With more and more of televised cooking channels getting too slick and commercial (or contest-oriented), I’m turning to watching cooking videos on youtube.
I really like a few channels and never miss a new video. Here are my favorites:
Cooking With Dog. It’s a Japanese cooking show, with recipes demonstrated by “Chef”, a nice motherly lady, and Frances, her poodle. The poodle “narrates” the action. I love Japanese food, and I’ve learned a lot from this show.
The Scott Rea Project. I found this when I was Googling “hand-raised pork pies”, which I was curious about. He’s a cockney artisan butcher who started the series in order to record how real butchery is done, as he believes it’s becoming a dying art. As his series got more popular, he included traditional British cooking, like pork pies, steak and kidney pies, toad in the hole, etc. It has been fun seeing what a proper toad in the hole is supposed to look like! I’m trying to keep myself from using his slang, like “Get that down yer neck”.
This one isn’t a youtube series, but a French cooking/travel television show: Les Carnets de Julie. You can get entire episodes on youtube. A young woman drives around France and tracks down the origin of local specialties and chats with artisans about their products. She finishes each show with a sort of potluck feast to which the artisans bring their various products. This one has a lot of good footage of the countryside and villages in France.
Have you any favorite cooking channels to recommend?
This one is by a Ukrainian grandmother. It has some interesting recipes (such as the curried turkey breast). It has the recipes in metric and whatever system we use in the US. Whenever she lists “white wine” as an ingredient, she really means some kind of Ukrainian vodka.
Food Wishes and How To Cake It are 2 of my current faves. The former is hosted by Chef John, who never appears on camera, well just the once , but now just occasionally his hands. Weird, I know. Great food, plenty of basics and a lot of out-of-the-ordinary too. He can be quite humorous, rimshot-type humor, and he’s loaded with all sorts of great ideas, tips and just different ways of approaching recipes. You’d definitely want to have a meal with him, whether he cooked it or not.
HTCI is hosted by Yolanda Gampp, who must be a rising star because she amassed 2 million viewers rather quickly, IMO. Cute, funny and infectiously charming. I don’t know that I’d actually make any of her designs, they’re just not my style, but her show is such a pleasure to watch that I find myself tuning in each Tuesday.
The greatest cooking show that has yet aired, IMO, is Hannah Hart’s My Drunk Kitchen. I still love Episode 7: Let’s Taco Bout It. (Some NSFW language.)
S1 of MDK was the best. “Frederick? Is that the Dinklingburgs? Tell them not to sit on anything!” She’s gotten a little preachy and life-coachy since moving to LA.
I also watch How To Cake It and Donal Skehan.
SortedFood is always fun and like Donal Skehan’s show, it’s cool to see flavor combinations that are in use in the UK that are unusual in the US.
I’ll second Food Wishes. Some nice recipes and I like his style.
Lately I’ve been really digging You Suck at Cooking. And by digging, I mean laughing my tits off. This guy is a riot. The videos are geared more towards humor than teaching cookery, but there’s still some pretty good recipes inbetween the jokes.