I’ve been having this idea pretty much ever since I started culinairy school but haven’t been able to flush out how I want to do this.
My idea is to start a cooking channel on YouTube (yeah I know there’s already thousands of those, it’d be for my own education and enjoyment mostly) but don’t do your basic recipe videos. I want to go into basics, explain cooking techniques and their origin. A bit of a mix between Binging With Babish and Tasting History but try to be more “like an actual culinairy school”, if you know what I mean by that. I’m already writing a few script ideas, about produce/equipment knowledge or one about techniques you’ll find in almost all recipes for example. still thought I’d come and ask the lovely folks here about what they’d want to see.
So, I’m wondering: Let’s say you have little to no cooking experience. Maybe frying an egg seems like a challenge to you already. What would you want to see on a youtube channel to help you start cooking. What knowledge do you feel you’re missing to start preparing meals and understand what you’re doing?
I’m not expecting a lot of responses, but if I can find out what people who pretty much never cook feel is holding them back, then that would be an amazing starting point for me.
Edit: i wouldn’t mind ideas for a channel name either. :)
I would probably watch a youtube channel that focused more on how to improvise in cooking than how to follow a recipe, along with pointing out various useful techniques and pitfalls to avoid.
Hell, this might actually already exist. I confess I’ve never really looked.
I’ve looked and haven’t found anything to my satisfaction. I found that pretty much all channels either give you too much details in way too much of a robotic way or they don’t go deep enough into a subject. I’m not gonna say I’m gonna have a easy time finding the middle ground myself, but I do feel there’s still a place for that on YouTube and at least I feel I have the required knowledge for that.
What about Kenji Lopez-Alt?
I think he gives a lot of great detail on techniques like braising, deglazing, etc. but in an approachable way. Maybe you see some things you think you could improve on, but his channel seems like a great place to use as a reference for the kind of content you’re aiming kefor.
Adam Ragusea is good for that.
Two things I usually wonder about -
- Substitutions - what if I don’t have all the ingredients, what if I don’t have the equipment for a step etc.
- Pairings - what combination of ingredients work and why but most importantly what won’t work and why.
Post the recipes under the video in both metic and imperial units for the international audience.
Avoid using phrase like add X to it, explicitly say what you are adding together more important when using more then one pot/pan. Be literal about how to cook.
An example, Sheppards pie in the BBC site
Step 1 add beef, onion, celery, and carrot to the pan and cook for 5 min
Cool, says what, where and how long.
Step 2 add tomatoes, tomato puree, stock cubes, Worcestershire sauce, and mixed herbs. (To where?) Refill the tomato tin with water and pour into the pan, add a good pinch of salt and pepper (??) Bring to a simmer (what is that) stir regularly for 25 min.
Several things I find wrong, where are the tomato, stock, sauce, and herbs going? You don’t say add to the pan, but you do say add the water to the pan. What is a simmering temperature and a person like my who is bad at cooking has no idea how much a pinch is, 5g 10g?
Step 3 for the topping put potatoes into a large saucepan and cover with cold water, bring to boil then reduce the heat slightly and simmer for 10 min. Add the leaks return to simmer and cook for 2 min.
Ok first half is good, but now we have 2 simmering pans and which one does the leeks go into?
Step 4 pre heat the oven to 220/200 fan/gas. Drain potatoes and leek and return to the pan.
Oh the leek goes into the potatoes.
I know this sounds like wow you don’t know what you are doing at all, or I should make assumptions but when dealing with absolute beginners it helps to say the extra few words to know what goes where.
Also don’t assume people are watching the video, there will be a non zero amount that will listen only so using explicit instructions will help.
These are all great things to keep in mind, thank you.
Also, to sort of respond to the recipe critism in your comment and to showcase what I want to do with the channel:
Step 3 for the topping put potatoes into a large saucepan and cover with cold water, bring to boil then reduce the heat slightly and simmer for 10 min. Add the leaks return to simmer and cook for 2 min.
Say I’d have this step in a recipe (I’m not planning on doing a lot of recipe videos, but still) i would not only want to be really clear on what to do and tell people to put the potatoes in cold water. I want to explain that there’s a good reason for starting potatoes out in cold water. Understanding why things are done makes it much easier to translate that knowledge and techniques in other areas of the kitchen.
Btw, you start potatoes out in cold water because they’re fairly dense as to vegetables go and have a super high starch content. If, like you do with pasta, drop them in boiling water the ourside of the potatoes will be overcooked before the inside in done. This will give you an almost waxy skin over potatoes because of those starches coagulating.
