Cooking for the Cameras

On any given day, Krissy Downey might find herself baking brownies for Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, cooking a dumpling lasagna with Jenna Bush Hager, or assembling a tuna melt with Connor Storrie—and all before nine o’clock in the morning. Downey is a multitasking chef, food stylist, and recipe tester on the long-running Today show, working on the program’s food segments, which are shot five days a week, often in front of a live studio audience. If, for instance, a celebrity chef guest appears on the show to showcase a roast chicken recipe, Downey’s team might cook six different chickens in advance to reflect various stages of completion. That allows the segment to clearly demonstrate the entire process, from start to finish, in mere minutes. “The goal is that when someone is watching the show, they don’t realize that someone else made everything,” Downey said.

Most mornings she arrives at the show’s Rockefeller Center studio, in New York City, around 6:30 a.m. to begin preparing the day’s dishes, rehearse a food segment with the Today hosts, and beautify anything edible before cameras start to roll by using one of the many tricks of the trade she’s developed. “If we’re about to go live and something looks dull," Downey said, “I’m like, ‘Spray it with Pam, it’ll come back to life.’”

Downey, who grew up in Georgia and studied communications at BC, worked as a freelance food stylist for shows like Beat Bobby Flay before joining Today two years ago. She started out with the program as a food stylist but is now an associate culinary producer. Her role expanded again when the show’s producers discovered the casual cooking videos she posts to her TikTok and Instagram accounts, @acrosskrissystable, which have more than 235,000 followers. Impressed, the producers approached Downey about appearing in Today cooking segments. For her first on-camera appearance, in January, she prepared her original recipe for the dish pastina alla vodka. “It solidified for me that that’s what I want to do,” she said of the experience, “talk about food in my own way. I’m just having so much fun.”  ◽