Priya Krishna Shares What It Was Like To Teach Selena Gomez How To Cook - Exclusive

If you're into food and spend time online, you've probably run into Priya Krishna's work at some point. She has worn many hats in her career, including cookbook author, video host, and New York Times food journalist. Clearly, she's an experienced writer, cook, and food personality, but she recently took on an assignment that was a new challenge even for someone with her résumé: Teaching a mega-famous pop star, actress, and entrepreneur how to cook.

The superstar multi-hyphenate in question was Selena Gomez, and Krishna taught her how to cook on an episode of Gomez's HBO Max show, "Selena + Chef." With Krishna's help, Gomez tackled dahi toast — an Indian-spiced, toasted sandwich — and shikanji, a spicy and salty version of limeade. If we were in Krishna's shoes, we would be quite intimidated at the prospect of teaching someone of Gomez's stature how to cook, so we needed to know what the experience was like. Fortunately for us, Krishna sat down with Mashed for an exclusive interview to share her perspective on the experience.

The format of "Selena + Chef" is that the chef of the week talks to Selena Gomez over a video call and teaches her (and often her friends and family members) how to prepare a couple of dishes. While it might seem like it would be difficult to teach someone how to cook without actually being in the same room as them, Priya Krishna said that it wasn't actually that hard. In fact, she claimed, "It was really fun." Krishna credits her style of cooking for making the process a little easier: "I hope Selena took away that with the way I cook, you don't have to be staring at me and precisely following my steps over Zoom. I hope that translated and made it easier to cook over Zoom."

And how was Selena Gomez as a cooking student? According to Krishna, Gomez was a natural in the kitchen, and quite humble as well. "Selena does not give herself enough credit. She did a fantastic job. Her dahi toast looked awesome." She also described Gomez as having an unpretentious taste in food. 

Krishna explained how this influenced her thought process for picking the dishes she cooked on the show: "I feel like she doesn't like the super fancy, fussy food. So I was like, 'What's something that's simple and unfussy and just essentially delicious?'" Now you know what kind of food to make if you ever have to cook for Selena Gomez!

Priya Krishna's episode of "Selena + Chef" is now streaming on HBO Max. Her cookbooks are available on Amazon.