So I started writing this at the top of the year, really enthusiastic about it. And then had to go through two surgeries back-to-back that prevented me from eating solid foods for a long time and that kind of killed my enthusiasm to talk about any of this. So I tabled it for later, and now it's later. Take this advice with you, friends.
If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've either learned or attempted to learn a skill with YouTube as your primary teacher. It can be a great resource, full of skilled, helpful folks who want nothing more than to share their years of experience with newcomers. It's also full of opportunists, grifters, and Mr. Beast-style SEO-brained fools trying to draw in as many people as possible, quality of information be damned. This is how trending is filled with videos titled things like "Three Ingredient Pizza (I eat this five times a week) KETO FRIENDLY" that contain multiple sponsored segements and very little actual recipe advice that you, a person with limited time and resources, are going to want to follow.
Like all of YouTube, those truly great creators are constantly struggling against an alogrithm that pushes the aforementioned SEO-maxers over them. So, as a dude who makes some pretty tasty meals and who taught themself how to do so pretty much entirely from YouTube, I thought I would share a couple reccomendations, as well as a few popular channels I don't actually totally recommend following and why.
Best Channels for Total Beginners!
J. Kenji López-Alt
Before we go any further, I need you to watch this grilled cheese video. I come back to it every few months. It truly is a thing of beauty, like a scene from a slice of life anime about managing an inn or something. There are two really cute dogs in it. You must watch it, this will be on the test.
Good, now that you've finished that, wasn't that satisfying? It's a very simple sandwich, the filling is just three ingredients, but I love it for the style of cooking López-Alt displays here. You're hungry, it's late, fuck it, let's mess around in the kitchen. You got some herbs left over from lunch? Throw 'em in. Eat that big chuck of cheese that broke off while you were grating, it's not going to melt right anyway. Have a beer while you're at it, maybe the trip to the fridge will help inspire you. It's no big thing.
A lot of López-Alt's best videos have a similar format, filmed via head-mounted camera, so you've got a Ratatouille POV of the process, but with actual commentary. It's great because you get to see the whole process of cooking in real time, with all the little things that a chef of his caliber does almost unconciously. Plus, he's just a generally funny and knowledgable guy, with a wealth of stories to tell while he does his thing.
For beginners I highly recommend his biscuits and gravy for a simple, heavy-but-delcious lazy sunday brunch and his smash burger technique for tasty, easy and cheap fast-food style cheeseburgers. Seriously, once you see how quickly you can make a burger better than anything you can get at a drive-through you'll be making these things as often as you can. You don't need to actually use a trowel and a scraper, though, those are just extra.
Internet Shaquille
I've praised this guy a lot before but hear me out: Internet Shaquille might be one of the best channels to follow when it comes to beaming kitchen related information into your brain as efficiently as possible. This guy changed how I hold knives and it wasn't even the focus of the video in question. Every new Shaq video is a treasure because the dude just casually drops kitchen knowledge with no filler, no ad-breaks (all sponsors are read out at the end and prefaced with the statement "sponsor has paid to be mentioned at the end of this video"), and no attempt to chase trends. Well, except the tiktok feta pasta and Joshua Weissman parody (more on him later), but those are April Fools day jokes so they don't count.
Shaq's focus is rarely on singular recipes and more on transferable skills and techniques. One of my favorite examples of this is his video on veggie sandwiches. I have refered to this video a number of times despite never having followed any of the recipes he showcases, because the advice he gives is applicable no matter what selection of vegetables you have in front of you. These videos are the best because they give you ideas on how to make food you want to eat, not just presenting you with a rigid recipe to follow.
That said, if you are looking for specific recipes to follow, I have made his chicken tinga recipe at least once a month since it dropped. It gives you a tasty, flexible protein that you can use several days in a row and it takes almost no effort. You can prep it the night before in twenty minutes, keep it in the fridge overnight, throw it in your slow cooker before you go to work, and boom! Dinner is ready when you walk in the door. And if you want to use the leftovers for nachos he's got a video for that, too.
