Help me find something I remember seeing several of, several years back. Not fake, as such – not those videos that show how to bake a perfect 7-layer wedding cake all at once in the microwave, and they’ve blatantly faked the result.
The videos I’m thinking of seemed real enough, but were surreal in their complexity. No narration, minimal captioning if any. Production values looked like any cooking video of the 5-Minute Crafts / Best Cooking Hacks genre. They’d show a complex series of processes which no sane person would ever do to food, a seemingly endless sequence of ingredients and preparations mostly involving putting things inside of other things.
Like, you start with making a cookie dough. Then you stuff that inside a different cookie dough. Then you roll it all out and roll it up again and cut it into pieces, Then you make some cake batter and dip in the pieces, then fry them. Then you make a double pie crust and bake it all in. Then you make cake layers and layer in the pie. Or the savory version, you put (say) hot dogs inside hamburgers on top of pizzas baked into a tenderloin roast, carved up and served on waffles with a 30-ingredient sauce.
I’m making this up, but you get the idea. The videos would end up a half hour long - just mind-boggling. And now I can’t find a single one. Did I dream up this genre?
If this topic is less than compelling, feel free to mention any weird, stupid or gross food videos you like.
I saw a video debunking one of those fake videos. No idea why anyone would bother. If they think it’s a prank then it’s a very lame one. If it’s just to generate hits then it doesn’t sound very productive. Someone could make very entertaining fake cooking videos if they wanted to but I think YouTube is no place for truly creative works and I don’t see why they would bother.
Yes, Ann Reardon is great. Watching her led me to think of this other overly-complex type of video. They’re all going after clicks, but in slightly different ways. The kind I described weren’t fake, as such – not trying to fool anyone, I don’t think – but they were compelling in their strangeness, impossible to stop watching because you had to see what insane/inane thing they would do next.
They were kind of like the cooking-video equivalent of Too Many Cooks.
The only video that’s coming to mind is one where some guy made some kind of ludicrous meat wad with 37 woven layers of bacon (with the intermediate layers being different kinds of cheese or meat). I’m not sure how to search for it on Youtube, though.
I know what you’re referring to, though I don’t know of a name for it other than “annoying”. One I saw recently had a woman making a pineapple upside down cake, but it was clearly designed to be idiotic and/or infuriating. She basically dropped a bag of cake mix into a frying pan, broke some eggs over it, put a lid on it, set the flame to high and acted like that was a sane course of events. The video was about 7 minutes long, but I made it about a minute and a half into it before realizing it was just nonsense. The only thing I can think of is that they’re meant to generate engagement by compelling people to discuss how dumb the method is, share it with friends to commiserate about how dumb it is, etc. Engagement is money on social media, even (or possibly especially?) when it’s negative.
HowToBasic is a channel that’s been around for awhile that parodies these type of fake recipe videos by turning the ridiculousness up to eleven.
I shudder to imagine how long it takes to clean up the set after one of these productions, though there’s also a distinct possibility that this type of thing is someone’s fetish.
Glad you said this part! The one I was thinking of is pretty similar to what you described, only it wasn’t 30 minutes long: it’s the infamous Counter Spaghetti video.
A video on debunking a video. I’m glad someone is doing this, but it just sounds a little odd. When is the interplanetary shuttle going to be flying? If it includes humans, never mind.
The one I was thinking of is pretty similar to what you described, only it wasn’t 30 minutes long: it’s the infamous Counter Spaghetti video.
