Yeardley Smith Reveals Inspiration Behind New YouTube Web Series ‘Oil & Water’ (Exclusive)

If there is one genre of programming that will forever satiate our palettes, it’s cooking and baking shows! Delicious and delectable, it’s the type of show you can watch continuously, never get bored of and always feel inspired by. But while it might feel like every channel or streaming service is serving up its own dish, Emmy Award-winning actress and novelist Yeardley Smith is setting the bar with her unique take on cooking and baking in the new YouTube web series Oil & Water.

Creating a wild, calamitous, how-to, cooking-adventure blending game show elements by using ingredients that aren’t usually friends and making them get well acquainted with one another, Oil & Water stems from Smith’s passion for cooking. “I decided I would make a recipe from The Simpsons where Homer made Bart dinner, where he smashed together ground pork and ground fish and made these porkified fish nuggets,” she told PopCulture exclusively. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to do a cooking show where you combined ingredients that don’t ordinarily go together?’ So I created this game where I would draw a random sweet ingredient, a random savory ingredient and then a random thing, like it’s a pie, it’s ice cream, it’s a soup, it’s a pandowdy and that was the game.”

The less-than-satisfying recipes in her web series also sparked a new segment called Stupid Good, which was born from Smith’s exhaustion of putting “sardines in [her] ice cream” for the show. “I’ve morphed it into something I call Stupid Good, where now I’m cooking recipes I’ve never made before from internet chefs, cookbook chefs, things that look so good to me and I want to make them and see if they’re like stupid good, which is sort of good, on top of good, on top of good,” she laughed.

Adding how the tastier recipes are “100%” better than the not-so-fun ingredients blending for a less than desirable dish, Smith says there were still a “couple of surprises” in the original incarnation of her show that was not so terrible. “I did a cherry tomato, it was basically like a tri-fold. So it was a cherry tomato with sponge cake and lemon cream and I put basil in it. And the tomatoes really offset the sweetness of the lemon cream and that was a lovely surprise. A couple of them we had to set on fire, like the candy apple with Skittles and caviar. Maybe the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had in my life,” she said further calling it “brutal.”

Smith, who loves to bake and has a “huge sweet tooth” shares that there was one recipe, in particular, containing some less appealing ingredients that actually turned out all right. “I remember taking anchovies and putting them into something sweet. I want to say like a pie filling or something. I can’t quite remember. Alison Roman has a recipe where she takes all these anchovies and she cooks them forever and they basically melt so they no longer taste fishy and I’m like, ‘All right, Alison, don’t fail me now. I’m going to take these anchovies, I’m going to cook them to death in hopes that they don’t so ruin this pie filling.’ And it didn’t. It was not terrible, which on Oil & Water was high praise. Not terrible was like, ‘Okay, that’s a winner.’”

Sharing how there’s “so much good food on the internet” to try out, Smith’s show can be found on YouTube with new episodes out every Wednesday. The actress and host is also the mastermind behind the true-crime podcast, Small Town Dicks. With Season 10 premiering this April, Smith’s podcast sets itself apart to guide listeners through stories of Small Town, USA with detectives who first broke the case. But the mass fascination with true crime podcasts isn’t something new for audiences. 

Featuring a diverse amount of episodes on Small Town Dicks, Smith adds how a podcast like hers, which began in 2017, enlightens listeners about the genre and policing in general through the sheer significance of its sources sharing firsthand accounts. “I think it’s always really valuable to hear the account of something from the source rather than detectives Dan and Dave tell me about the case and then I would relate it to the audience. It would be an entirely different experience. I think not nearly as, obviously, not as authentic. Not nearly as valid in many ways because I couldn’t speak to any of the nuances because I haven’t had the experiences,” she said. “I do think that if you like true crime, especially in the podcast space, it’s much rarer to have those stories told by the detectives. You have more of that in the television space, but we’re sort of unique in the podcast space.”