Traditional TV cooking shows aren’t really about cooking. They’re about watching, about seeing high-production cheffiness or Gordon Ramsay swear at people. Despite the numerous what-to-watch-in-2022 lists that featured Netflix’s Chinese cooking series Flavorful Origins or Nadiya’s Time to Eat on the BBC, it is rare that you will actually feed yourself off the back of one of them.
The same is not true of someone strapping a GoPro to their forehead so they can show you how to make amazing scrambled eggs. Modernist cooking wunderkinds like Kenji Lopez-Alt are using YouTube to make videos that are as immediately instructive as they are zanily entertaining. For all the talk of so-called FoodTok luminaries raking in followers by the millions and earning six-figure incomes, it is YouTube food chefs who are making the best food videos around. They are not constrained, as TikTokers are, by the platform’s time duration or (like television chefs) dictated to by viewing schedules. They can take their time; they can shoot when they want to. No one is telling them what to cook, or what to say. No wonder there are upwards of 1 million food channels. Meet five of the best.
Rachel Ama
Launched in the summer of 2017, this channel serves as a diary of London cookbook author Rachel Ama’s vegan journey and every dish Ama talks you through is one you want to have a go at. Which is not surprising, given that she explains her reason for starting the channel as: “I went vegan overnight and it was such a good feeling, I wanted the people I loved to experience it, too.”
Ama melds the Caribbean food her St Lucian grandmother used to make and the trad British dishes she grew up with in north London with restaurant fare from her travels in Spain, New Orleans and Colombia. She says she is always awkward in photographs, but on video, she has been magnetic from day one. In the second video she ever made, that boundless excitement surges when she realises, on screen, that the faux tuna she’s just demonstrated could actually become a faux tuna melt – the first she’ll have had since going vegan. “Let’s do it, lads,” she gasps and you’re right there with her and that packet of vegan cheese she’s holding up in pure, unscripted triumph.
A particular highlight is the high-protein vegan Caribbean feast she posted a few years back, including jerk lentils slightly sweetened with maple syrup and a gorgeously creamy cashew-based mac’n’cheese. The food is so good that after plating up, she forgets herself and eats most of it before realising she has not filmed the tasting.
Maangchi
As YouTube food channels go, Maangchi is up there with the most famous, a fixture in Top 10 lists. And yet, 14 years after she first made a dish on camera (ojingeo-bokkeum, stir-fried squid) host Emily Kim has no PR, PA or TV slot. She is still doing it all herself.
Maangchi has become the go-to guide for authentic Korean recipes in English, from bibimbap (12m views) to trad kimchi (23.5m), and everything in between – fluffy red-bean buns, steamed eggs, twisted doughnuts, green beans in garlic. She is an excellent instructor, explaining what to buy, how to clean it, when to chop or stir or cover and how long to wait, in clear and simple terms.
Kim shoots from her immaculately tidy but otherwise ordinary kitchen in Times Square, wearing fabulous outfits such as a green pillbox hat, a pink wig and fake grape earrings. An actual legion of fans from across the globe agree with her son that she is the best cook in the world and their own adoptive mother. Headlines and tweets variously describe her as YouTube’s Korean mom, the internet’s Korean mother and “Maangchi is my mother now”. The love is reciprocated: “My viewers keep sending me messages, saying ‘Maangchi, I made your chicken and it was a big hit and I was proud of myself,’ and I tell them, ‘I’m proud of you’ and even though I don’t see their face, I’m always thrilled, you know.”
Chinese Cooking Demystified
Fried rice, flavoured rice, things on rice, homemade dim sum, all the noodles: each new video here feels like an invitation and looks like lunch. Run by a Chinese woman, Stephanie Li and her American partner, Chris Thomas, based in Shenzhen, China, this channel does exactly as its name suggests. “English language sources seem to both overthink and underthink Chinese cuisine,” says Thomas: they try to mimic restaurant techniques, but fail to properly explain the foundational ingredients to a western audience.
Li and Thomas’s videos are usually under 10 minutes long, neatly edited with a rapid-fire intro and cooking demo out on their balcony – if they take you inside, they will tell you why, and it is all part of what makes them so helpful. The viewer’s own culinary restrictions are always a priority: they will often give you options for the method (if you have a wok, a gas stove, or neither). They shoot up close with clear audio, to make sure you understand what tiger eggs sound like when they are being deep-fried, or exactly how slowly to turn your scrambled eggs to make them in true Cantonese style. For added homestyle goodness, the couple’s dog, Hayek, sits on a chair beside Li as she cooks on camera. “He’s an intense air-licker when he gets excited,” says Thomas.
Grandbaby Cakes
Chef and baker Jocelyn Delk Adams is a longtime blogger, cookbook author and regular on US TV with appearances on the Food Network and Good Morning America. She is known for very pretty, pastel hued bakes and her videos look and feel exactly like those treats. On screen, she favours gorgeous knits and ice-cream colours; she demos sour-cream poundcakes, buttery cornbread and perfect pie crusts with the easy, welcoming demeanour of an eminently capable host. From creamy grits with shrimp scampi to the deepest reddest crunchiest spiciest fried chicken – well, it’s just beautiful.
“When I’m in front of the camera, there’s such a glow and a spark, an enjoyment,” she says. In one of her very first videos back in 2013, she goes back home to Winona, Mississippi to bake biscuits with her grandmother. You watch Delk Adams at the stovetop with Big Mama Maggie, as she was known to everyone, making biscuits as she did every day for decades. It’s an incredibly real, intimate moment – the kind that chefs like to write about in cookbooks, but that no one ever really gets to witness first-hand.
“I think about my grandmother all of the time,” she tells me. “She is 100% why I created my entire brand, just wanting to honour her.”
Sorted Food
The four guys from Hertfordshire who started Sorted Food – Ben Ebbrell, Mike Huttlestone, Jamie Spafford and Barry Taylor – have been making each other laugh over lunch since they were in year 7 together. Back in 2010, on a drunken weekend away in Cornwall, they had the idea to shoot some food videos for some friends who were unable to make the trip. A short while later, they posted a follow-up on YouTube – a lasagne how-to which, much to their surprise, garnered, as Spafford puts it, “comments from people we didn’t know”. Some told them off for not adding milk to the ragu, others for not making the dish like their grandma would have.
Every video created since has been a similarly communal effort: burger battles, chocolate challenges, blindfolded taste tests, the four of them often joined by guest chefs, and sometimes, celebs (Emma Thompson turned up in December with her daughter and a Christmas jumper).
“It’s mates hanging out, being able to cook and eat great food with each other,” says Spafford. Only Ebbrell is a trained chef, so that means any given episode typically involves him rescuing the messes the three “normals” have made.
They have toured the US for NBC’s Today show, published 14 cookbooks, launched an app, convened a community 2.52 million strong, and still they read every single comment. “It doesn’t make much sense commercially,” they agree, but being there for their fans, like they are for each other, is, really, what they are best at.
