For some foodies, the path to their career happens in a roundabout way. That’s defiantly the case for Molly Yeh, the cookbook author who has parlayed her love of food and cooking to amass a fortune. As of 2023, Molly Yeh has a net worth of $9 million.
Early Life
Molly Yeh was born in 1989 in Glenview, Ohio, which is a suburb of Chicago. She definitely had an interesting parental mix, as Yeh is of Jewish and Chinese descent.
Yeh grew up with artistic inclinations. She attended the Midwest Young Artists Conservatory, and Yeh was a member of two percussion ensembles. Molly also won two gold medals in the junior division of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
But banging on pots and pans would eventually win out over banging on a variety of drums and other percussive instruments. Yeh moved to New York to attend Julliard, and while she did earn a bachelor’s in music, she began to fall in love with food.
She started out simply enough, creating a blog so she could share her recipes, and this turned out to be the start of her career in the world of food.
Food on the Farm
While New York might have seemed like the perfect place to start a food-based career, life had other plans for Yeh. In 2013 she left Brooklyn to head to the Upper Midwest with her fiancé, a fifth-generation sugar beet farmer who could trace his ancestry back to Norway.
But Yeh’s interest in food stayed strong, and after several years of adding farm-based ingredients to her recipes, she published her first cookbook, “Molly on the Range: Recipes and Stories from an Unlikely Life on a Farm.”
The success of the book seemed equally unlikely, but in 2016 the book won the International Associates of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award.
That earned Yeh a spot hosting a show on the Food Network, where she proved to be much more than attractive eye candy with a few intriguing recipes.
Her series, “Girl Meets Farm,” has been running successfully for nine seasons now, and Yeh’s passion for all things food remains strong, bolstered by her charming, engaging approach.
Yeh also maintained an interest in music, and in 2018 she brought that back into her life, hosting a show called “From the Top,” which showcases the work of young classical musicians.
The show had a great reputation as a talent showcase before Yeh began hosting, and she’d continued it with her work as a podcast host.
Private Life
Despite all the unusual twists and turns, her life has taken – or perhaps because of them – Yeh’s marriage to her husband Nick Hagen has stood the test of time.
Hagen was also a music major at Julliard, and the couple has two daughters, Ira Dorothy and Bernadette Rosemary, who were born in 2019 and 2022, respectively. The couple still maintains their farm on the North Dakota/Minnesota border, although Yeh’s duties as a TV host have her traveling frequently as well.
