About Bry | Cooking with Bry
My Culinary Journey
I’ve always believed that the best way to understand a country, or a person, is through food. The stories we tell, the memories we share, and the love we offer often start around a table, with something delicious bubbling away on the stove. It’s a belief I’ve held my entire life, and one that has taken me from a Western Sydney kitchen to the streets of Berlin, the cafes of Paris, and the food markets of Glasgow.
For me, it all started as a child, standing on a dining chair just to reach the stove. I’d stir pots of caramel under close supervision, help mix the sausage roll mince like it was a matter of national importance, and wait impatiently while Mum brought home her weekly magazines. Not for the gossip, but for the recipes. I’d clip out the ones that caught my eye and file them away in a red folder. That folder still exists, kept safe by my mum: a little time capsule of my earliest food obsessions and proof that this passion has been with me for nearly forty years.
Learning to Cook
Long before I thought of myself as a food writer, I was the teenager who quietly tweaked every recipe and kept the changes to herself. The family would try to recreate a dish later and wonder why it never tasted quite as good. I understood even then that recipes were just guides, and I had a real instinct for flavour, particularly when it came to spices and seasoning. That instinct didn’t come from cookbooks. It came from growing up in Western Sydney.
Western Sydney in the 1990s was, and still is, one of the most culinarily diverse parts of Australia. I grew up eating Turkish kebabs laden with humus and tabbouleh, hot Vietnamese rolls on a Sunday morning fresh from the bakery, Chinese Satay on a Friday, and a full Aussie barbecue every other weekend. Food from across the Mediterranean and Middle East wasn’t exotic to me. It was just Tuesday. That early, immersive exposure to bold, diverse flavours is the foundation everything I cook is built on, and it’s what makes my approach to comfort food a little different from the standard.
I was the go-to salad girl at every family barbecue: Dad at the barbie, Mum rolling cold rolls at the bench, and me pulling together the salads. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was my start. It’s where I began to understand how flavours work together, how textures balance, and how a kitchen, no matter how chaotic, can feel like home.
Nearly Thirty Years in the Kitchen
I have been cooking seriously for close to thirty years, and writing recipes for almost as long. What started as clipped magazine pages in a red folder became a genuine, lifelong practice of developing, testing, and refining recipes across dozens of cuisines and cooking styles. Over the years I have cooked professionally for others, developed recipes from scratch for my blog and broader content platform, and built an archive of over 215 original recipes spanning everything from classic British pub food to Middle Eastern mezze, traditional Australian favourites, and Mediterranean-inspired weeknight dinners.
My approach has always been the same: understand why a recipe works, strip it back to its essentials, and make it accessible without sacrificing flavour. I don’t believe in dumbing food down. I believe in respecting the home cook enough to give them the real version, explained clearly, with honest notes on what matters and what doesn’t. That philosophy has shaped every recipe I’ve published on Cooking with Bry.
The Story Behind Cooking with Bry
Cooking with Bry wasn’t my first step into food blogging. In my mid-twenties, when friends kept asking for my recipes, a mate suggested I start a blog. So I did: a simple space for loved ones to access my recipes without endless back-and-forth emails. The photos were bad (truly bad), but it served its purpose.
I always dreamed bigger. I secretly wanted to be the next Nigella. In 2015, life took me to the UK, and food blogging quietly took a back seat while I adjusted to expat life. I dabbled in a lifestyle blog instead. Less soup, more serums. The dream faded, but it never quite disappeared.
By 2019, I was living in Scotland and missing the joy that came from sharing food. The hearty, soul-hugging recipes I was making in my tiny Glasgow flat kitchen didn’t belong on a lifestyle blog. So I launched Cooking with Bry properly. It was finally the right time and the right place to share the food I loved most: comforting, joyful, honest cooking. The blog has been running ever since, and now spans over 215 original recipes with a growing library of video content, tutorials, and collection guides.
