Is Gwyneth the new Martha Stewart ?

Paltrow toured Spain with her pal Mario Batali for her PBS cooking travel series. (Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com)

Gwyneth Paltrow is accomplished at many things: She’s an Oscar-winning actress and a TV sensation. She’s the wife of a rock star and a blossoming singer herself, with performances at the Oscars, Grammys and Country Music Awards under her belt. And with a new cookbook, “My Father’s Daughter,” out today, she’s gunning to be the next Martha Stewart.

And — wait for it — food and brand experts say she can pull it off.

“Every food celebrity appeals to us as a surrogate family member,” says journalist Allen Salkin, who is working on a book about the rise of the food celebrity. “Martha is your crafty aunt, and so in the family of food celebrities, I could see Gwyneth as your slightly kooky but sweet sister.”

Her publisher is certainly putting its money where its mouth is. Grand Central has already ordered a second pre-publication print run of “My Father’s Daughter,” and the book has been steadily rising on Amazon’s Top 100 best-seller list for more than a week thanks to pre-order sales. Meanwhile, it’s rumored that Paltrow’s partnering up with Hearst to launch her own magazine, in the style of Stewart, though the publishing corporation has denied this.

But who is Gwyneth, the brand?

Her audience definitely skews younger than Martha’s demographic (the 11 million readers of Martha Stewart Living are overwhelmingly female homeowners, median age 48), but her challenge is to broaden it beyond the fashion-conscious urban elite. “The thing about Gwyneth is she really does have hip and cool down. She’s in that world, but it’s not too indie. It’s not Chloe Sevigny. She’s mainstream. She’s true Hollywood,” says one lifestyle- brand expert who consults food celebrities and spoke on condition of anonymity.

She’ll also get the mommy vote. Though hubby Chris Martin is noticeably absent from her book’s pages, which focus on simple, healthful recipes to be enjoyed at the family table, her two children, Apple, 6, and Moses, 5, play an important role. Apple is said to be a vegetarian, and there’s a quote from her declaring, “I’m not gluten free but I like gluten-free food.” There are even glossy photographs of Paltrow, 38, cooking with her children, giving an intimate look into their happy domestic lives.

“[The book is] probably going to appeal to a lot of young moms — people who want to cook healthy for their kids,” says Lee Schrager, founder and director of the Food Network NYC Wine & Food Festival.

Both icy blondes, Stewart and Paltrow also had somewhat similar beginnings. Although Stewart, 69, was a professional caterer before she branched out into cookbooks with “Entertaining” in 1982, both the multimillionaire lifestyle guru and Paltrow are self-taught home cooks.

In the early ’60s, when she was starting out, Stewart worked as a model, appeared in ads for brands such as Tareyton cigarettes and was named one of Glamour’s “Best Dressed College Girls” in 1961. Famously fashion-forward Paltrow has been the face of cosmetics giant Estée Lauder and boasts an impossibly lean, statuesque figure.

On the cover of “My Father’s Daughter,” she sports a sailor shirt that manages to be both approachable (it’s something anyone might find in their closet) and effortlessly chic (Jean Seberg in “Breathless,” anyone?). While many find her flawlessness unapproachable, it could be her big selling point.

“Listen, Martha is a very attractive woman. [But] people relate to Martha more like your neighbor next door,” says Schrager. “I don’t know that my neighbor looks like Gwyneth. That she is beautiful and talented is the reason we’re talking about her.”

And while Paltrow’s homey, easy-to-follow style is far from the elaborate spreads that made Stewart a household name, her approach appears to be true to who she is.

“As long as she’s not claiming to be something she’s not, she’s fine,” says Salkin.

But this, some argue, is part of the problem, considering that the flaxen-haired actress has been largely known for what she doesn’t eat. A longtime adherent to a strictly organic, local and macro diet, she rid her body of dairy, sugar, meat, alcohol and gluten after her father Bruce was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998.

It’s hard to imagine her chowing down on rotisserie-style roast chicken and “Grandad Danner’s Favorite Peanut Butter Cookies,” both recipes featured in the new book, with any regularity — even if Mario Batali vouches for her voracious appetite in the book’s forward. “GP can effortlessly down a whole pan of perfect paella in Valencia,” he enthuses.

Paltrow, however, has shifted her diet of late. These days, she follows a “flexitarian” regime — she limits sugar and dairy, occasionally eats chicken and fish, eschews red meat (Leonardo DiCaprio once lectured her about the brutality of factory-farmed animals) and emphasizes health-store staples such as Vegenaise, a vegan mayonnaise substitute (“one of my favorite things on the planet”).

“The fact that she’s a ‘flexitarian’ is great because people have a hard time hearing ‘no, no, no,’” says the lifestyle brand expert, who goes on to caution, “[but] I don’t think you can be evangelical about it. She has to have the right balance, because if you become too vigilant, you risk turning off as many people as you might gain.”

Paltrow certainly has proved she has a long-term passion for food and lifestyle pursuits — and the audience to boot. In 2008, she launched the lifestyle newsletter and Web site GOOP.com, which delivered weekly exhortations on 21-day detox diets and $60 bottles of olive oil — a hobby that was roundly ridiculed by critics who labeled her “out of touch.”

Yet her lifestyle brand is clearly growing.

GOOP.com is said to have 150,000 subscribers. She toured Spain with superstar-chef pal Batali for the PBS TV series “Spain . . . On the Road Again” (even if food pundits carped about her refusal to eat jamon).

With her cookbook, Paltrow’s heart seems to be in the right place. Dedicated to her father, producer/director Bruce Paltrow, who died in 2002, she writes in the introduction that “I always feel closest to my father . . . when I am in the kitchen.” They began cooking together when she was a teen. In one of the book’s more poignant passages, she says that when he was diagnosed with cancer, she “became convinced that he could heal himself with good foods and alternative medicine, even if he was resistant to the (perhaps naive) idea.”

Salkin says her earnestness is a plus. “I don’t think [the book] is a cynical calculation by Gwyneth. I’m sure it’s coming from a heartfelt place. That’s the beauty of the food celebrity and why the food celebrity is so marketable now. The public wants authenticity and safety in their celebrities.”

Schrager agrees. “I think the fact that she is a mom makes her more accessible, more like the girl next door. Whether it’s true or not, wouldn’t you like to think that she’s cooking dinner for her kids every night? I would.” The public seems to agree. It has been reported that her Q Score, which measures familiarity and appeal, has never been higher.

But if she’s going to increase her popularity, she needs to focus. “Martha understood how to cook and garden and cater and decorate, and those are the pillars of her brand,” says the expert. “I think with Gwyneth, maybe she’s coming out of understanding how to act and sell, but she needs to further define what her content is.”

Everyone agrees that if Paltrow’s going to do this properly, she has to do it 100 percent — and give up acting, singing and TV appearances that don’t enhance her brand. “If you want to get really serious about this, you need to be a total machine and integrate all of your messaging at all times,” continues the brand expert.

Adds Salkin, “It’s a 24-hour-a-day job and unless Gwyneth wants to put aside all of her other interests, I don’t see her as the next Martha Stewart. Now if she wants to give it that kind of commitment, who knows?”

In other words, the greatest lesson supermommy Gwyneth needs to learn is you really shouldn’t do it all.