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.
