| Born | February 19, 1952 New York City, New York, United States |
|---|---|
| Education | • University of Michigan (1974) • Culinary Institute of America (1977) |
| Spouse | Bill Adler |
| Official website | |
| saramoulton.com | |
Sara Moulton (born February 19,[1] 1952) is an American chef, cookbook author and television personality.
She is a food editor for Good Morning America, a morning news-and-talk show broadcast on the ABC television network. For twenty years, she was the chef of the executive dining room at Gourmet until the magazine's publisher, Condé Nast Publications, announced on October 5, 2009, that the magazine was ceasing publication.
Since 2008, Moulton is the host of Sara's Weeknight Meals, a cooking show on PBS, a public-television network.
Between 1996 and 2005, she hosted Cooking Live (1997–2003), Cooking Live Primetime (1999) and Sara's Secrets (2002–2005) cooking shows on the Food Network, becoming one of the original stars of that cable- and satellite-television channel during its first decade.
Moulton is the author of several cookbooks and videos including Sara Moulton Cooks at Home (2002), Sara's Secrets for Weeknight Meals (2005) and Sara Moulton's Everyday Family Dinners (2010).
She was one of the founders, in 1982, of the New York Women's Culinary Alliance.
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Moulton was born in New York City, New York, and attended The Brearley School in New York City's Manhattan borough.
The idea of channeling her childhood passion for food into a career did not occur to Moulton until after she graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan,[2] with a major in the history of ideas in 1974.
Moulton enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York[3] in 1975 and graduated with highest honors in 1977, winning a scholarship from Les Dames D'Escoffier in the process.
She began working in restaurants immediately, first in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in New York City, taking off time only for a postgraduate apprenticeship with Master Chef Maurice Cazalis of the Henri IV Restaurant in Chartres, France, in 1979. She also served as a chef tournant at La Tulipe, a restaurant in New York City in the early 1980s.
In 1982, Moulton co-founded the New York Women's Culinary Alliance,[4] a still-functioning "old girl's network" designed to help women working in the culinary field.
In the interest of starting a family, she left restaurant work and began devoting herself instead to recipe testing and development. Moulton worked for two years as an instructor at Peter Kump's New York Cooking School (now known as the Institute of Culinary Education), where she discovered her love of teaching.
In 1984, she took a job in the test kitchen at Gourmet.[5] Four years later she became chef of the magazine's executive dining room.
Moulton's television career began in 1979, when she was hired to work behind the scenes on Julia Child & More Company, a cooking program on PBS. Her friendship with Julia Child led eventually to Moulton's job at Good Morning America,[6] where what started as another behind-the-scenes position ripened in 1997 into on-camera work.
By then she had begun hosting the Food Network's Cooking Live. Six years and over 1,200 hour-long shows later, that show ended on March 31, 2002.[7] Sara's Secrets began the next day which ran for five years from 2002 until 2007.[8] "Other TV chefs may own famous restaurants and perform with theatrical flair," said 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."[9]
The second season of "Sara's Weeknight Meals" began airing on public television in October 2011.
Her first cookbook, Sara Moulton Cooks at Home, was published by Broadway Books in October 2002[10] and was meant to counter America's disastrous love affair with fast food by encouraging everyone to cook delicious and healthy food at home and to dine with family and friends.[11] "While rooted in classic French technique, the book also accommodates the American hunger for convenience, novelty and freshness," wrote Mike Dunne for The Sacramento Bee.[12]
Moulton's second cookbook, Sara's Secrets for Weeknight Meals, was published by Broadway Books in October 2005. It was reviewed by Michelle Green in People magazine, who wrote: "Sara has a gift for creating quick, accessible fine cuisine. Why suffer to make a gorgeous meal?"[13] In 2008, Sara's Weeknight Meals, based on her second book, débuted on public television.[14]
Her third cookbook, Sara Moulton's Everyday Family Dinners, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2010.[15] Blogging for StoveTop Readings in November of 2010, Greg Mowery wrote: "If there is a less pretentious, more accessible, and creative cookbook that gets great food on the table in good time with the least amount of fuss, I haven't seen it this year….This new book belongs in every family kitchen."[16]
In 2001, Moulton was the Culinary Institute of America's Chef of the Year.[17]
In 2002, she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America.[18]
In 2011, Sara Moulton's Everyday Family Dinners was an International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Awards Winner in the category of Children, Youth and Family.[19]
Moulton lives in New York City with her husband and two children.