Sara Moulton,
Chef, Cookbook Author, Television Personality
One of the hardest-working women in the food biz, Sara Moulton has been juggling multiple jobs – as well as a full family life — for her entire career. Admired by millions as the host of Cooking Live, Cooking Live Primetime, and Sara’s Secrets, Sara was one of the Food Network’s defining personalities during the outlet’s first decade. In addition to her work on the Food Network, Sara was the Executive Chef of Gourmet Magazine for twenty-three years — right up until its closing in October 2009.
Sara is the author of Sara Moulton Cooks at Home (Broadway Books, 2002) and Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals (Broadway Books, 2005), which served as the basis for “Sara’s Weeknight Meals,” a series on public television that launched in 2008. Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners will be published by Simon & Schuster in April of this year. She is also the Food Editor of ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.”
Ask Sara how it all began and she will tell you, “I’ve always liked to eat.” The idea of channeling this deep affection into a career, however, didn’t occur to her until after she graduated from the University of Michigan with a major in the History of Ideas in 1974. And, indeed, it was at the Culinary Institute of America that Sara found herself.
She graduated with highest honors in 1977 and commenced working in restaurants immediately, first in Boston and then in New York, taking off time only to apply herself to a postgraduate apprenticeship with a master chef in Chartres, France in 1979. Sara’s restaurant experience peaked with a stint as chef tournant at La Tulipe in New York in the early Eighties. It was also during this period that Sara co-founded the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance, an “old girl’s network” designed to help women working in the culinary field. The Alliance celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007.
In the interest of starting a family, Sara left restaurant work to pursue recipe testing and development. She was an instructor for two years at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now known as the Institute of Culinary Education), where she discovered her love of teaching, a passion that would give focus to her subsequent work in television. In 1984 Sara took a job in the test kitchen at Gourmet. Four years later she became chef of the magazine’s executive dining room.
Sara’s TV career began in 1979, when she was hired to work behind the scenes on public television’s “Julia Child & More Company.” Her friendship with Julia led eventually to Sara’s gig at “GMA,” where what started as another behind-the-scenes position ripened by 1997 into on-camera work. By then Sara had begun hosting the Food Network’s “Cooking Live.” Six years and over 1200 hour-long shows later, “Cooking Live” ended its run on March 31, 2002. “Sara’s Secrets” began the next day. “Other TV chefs may own famous restaurants and perform with theatrical flair,” noted TV Guide’s Herma Rosenthal, “But Moulton’s the one you can actually picture popping over to help you fix the lumpy gravy or the fallen soufflé.” Sara has several new television projects in development and is currently raising money for the second round of her public television series
Her new cookbook, Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners, features 200 new recipes for over-scheduled home cooks who want to treat the family to something new without breaking the bank or spending hours in the kitchen. “Broadly,” she says, “this book is a compendium of strategies to wriggle free of the strait jacket that stipulates starch/vegetable/protein at every meal.”
Sara lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
