YouTube Taught Me How to Cook

I never learned how to cook growing up. Throughout my teenage years, I was sometimes recruited as an assistant for meal preparation but was never prompted to be a chef. I cut vegetables for holiday dinners, stirred soups on the stove, licked spoons, and not much else. Relatively often, I handily opened a bottle of wine while others cooked.

At college, the cafeteria food was consistently awful, so I began making basic dishes for myself: baguettes with prosciutto and burrata, bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese, and pasta in oil with parmesan. Still, I wasn’t cooking. Yes, I was doing things in my kitchen, but I was hardly manipulating the ingredients. I was just assembling them.

Then, I moved to England, and I quickly grew bored with the bland food. Although my coursework kept me busy, I decided it was time that I actually learn how to cook a few decent dishes. My first resource was my Italian grandmother, who certainly deserves Michelin stars; unfortunately, when I asked her for recipes, her instructions were completely unintuitive and unhelpful, like “sear the vegetables that you have in the fridge but do not use too many” and “it is done when it smells good.” Without any substantive guidance, I was overwhelmed, confused, and ultimately unsuccessful.

I tried following recipes from various blogs. For whatever reason, this required scrolling down the website page for minutes to even see the ingredients list. The chefs always began their recipes with lengthy anecdotes about childhood summers and catching fireflies at a lake house. An issue with blogs and cookbooks alike is that they generally assumed I had an impressive degree of technical knowledge — but I didn’t. Are “braising,” “browning,” and “simmering” different? Should I turn the stove knob to 7 or 10 for “high heat”? Who are “Julienne” and “Blanch?” For every recipe I read, I had to spend an hour just researching specific cooking techniques and Googling dumb questions. The endeavor was frustrating and draining without ever resulting in a decent dish.

I needed someone to show me exactly what to do — and what not to do. Thankfully, I discovered my kitchen savior: YouTube. I guess that my Google searches influenced my YouTube recommendations, so I unintentionally encountered ten-minute instructional videos that guide clueless cooks through basic (but delicious) meals. Several times a week, I set my laptop beside the stove so the virtual chef is beside me, and I follow along step by step. Generally, I found the “monkey-see-monkey-do” approach much more enlightening than written guides, since I could see how exactly I was supposed to cut the ingredients, what color the meat should be, and how viscous the sauce should appear.

Now, I’ve perfected a few good dishes: short ribs, lamb legs, beef bourguignon, and mushroom soup, among others. I’m usually proud of whatever I prepare, even if all I did was follow instructions. I send pictures to my family to say, “Look, I made this!” If the plate is particularly photogenic, I might post it on Instagram, too. Am I the next Master Chef? Certainly not. But I can at least cook a good meal now, and without YouTube, I would have resigned myself to a life of protein bars, microwaveable meals, and toast.

YouTube has been a helpful aide in other circumstances. I hardly understand anything discussed in my semantics textbook, but thankfully, a saintly tutor has uploaded informative lectures about lambda calculus. (Believe it or not, there’s a lot of math in linguistics.) I’ve watched other people assemble the furniture that I couldn’t construct myself, and I acquired some knitting patterns. Sure, YouTube — like other platforms — hosts some abhorrent content and can be a draining waste of time. Yet the modern resource has been my gateway to acquiring traditional skills and pursuing self-improvement.