A bit more complex
Brian Lagerstrom
"But Michael" You may be asking, "these are mostly just kitchen advice. Where are the recipes?" Well, that's not my name, but here's one of my favorite recipe creators on the platform: professional chef and baker Brian Lagerstrom. His recipes are all delicious and, while they're a little more complex than the entry-level stuff I've posted from J. Kenji and Shaq, they're still all doable in a home kitchen with basic kitchen tools. I'm putting this in the "more complex" section because while he doesn't bust out any molecular gastronomy kitchen tech, his videos do expect more comfortability in the kitchen than Lopez or Shaq's and some require a few more specialized tools. A few of these are going to be really hard to accomplish without things like a dutch oven or an immersion blender. If that's not you right now, hey, no worries, building up your kitchen takes time; I'm still working on it myself and I've been at this for quite a while.
I'm highlighting his salad dressing video because it's great and easy. I've made like half of these this past month alone and they're miles ahead of anything that comes in a bottle. But I'd be a fool not to mention his pizza videos. That link takes you to a playlist with thirty one different ways to make a pizza. He's got the YouTube pizza game down, I've made like five of these and they've all been solid. For those without a pizza steel or peel (which I imagine are most of you) the sheet pan pizza and one hour pan pizza are both game-changers. I took the sheet-pan pizza to a party once and that thing disappeared when I was in another room. The delivery style is also a real winner if you're specifically going for a Domino's kind of pizza with a softer, breadier crust, and if you want you can fold it in half and stuff it with cheddar cheese and jalapenos for a real treat.
Long story short, I am eating more pizza than ever and I haven't ordered it from takeout in almost a year. And this man is to blame.
Not Another Cooking Show
I have admittedly made just one recipe from this man's channel but I'm sharing it on the strength of that recipe alone. MAKE THIS MAN'S VODKA SAUCE. I have made this sauce for Christmas dinner at my parent's place two years running now. My dad asks for it for his birthday, not for birthday dinner, he just wants me to make him a double batch and freeze it so he can eat it for a month. And while my version has evolved and changed quite a bit over that two years, it's this original recipe that everyone fell in love with. I reccomend pairing it with sausage and kale, using chopped calabrian chilis instead of red pepper flakes if you really want to level it up, and using gnocchi instead of penne if you're going for something truly indulgent.
Mixed feelings
Adam Ragusea
To start: this shepherd's pie is delicious, you should make it, no notes. But I'm putting Adam's videos in the mixed feelings bucket because for every great recipe he's got there are one or two that are just kind of weird and inadvisable or require some modification to work. His infamous Why I Season My Cutting Board, Not My Steak is the best example of one of these, granted one he's admitted to being not that great since then.
Basically, Adam's a guy with a lot of biases and personal preferences that shape how and what he cooks, and a tendency to repeat these biases in his video as universal truths of cooking. He seem like a guy who insists on driving the longer route home because the shorter route has more speedbumps. We are all that guy in some way, it's just something to look out for in his videos. Another good example is his meatloaf video. I haven't tried it but it looks like it would make a good meatloaf, it's just that for some reason he's structured it around the idea of only using the pan you cook it in and never using a mixing bowl or cutting board so you don't have to do additional dishes. Which, cool, but not something I really need in a recipe.
I'd say give him a look out, some or even most of these recipes are really good, but just be aware that if a step seems overcomplicated than it probably is. The comments section almost always has some good tips to fix these weird digressions.
Entertaining but not reccomended to follow as advice
Binging with Babish
Babish's channel will always hold a special place in my heart. It really got me started in the kitchen by way of another hyperfixation: classic movies. And while he does create some delicious looking meals and there are a lot of transferable skills you can pick up from his videos, I don't necessarily recommend using them as a guide unless you're already pretty experienced. The focus of the channel is recreating food from movies, and when they inevitably fail he makes a "chefy" fine dining version. And that's fun and cool! You might even pick up some ideas for later from that, but those feel a little like jumping in to the deep end.