What Cooking with Bry Is All About
Scotland, with its seemingly endless winters, shaped the heart of my cooking style. Comfort food became my north star: not just stews and roasts, but food that makes you feel hugged from the inside out. To me, comfort food isn’t about heaviness. It’s about happiness. It’s food that warms your bones, boosts your mood, and makes you pause and smile. The kind of food I grew up eating in Western Sydney, refined by years of living, eating, and cooking across the world.
Every recipe on this site is built around that idea. Whether it’s a cheesy traybake, a slow-cooked curry, or a bowl of pasta that comes together in twenty minutes, my recipes are designed to be achievable and deeply satisfying. They draw from the cuisines I know and love most: classic Australian, traditional British, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean. They’re made for real kitchens, real lives, and real appetites. If you’ve ever stood in front of the fridge wondering what on earth to make for dinner, you’re in exactly the right place.
Eating My Way Around the World
Food has taken me far, and I’ve been lucky enough to eat well in some pretty extraordinary places. Growing up in Western Sydney gave me an early education in bold, multicultural flavour. Seven years living in the UK, across London and then Glasgow, gave me a deep appreciation for British comfort food, proper pub classics, and the kind of cooking that gets you through a grey November. Along the way I spent time in Adelaide, the undisputed foodie capital of Australia, where the produce is extraordinary, the wine is even better, and the markets will ruin you for anywhere else.
But the eating didn’t stop there. I’ve sipped coffee in Parisian cafes, wandered through Viennese Christmas markets with something warm and spiced in hand, and eaten street sausage in Berlin in a way that made me question every sausage I’d had before. I’ve grabbed a classic New York slice on Fifth Avenue and eaten some of the best food of my life in Portland, a city that takes its food culture seriously and delivers on every promise.
All of that, Western Sydney, London, Glasgow, Adelaide, Brisbane, Paris, Berlin, New York, Portland, lives somewhere in my cooking. A spice instinct developed in a Western Sydney market. A confidence with produce learned in Adelaide. A respect for simplicity absorbed somewhere between a Parisian lunch and a Glasgow winter. Travel has made me a more curious, more considered cook, and that curiosity drives every recipe on this site.
Life in Brisbane
In 2022, I returned to Australia after years in the UK and a global pandemic that kept so many of us apart. I’m now settled in Brisbane, where the food scene punches well above its weight, the farmers’ markets are a genuine weekly ritual, and the sunshine makes even a simple meal feel like a celebration.
Brisbane has reignited my love of fresh produce and big, bold flavours. The city’s enthusiasm for good food constantly inspires me to keep creating, keep experimenting, and keep sharing. And of course, no kitchen update would be complete without mentioning my other culinary companion: Lulu, my fluffy black cat with a serious attitude and a nose for mischief. He insists on sniff-testing every single recipe. He believes he’s entitled to a taste of everything I cook. He isn’t, but I can’t tell him that.
How I Develop a Recipe
I’ve been collecting recipes for nearly forty years and writing them for close to thirty. Some of what you’ll find here is polished and new; other recipes come from what I fondly call The Archives, those early-days-of-cooking attempts scribbled down before the internet existed, tested and refined until they’re worth sharing. Every recipe published on Cooking with Bry has been made in a real home kitchen, tested by a real person with nearly three decades of cooking experience, and written with enough detail that you can actually pull it off on a Tuesday night.
Most of my recipes begin with a single ingredient or flavour. Maybe I spot something at the markets, or a craving hits at 3pm, or I find myself thinking about a dish I ate somewhere years ago and can’t stop thinking about. I’ll read a dozen versions, pick out what makes sense, and head off in my own direction, with simplicity, comfort, and flavour as my compass. I focus on technique where it matters, skip the fuss where it doesn’t, and always write to the home cook, not to impress another food writer.
There’s no such thing as a perfectly traditional recipe. Ingredients change. Kitchens change. We change. I believe in cooking with heart, not strict rules. And that’s exactly the kind of cooking you’ll find here.
Bry is a Brisbane-based recipe developer and food writer with nearly thirty years of cooking experience and the founder of Cooking with Bry. She specialises in classic Australian, British, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean comfort food, with over 200 original recipes published across her platform.