Daniela Park
Founder & Head Editor
Daniela started Shake Stir Strain as a private newsletter in 2022 and never quite stopped writing it. She edits every recipe before it goes live and bakes more bread than is strictly reasonable.
Our story
Cooking is the most useful art form we know.
Shake Stir Strain Recipes started in an apartment kitchen in South Florida with a stubborn idea -- that home cooks deserve real recipes that actually work, paired with the few kitchen tools that genuinely earn their counter space.
Founding story
From a Sunday dinner to a members club
The first Shake Stir Strain dinner was twelve people crammed around a six-person table in 2022. Our founder, Daniela, had been writing a private newsletter for friends called This Week We Cooked -- two recipes a week, photographed in window light on her kitchen counter, with notes on what went wrong and how to fix it. The list grew slowly, then quickly. By the end of the year there were two thousand subscribers, none of whom she had ever met.
What kept readers around was not novelty. It was that every recipe had been cooked, rewritten, cooked again, and only then sent out. When a sauce broke, we said so. When a baking time was off by ten minutes, we corrected it the next week. The newsletter felt less like food media and more like a long conversation between cooks who actually use their kitchens.
In 2024 we turned that conversation into a membership. Today, Shake Stir Strain Recipes is a small team based in Aventura, Florida, publishing across ten cuisines, running a tightly edited kitchen store, and writing a journal worth reading on a Saturday morning. We still test every recipe more than once. We still admit when something is fussy. And we still cook for twelve people every chance we get.
Inside our kitchen
A working test kitchen, photographed honestly
Our team
The small group behind every recipe
Marcus Boateng
Recipe Director
Marcus runs the test kitchen and decides which recipes are good enough to publish. He spent eight years on restaurant lines in Chicago and London before trading the pass for a home stove.
Yulia Chen
Photography Director
Yulia shoots every recipe in natural light on a single counter near a north-facing window. She believes that food photography should look like dinner, not like a magazine.
Ines Holm
Member Experience Lead
Ines reads every email that lands in our inbox and answers most of them personally. If you have written to us about a substitution or a stuck checkout, you have probably heard back from her.
Cook with us
Membership unlocks our full library of hand-tested recipes across ten cuisines, plus members-only essays and seasonal collections. Try it for a month, cancel anytime.
See membership plans