As for the basics videos, yeah, they're okay, but I think they've been de-emphasized in the channel as it grows, as more people come on, and as the focus drifts into more personality-based content. Aside from that, I'm just of the opinion that Babish is much better entertainer than he is a teacher. But damn is he fun to watch, that's one charismatic man.
All that said, this Boeuf Bourguignon? It's heavenly. It is Julia Child's recipe rather than Babish's but damn, it's delicious. This is another to break out on special occassions, it's what I make my partner for their birthday almost every year at their request. I sub the bacon for cubes of pork belly because I've usually got some in the freezer and buy the pearl onions frozen because they're a pain in the ass to peel but other than that it's perfect as is. Definitely make this one.
Mythical Kitchen
This is just a group of goofy folks making silly stuff. The focus here is completely on entertainment, there are a couple series that have some educational value (Mythmunchers might give you a few tricks to try out) but they're but they're by far the minority. Things like Meals of History and Last Meal are really fun to watch but the food is more the backdrop to the conversation in each. Fancy fast food (pictured above) and Past Food are a good time but both are prohibitively expensive and require far too much effort for the end result.
Still, I really like these folks! They've got that "group of friends starting a podcast" dynamic that makes for good light viewing. Probably won't be for everyone, but if you're just looking to occupy yourself with jokes and tasty food you can do a lot worse.
One I Don't Recommend
Joshua Weissman
Gonna start this off with a statement that I'm sure Weissman would see as a compliment but that I mean as critique: He's the Mr. Beast of food YouTube. Lots of shiny new kitchen toys, sound effects, quick cuts, memes I'm too old to get, etc. I'm not a fan. I would just write him off as "food entertainment" like the above two entries with the caveat that his style and sense of humor just aren't for me but he does have a series of videos titled But Cheaper that are meant to be made at home in place of ordering takeout. I don't like these and I feel I should explain for a bit why I don't recomend them.
I shared the 1 Dollar Sushi Rolls video because it's illustrative of a lot of the problems I have with this format. Weissman begins with a universal truth: sushi is expensive. Individual rolls cost $10-$15 dollars each, you have to eat multiple rolls to get a full meal. He then spells out the process to make eight salmon tamaki handrolls at around $1.29 per roll, or around $15 dollars for a full batch. But Weissman counts ingredients by how much you use and not how much they costs to purchase at the store, i.e. one garlic clove is used in the recipe, so $.04 cents are added to the total instead of $1.25. The actual cost of the necessary ingredients is closer to $20. That's for one type of roll, and sushi is all about having several varieties. The price per serving is down but if you want multiple rolls you're going to end up paying about the same price as you would if you just went out, and also this recipe is really difficult to scale down efficiently so you'd better plan on making it for a lot of people.
It's this sort of video that leads people to conclude "Oh, well, if takeout is just as expensive, I guess I'll order keep ordering takeout instead." I don't want to relitigate that particular discourse but takeout is not cheaper that cooking your own food. Some foods are just difficult to make in a cost-effective way for a home cook and the solution isn't to recreate those foods at home, it's to achieve a similar flavor profile in a more efficient way. I do live in an area where fresh seafood is cheaper than average and I can say that a homemade chirashi bowl is a much better choice in terms of both time and price than homemade sushi. Plus, it's flexible so I can use whatever's on sale.
But if that's not your situation, that's totally fine! You can in fact just buy sushi at a restaurant as a nice treat every once in a while. Trying to master every single cuisine is how you end up with a spice rack full of stuff you never use. It's okay to focus on one or two styles of cooking with shared ingredients and have that be your niche for day-to-day meals, in fact it's probably advisable. Then when you want to go out to eat you just pick something that's not in your wheelhouse, and you don't have to feel as guilty about spending $50 on sushi because this is a little treat and you deserve a little treat this week.
In Conclusion
Cooking is a journey and it's hard to know where to start. I hope that these creators can help you find that entry point, I know that they've helped me a lot and it's been such a rewarding experience.
And now, what are the names of the two hot sauces in that grilled cheese video?
