I made the recipes from Paris Hilton’s Netflix show ‘Cooking with Paris’

This is “Cooking with Paris,” the celebrity heiress’s latest endeavor: a Netflix cooking show built on the premise that she’s absolutely no culinary wizard, but hey, she wants to learn. 

On the show, Hilton invites friends like Kim Kardashian and Demi Lovato over to her house to make a meal while dressed to the nines. In each episode, three things are guaranteed: Hilton will wear an impractical outfit, she will say “sliving” too many times and she will be confused by at least one cooking tool or ingredient. 

“What does ‘zest lemon’ mean?” she asks her phone’s virtual assistant in one episode. 

“Excuse me, sir, what do chives look like?” she asks a grocery store employee in another episode. “What do I do with it?”

By now, it’s common knowledge that Hilton’s “dumb blonde” persona is just a character she does for the camera. But while we’ve seen her drop the act and get vulnerable in recent documentary “This Is Paris,” the new cooking show is evidence that her ditzy rich girl character is still fun to play around with sometimes. 

I first became convinced that a Paris Hilton cooking show would absolutely rule after seeing a video she posted in January 2020 where she makes lasagna but refuses to add onion or garlic to her recipe because she didn’t feel like chopping anything. Oh, and she introduces her tiny dog in a Chanel coat as her cooking assistant. 

An entire show about her cluelessness in the kitchen was just as entertaining as I’d hoped. Watching Hilton try to figure out what a blender is or heave in disgust while rubbing a Thanksgiving turkey with seasoning (“I feel like I’m massaging some fat hairy gross guy”) makes for great television, but I had to know — did the recipes hold up?

I decided to cook the brunch recipes from the show’s first episode, in which Hilton invites over longtime friend Kardashian — who, unlike Hilton, seems to at least sort of know her way around a kitchen. The dining room is decorated with a ridiculous amount of white balloons to look like a cloud, and the menu is themed similarly: a fluffy frittata and frosted flakes-covered French toast with blue marshmallows. 

To start off, I prepped the blue marshmallows, a recipe inspired by Hilton’s love for Lucky Charms cereal. It’s sort of unclear why this is a necessary addition to the brunch, other than to look cute sitting beside the French toast. But that’s just Hilton’s approach to cooking: style over substance.

I hit one snag — I don’t own any cookie cutters, and I couldn’t find any at the store. So, with the help of YouTube, I fashioned a soda can into a makeshift cloud shape. Then, I melted down a bag of marshmallows in the microwave, added a bunch of blue food coloring, poured it in a pan, and put it in the fridge overnight. 

On the show, Hilton and Kardashian struggle with getting their cookie cutters to wiggle into the marshmallow without sticking, but eventually, they somehow manage to pull it off. In real life, I found this to be an impossible task. Yes, I was working with a makeshift cookie cutter, but even a knife coated in powdered sugar could not pry the marshmallow from the pan. All I got was blue goo all over my gloveless fingers and an all-consuming sense of despair. So reader, I gave up on this wildly time-consuming French toast topping. Cloud-shaped blue marshmallows: total fail. 

Things could only go up from here. I started the fluffy frittata, a fairly simple recipe with tomatoes, bacon (I used a plant-based substitute), onion powder, garlic powder and Italian seasoning. The recipe requires fluffing up the eggs in the blender, a step for which I had an advantage — unlike Hilton, I know what a blender is. 

Upon removing the frittata from the oven, I was pleased to find it golden brown and very fluffy. But it quickly deflated, and slicing in, I was greeted with eggy disappointment: it was brutally overcooked. Hilton’s instruction to cook for 12 minutes at 400 degrees had led me astray. As Paris would say, it was beyond. 

The flavor was decent, but it definitely would have been better with fresh garlic, onion and herbs rather than the dried variety. But as we know, Hilton avoids chopping onions at all costs, unless she’s wearing giant bedazzled sunglasses while doing it. 

The French toast, which Kardashian declares “some of the best French toast [she’s] ever had,” was another story. I was skeptical about the cornflake coating, but they added a lovely crunch to the fluffy brioche. That’s hot. 

For science, I added a fistful of my sad blue marshmallow blob to a bite of the French toast, as Hilton intended. I wrinkled my nose up. The combination tasted sickeningly sweet. A little kid would probably love this. It’s blue sugar, for god’s sake. But as an adult, you can count me out.

All in all, a Paris Hilton brunch is not half bad. If I adjusted the cook time on the frittata and just ditched the whole blue marshmallow disaster, it would have made for a perfectly delicious —  and easy — Saturday morning meal. 

That’s the thing about “Cooking With Paris”: a lot of these recipes are barely recipes at all, making them super approachable. Her mac and cheese recipe is just adding a mountain of shredded cheese to a box of Kraft, and her cake recipe relies heavily on a box of Funfetti cake mix. 

Plus, when things go sour, Hilton also isn’t afraid to admit defeat. In the Demi Lovato episode, the pair attempt to make heart-shaped ravioli from scratch, which I won’t spoil but let’s just say it does not go exactly as planned. But not to worry: Hilton has premade ravioli from the store in the fridge. While not a beacon of talent in the kitchen, Hilton’s trials and tribulations make her endearingly relatable to the novice home cook.

Well, until she takes a break from cooking to feed her dog caviar. Now that’s what I call sliving.