There comes a time in most every adult’s life when you suddenly understand your parents’ love of food documentaries and cooking shows. It’s like a switch flips in your head and they go from being the most boring thing ever to utterly bingeable content as you fantasize about eating everything on screen.
Whether you want to learn historic cookery or vicariously eat the food of your dreams through a thoroughly charming vlogger, we’ve rounded up some of the best YouTube cooking and food shows you might not already be watching. Happy eating.
Recipe Archaeology
Are you fascinated by the weird jello monstrosities and tinned meat dishes from vintage cookbooks? Have you ever wanted to know how they taste without having to actually bite the bullet and put it in your own mouth? Stephanie and Christine practice some Recipe Archaeology of their own as they dig up the weirdest historical recipes they can find and try them out. They’re providing us all a service and I salute them.
Tasting History with Max Miller
Another historic channel, Max Miller takes a research-heavy approach to re-constructing historic meals, like the 3rd class dinner menu from the Titanic or a typical Jane Austen breakfast. Miller’s food is interesting, and it often looks really delicious too. I haven’t tried making any of it myself yet but I’m definitely planning to.
Emmymade
From decades-old MREs to recipes from the great depression and contemporary trends Emmy tries a range of fascinating food from around the world. Sometimes it’s delicious, sometimes it’s horrifying, but she always gives you her honest take on the results. When not sampling pre-packaged horrors she cooks the food herself, usually with an instructional video so you can follow along at home.
Grandpa Kitchen
There’s something so satisfying about watching someone cook a huge amount of food, and Grandpa Kitchen not only lets you do that, it donates the food (and the proceeds of the videos) to orphans, providing them with food, clothes, school supplies, and even birthday presents. They mostly make various traditional Asian dishes but some recent sponsorships have led to some fun mashups with hot Cheetos and other chips being incorporated into the food.
From the Mind of Christine McConnell
Some of you may remember Christine McConnell’s tragically short-lived Netflix series from, oof… more years ago now than I care to realize. While her show wasn’t renewed, she has a YouTube channel where she continues to make her elaborate gothic creations.
A combination of cookery and other DIYs, McConnell shows you how to make a lot of things you know you’d never have the executive function to actually replicate, but it’s nice to dream. I may never live in a gothic dreamhouse but I can always turn on Youtube and fantasize about gong over to Christine’s for tea.
Life of Boris
Life of Boris is primarily a gaming channel but at some point he decided to start making food and travel videos too and I absolutely love it. A mixture of practical cooking advice (he has a series of videos about how to survive as a student when you’ve spent almost all of your food money on alcohol) and completely unhinged, slightly manic humor he’s a delightful experience and might just inspire you to try new things.
People Vs Food
People vs Food features the most amazing recreations of food from cartoons, movies, and TV shows, as well as real-world dishes from school lunches around the world to pregnancy cravings and stoner foods. There are a couple of different formats, sometimes people just get to try things, and sometimes there are ominous or silly games involved. The best is Try Not to Eat, where if you can make it through rejecting a string of delicious dishes you get an even better prize, while failure lands you a sometimes traumatizingly bad punishment food instead.
The Katering Show
Insufferable foodie Kate tries to cook gourmet food that her incredibly food-intolerant friend, also named Kate, can successfully digest. It’s a cooking show that’s also a parody of cooking shows and all the unbearable middle-class smugness that so often goes with them. I came for the soap opera that is the Kate and Kate friendship and stayed for the food. (OK, I stayed for both.) Sadly the show has ended but the episodes are still up and worth a watch.
Simply Dumpling
This is my favorite channel to watch when I’m really tired and want to zone out into fantasies about really delicious food. The host Mike Chen is not only capable of putting away a truly heroic amount of food but also brings such a friendly, upbeat vibe to describing the eating experience to the audience that you end up in a good mood just from watching. He’s also inspired me to try new dishes and cuisines when I go out to eat that I really love.
Beryl Shereshewsky
My current favorite food YouTuber Beryl Shereshewsky cooks different dishes from all around the world. Usually, she picks a specific theme, like eggs or one pot dishes, and builds her episode around that, and often she’s never made or tried the recipes before filming that day so we learn along with her.
What’s so special about Beryl’s channel is that most episodes are actually a collaborative project with her audience. People send in recipes and talk about what the dish means to them and their culture, and Beryl plays their videos with appropriate credits and links before attempting to make her own version. It’s heartwarming, interesting, and has inspired us to make quite a few of the dishes featured.
(featured image: People Vs Food)
