The Colorado star of Half Baked Harvest inspires loyalty — and controversy

SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — Tieghan Gerard was busy lighting pumpkin spice-scented candles when I arrived at her sunlit studio in October. After more than a year of negotiations with the representatives who guard her schedule and her image, she’d agreed to cook two recipes I’d chosen from the thousands on her immensely popular recipe site, Half Baked Harvest.

Small, soft-spoken and eager to please, she welcomed me warmly, but the coq au vin blanc meatballs and coffee-frosted pumpkin spice cake were not to be. “That cake takes two days to make,” she said.

Instead, her staple white chicken chili simmered in a pumpkin-shaped Dutch oven. She sliced apples and toasted pumpkin seeds for her fall harvest salad before moving on to her favorite part of the process: arranging the shot. She tucked and pulled the greens, fanned out the apples so they looked plush and dotted the shiny seeds on top.

“I’ve always been about the visuals,” she said of her recipe-development process. “I work backward from how I want it to look.”

Since 2012, Gerard has published a new recipe on Half Baked Harvest nearly every day, each illustrated by dozens of photos and videos that she shoots here in the hilltop compound where she also lives. This fire hose of new content keeps her followers — 5.4 million on Instagram alone — well-fed and loyal. Celebrities like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Emma Roberts and Blake Lively extended her reach during the pandemic, with posts about cooking her recipes at home.

From the beginning, her recipes — many of them cheesy, crispy, creamy or a combination — hit a sweet spot between approachable and aspirational. She burrowed into it, thanking and responding to fans around the clock.

“I feel like I grew up with her,” said Tina Nowak, 34, who said she often uses all three Half Baked Harvest cookbooks in her kitchen outside Chicago.

But Gerard has also become an unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism.

Half Baked Harvest began as a chronicle of the big family dinners Gerard cooked for her parents, brothers and sisters — her seven siblings range in age from 3 to 38. Her intense productivity, paired with lifelong anxieties that have kept her near family, helped her build one of the food world’s most consistently successful platforms.

“I love the work, and I have to be creative,” because she spends so much of her life at home, she said.

Eleven years later, much remains the same for Gerard, who turned 30 in September. She has lived here since she was 14, apart from a brief attempt at fashion school in Los Angeles that was cut short by homesickness. Her mother, Jen, 57, still runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest from her house a few hundred yards up the hill. She still doesn’t like to drive, and she hasn’t traveled outside North America except to watch her brother, snowboarder Red Gerard, win a gold medal at the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

And Gerard’s recipes are still essential cooking for thousands of women living between America’s coasts, including her 700,000 daily email subscribers and the more than 2 million readers of her cookbooks. The 25- to 44-year-old women who make up her core demographic are still fiercely loyal; she said that 60% of subscribers open her newsletter every day, a stunningly high number.

But just as much has changed. Gerard, who is white, has long been called out for mispronouncing dishes from other cultures and misidentifying her creations, like calling tacos with pineapple “Hawaiian” and noodles with honey and peanut butter “Chinese.”

But the objections have intensified since 2021, when she posted a recipe for “pho” that was wildly unrelated to the Vietnamese dish, and many longtime fans spoke out about her pattern of disrespecting foods from nonwhite cultures. She apologized, promising to “do more research.”

When it happened again last March, this time with a “banh mi rice bowl,” the pushback was so strong that it was covered by NBC News. Gerard apologized again. (Both recipes remain on the site, with tweaked titles.)