Once traditional staples of television, tutorial-based cooking shows are disappearing from the TV screen. The Food Network, alongside its spinoff, Cooking Channel, has long dominated the food category on cable television with the once genre-defining “in the kitchen” style shows. However, in recent years, the networks have pivoted towards cooking competitions where chefs battle each other, usually with time constraints and other challenges. As traditional “stand-and-stir” programming shifts toward competition-based content, independent chefs are stepping in to fill the void. Platforms like YouTube have become the new home for these instructional cooking shows, offering chefs creative autonomy and flexibility. Many creators take advantage of their independence to make their programs more unfiltered, from utilizing more casual vocabulary to including their mistakes as they go.
Tutorials are one of the most popular content categories on YouTube. According to data by Ipsos, 80 percent of Gen Z and 70 percent of millennials say they use the platform to learn something new. YouTube also pays creators better than most rival video platforms through Alphabet’s AdSense, channel memberships and paid interactions on live streaming.
Just as Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa) and Ree Drummond (Pioneer Woman) built loyal followings on traditional television, today’s online cooking personalities are cultivating similar relationships with their audience. Different chefs cater to various audiences—the home cooks who need new recipes for their families, the young cooks freshly weaned off the college dining hall, and experienced cooks eager to try new cuisines and advanced techniques.
Meredith Hayden, a private chef in New York City and the Hamptons, rose to fame after posting videos of her day working for her clients on TikTok under the username WishboneKitchen. Now boasting over 2 million followers on TikTok and 1.1 million on Instagram, Hayden has scaled back her private chef work to focus on writing a cookbook while continuing to produce content across her social media platforms, including YouTube, where she offers tutorials on hosting and cooking for large groups.
@wishbonekitchen Client’s birthday weekend = non-stop cooking 🫡 kinda popped off with dinner tho ngl
Molly Baz, a former editor at Bon Appétit, started a YouTube channel called “Hit the Kitch” in 2021 after leaving the publication. There, she covers basic how-tos (like the right way to grill corn indoors) and shares tutorials on her recipes and twists on classic dishes. Most famous for her extensive repertoire of sandwiches and informal nicknames of dishes and ingredients, Baz’s videos are shot in her Los Angeles home kitchen, which feels more intimate than her previous content for Bon Appetit, where chefs hosted content in the company’s industrial kitchen.
Claire Saffitz, another Bon Appétit veteran, focuses primarily on desserts and baking on her YouTube channel, “Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person,” which has 1.28 million subscribers. Created to demonstrate step-by-step visual instruction for her recipes in her cookbook, Dessert Person, Saffitz has curated her content to include savory recipes and a series called Claire Recreates, where she recreates popular snack foods—a successor to her Gourmet Makes series, which she started during her time on the Bon Appétit channel.
Saffitz’s videos range from 15 minutes to over an hour in length. Whether a basic recipe like classic focaccia or something more complex like éclairs, she explains each step in detail, including which dishes to reuse, when to clean and what to prep. Since baking generally requires deeper precision than cooking, Saffitz dives more into technique than Baz, but her interactions with her filming crew, who frequently pepper in commentary about her process, provide a similar laid-back atmosphere to her content.
James Delmage, host of the YouTube channel “Sip and Feast,” took a less conventional route to food content creation. After a 15-year career as a trader on Wall Street, Delmage quit in 2018 to pursue his lifelong passion for food, launching his channel and blog. “Sip and Feast,” now at over 893,000 subscribers, takes a nod from the classic instructional styles that had made the Food Network a household name in the early aughts. Primarily drawing on recipes from his grandmother, Delmage breaks down recipes through step-by-step instructions with detailed explanations of the how, what and why behind them. In each video, Delmage aspires to recreate the environment where he learned to cook—with his grandmother in their family kitchen—to make new recipes approachable, encouraging viewers to adapt recipes to local ingredients and explaining when and why they can substitute ingredients.
Being a YouTuber comes with its own challenges
While viewers are increasingly drawn to these creators’ long-form content, producing a cooking show on YouTube comes with its own set of challenges. The platform’s vast ecosystem is highly competitive, requiring chefs to invest heavily in marketing and production to stand out. In contrast, signing with a network like the Food Network offers access to a ready-made audience and polished production support, but sometimes at the cost of creative autonomy. For example, chefs working with networks must adhere to strict content guidelines, often limiting their ability to express individuality and maintain control over their brand and image.
Most YouTube chefs rely on sponsorships to fund the production of their content, while signing with a network offers a consistent paycheck and greater financial stability. Sponsorship fatigue can also limit YouTube content because posting too much sponsorship content can create disconnect and disengagement between the chef and their audience.
Still, the appeal of long-form videos remains for cooking content creators. YouTube provides an alternative to fast-paced, short-form content on TikTok and Instagram. Popularized by creators like Buzzfeed’s Tasty, short-form content offers tutorials—often in 30 seconds or less—on a dish, frequently an outlandish creation (like a giant 30-pound burger), or promoting a “hack” for making food quickly. In contrast, longer videos allow room for detailed instruction. “Cooking is not a paint-by-numbers, 30-second TikTok video. It just isn’t. All those concise videos do is giving you the wrong idea of what it takes to reliably and properly make a recipe that tastes great,” Delmage remarked on his blog.
YouTube also allows creators of all backgrounds to post. Saffitz took the most traditional path—she studied French cuisine and pastry at École Grégoire-Ferrandi in Paris, France—while Baz was inspired to pursue the culinary arts after studying abroad in Florence, Italy, and is primarily self-taught, alongside her time as a line cook. Delmage is entirely self-taught.
While professionals, these chefs are not afraid of showing their mistakes in the kitchen. Every few months, Saffitz sits down for a question-and-answer video. Often, she fields questions about what to do if something in a recipe goes awry. Peppering in anecdotes of her own failed cooking experiences, Saffitz guides viewers through troubleshooting steps. “I had an idea, there’s a conception, and the execution just doesn’t match the expectation. I’m not going to be able to bridge that gap, so I need to pivot, my idea needs to change, my expectation needs to change,” Saffitz said in a recent video.