On that same vein, recipes where you have the same ingredient going to multiple places irritate me when they don’t specify quantity in the main recipe, but only in the ingredients list.
For example if the ingredients are 2 cups of soy sauce, 1.5 cups for sauce, 0.5 cups for marinade, I want the recipe to say “add soy sauce to marinade (0.5 cups)” or something like that not, “add soy sauce to marinade” or “add remainder of soy sauce to marinade”.
Remainder could work if a very recent instruction says something to the effect of “measure 2 cups of soy sauce, add 1.5 cups to sauce” so there is a remainder to add, not just “lol add the rest idiot”
I really liked Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. I thought he did a nice job explaining the science behind cooking methods and ingredients in an easy to understand way.
I would love to see more technique and theory videos. There’s piles of recipes and such, but, like, what does it mean to dice something as opposed to julienne it? How the hell do you chop things so fast without losing a finger or leaving a hand-span of un-chopped stuff behind? Why does it matter if my pots are “heavy bottomed” or not and what even is that?
Etc ad nauseam.
Recipes that are attainable for a home chef.
My biggest pet peeves are when I see a channel insist that I buy a brand new piece of equipment or an ingredient that can only be found in a specialty shop. I love Babish, but it annoys me when he says, “Go to your local Mexican grocery store,” or something of that nature. I do not have one, and if I do, it’s more catered towards a white American and not the immigrants looking for their countries ingredients. I had to stop watching Joshua Weissman because he would constantly say I needed a certain piece of equipment that was $100+ or a fresh ingredient and there was no way I would ever be able to get it fresh.
The cooking channel I love the most is Internet Shaquillle. He never says you have to buy a certain product. He’ll straight up show you things you can buy at Kroger for $2. And he’ll give alternatives if you don’t have certain equipment. Ethan Chlebowski is another fantastic one.
Adam Ragusea is the solution to your problems.
I would love to see a show about how to adapt traditional meals to vegetarian or reduced meat dishes, but absolutely not presented by a vegetarian or vegan. Existing presenters can’t seem to stop talking about vegetarianism/veganism. I would appreciate the information, but I can only abide their purity spiral attitudes briefly.
I think it would be really cool to see how different cooking techniques change the food on the chemical level.
This would be really cool indeed, but would probably be too difficult for me to showcase. At least at first.
I’d think something like have each episode demonstrating not only how to cook a particular meal, but also go over all the vast myriad of cooking utensils, pots, pans, bowls, dishes, etc, and how to properly use them.
The the secret to making …
Like certain types of bread , cake, kiche.
The secret to breads or bakes not flattening after taking them out of the oven… That sort of stuff
This is a solid way
I really want to see no bullshit science based cooking. With percise measurmene. Like whats the exact temperature and time to cook a salmon staek medium rare. I really need exact measurements based on science and experiments.
More content like the Chinese Cooking Demystified channel, and the Food 52 stuff with chef Lucas Sin.
I like to watch stuff where I’m getting some of the history and geography of the techniques, ingredients and dishes being presented; while also being talked through the various chemical reactions going on at every stage and why they’re important to the desired outcome of the dish.
Plant based content would very much be appreciated too.
Advice on difficult to judge things like how to sauté onions correctly without burning them; how to deal with yeast (what does it mean when your bread is hollow? What about when it’s hard? Doesn’t rise?); how to make a cheese sauce that isn’t too thick, thin, or chunky; techniques for timing stuff to be ready at the right time (ie ‘cook the eggs last’); balancing things with lemon juice (in general the stuff about balancing acids); seasoning soups so they’re not bland.
I would love to see a show about how to adapt traditional meals to vegetarian or reduced meat dishes, but absolutely not presented by a vegetarian or vegan. Existing presenters can’t seem to stop talking about vegetarianism/veganism. I would appreciate the information, but I can only abide their purity spiral attitudes briefly.
“Chef At Home” was a stellar Canadian cooking show! It was on the Food network. He did another couple of shows, one online too. However, CAH was, IMHO the best of the best.
Very relaxed and educational.
It was Hosted by Chef Michael Smith from PEI.
I could cook well enough before watching him. I cook WAY better now, with thanks to him for teaching me how to THINK in the kitchen, and not just “do”.
Also, once and a while? I’d like to see an episode on ‘mistakes & failures’. We ALL have them, and watching an experienced chef “fuck it up” once and a while is inspiring in that it teaches you to learn, and move on from your fails. “If HE/SHE can fail, then I should not be discouraged!
