Amy Chaplin

Amy Chaplin is an Australian-American vegetarian and vegan chef, recipe developer and cookbook writer. Her first cookbook, At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen, was a 2015 James Beard Award winner. Her Whole Food Cooking Every Day was a 2020 James Beard Award winner.

Early life Chaplin was born and raised in New South Wales, Australia, where she grew up in a mudbrick home on a farm near Dundurrabin, a small town between Dorrigo and Grafton in the New England region. She told an interviewer "There were no shops within a 50-km radius of where we lived." The family grew their own produce and raised chickens, and her mother made tofu and her father baked sourdough bread.

Career Chaplin worked in a cafe in Sydney and in the 1990s as a pastry chef in Amsterdam. In 2003 she began working at Angelica Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in Manhattan, three days a week as a pastry chef and became executive chef about a year later. She left Angelica Kitchen in 2010.

Reception The New York Times called Chaplin's approach to vegetarian cooking "deeply thoughtful". The Washington Post 's Joe Yonan wrote, "Some cookbook authors have earned my complete trust, and Amy Chaplin is one of them." The Times called it "a sneaker" because it "arrived quietly from a small press, then won a James Beard Award". Epicurious called it "the ideal building block book for anyone with dietary restrictions". Bon Appétit listed it as one of their best fall cookbooks of 2019. Vogue named it to their list of cookbooks everyone should own.

Whole Food Cooking Every Day: Transform the Way You Eat with 250 Vegetarian Recipes Free of Gluten, Dairy, and Refined Sugar. Artisan, 2019. At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen: Celebrating the Art of Eating Well. Roost Books, 2014.

Personal life As of 2014 Chaplin was living in Manhattan's East Village. As of 2019 she was dividing her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York. As of 2020 Chaplin lived in the Hudson Valley of New York. She has a son.