pitchoune: Cooking in France (2022). “It was the first time we brought it outside of our heads and to clients,” Makenna recalls. “We got there the way any educator gets there.”

In Makenna’s mind, creating a framework, instead of aiming for the “solution” to effective cooking, achieves what a recipe alone cannot. She admits, “I think [recipes] fell flat [to me] because they’re geared towards a common denominator rather than you or me.” With this in mind, they made a “creative, iterative process from the get-go,” rather than a process of replicating what you see in the hopes of acquiring the skills yourself.

The next generation of the Courageous Cooking Method

From a business perspective, the in-person class format was difficult to sustain. Makenna underscores that having a classroom experience is imperative: having at least four people, and ideally six to seven, attending the school at a time facilitates a more dynamic atmosphere, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking, different flavor combinations, and the ability to bounce ideas off of others.

However, because people’s plans change and cancellations occur, this depth of experience was difficult to ensure, necessitating a shift away from La Peetch as a school. With the goal of reaching as many people as possible and increasing access to the recipe-free mindset, RecipeKick was born.

This platform makes the Courageous Cooking experience a broader methodology. While the program is still in its infancy, Makenna explains that it began with RecipeKick Adventures – physical travel excursions that focus on the fun of the cooking experience – and the online school, through which you can walk through a dish with one of the platform’s talented chefs or “a very adept home cook,” as Makenna calls herself. 

All live classes are free, and it costs just $5 a month to access all recordings.

  Going far beyond a step-by-step approach, RecipeKick lessons teach you how to look for, smell, taste, and feel different qualities in a dish and how to adjust depending on the intricacies and quirks of your ingredients, appliances, and more. “You’re really watching someone explore a dish and explain their thinking out loud. And I think that one of the hardest things about cooking is that no one is explaining their thought process to you, even when they’re teaching,” Makenna points out. “If you know what you’re looking for, then you can adjust and get better.”

This evolution beyond step-by-step thinking doesn’t fully dismiss recipes either; rather, the platform bridges the gap between recipe-free cooking and recipes themselves. “It’s both your sidekick to recipes and [your permission] to kick recipes to the curb when you’re ready,” says Makenna. “But I love cookbooks. I want to keep writing them. I don’t think you lose recipes when you introduce recipe-free cooking. I think what you gain is a better understanding of why a recipe works.”

Makenna also illustrates that a recipe-free perspective in the kitchen can have positive effects beyond the kitchen. “It unlocks all sorts of benefits to you as a person, to your brain, to your health outcomes, to how long you spend shopping, the fact that you can shop more locally, spending less time seeking out recipes,” she outlines. 

And once you acquire this way of thinking, you can apply it to your business models, leadership approach, relationships, and family dynamics … the list goes on. “Every time we can unlock something in our brains and create a little bit of space, we create space for difference. We create space for Other. We create space for acceptance of diversity, diversities of cuisine, diversities of thought, and that’s really important.”

Cooking better for people, paychecks, the environment, and more

Makenna shares that when she herself was learning to cook, she wasn’t sure where to begin when it came to cooking without a recipe, or coming up with a dish based around a cool piece of produce she found at the farmers market. “Then I had to find a recipe. But then I’d often end up going to another grocery store to finish the recipe,” she admits. “The amount of time and mental energy that requires takes the creativity and joy out of the process.”

Another goal of RecipeKick, then, is connecting people to recipes. Makenna notes that this is all the more important when physical cookbooks and digital recipes alike can easily go forgotten amidst “the realities of cooking in the real world, which is shopping, prepping, planning, reading cookbooks, looking up meal plans.” 

The idea is to bridge the gap between recipe-free cooking and recipes, while also connecting the planning process to cook a meal with the act of cooking itself. Makenna calculates that households in the United States spend a total of 190 billion hours cooking each year, and amidst this labor, she emphasizes that 31% of our grocery carts, on average, are thrown away. Thus, the food system’s carbon footprint is intrinsically connected to the often-laborious task of cooking. “And if you’re not doing that labor,” Makenna observes, “someone else is doing that labor in a low-paid way.”

Supporting people with the tools and methods to cook in a more enjoyable way, while also creating less waste, is what RecipeKick strives to accomplish. Makenna considers, “How can we lower that labor but still be cooking? How do we make cookbooks and recipes, and all of the labor that people are doing making delicious recipes, findable? And how do we create an ecosystem that allows us to actually cook in a way that’s exciting and joy producing, rather than feeling like labor?”

Envisioning & writing Mostly French

These same ideals apply to Makenna’s new cookbook, Mostly French: Recipes from a Kitchen in Provence. The book was created with the aim of conveying a distinctly French feeling, without the “stodgy” associations, while showing that food is always in evolution. To Makenna, there is no one correct way to make a dish or accomplish a flavor profile, and Mostly French reflects her belief in the dynamic coexistence of cookbooks and a recipe-free approach. 

“I love developing recipes,” Makenna exclaims. “For me, it was a way to show that we can have fun recipes that are French. Hence the title, right? It’s French-adjacent. It’s mostly French.”

All of the recipes in the book were developed directly from French markets and grocery stores, and each technique stems from a French mindset. “The recipe becomes a study in moving away from classic recipes. And that was important to me.”

Through all of Makenna’s work, she makes clear that there’s an opportunity to reimagine what the cooking process looks like for the better. And to elegantly streamline this typically daunting undertaking is Makenna’s vision. In an ideal world, “I can go to a place where I can buy the things that are beautiful to me. I can take them home and there are tools to help me turn them into something delicious,” she muses. 

Makenna seeks to share the joy and efficiency she’s developed by learning this skill set with as many people as possible. “What I love about cooking and what I love about recipe developing is that I can create these beautiful things, and they are flashes in the pan. They aren’t really repeatable unless it’s the season again,” she asserts. “What I want people to have access to is that magic, no matter where they live and no matter what produce they have access to.”

Mostly French: Recipes from a Kitchen in Provence is out now and available to purchase! To get your own copy, please visit makennaheld.com. If you’d like to see Makenna on tour, you can find more information at makennaheld.com/tour. If you’re interested in learning more about RecipeKick, please go to recipekick.tv. To support Makenna and stay updated, follow her on Instagram @makennaheld.